cool article, interesting quote

"strong" != "good".

What part of the US do you believe is free of government corruption? (How do you define corruption, exactly?)

Whatever you con or don't cede, cockroaches, sharks, and dinosaurs already have a much better record than humanity. There is a fundamental law of nature that says a species cannot live exclusively on its own waste.

Since we've sent millions of dollars of food and supplies to famine-stricken third-world countries and seen them rot on the docks because the beneficiaries' governments wouldn't let us distribute them, why do you think $2 trillion would help any more?

John Perry

Baseball has some *good* batters. What baseball player bats 1000?

In general, corruption in the governments listed is a small fraction of their total effect.

When and where did that happen?

I think it was Churchill who said "Democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others".

To paraphrase someone, a culture gets the government it deserves.

To put it more strongly, we have problems with our cultures.

As someone who grew up in the late 50s/60s, I used to tell my kids as they were growing up that things had improved hugely in my lifetime. Now, I'm not so sure.

It's not just about governments; it's about *us*.

Steve

I'm not sure we *have* a trillion dollars. (/me checks his pockets...)

Besides, we did the crusades thing a few times already a few hundred years back, and it got old.

Steve

Certainly there's some. But serious corruption - taking bribes, perjury, election fraud, corrupting the justice system, stuff like that, put politicos in prison here.

Violating the law, mainly.

John

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Where to start? OK, number 1 the people that maintain the traffic signals have demanded and are getting systems that are completely independent of the traffic signal controller, even to the point of requiring "do not enter my cabinet" detection of traffic signal indications.

1. Not all contracts are the same, some still get a "piece of the action", plus many times the third party is paying the construction costs of the installation and wants a return on their investment.
2. I have set timing for traffic signal controllers, and have done so with the help of various traffic analysis tools. No black art, but we do not bother "Tam" and "Max" of the public with the details of the methods. If you are really interested and want to convince me that you are really interested you should start with the Federal FETSIM program and tell us what you find there.

And some use 6502's and some use 68332's or 68334's and some use other uP's. If you are really interested lookup NEMA TS-1, TS-2 and TS-3 traffic signal controllers.

Good government isn't a government made up only of good people, so judged using some hypothetical or mystical value system. It's government that largely *works* *despite* being made up of real (i.e. untrustworthy) people.

When I say "works", I mean it allows:

• the production of enough wealth for most people to have time for more than *just* the production of wealth, and

• sufficiently fair distribution of said wealth that society continues in a stable form without periodic wholesale destruction of accumulated wealth.

Compare most African societies against those goals, and I think you'll agree with John Larkin - most Western governments actually do "work" and are therefore "good", according to my definition above.

Of course, there are those Western governments that seem unable to maintain their stability without periodically creating wholesale destruction in *other* countries... and that might be seen to disqualify them, depending on where you sit.

Clifford Heath.

Several places, for many reasons -- governments, warlords, riots...

jp

Have you got any references on this? I'd be very grateful for any pointer or direction.

In article , John Larkin writes

That is patently untrue.

Three cabinet ministers in resigning position this week.. Went to war illegally..... Lied t the country.... The UK does not have a good goverment

Low levels of corruption? Look at the lying over Iraq (and WMD) kickbacks for friends on the contracts etc I think you will find there is corruption in both the US and the UK.

Not the petty corruption that is in Uganda but certainly at the top on MAJOR things there is

In article , John Larkin writes

They are.

I would take that as strong evidence that you *do* have good gov't. If they *weren't* resigning - that would be a problem.

I can remember having some discussions with folks at Apollo, who were working on something somewhat similar but not as aggressive and not for as many cpus. It was designed for local networking. They had a compiler that would granularize the code for that similar use. The call interface between granules was handled by the network layer and if the granule was on the same processor it just turned into a regular call but if the granule was on a different machine then it went out via the network. I'm not sure how automatic moving the granules around might have been.

However, discussing these details with the O/S designers got my mind rolling and I suggested an idea I had for an approach that would be similar to simulated annealing -- in that a cpu in a matrix network of transputers would start out at a "high temperature" where processes would be sent out to adjacent processors or accepted from them even when the direction of doing that would be "uphill" (slows down the computation rate), because doing so might allow the overall system to find a new "pocket" of resolving the diffusion where processing happens even faster. But then the temperature would be gradually lowered so that cpus would be far less likely to ship out granules if they knew in advance that the communication burden would probably have a too-high cost. Eventually, the system winds down and is more conservative. But it starts out aggressive and allows itself to make choices that slow things down while it searches the topology space for a better "pocket" to later drop down into as it "cools."

We discussed some of the details of how to actually make this work, at length. Then they pointed out to me that although the annealing idea itself hadn't been considered, it was a nifty approach, and there was another team elsewhere working on something like what I had imagined, and that it was on transputers. The method of diffusing out the granules was statically done at the time, but I was told they were considering approaches to doing it at run-time. I never did find out who or how far they got -- but the fact of it did seem to confirm that my imagination was okay. And I really enjoyed hashing out some of the details of how to make such an idea work in practice.

But my interest was more a hobby than serious. I never took it further. Surprisingly, I later discovered that my cousin, David C DiNucci, had been working much more seriously on ideas in similar areas at NASA. If you look him up, you might see something of interest. Or write him and ask.

(He and I had no prior discussions on this topic and I had had no idea whatsoever that he was doing any work in this area until I read a paper of his, published in a book on a signal processing gathering that I was studying. I was shocked to see his name. Shocked further to see what he was writing about. Where I had a modest, natural inclination, he has taken the subject area for his Ph.D. He even has spent time working with transputers, as well.)

Jon

That just about sums up my feelings.

We've got a system (US) where an idiot can be elected to office and decisions are more influenced by re-election strategy than logic.

The same system allows us to elect whoever we like, and get rid of them the next election if we change our mind.

I'm betting the constitution will last for another 230 years.

-Hershel