NeutronBoy

Why?

I know a few years ago when I was working on a government procurement project for some software, the (very good) lawyers were very weary of any OSS included in the proprietary product we were buying. Their reasoning was, we were buying the product from the vendor. If the vendor had incorporated the OSS code into their product and it was found that they'd breached the license conditions, then we essentially lost the license to run the software - otherwise we'd be in breach as well. Not what you want when you're spending hundreds of millions on a project.

> What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you can pay per-article

The other side of the coin is that if you're a news organisation, "the economics just don't work" with micro payments. You can't fund a month long investigative report based on micropayments, even if it produces a prize-winning piece, if you don't have guaranteed income to support it. What happens if you spend the month investigating and don't find anything?

Micro-payment per-article will only encourage "safe" journalism - articles that you know will resonate with your readers, rather than controversial pieces or in-depth, resource intensive research.

Most governments have public portals (or you have to register with your company details but it's basically open apart from that) that they post RF{I,T,Q}s on.

> I'd rather FB just said "we'll never pony up the wages necessary to moderate well so we're just going to make facebook a complete free speech zone."

They were literally doing this! Then they got slammed for 'censorship', so they got rid of the moderators. Now they're in the position they are now.

Yes.

Our compulsory voting is really "compulsory voting". It's "compulsory turn up to a polling station and get your name marked off". You can drop an empty ballot in the box, draw penises on it, or even just turn and walk out of the polling place.

Also, the OP underestimates the impact of the minor parties. While there are two major parties, one of them is a coalition between two parties (Liberals and the Nationals), and there's a significant block of smaller parties and independents that are big enough that when they vote together they can have a deciding vote on legislation.

> Security through obscurity is not the solution, though

Security is about layers. Nothing is foolproof. It's about implementing layers of controls to reduce your attack surface to an acceptable level, with the trade-off that many controls increase the complexity of your setup or compromises the convenience for your users.

For example, for SSH, this probably includes

* changing the default port

* enforcing SSH key authentication

* enforcing passwords on SSH keys

* implementing fail2ban

* installing jump hosts for internal machines

* implementing a VPN rather than external facing hosts (and with that comes all the additional layers for the VPN)

* etc...

What would you question about it?

There are normally multiple observers from all parties, plus election officials, that scrutinize the counting process in real-time. Disputes are raised and resolved on the spot where possible, and it not are normally escalated. This is why elections can have provisional results on the same day/night, and the official results are a few days later.

To be fair, that's my impression of a number of people who introduce themselves as 'entrepreneurs'.

The people who run a business, or are building something or are otherwise working, will say that. People who say they're in 'business' or are an 'entrepreneur' are the ones who haven't figured out exactly what they're up to.

There's almost two conclusions from the article:

- running government more like a business isn't necessarily a bad thing, and

- a ruthless business-man isn't necessarily the best suited person to do it