I'm sorry, that may be true, but the difference comes in the next sentence.

"If a proprietary project is not dealt with appropriately, the 'proprietors' will hold the managers accountable."

No such guarantee for open-source. Open source requires initiative, because it's all carrot, no stick.

Here in Texas, Jury duty (and even appearing as a witness) has to be treated as paid leave by employers. And they can't fire or demote you for your absence, either. It's the same in a lot of other states.

Serious question: do you guys have a software routine you use to account for fat-fingered typos? So do you weight the positional changes by how close a letter is to another on the keyboard?

So for example,

Leyboard

would be a closer to match to "keyboard" than

Reyboard

because L is geospatially closer to K on the keyboard than R is?

That would be an interesting program to see, anyway.

"Fitness" doesn't always have to be related to the output; it can be related to the quality of a guessed input.

Consider the corollary of a poll test: a model in which "trusted" voters receive extra votes while everyone else still gets on vote. You can determine "trustworthiness" (or "karma", if you will) the same way Slashdot does - through moderation and meta-moderation, or you can use a more objective "de minimis research" criteria (like a poll test but without the punishment for failure.)

So someone voting on a school board bond election who can correctly answer questions about the stated usage of that bond, or the school district's financial bond rating, or who attends a school board meeting discussing the bond, could get 2 votes for the price of one.

This would a) allow "passionate" (albeit informed) voters to have more of a say than someone who is indifferent, and b) encourage people to do research and get involved in politics.

In a way, it's anti-democratic, but if you are going to insert any sort of elitism into the system, it might as well be a meritocracy.

In the swankier part of town, I saw some kid (16 tops) drive into the Target parking lot yesterday in a Z3. That car is as good as wrecked, my friends, because there is no way that kid treats that car with the same respect that some single mom does her 1993 Taurus that is her only means of transportation and thus survival.

Lord knows if I had enough income/cash to buy a Z3 my 16 year old kid would still be getting the beater with his own job money.

For most Texas state government RFPs, the lowest bidder within 10% of the average of the middle 75th percentile (so, throw out the lowest 1/8th and highest 1/8th bids) is accepted. And if they are more than 5% below there's actually a discretionary fund we use to pay them more (up to 5% below that 75% average) if they run into unforeseen shortages, as a reward for their generous bid.

Naturally, it's in everyone's interest to bid 9.99% below the middle 75% ... hard to do, but some companies are amazingly good at value determination.

Also naturally, some companies got in a lot of trouble back in the day for creating dummy corps to bid at the high end of the 75% percentile to drive up the average and thus the rake.

This was marked Insightful?

God, Slashdot could use more women.

Dear Penthouse,

My wife and I are 41 and 43. That "old fart" stigma is not related to age but to how far a stick is up their rectum.

Naked bodies are not "dirty" sex is not "dirty" Those that believe it is have a serious emotional problem or physiological disorder. and yes I know this goes against the grain of the Puritanical popular stance that has overtaken the United states.

Who cares, My wife and I have sex with the windows open in the summer when it's a nice night out, and she is one hell of a screamer.

FTFY.

If, when I was one year old (1983), my uncle had put an 8 track in a time capsule that I could open in 1999 ....

I could have easily played it, since my dad still had his 8 track player. If he hadn't, I could have easily bought one at a flea market, or on that fledgling eBay service, or through a hobbyist magazine - maybe even at a secondhand music store.

I can't think of a single digital format from the past 20 years that is truly in every sense of the word "obsolete" and therefore unretrievable. They may be archaic, you may have to hunt a bit more with some technologies than others to get a working reader, call up some universities, some digital museums, libraries, hobbyist friends, but it can be done.

Even if it can't be done, the schematics for building a reader are out there somewhere. Things are still just made out of elements, aren't they?

16 years is a while, it's not THAT long.

The better question is: just because something is an arcane relic, does that mean there will be no way to read it? He's not asking to have it published in the most popular standard, he just wants something that can be read in 17 years. You can still get a reader for every format you listed there via eBay or Craigslist or a flea market.

That may be half the fun of getting something in a time capsule like this. "Hmm, a USB 2.0 drive? How do I download this to my neural cyberdeck?"

Your point is well taken but overstated. 16 years old doesn't equal "Very old hardware." It's still very easy to find VCRs, LP players, 8 track and cassette players, Zip and floppy drive readers - even proprietary, esoteric standards such as ViewMaster disc-reading toys, player piano roll readers, and BetaMax players are still available.

I will bet you or anyone else $500 that 16 years from today, we will still have an easily affordable way to read CDs and DVDs from today.

It will most likely be akin to buying a floppy drive reader now - it won't come standard, but it can be bought in USB form for under $50 retail.

Even if that doesn't come to fruition, a working PC from the era before optical drives became obsolete (my guess? at least another 5 years) will still be easily available via eBay or a public library or basically any other place where current DVDs will still have interest.

Straw man. I and many others like me have NEVER ridiculed Wikipedia's notion that anyone can edit it. That is its single greatest strength, it is in its very credo ("everyone", no qualifier necessary), and is the sole reason it is what it is today.

Someone will come and take their place now, swipe all their content, and open it up again to all and surpass them rather quickly in terms of usefulness. 5, 10 years tops.

Elitist much?

How is an echo chamber an improvement over Wikipedia? Have you watched Fox News or read DailyKos lately? Back-patting has no place in an encyclopedia.

*reads this as he massages the inside of his cheek that he bit for the fifth time this year*

Well shit.