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This is not accurate, although someone might have patented process for making laser diodes that slowed things down (I don't know that one way or another). Check out this link for a history of laser diodes. They were invented 40 years ago. Presumably the patent expired in 1982 or so. I don't remember a flood of consumer laser diodes in the early 80's.

For that matter Holonyak's laser was the first GaAsP diode light emmitting diode---a category that includes every red LED that you saw on alarm clocks, early digital watches and calculators in the 70's. If the patent on his laser had been enforced aggressively I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have seen red LEDs in cheap consumer items.

This article mentions that it uses .NET's Common Language Runtime.

I am a senior at Univeristy of California - San Diego. I was forced to use the turnitin.com system on several occasions. Having served my time in the university system, I have seen many students get away with cheating. As a student with something of a (imho) high moral code, this drives me crazy. I think cheating on a test or plagiarizing a paper is reprehensible. As an electrical engineer, I find it important that all other engineering majors believe in the same ethical code (such as the ieee code of ethics) - because cheating in the real world can lead to disastrous consequences.

Turnitin.com serves two important functions: to prevent plagarism, and to catch plagarism. In my writing classes, a few students (knowing that we use turnitin.com) plagiarized anyways. These idiots rightly deserved to be punished. On the downside, a friend of mine (writing a paper at 5am) forgot to use an endquote (") when citing something. She was marked for plagiarism, received an "F" in the class, and has that label on her permanent record. However, in that incident I find the administration to blame, not turnitin.com.

The honor system is a great ideal, but (at least at UCSD) it is not followed. Turnitin.com is not invasive, it simply ensures that people do their own work (and therefore the grading curve reflects students' actual achievments). They profit slightly by adding your paper to their database, but at least that way nobody can plagiarize your work- doing a service to you. BTW, no grading what-so-ever is done by turnitin.com - the web-service returns information on sources of text- not style of writing or anything else. TAs or Professors still do the grading - they will just know that they are grading an original work.

I think this Rosenfeld guy is a big whiner.

I don't know who you publish with, but copyright agreements I've seen and signed transfer the copyright to the publisher (but you retain certain rights, e.g., the right to make the paper available on your webpage, any rights in a process reported on in the paper).

For instance:

The IEEE: "The undersigned hereby assigns to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Incorporated (the "IEEE") all rights under copyright that may exist in and to the above Work, and any revised or expanded derivative works submitted to the IEEE by the undersigned based on the Work. The undersigned hereby warrants that the Work is original and that he/she is the author of the Work; to the extent the Work incorporates text passages, figures, data or other material from the works of others, the undersigned has obtained any necessary permissions. See reverse side for Retained Rights and other Terms and Conditions."

Springer-Verlag: "The copyright to the contribution identified above is transferred to Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York (for U.S. government employees: to the extent transferable). The copyright transfer covers the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the contribution, including reprints, translations, photographic reproductions, microform, electronic form (offline, online), or any other reproductions of similar nature."

It's like the Indian hypersonic plane article from last week. The article submitter frantically hyperlinks every other word in his story and even throws in an completely meaningless tidbit about how India's cruise missles are faster (there's a reason for this) in order to stir Indian pride. Of course all the non-Indian newspaper links don't even mention India as seriously involved in scramjet research.

So basically I now know to discount all claims made in Indian newspapers about the state of scientific research or industry in that country. India is a free nation with a free press (unlike China, for example), but theirs newspapers are hyperbolic, to say the least. Of course this raises the question of why Slashdot "editors" post such news items unfiltered. Couldn't have anything to do with the volume of posts (and ad views) a good ol' flag-waving, my country-is-better-than-yours pissing competition generates, could it?

Hold the phone. I tried that route (unintentionally), and it takes several years of living independently before only your income will be considered and not your income plus your parents' income according to IRS rules. Your school financial aid office can override this in extenuating circumstances, but you have to provide an assload of information proving you are actually independent. Even still, it's no guarantee you'll be considered independent for financial aid purposes.

Stay on your parents' taxes, fill out scholarship/grant applications like mad, and keep the grades up. It also doesn't hurt to get involved in a professional organization at your school such as IEEE, ACM, or NSPE. They either provide scholarships directly or will get you exposure with professors and administrators in order to get other scholarships.

Avoid loans if at all possible, but don't put off your education unnecessarily. Get a co-op job where you can - at least you're getting experience in your field.

That might not be from substandard capacitors, but from substandard electrolyte used in the caps. A lot of Taiwanese mobos had that problem a couple years ago. I have an dead Abit KA7 sitting on the shelf until I have time to play with it. Here's a link concerning the "Leaky Capacitor Fiasco".

Here's a simplified picture:

If I'm calling the lower east side of manhattan from the upper west side, I pick up my handset in my apartment. That establishes a physical straight wire from the handset to my switch (typically just a few blocks away).

I then dial a number - say, 222-2123.

At the switch, the computer examines the exchange (the first three digits), determines the correct remote switch associated with that exchange, chooses another physical wire that directly connects the two switches. That line is connected directly to my line, and the number dialed is forwared to the remote switch.

The remote switch then analyzes the last four digits, find the physical wire connecting the destination phone, and rings that phone. We're then connected with a direct wire between the two points - almost exactly the same as the operator used to create, except the computerized switch is much faster than the operator :-)

One important point - there's lots of multiplexing going on, whereby many simultaneous conversations share the same wires. At the very dawn of telephony, it was one conversation, one wire. That changed quickly. :-)

Until relatively recently, long distance worked more or less the same way, with wires. Overseas calls were wired or via satellite, but still the same idea.

Today, lots of traffic is carried via IP, which is a whole different ball of wax - packets fly around in no particular sequence, to be reassembled near the destination. But that's another story.

here's a pretty good technical history, if you're interested...

The good news is that some new network devices (like VoIP handsets) may avoid the wall-wart syndrome of most modern telephones. IEEE P802.3af is a backward-compatible standard that delivers device power over standard CAT5 ethernet lines. A quick search shows that network gear makers are already selling switches that provide power to connected devices.

It will be nice to return to the days when desktop telephones were powered by their network connections.

Both AT&T and Santa Cruz Operation participated in the development of the POSIX / FIPS 151-X standards and they did not identify any such royalty/patent dependent section as required for Federal endorsed standards.

In terms of copyright, anyone and any organization who has purchased and ISO standard is free to release implementations based upon those standards.

... And lastly to totally blow away your argument From This is the final listing of Testing Laboratories and Validated Products from the NIST POSIX Testing Program, dated December 31, 1997.

151-2OLL001 Issued: 03/08/96 Type: Native

Product Supplier: Open Linux Ltd

Product: Linux, Version1.2.13, Release FT 1.2 i486

PCD: Linux-FT POSIX.1 Conformance Document 1.0 Oct 18, 1995

GTI- Supported by Product MC - Supported by Product

MFS- Supported by Product AP - Supported by Product

Computer Hardware Supplier: MICRO CITY

Computer Hardware Product: 486/66 PC

C Compiler: Linux-FT C89(V2.7)

APTL: 100367 UNISYS Systems Certification

IEEE 802.11 is working on this NOW. The Task Group is called WAVE (Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment), and the next meeting is at the IEEE 802.11 Interim Meeting in Vancouver in January. IEEE Meetings are open to all, BTW. Just pay your registration fee, show up and participate.

IEEE 802.11 is working on this NOW. The Task Group is called WAVE (Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment), and the next meeting is at the IEEE 802.11 Interim Meeting in Vancouver in January. IEEE Meetings are open to all, BTW. Just pay your registration fee, show up and participate.

Your commitment to do good is impressive. Perhaps you could take a cue from this article. I guess Uganda might not be very different (given the Equatorial climate).

I must say I've never heard of 802.11i before; have I missed everybody talking about it, or is it underreported? I don't pretend to be an expert in wireless technology, but I've not seen it mentioned anywhere... Then again, their status page (quickly looked up, yay Mysterious Future...) uses <blink>, was exported by MS Word, was "cleaned up" by Netscape 4, and has an incorrectly capitalised DOCTYPE, and I'm not sure if I'd trust wireless security to a group with a status page like that :-P (I know, they probably didn't make the page, but it still gives a bad impression).

Exactly right. Security, in wireless sensor networks, means more than just encryption (for privacy), however. In many applications it's more important to have message integrity and sender authentication, meaning that the recipient is guaranteed that the message hasn't been altered, and that it was from who it says it was from. For example, having an encrypted message from a short-range wireless light switch is often of little utility; people around can see the light come on (perhaps through a window), so you're not really protecting anything. However, as the parent poster says, you really don't want some car of script kiddies driving through your neighborhood randomly turning lights on and off at 2 AM. The wireless lights need to know that the messages they receive are from their associated switches, not from some 3l33t d00dz; that's the function of message integrity and source authentication checking.

Recognizing the importance of these types of security, the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, available here, employs the Advanced Encryption Standard for encryption, message integrity, and sender authentication. The ZigBee Alliance specifies key transport protocols, key management, and other higher layer security functions.

Wireless sensor networks are not new; there is even a textbook published recently on them (Wireless Sensor Networks: Architectures and Protocols). Many corporations have active WSN programs, including:

Motorola

Ember and

Figure 8 Wireless.

University research programs, in addition to Berkeley, include:

UCLA WINS

MIT uAMPS

plus those sposored by DARPA.

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard, available here, was designed to support such networks. The ZigBee Alliance, an industrial consortium of over 60 companies, is the marketing and compliance arm of the 802.15.4 standard, as the Wi-Fi Alliance is to 802.11. The vitality of the ZigBee Alliance, which had over 350 attendees at its recent open house in Silicon Valley, is an indication that this technology is moving from research into commercialization; the commercialization of wireless sensor networks is the real significance of the Wired article.

I found a Spectrum article about jacks, plugs and sockets. I cannot recall whether my professor said "socket" or "jack."

Your post is nonsense. I felt puzzled because the verb has a separate date, 15th century, from the noun, 1533. The two disagree blatantly. The two differ by at least 32 years. You misunderstood the Merriam-Webster clarification of dates and incorrectly blamed it on the database. Additionally, the 1828 link you provide, while it does not list "socket" as a verb, does list "unsocket" as a verb.

I checked to OED. Needless to write, I am right. "1533 Lett. & P. Hen. VIII, VI. 642 For mendyng and sockettyng newe Cressytts." Henry VIII most definitely was not American, but English. Next time you consider being pedantic, make sure to be correct, too.

I thought IEEE spectrum mentioned Dr.Belcher was close to building it. It didnt say there was actually a device built. The Newscientist article says they have actually realized this goal.

I presume the article you are referring to is this

ACM and IEEE are just the places I would look for such papers. The proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM for example are a very good "filter" for the flood of papers on networking.

NLOS is the way to go The Line-of-site requirement kills a lot of wireless broadband rollouts.

They aren't even obligated to tell you. They might sell that data to lots of other companies, together with information about what kind of consumer you are, etc.

However, before they do all this, they'll definitely need to include this in their fine print legal notices, so at least someone would notice I'm sure, the EFF or the like. But as for the average consumer, yes, they probably wouldn't be aware of this.

However, I would believe that if, as you and I both mentioned, these things become mandatory, it would be relatively well spelled-out as to what the manufacturer can actually do with the data, and even what kinds of data they can record. A quick Google on automotive black box turns up a link to, among other things, a Slashdot story from way back in 2002 about the IEEE developing a standard for automotive black boxes. Digging around on the IEEE site, I found a homepage for their MVEDR (Motor Vehicle Event Data Recorders project. I don't have Acrobat or PowerPoint installed though, so I can't read many of their documents regarding the project.

In short, it would seem to me that once these things become commonplace, everyone's going to be jumping over the manufacturers to make sure they behave with the data. Although, my faith in humanity and America may be too high.

(there's a good technical discussion of the whole issue here.)

My concern is over what criteria will be used to flag a program as non-recordable. Will they only flag major movies and sporting events? Or will the regular sitcom and drama series be flagged as well?

(I work second shift. The only programs that are on TV while I'm home are infomercials, preachers, soaps, and Sesame Street. If I'm unable to record prime-time TV for viewing later, I might as well not have a TV. My situation is obviously by no means unique.)

The scheme used may well end up obsoleting existing ATSC receiving equipment. Studios are concerned about something called the "analog hole" - you can't record off the digital output, but there's no way to pass the Broadcast Flag to the analog outputs of the decoder. (well, there is, but existing analog recorders will ignore it) You could just record in analog - with the development of new equipment, even in high-definition analog.

Plugging the "analog hole" would require ensuring the ATSC decoder has no analog outputs. Any external connection between your decoder and your display would have to be digital, so as to preserve the Flag.

On the other hand, I have to agree with the poster who suggested obsoleting all existing decoders would probably kill the DTV transition. This will not be an easily-resolved issue.

(or will it? Just enact the a "TV Studio Protection Act" which makes it a federal felony to connect a VCR to a DTV decoder...)

By WiFi you mean 802.11b, right? Because 802.11b runs Ethernet natively, not TCP/IP. (Well, sort of. It's actually "wireless ethernet" and has distinct differences between "wired ethernet" which is IEEE 802.3.) Any protocol that can be run over Ethernet, like TCP/IP, can be run over 802.11b.

So it is conceivably possible to create a new protocol that isn't TCP/IP that would run over 802.11b links to offer something like bluetooth. However:

...quite a lot of power consumption, and is designed to connect complete devices. Wifi isn't meant to attach your keyboard to your desktop, for example.

Is still true. So while it might be possible to create a new protocol to connect devices using 802.11b, I really can't see it being really practical. But 802.11b does not demand TCP/IP.

The article says 802.15.3a will replace BlueTooth, but after googling around there seems to be substantial differences. The can be summed up like this:

. . . . . .Power. . .Speed. . .Distance
BlueTooth. . 1mW. . .0.4Mb. . 10m..100m
802.15.3a. 200mW. . .100Mb. . .5m...20m

The figures were taken from here and here. The figures aren't directly compatible, as Bluetooth takes into account the "Bluetooth protocol" which evidently is optimised for power efficiency, whereas I expect the in typical use your 802.15.3a will have a VB programmer pumping TCP/IP over it. I guess that is the payback Bluetooth gets for all that complexity.

Still, the differences are measured in orders of magnitude. That does not meet my definition of "the same".

You know it's funny, but I can't seem to find an IEEE standard for "athakur999." ;)

It is a SIMD machine. It looks like they've put some real thought into the software, which is the hard part in something like this. The debugger certainly looks pretty.

The ported C code on slide 13 is a bit scary. The intermediate language appears to rely on the compiler to distribute the workload to the PEs (otherwise why is the loop the same in both.) I'd much prefer the intermediate language give you complete control of the PEs rather than letting the compiler do it for you.

It does look like there are actual dies out there. Maybe not functional, but built. Also, it looks like the PE communication is more limited than I'd like. There are only two communcation ports. I'd expect four if they want this architecture to scale past 64 PEs.

Other comments.

• "multi-treaded" is as close to a false description as you can get. Only one thread (instruction stream) runs at a time. Sure, you get 64 data streams but that is SIMD, not MT.

• The peak GFLOPS numbers are actually really really poor compared to a P4. 25 vs. 12? And while both are much higher than actually achievable on real programs, the P4 is probably easier to come close on.

• 64 PEs on chip? It looks like there only 12 million logic transistors. Which after the main core means that only slightly more than 100,000 transistors are spent per PE. I'd really expect to see a whole lot more logic transistors. The Itanium 2 (which uses a newer process) has about 75 million logic transistors ((see here). Doing the same here would give space for more than 256 PEs.

Given the above issues I don't think this thing is going to take off anytime soon for "super computer" purposes. The big win is high FLOPS per Watt, which isn't all that important for SCs (well not that important). As part of a graphics processor or DSP I could see potential. I still think that in a few years (say 5 to 10) this type of thing will be a coprossesor on a fair number of those Linux clusters used for scientific computing. But this one isn't there yet.

I've seen people toss around $16,000 as a price point, but I can't find that anywhere. I assume I'm missing something obvious. At that price it is useless. It needs to be under $1,000, and really wants to be a lot cheaper than that to be interesting.

The PLoS is really important. More important than "open source", and it should be on the front page of slashdot.

Listen: Right now, basically everything published in a journal in the last 50 years is *owned* not by scientists but by publishers. You might not realize this if you never published, but journals and conferences make you *assign the copyright* for your paper to the publishing company. Not license it to them for publication (this would be reasonable), but *give* them the copyright and lose your own rights to publish and distribute the work. Here's a sample agreement from the IEEE .

This is seriously fucked up. It means that, if the publishers wanted, they could close up shop and never let anybody see the archive of scientific papers again. It means they can sue you if you publish your own paper on your web page, or make copies of it for a class you teach!

Computer scientists, being handy with the web, typically publish their papers and then put them up on their websites, playing "civil disobedience." (Some journals have even caved to this, and part of the copyright assignment you actually get licensed to put the paper on your web page.) That means there's already a sort of PLOS for computer science: an index of Computer Scientists' web pages and publications at citeseer .

The culture in other sciences, like biology, is really different. These guys write, sign the form, and then pay for a few paper copies of the article that they can give out if requested.

The way it's happening in CS is one way to free science. It seems to be working. But for those who don't actively maintain web pages and don't have a culture where the web is the place to go to look for papers, the PLoS seems like a good way to make this happen. I really, really hope it succeeds.

Putting the Move Back in Movies

A personal video player puts films in the palm of your hand for US $99

By Steven M. Cherry

Bumper-to-bumper traffic stretches ahead for miles. You're hot, tired, and the kids are fidgeting in the back seat. They're too young for Game Boys. You used to long for one of the big expensive DVD players mounted below the roof. But now you reach into your purse for the ZVUE, a US $99 handheld video player.

About the same size and shape as a Game Boy, the ZVUE has the added advantage that, unlike a DVD player, a child--or you--can carry it around and watch it on a long airplane ride or in a doctor's waiting room.

Yes, the ZVUE player's movie screen is very small, but then size didn't keep Nintendo's Game Boy and its ilk from becoming hugely popular among the same 8- to 18-year-old set at which this device is aimed. The ZVUE plays movies, television shows, and music videos with a clarity that will surprise adults and captivate the youngsters.

From HandHeld Entertainment Inc. (San Francisco), the ZVUE relies on a 2.5-inch (diagonal) thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display and stores its programs on a Secure Digital Multimedia card already popular for handheld consumer electronics, including digital cameras. These so-called SD cards come with capacities of 8 to 256 MB--at roughly one minute per megabyte, the largest cards can hold two full two-hour movies each.

A major part of the ZVUE development involved a proprietary encoding scheme, which HandHeld Entertainment calls its HHe codec, that fiercely compresses programs at a 100 to 1 ratio. Nonetheless, the ZVUE plays video with none of the jerkiness (using only a few frames per second) or fuzziness (using just a small number of pixels per frame) one might expect.

None of those usual problems could be seen when I watched Toy Story 2 on a preproduction demo unit that company CEO Nathan Schulhof brought to the IEEE Spectrum office in mid-August. The 24-bit color picture, the same as on a conventional computer color display, was crisp, and the figures moved as smoothly as in the best video games. A 128-MB SD card, holding a two-hour movie, costs about $50.

A proprietary codec can be the kiss of death for something like a media player. Sales of the player start out small, so few film distributors encode their movies for it. With only a few movies available, device sales languish and the cycle continues. Aware of this chicken-and-egg problem, Schulhof is licensing his codec to other manufacturers. With more versions of ZVUE out there, more movies should be available for them.

Additionally, for those who already have movies languishing on their hard drives in the MPEG-4 format, HandHeld will soon release a software package for converting these files into a form compatible with its codec. (Note to Schulhof: a conversion from DivX would be nice, too.) Burn the result onto an SD card via the device's USB connection and your kids will have another movie for the ZVUE.

The 75-gram unit plays for up to eight hours on four AA batteries and has a slot for the SD card. The device comes with only one set of headphones but a port for a second pair, so both of the little tykes in the back seat can share sound as well as pictures without your having to listen to Shrek for the hundredth time. First units are expected to show up in Toys "R" Us stores in the United States this month, in time for the end-of-year holiday season.

ZVUE is being manufactured in Hong Kong by Eastern Asia Technology

What about the black boxes that are now standard in cars?

According to the link you posted, these aren't standard... the standard for them is being developed. At least, it was as of April 2002, and it seems unlikely that in less than a year it's gone from concept to standard equipment.

However, standardization of car electronics interface would probably make the project you've pointed out quite a bit easier.

I believe this will have a positive impact on the cost and maintenance of my future car. Lowering the cost from the current $100 to a future of $25 for one sensor/device may not have much of an effect, but for 100 different sensors it should have a very positive effect. And with the many manufacturere producing standards compliant sensors/devices the reliability of our vehicles is also bound to increase. I jut have a few questions here:

1. How will the DMCA affect this? Will we still be able to work on our own cars or will that be circumvention subject to DMCA? How about modifying the software (hacking in the pure sense) the software that runs my car - Will I be able to do that legally?

2. What about the black boxes that are now standard in cars? What data will it now store? Who owns that data? Who controls that data? Can I erase it? Can I refuse to let it be recorded? What happens when GPS is integrated?

3. What happens when I sell my car? Is the software included like it is now? Or does it have to be relicensed like when I sell a computer?

This is insane. My company rolled out 802.11 a while ago, and they had a few statistics they sent out to address safety concerns.

Stuff like, "Since these run at low transmit power (.03 Watts), it's 1/10-1/20 the power of a cell phone." and "You'd have to hold a body part within 2cm of the antena for 30 minutes while the radio operated continuously at 100% capacity for that time."

Just look at IEEE C95.1 1991, which details the maximum safe exposure for any EM radiation.

Or, gosh, here's a thought... what about OSHA?! They've got a bazillion links on the research involved.

I hope this gets thrown out of the courts faster than you can blink. The last thing students need is to be shoved back into the backwaters of technology.

I'm suprised there's no mention of the Burton Amp Jacket with sleeve based controls for your iPod. mmm.. me like.. They only mention this goofy looking jacket. Looks like he's got a PCB up his sleeve by the outline of the control surface surrounding the buttons. Burton/Apple did a better job IMHO.

How to hack an election 1.12: Diebold tries to silence incriminating evidence : Diebold, maker of proven-to-be hackable voting systems, plays global whack-a-mole, in effort to scare ISP's into taking down websites with incriminating material. They used the DCMA to shut down BlackBoxVoting.org.

But the incriminating data just keeps popping back up on the Net, and Gun-and-Voting rights activist Jim March calls the bluff and challenges Diebold "Diebold: You are cordially invited to bite me. Bring it on. Make my day.. March has created a legal strategy/toolkit for voting rights activists who want to fight Diebold, a company which has knowingly - for 10 years - sold security-compromised voting technology, and whose CEO, an aggressive Republican fundraiser, has said he is he is committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year. In internal memos published by Scoop, Diebold's officials admit that their voting records database is (and has been for a long time) hackable ( [anyone can] access the GEMS Access database and alter the Audit log without entering a password ) but that this isn't necessarily a problem because It has a lot to do with perception. Of course everyone knows perception is reality. For background to this story, see my summary of Mefi posts on the Voting Fraud story, from this thread. Diebold's funky voting systems are in the process of being Certified, in Maryland and elsewhere, by SAIC, a company convicted of major frauds within the last decade and which has extensive ties to the Bush Administration, the CIA, and which proudly lists DARPA in its annual report as one of its prime clients., and owns Network Solutions, Inc. SAIC has not, it seems, noticed the GEMS database story (see main link). If Diebold systems win certification, we can expect an awful lot of This sort of thing.

Computer security expert Dr. Rebecca Mercuri has some pointed analysis on the subject.

You can join the effort to demand truly secure voting systems at VerifiedVoting.Org

I got this in my inbox yesterday:

Voter Verification Newsletter - Vol 1, Number 11

David L. Dill (elections@chicory.stanford.edu) September 21, 2003 http://www.verifiedvoting.org

For previous newsletters, see http://www.verifiedvoting.org/news.asp

It's been over three weeks since my last newsletter! Lots of things have been happening, but I haven't had time to write about them. Here are a few of them.

IEEE VOTING SYSTEM STANDARD
---

A seemingly obscure standards subcommittee of IEEE may determine whether we have trustworthy voting systems or not. And things are not going well.

IEEE is the "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers." It is a highly respected organization with a huge number of electrical engineers, many of whom have substantial expertise in computer-related topics. It is reasonable to expect that IEEE involvement in voting technology would be a good thing.

There is an IEEE standards committee (called P1583) that is writing standards for voting systems, including security standards for DREs. (http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/scc38/1583/) Although this committee may seem obscure, this standard may very well be the basis for future Federal regulation of voting equipment.

Recently, several voter-verifiable-audit-trail advocates with strong technology credentials have joined the P1583 committee in an effort to ensure the standard requires an adequate level of security. I am one of them.

Unfortunately, many of the current members on the committee are working very hard to prevent us from contributing to the standard. As we have gotten more involved, the tactics have become more extreme. The standard is now being rushed to a vote by the Standards Association, in an apparent attempt to freeze it before our most important suggestions can be incorporated. Many of the suggestions we HAVE made are dismissed for the flimsiest of reasons, and rules seem to be made up on the fly to exclude us from the standards-writing process.

So far as I can see, the committee is controlled by voting companies -- the chair of the committee works for ES&S, and even the IEEE standards people on the committee, including the president of the Standards Association, voted with them as a block in a teleconference earlier this week.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has taken an interest in e-voting and in the behavior of the P1583 committee as well. They issued a press release on Friday (see http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/20030919_eff_ pr.php), along with an action alert for IEEE members (http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/IEEE/). You can send a letter expressing your views, too (it will be especially effective if you are an IEEE member).

There will be more updates on this topic, no doubt.

Today I got this follow-up & correction:

There is a correction to the Voter Verification Newsletter emailed last night. I was writing about the IEEE P1583 voting equipment standards committee. Here is what I said:

So far as I can see, the committee is controlled by voting companies -- the chair of the committee works for ES&S, and even the IEEE standards people on the committee, including the president of the Standards Association, voted with them as a block in a teleconference earlier this week.

In fact, the president was not in the teleconference and, so far as I know, is not a member of the committee. The individual in question, Don Heirman, is a CANDIDATE for president of the Standards Association in the IEEE election that is currently underway.

Sorry,
David Dill

Now there's something we EE's know about. (Or not...) We got it wrong in the upper North East with the huge black out.

Looks like it's even used in the tiny chip to chip communications. Basically, to overcome the impotence caused by the little bit of impedance between the chips, we'll add some capacitance (CAPs). Adding the cap's to ground provides reactive power.

Actually, the *bi prefixes are IEC (60027-2), and IEEE (1541-2002) standards, and a proposed ISO standard.

Argh. I don't even know where to start, that post is so full of meaningless misinformation.

First of all, a cell phone is designed to be an RF antenna, a Palm pilot is designed to be a hunk of electronics. Comparing them is silly to begin with. Second of all, if you're going to use 60*50mW = 3W that's insane. That would only be meaningful if the Palm Pilots were all placed at the exact same spot and in exactly the same phase so they constructively interfered.

Think of rain falling on a swimming pool. you might do a calculation that says that on average 100mL of water was falling each second. Would the effect on the waves on the surface be the same if you threw in a water balloon containing 100mL of water? NO! Of course not! One makes a big, central splash, the other makes lots of tiny isolated splashes.

The odds of those 60 palm pilots interfering constructively is about the same as water falling into a pool in exactly the right way to simulate the waves caused by a big water balloon hitting the surface. How likely do you think that is?

But all that doesn't matter because there's no way that a Palm emits anywhere close to 50mW as RF energy. I simply picked a huge number like that to show you how ridiculous your claims were. In fact, a modern digital cell phone (remember, these are designed to be antennas) puts out approx. 100mW. Since putting out that kind of energy is the only thing they do, and they require big batteries to do it. Based on that, a Palm most likely puts out less than 5mW in radiant RF energy, if that, so the energy hitting these wires 20cm away is more like 1/200th that required to light an LED.

If you're so worried about RF noice which may affect the plane, I guess you never move around in your seat, for fear of building up some static electricity. The spark of a discharge would be huge compared to a Palm Pilot. You must also never use the bathroom, because turning on the lightbulb in there throws out 60W of power!!!

So you're spooked by electronics. That's fine, go live with a tinfoil hat on, but don't tell me not to use a Palm Pilot on a flight because it scares you. At least do some basic thinking first.

The IEEE had a very interesting article in Spectrum magazine 7 years ago on the issue of portable electronics and flight safety. As megahertz/gigahertz ratings increase for computing devices, this should only get worse (maybe until it gets to the point where computing is beyond "normal" RF?)

The conclusion was that there is little doubt about the interference and it is not just cell phones. The article relates an incident when too many people listening to the radio (there was some "important" sports match going on) did cause noticeable interference. It seems that in most cases the pilot can notice that some instruments are providing inaccurate readings (thanks to having redundant information around, different instruments would be affected differently) and it doesn't become a big problem.

So, by using your high-frequency electronic devices inside the plane you're making the pilot's job more difficult. During cruise flight it may be less risky and during takeoff and landing it is definitely not recommended. Personally I wouldn't even trust that much those skyphones. I'd rather err on the safe side. Read a book!

He saw a photo credit at the bottom of the page and didn't realize that it referred to this photo instead of the illustration at the top of the article.

I would hardly call the IEEE Spectrum a "small, little" trade magazine. Every IEEE member gets a copy. There are well over 300 000 IEEE in the world. Circulation is at least thus 300 000. Here are the benefits of such a membership.

After all, not every Zalman ZM400A-APF is going to have a 12V min/max fluctuation of only 0.005V, and not every Enermax EG651P-VE FMA 550W is going to have a fluctuaction of 0.65V.


If the fluctuations are due to the switching power supply and regulator design, then yes these measurements are going to be similar on other samples of these models (assuming no revision changes).

Modern electronics components are amazing reliable and consistent as long you don't use surplus parts (or capacitors made from incorrect stolen information) and operate them in their specifications. Most components are either DOA, and thus found before they leave the factory, or die from common but well understood semiconductor failures (thermal breakdown, static discharage, etc.)

Though I agree, for the most accurate testing, multiple samples should be used. That's just standard scientific method.

Muscat, J.E., et al., "Handheld cellular telephone use and risk of brain cancer", Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 284, pp. 3001-7, 2000.

Inskip, P.D., et al., "Cellular-telephone use and brain tumors", New England Journal of Medecine, vol. 344, pp 79-86, 2001.

Johansen, C., et al., "Cellular telephones and cancer", Journal of the National Cancer Institute, vol. 93, pp 203-7, 2001.

also have a look at 802.11e which I think might be addressing QoS in the hidden node problem as well.

simon

Yes, so very true.

Additionally, like you said, better healthcare rates are available through a large organization; however, that organization does not need to be your employeer.

I belong to IEEE which offers insurance through their group plan. Many large organizations have that ability, and If I didn't have coverage otherwise, I'd heavily consider it.

If losing benefits is a problem, you should check out (if you haven't already) your COBRA rights. In short, the Cobra act of 1986 allows an employee who is no longer elgible to participate in an employer's health plan (i.e. fired, laid off, etc..) to still continue to participate in the health plan for up to 3 years if the employeee (former) is willing to burden the premium costs 100% plus a small administrative fee. Again, it may not be the cheapest way to do it, but if you're worried about switching providers with a pre-existing condition that may not be covered under a new plan it's an option.

Your example seems to indicate a group who does care about using computers to write its language. I have no problem with that.

My point is: if there are enough computer users who find it more useful to have available elvish or klingon, it doesn't matter that it is not "real".

It is like using dingbats or other character-graphics, if there are enough people wanting to use them, it is a good thing that they're incorporated into the standard. If more computer users find it useful to have a heavy teardrop-spoked pinwheel asterisk (U2743) than to have sumerian cuneiform letters, then it is irrelevant which is more of a "real language". If you really need cuneiform letters, there are still ways to produce them with a computer regardless of their status in the standard.

I personally prefer to have elvish letters available than 40 different varieties of stars, asterisks and snowflakes. Mmm... Let me check if my SA membership lets me vote on that...

Microsoft are being sued and its passed the kick out phase and is now well into court. Sony and Philips have paid several hundred million for licenses, and of course this represents the legal slush fund for Intertrust.

Why no focus on something that could stop the shipping of ALL microsoft products ?

Well, linux is not unix. Technically...

Well, Linux could become Unix. Unix is now a specification, just like POSIX is a specification.

Certain Linux distributions have become POSIX certified, and it is conceivable that certain Linux distributions could some day become Unix certified. All it takes is for someone with deep enough pockets to want it enough.

The latest issue of IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article on Why Apple, Sun, and Red Hat must merge.

The latest issue of IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article on Why Apple, Sun, and Red Hat must merge.

Care to link to this spec? The 802.1u I know of has to do with virtual bridged local area networks.