Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Pronouns, Acronyms, Abbreviations
Aren't you ever gonna get that thing declawed? AnonymousCowhand pointed to this NYTimes story on the CueCat. The article is a nice overview of the way the little-bar-code-reader-that-could (that could track users by serial number, that is) came to be mailed out to hundreds of thousands of people, and how successful it's been. A hint: " After partners like Forbes, Wired and other publishers distributed the CueCat device to several million subscribers, the technology was criticized by reviewers and consumers for being impractical and of limited benefit."
I'd be nearly as willing to vote with a fake machine ... Anonymous Coward writes "Forbes reports that the Microsoft, Unisys, & Dell plan to build a new voting solution is 'phony'. A Microsoft spokesman denies that the company is part of such a partnership."
My favorite line in a long time is this one: "When Unisys says it's "offering a fully integrated approach to election management," it does not mean it has something specific to offer." Well, then, just so that's clear.
Like, OMG! Chuck Borromeo wrote in response to the story that hemos posted the other day about XML, bioinformatics, and markup languages for genetic information.
He says: "I noticed your posting on Slashdot. You're right, XML will be very helpful in the Bioinformatics field. However, there is another gene expression XML DTD in the works. It's being proposed by an OMG group called MGED (www.mged.org). GEML is proprietary and is being supported by its creator Rosetta Pharmaceuticals. MGED is going to become an OMG standard and already enjoys support and contributions from a wide variety of academic and industrial leaders."
Another installment in the reprint of Jon Katz' series of columns, emails and comments is online for your perusal.
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
actually, maybe there isn't enough money in it for them. It would be too hard to get a monopoly.
now that we have the obligatory bashing done, I can imagine the hassles of using a MS system for voting. Can you imagine the legal fights because of a blue screen or two on election day in Florida?
Microsoft Electonic Chads leave no unsightly mess on your counting room floor!
I can see it now . . .
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I don't know... "Use this stick to poke a hole in this piece of paper" doesn't seem all that "technical" to me...
Functionally, it's pretty much the same as "fill in the appropriate circle with a #2 pencil" in complexity, in my opinion.
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
First time in a long time: Capitalism wins.
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-Be a man. Insult me without using an AC.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
The problem with the pencil and paper is that it is expensive. You can only hire so many people to count, and if you hire them at too low of a salary they could conceivably be susceptible to election fraud.
That is easily solved by having the votes counted at least twice by independent groups of counters. I've worked as a vote counter in Sweden, and that's how it's done there. And I'm pretty sure they get the numbers exactly right most of the time.
I don't like pencils though. They're erasable, you know.
We call that statistical sampling.
You've forgotten about the penchant of hardcore unix freaks to prounce initialisms, for example: etc - "et-see", tcsh - "teesh", vi - "vie", fsck - "f-suck" and so on. So, the hardcore are saying:
IBM - "ib-em"
XML - "zimel"
SGI - "siggy"
HPUX - "H-PUCKS"
AIX - "aches"
...
To the truly hardcore, anything can be pronounced.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
That's how I learned it as well. But somewhere along the way I decided to "rationalize" it, and started putting punctuation inside the quotes only when I was quoting the punctuation too. So these would mean different things to me:
- He said "me?"
- He said "me"?
(Actually, I would probably also put a period after the first one.)I've noticed that papers published by CS researchers tend to use rationalized punctuation as well. For geeks, the rationalized method surely arises from the drilled-in requirement of parenthesizing expressions properly. For us, the parentheses in (2+3)*3 have semantic implementations, and thus we have to be concerned with "correct" (= "right") rather than with "correct" (= "approved tradition"). I suspect we have just generalized the concept to apply to text as well as to code and mathematical expressions.
You could probably go to a university and map the campus to show regions that punctuate the traditional way and regions that punctuate the rationalized way.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I must have missed that issue of Wired 6 years ago where they said something interesting.
I didn't pay for my operating system either
Hey, it works just fine in Canada! 32 million people, about a zillion ha of uninhabited land, four and a half time zones (half an hour later in da Rock, doncha know, bye)--and cheap Chinese pencils!!--and our recent election still came off without a hitch! ...that is, unless you're one of those full of CRAP types...*
*Uh, that's "Canadian Reform Alliance Party," and don't you forget it!
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Don't be fooled by the media. It's not a race. The media is about the only one to benifit from quick results. You don't win prizes because your electorate was counted quickly. Also postal ballots take about a week before the results from them become known.
I'm from the Philly suburbs as well. What town has this? Nobody I know of voted that way? I actually used lever machines. (Doylestown.)
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"Don't trolls get tired?"
One truly hopes that that is sarcasm. As a good little minion of the US media, I followed the shenanigans in Florida rather cloesly, and it took a loooong time to hadncount all those votes. There has to be something mechanical in that along the way.This is a big country.
Size doesn't really matter, here in the EU we have an roughly/somewhat equal number of people who can vote (EU vote).(My expirience is limited to elections in Germany, but as the EU election takes place in all countries, I asume their handling of those events isn't that different)
6-7 people can easily count the votes of 1000-3000 people, they mostly come from a different political party, cheating is impossible this way. As for the time we have knowledge people & computers they get data from some small selected districts and who knows what else. We get forecasts and "Hochrechnungen" (sorry no english word available) starting a few minutes after the election is closed and getting very close to the real end result, after ~45 min...:-)Of course you get those data in nice grapics on TV.
I don't know much about the US system but using something like machines, who ever created the OS doesn't really matter in this case, is really not the right respect we should have...
Michael
:) I actually used m-w.com for their definition of acronym; but indeed their definition of initialism is wrong. I got my information from "A Way With Words" a KPBS radio show.
Joseph Elwell.
Saying that it never fails but only ceases to be applicable isn't really a good pro-obscurity argument. If i was selling you a burglar alarm and said it will always always work and never fail, but it might just cease to exist.. would you buy it?
See right now parser people are rolling their eyes. I sat with a parser guy at a conference as we were repeatable bombarded with the words "generic parser", it's not a generic parser, it's a generic XML parser. A generic parser is a very different thing all together. Should someone actually figure out a way to efficently parse arbitary grammars and write a parser to do so, then you will have a generic parser and it will supercede XML because it will be able to parse anything efficently, not just XML. So yes, in the not too distant future you can expect to see the next bit of snake oil that claims to be a "generic parser" without even looking up the definition and everyone will run to it. They will only at that point downplay the importance of XML saying it was the worst thing since LISP and list all the virtues of the new technology and its many three letter acronyms.
How we know is more important than what we know.
As I remember the ballot is counted by optical scanner with human backup.
Federal elections are done with pencil and paper, with the counting done in parallel. Each poll counts it's own votes, and there's already one person available per balot box. The result is that few people are responsible for counting more than a few hundred ballots. The results are then tabulated and forwarded. Few, if any, ballots are uncounted within a couple of hours.
To prevent/minimize the probability of fraud, each candidate is allowed to have scrutineers at each ballot location to make sure that the count goes properly (I've been one). If questions are raised, a judical recount can be asked for (with a worst case not unlike the Gore-Bush standoff, but with lower stakes).
For a Judicial recount, pencil and paper allow an actual accounting. If there was a problem (including fraud) with a pure electronic system, I don't see how you could have an audit trail that had much hope of finding the problem. One option is that the system then prints a human-verifiable ballot for each vote -- in which case, you end up with something pretty close to pencil and paper.
Even so, there is a forensic value to pencil and paper: If one person marks dozens/hundreds of ballots, the similarity of the marks might get the attention of the people doing a recount and looking for signs of such fraud. With computer-printed output, they're all printed by the same machine.
BTW: I think that "the time when it took weeks to figure out the election, every election?" was back before the telegraph/telephone days -- when it took weeks to get the results from California to Washington, and then the tabulation back to California.
`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
That's not really so big an issue. In the UK we manage hand-counts of 20-30 million votes at general elections, and the first results are in in two hours after the polls close (usually Chris Mullen's constituency, up Geordie way, who make it a point of pride to be fast, and since Mullen's had a majority to die for for twenty years, inaccuracies don't matter much).
Vote-counters aren't hired at a salary anyway: elections are too infrequent an event for anyone to make a living at it. Usually it's local government civil servants getting a spot of overtime payment here in the UK, and a dozen or so vote-counters can easily handle the votes of a constituency in which 30-40,000 votes are cast.
Election fraud is actually less of an issue with human counting: you've got to bribe or threaten every single counter in a voting district to make a difference, whereas with a machine count you only have to nobble the guy who oerhauls the machine on the night.
Single points of failure are a Bad Thing.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
Ok, so the proper terms are:
class Queue
{
Queue();
~Queue();
void cat(long);
void tail(short);
};
So they really need to promote the re-usability and extensibility of the new queue::cat interface.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
The same thing happens with politicians. If there's pre-existing laws that aren't being enforced, congress will happily create new legislation that does the same thing, just so they can tell their constituents that they're working hard.
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I mean, really, why spend 90 percent of the message transferring the DTD description of the data and validation when you can use XML Schema like everyone else and ship the schema only when it changes in header and footer segments.
...
Doesn't anyone else go to Sun Tech Days around here?
If you did, you might get a cool alien t-shirt or alien baby like I did
Or maybe you'd understand HOW to implement XML. Heck, even the MSFT methods are a reasonable implementation, and a lot better than XML DTD would be.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The Canadians aren't counting chad. They're counting ballots designed to be counted by hand.
If something is contested, what do you do? You can't do anything but have a total revote. If you have all those pieces of paper in a box u just count them again.
Not if you use a scanner. To my mind, the best system would be one in which you mark your choices, feed it in and the system displays on screen "You voted for Roblimo for president, Hemos for Senator and YES on Proposition 51, the Slashdot Initiative. Is this correct?" Push the YES button and your vote is recorded and your ballot stored in a lock-box. Push NO and your ballot is spit back out to you for you to change.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Look around Dallas, TX some time (:::Digital::Convergence:::'s home). They've put :Cue's (oh, it hurts to say it) in the Dallas Morning News ("swipe here for more info about this article"), and they advertise all over the place. So they're trying.
My CueCat has been idle on my desk for a long time, offering a mild red glow of CueCat warmth to its surroundings. Maybe I'll open it and remove the ID code some day. Hmmm. Or not.
-John
I am so glad the the rumours of Microsoft and Dell developing a new voting machine are false. It would doubtless have been even more of a disaster than the present one.
Voting procedures should be as simple as possible, like the UKian model, in order to make it as resistant to fraud as possible.
Complexity breeds error and fraud. Technical types tend to forget that.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
It's not like what we (the geek community) are proposing you do with the thing is illegal at all (though DC obviously wishes it were), but, we all know Wired isn't going to stick their neck out like that. I like to believe they might have 6 years ago...
But, alas, the days of old are gone.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
Just give them some time. They spent two years researching and designing one of the more innovative products out there, and so they've run into a few snags. Nothing big, really. They'll bounce back, sooner than you can say ":Cuecat". Why have they failed so far? Not enough punctuation.
:cue:cat is to increase the number of colons (":"). One thing you learn in business school is that when you're going for an angle with a marketing campaign, you can't hammer home your main point enough. You have to try harder. Most people don't even notice the colons when they first look at ":CueCat", and far fewer remember to include them when discussing the product among friends. It's a losing proposition, I'm afraid.
:CRQ should consider themselves lucky.
My advice to
That's why they need to have more colons. They shouldn't stop until their name at least looks like ":::c:u:e:c:a:t::". They should also get a trademark on "cuecat" without the colons and start harassing people who misuse it instead of ":CueCat". They also have to dump cuecat.com as their homepage, because it unfortunately reinforces the "no colon" mistake. Problems like these aren't often solved so easily.
Read the rest of this comment...
XML XML XML.. great to see another buzzword compliant solution. Give it five years, we'll be trying to migrate stuff in XML to some other new fangled solution.
How we know is more important than what we know.
He said afterwards and I quote: "That has got to be the most DUMBASS idea I've ever heard." He went and searched all his business journals, found all the related articles and gave them six months before they folded.
They've got 2 months left. :)
Maybe we can use some of the 100,000,000 surplus unused cuecats to do our voting!
On second thought, maybe the chads are better...
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
The problem with the pencil and paper is that it is expensive. You can only hire so many people to count, and if you hire them at too low of a salary they could conceivably be susceptible to election fraud.
Furthermore, a simple vote procedure should be backed up by a strong computerized system, in order to ensure the rapid tabulation of results. Or would you have us go back to the time when it took weeks to figure out the election, every election?
Furthermore, electronic voting, if it can be perfected, is a good way to extend the direct initiative and referendum on more issues to citizens. Technologies like the internet enable us to expand the realm of direct democracy and shrink the role of government.
Goat sex free since 2001
XML is an initialism.
:)
An acronym is a word formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term.
An initialism is not a word at all, but the intial letter or letters of a compound term.
The easiest way to remember this is:
radar is an acronym, you say "ray-dar" you don't prounounce out the letters "r-ay-dee-ay-r".
If you pronounce out all the letters, it's an initialism, not a acronym. like IBM is an initialism - although I don't think IBM stands for International Business Machine anymore...
OK - is both!! Check your OED.
Joseph Elwell.
Periods go outside of parens if what is inside is not a complete sentence (not an extra comment). (This, for example is a complete sentence in parentheses.)
And as for "supressed", I should also have said "I am a writer": my own mistakes are often invisible to me. Which is what gives me the sense of shame and guilt I need to edit.
Now Timothy, I know you are fond of using(apparently Linux/Unix only) umlauts, but this is at least the 2nd time a story of yours has make the slashdot.xml page not work with an industry-standard XML parser.
What's the deal here? Anyone? Are you doing this on purpose to fuck with people using MS software?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Convergence is the coming together of existing objects - not really anything new.
Still, if there's nothing new, at least it isn't patentable :-)
... and today's pet project has
Sorry, it was a direct cut-n-paste quote from his website, www.woz.org.
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak