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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
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.
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.
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
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...
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. :)
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
Sure, but you wouldn't be able to read it because they would have used lime green ink on a yellow background to show how 1337 they are!
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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.
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?