On 2/13/2010 7:59 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:07:14 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>
>> Bets on how many of which we would end up with?
>
> There's nothing wrong with being an idealist, as long as it's tempered
> with some reality.  I've only been talking about an ideal situation so
> far.
>
> Jim
Hmm. Prefer being a realist. Its like building security systems. An 
idealist expects to be able to "train" people to use the new system. A 
realist designs the system to deal with human nature, since anything 
that you put into the system that works different than people "normally" 
react **will** break. A lot of human psychology you can't change, 
without breaking the people you want to make do something. The result is 
usually not terribly pretty. Like the, "everyone has to use their 
keycard to open the front door", type things. Its fine, if only 1-2 
people every go through the door. The only "solution", if a lot of them 
do, is to only hire assholes that don't open doors for people, or 
destroy their compassion, so they never make the mistake of opening it 
to be nice to someone. The "proper" solution is to not install that kind 
of thing on the bloody front door of the building in the first place.

Politics is much the same. Optimal is never going to happen, and human 
nature is such that the result will be as far from optimal as possible, 
given the conditions, so... your best option is a non-optimal one, 
where, hopefully, most of the flaws balance themselves out, due to the 
cost being distributed among a larger number of interested parties, and 
not just the one guy with a shitty pay check. It can still fail, if you 
also refuse to place limitations, checks and balances, or counters, in 
place against those influences. And, that is *precisely* why we have a 
problem. There are almost none, and the supreme court just erased 
another one of them.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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