Very well put. He made a huge impact on me growing up. A lot of people think of him as only a Sci-Fi writer, but his works went way beyond that. My wife is anything buy a Scifi fan, but she was deeply influenced by Bradbury and his "Zen and the Art of Writing". He was a true master and will be deeply missed.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

The egg.

FTFY

What makes you think I don't believe parties will exploit any opportunity they get? I didn't say that. What I said was electronic voting has a great chance of fraud and the potential for abuse. It makes me wonder if you even read my comments. I'm all in favor of having a discussion on the topic, but please refrain from putting words in my mouth or jumping to conclusions.

Election fraud and vote fraud occur rather often around the world, with paper ballots. Electronic voting simply has a higher margin of fraud. As for being easier, that doesn't make it better, it just shows laziness and impatience.

Sure, they can be made "secure", I didn't mean to imply they couldn't be, I was just pointing out that security isn't the problem. I appreciate the link to the Three Ballot systems entry, but even that article mentions the usability problems and doesn't address how it would be used electronically. It's a great concept, but impractical given the fact that in 2004 we had a wide spread problem with people getting just one ballot right. I would also like to point out that I don't have any problem with the people operating the machines, I have a problem with the companies that own and maintain those machines. It would be a fairly trivial process for them to commit election fraud without the operators knowing anything about it. The people I trust, but the machines I don't. Why? Because I know how easy it would be to manipulate the electronic results, especially on a large scale. Again, I want to point out that I'm not convinced this has happened, my tin foil hat is still in the closet, but I believe it is plausible enough that I don't currently feel comfortable with it.

Security isn't the issue. The problem is that electronic records are easy to manipulate. Electronic voting has a wide potential for abuse. I believe laws should be passed to ban electronic voting and the electronic tallying of paper ballots. I realize this isn't convenient, but paper does make it much easier to prove election fraud and gives a better account of what really happened in an election. There are plenty of people who believe that the 2008 elections and the current 2012 Republican primaries show evidence of vote flipping. I believe this is possible, but I'm not convinced this has actually occurred. My concern isn't that this has happened, but that it potentially could.

I've seen a couple documents recently that make a compelling argument both for and against it having taken place in the Primaries. As I stated, I'm not convinced this has happened, but the plausibility of it is enough that I don't feel comfortable with an electronic voting system.

Short Version
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByJAC-sfXwumZzI2bVlON2VTMnFyYVZZSnpDYnNyQQ/edit?pli=1

Long Version
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByJAC-sfXwumdkE4d0Y2eWtURTZ2eDM5RmlLc3ZhQQ/edit?pli=1

Here's the deal, the stock price was way over priced. If they had priced it lower then the underwriters wouldn't have had to step in repeatedly to prop it up in order to maintain the $38 share price. Without the intervention of the underwriters the stock would have plummeted.

What we're seeing is the beginning of a market correction that will adjust the price to a real world value. The underwriters can only support it's value in the market for so long before they are no longer able to keep the artificial value where it's at.

At $38, Facebook's price-to-earnings ratio was more than four times Google's. Google's posting revenue and profit than were 10 times higher than Facebook. Google also had a long term strategic plan for the money they raised from their IPO. As far as I know Facebook had no public plan for the use of the funds raised during the IPO, it seemed more like a get rich plan for the people (and banks) who held stock.

Long term I'm sure Facebook will rebound in the market, but it's going to be months before the actual price of the stock has been determined by the market and we know for sure.

No, they didn't. If they had nailed it then they wouldn't be stepping in continually to keep the price from plummeting below $38. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/real-time

Check out the NASDAQ chart; http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/real-time

You can see time they've stepped in. During that flat line you can see they've stepped in 5 or 6 times in just 20 minutes.

That's very true. We're only looking at one day. We need to remember that as we're all discussing this. The next 30-60 days are going to give us a much better picture of how well the stock was valued when it went live on the market.

it never went past $43. wouldn't say it raised quite fast either, it kind of burped and then plummeted, then the underwriters stepped in to stabilize the price (twice). it's actually doing very poorly; you can watch all the excitement at; http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/real-time

It needs to close at around $43 or $44 for the IPO to not be considered a failure.

Adwords was started back in 2000, 4 years before the IPO. By 2003 they were making a significant amount of money from it. The also had a long term plan to improve the product and grow the company beyond basic search. Dollar for dollar Google was a much better investment when they went public than Facebook currently is.

You make some good points and I'm not sure anyone has the right answer, but I do know that having definite proof of life on another world will change our culture and reinvigorate our quest for knowledge. That alone might well reshape the political landscape by forever changing our perception of the Universe around us. It might also change our economic future by stimulating space exploration.

Some might say that money is wasted, but a great many technical advances were made in our quest to put a man on the moon.

Many people don't realize that we use those advances in everyday life. Tires, footwear and communication systems have all been drastically improved from what we learned on that quest. Those are just a few obvious changes, the first two are ones most people wouldn't even think about and there are hundreds of others. Will finding life on Mars change life here, yes. How? I don't know, but the big picture is so big that none of us are going to really see it until happens (if it happens?).

You make some valid points, if we outsourced work on a regular basis then I agree, we would wither and die, especially since a large part of our revenue comes from picking up outsourced work from other companies. But it's very seldom we have someone else jump in and help us out. When we have reached out it has been to people I've known for most of the last 10 years and have proven themselves to be reliable.

You're also making the assumption that when we have outsourced we've been totally ignorant of what work they've done to accomplish the goal. When in reality we've often worked side by side with them working on the same project, following the same road map. Hiring someone to help doesn't mean handing the entire project off and have them do it for you, it means hiring someone to work with you (or at least it should). The point is that you have to treat them just like someone on the team who is sitting in the office next to you (it also means having a wife who doesn't get upset because you have a middle of the night conference call).