OT: Open source voting machines and other gizmos

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Al <alfred_j_wheeler at verizon.net>
> We maybe could create a totally national mass transit paid for by taxes.

Cool idea, except then you get wasteful/corrupt management.  I think there is
a genetic predisposition for people to siphon money off whenever an entity
grows beyond the size of a mom & pop.  The MBTA is Exhibit A in how to waste
amounts ranging from a few million a year on escalator maintenance to a large
percentage of potential sales on poor product-packaging and marketing (try to
get from point A to point B by paying a single easily-understood fare if one
of the points is not on a trolley line) to a billion or two on dumb
pork-barrel capital spending (the Silver Line, a bus route to nowhere that
cost as much as heavy rail).

Think you can trust similar amounts of money to private enterprise?  Well I've
got plenty of Exhibits B to choose from.

You get my political drift:  use the open-source model to encourage creation
of large numbers of sole-proprietorships and/or mom & pop enterprises that
have EQUAL ACCESS to provide the products and services we all rely on to get
through the day.

It's not going to happen in this lifetime but we can do our part to encourage
gov't to create level playing fields.  (I could go on and on about the Mass
Pike EZ Pass thing, having been part of the bidding process against the
contractor who was already pre-selected on the basis of proprietary software
features--the spineless gov't bureaucrats rarely if ever force providers of
big contracts like this to adhere to standards in their RFP's which would
allow smaller providers to get a portion of the business...)

Hmm, a thought to ponder on the privacy issue:  suppose through Turnpike
Authority made toll payments visible in real-time via a webserver accessible
to the public?  That way your friends, or your ex, or the cops, or whomever
can determine your commuting patterns.  Pay-as-you-go facilities can then be
rolled out on I-93, routes 2 & 3, and maybe we can even use the same software
(and webserver) for those supermarket and gas station key-fob discount
programs.

It's a cool society we're building.

-rich