I don't understand how a piece of paper equals coercion.
If you marked a paper ballot with a pen, and dropped the ballot in a box, then that would also be coercion? Seems like that's the way its been done for centuries.
What makes it different if the paper comes out of the voting machine before it gets dropped in the box?
It doesn't, what you're describing is a ballot, not a receipt. A ballot receipt would be something the voter takes with them. If the voter takes anything with them which shows who they voted for, they could be threatened beforehand to vote a certain way and they would have to produce the evidence afterward. More common would probably be the selling of votes since the voter could prove they voted a certain way.
In fact, there is no difference. Why do we even need the voting machine?
I think carefully designed electronic voting machines could be very helpful for improving voting accessibility and preventing voter mistakes. An electronic system could provide the ballot in many formats; large print, different languages, audio (with headphones) and include pictures of candidates. It could prevent people from voting for more than one person for a position and make it harder to accidentally not vote for any candidate for an office. They could be especially helpful when there are lots of choices, such as in the California recall election or when there are many ballot initiatives.
The machine can also make tabulation of votes very fast but ultimately it must print out the voter's ballot on paper which is placed in a secure box by the voter. That (anonymous) piece of paper is, at least, the official ballot in any instance of a dispute over the electronic result. The paper itself should be machine readable but also fully human readable (like the filled in bubbles on standardized tests, not barcodes which are not human readable).
Yes - ballot receipts are a huge mistake if and only if the voter keeps the receipt when leaving the polling station.
That's not a paper reciept, that's a paper ballot. The electronic results could be used, especially in the case of a blowout but the paper ballot would/should be the official ballot.
Yes, and around the same time he was buying up the digital rights to huge amounts of fine and commerical art. I thought Corbis was owned by Microsoft but apparently it's something he did on the side. I think it started by buying up an existing image supply company or two. Yahoo! Finance link
"Founded by Bill Gates in 1989, Corbis is headquartered in Seattle, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Paris, Dusseldorf, Vienna, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Tokyo."
As long as you get the new insurance without letting the old insurance lapse, yes. As it was explained to me, "pre-existing condition" is defined as a condition for which you've received uninsured treatment in the six months prior to your application. So basically, never be without health insurance, and you're okay on that point. But this is serious stuff so don't rely on the advice of some random person online.
It wasn't always this way, the "pre-existing" thing came about around when COBRA did, I believe, in the early or mid-90s. COBRA makes it more affordable to maintain insurance (and doctors) in-between jobs. It would be interesting if companies could provide the funds for health insurance but to have them go to the insurer of the individual's choice, pre-tax. For there to be a change in the dominance of employer-pays insurance, there will need to be changes to a number of (mostly tax) laws, at least as a first step.
As someone else mentioned, all but the smallest businesses can get better rates on insurance than an individual can on their own.
And, if I do lose my job, I'll still be insured.
So will I, thanks to COBRA. The details matter but basically it lets an individual keep their health insurance for up to 18 months if they lose their job, the individual just pays the amount the employer paid. My partner lost her job with a medium-sized non-profit (~100 people). In 2002 we paid $223/month for her coverage (Blue Cross Blue Shield, non-smoker, 30-somthing). She went to school and was insured through the school but if we paid the full amount for the same coverage, it was going to be $380/month. That's almost $1900 more per year.
Besides, if they're sending it overseas, their encryption options are going to be very limited.
Why? I think you're thinking the old "encryption is munitions" rules are still in effect. Basically, as long as the other country isn't on the "naughty" list, you can export encryption software to it. Since they're talking about transcription of English, there's no need for the software to be available in a local language.
It *is* unusual that it's not mentioned in their description of the G4 iBook but the eMac tech specs mentions "Velocity Engine." I bet it's either an oversight or just a marketing change to stop pushing the "Velocity Engine" as a marketing term.
Simple, you don't proscribe one of these things right off the bat. You start the person on something more conventional like a pill or injection (injection assumes a hospital setting where a bad reaction could be dealt with). If the person does okay on the other delivery method, they can then switch to the implanted slow-release "chip."
Apple is in Austin too and over the years Macs have had a solid presence on campus. Austin is Dell's headquarters but there are a lot of big tech firms in Austin, including IBM, so I don't think being neighbors was a significant factor.
Re:So, what's the deal with the numbers?
on
Review: 'Bubba Ho-Tep'
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I haven't checked the stats recently but Netscape 4.x and earlier does not supports Unicode. Pretty much all browsers can handle the HTML entities given in other examples. You may not care.
If you don't need access to your data at all times, you could get away with one 4bay enclosure + removable trays for each drive, then pop in the drive you need.
I think you hit on the solution for this guy. He doesn't need it all online all the time, he should use some kind of hot-swappable drive bay. The question is how cheap can you find the drive trays, sometimes those things cost as much as the drives themselves (well, not if they're 200GB drives).
Just buy an Xserve and Xserve raid unit, turn on NFS or SMB, and call it a day. They're brain-dead easy to set up, relatively cheap (not much more than building your own), and supported.
Cheap? I don't think so. The Xserve RAID with 1TB of space (7 180GB drives RAID5) is $7500 alone. The fibre channel card you need to put in the Mac connected to the RAID unit is another $500. If you want more than a 1 year warranty, that's another $999. If you look at the configurator, Apple wants $500 for each 180GB PATA drive (and they won't sell you just the drive trays). I haven't even gotten to buying the Mac yet. You probably could put the fibre channel card in a PC but then you can't use their monitoring and admin software.
Xserve RAID is cost competitive compared to similar Dell or HP offerings but not to a BTO computer with PATA or SATA drives. And if he wants to keep it simple (assuming he knows Windows better than UNIX), he can put Windows on it and use Microsoft's SMB. If it's Windows 2000/03 Server, he can use its software RAID5 (not that I would). 1TB in a BTO is easy to do for less than $3500.
My project is for long term (but still online) storage, no video encoding. It really doesn't require high end performance. In this case I value SATA for its cabling, not for it's supposed performance improvement. Also maybe I shouldn't have a better attitude about SATA hardware RAID cards compared to PATA, but I do.
I don't have a problem with Samsung but they don't have anything bigger than 160GB at this point. 8 drives for ~1TB makes it a lot harder to leave room for a 2nd terabyte in a case. Cheap is good, cool is good, quiet actually doesn't matter this time.
250GB PATA Drives $299x5 3ware Escalade 7506-12 ATA RAID $512
PATA would save me $130 on the drives (total), $214 on the card. That's not much a premium for SATA, I'll pay it.
These storage systems are just JBOD and they'll sell you RAID software but it only does 0 or 1. RAID0 is fine as scratch space for video editors but it's playing Russian Roulette for data you want to keep. Their only option for redundancy seems to be 4 pairs of RAID1 (in the 8 bay tower). If you get the 200GB drives that's 800GB of storage. You'd probably be better off using Linux (or Windows Server) and using the OS's RAID5 for 1400GB capacity.
Since it uses software RAID I think it spoils it's primary appeal, the ability to be detached and attached to another computer.
I've been looking at hardware to build a terabyte sized file server for work and this is basic hardware I've been looking at (prices may not be the absolute best, I didn't shop around):
Western Digital 250GB SATA 8 MB Cache 7200 RPM $325.00 QTY 5 [Using RAID5 gets you close to 1TB] Sub-total $1625
3Ware Escalade 8506-8 Serial ATA RAID $490.00 QTY 1
The SuperMicro "RAID cage" holds 5 1" SATA drives in the space of 3 5.25" bays. I haven't found anything else that packs this many drives in such a small space. I'd be very interested to hear of people's experiences with this or other RAID cages.
If you have a big enough case, you could add this to your existing computer and be good to go. If the case isn't big enough, just get a bigger case and move the guts of the computer into it, like a hermit crab:)
Alternately, you could buy/build a cheap computer with 4 5.25" bays (need one for the optical drive) and use it as a file server. Budget about $500 for it if it's really dedicated to just serving files, you can skimp on the processor, video card and the little extras. I would choose Linux for the file server but Windows would probably be okay if your main OS is Windows (but then you have to buy a Windows license which skews the cost of the file server). You would probably want to spend a little extra and get a extra pair of gigabit Ethernet NICs, one for the server, one for your desktop PC.
The whole thing should be around $3000 which is not too shabby. It could be even cheaper if you used smaller drives but more of them. 5 250GB @$325 = $1625 6 200GB @$260 =$1560 8 160GB @$156 = $1248 The 8 drive option would probably require bigger (more expensive) case than the other two.
For my project I'm planning on getting a 7 bay case and the 3Ware Escalade 8506-12 so I can just buy 5 more drives and another RAID cage to move up to 2TB. Woo!
Re:Looking forward... mostly
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 1
The Sumerian myth stuff probably came straight from Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which was pretty much where he got the Snow Crash's take on NLP. Jaynes' book has a "out there" thesis with rather weak evidence but it was interesting to read oh so long ago. Jaynes is a psychologist, not a historian, archeologist, or other professional who should know more about Sumerian myths.
Re:Display some adaptability.
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 1
the one catchprase from that book that sticks out in my mind at work is "increase shareholder value"
And it's ugly sibling, "due diligence." I'm sure I had heard the phrase before reading the book but it took Cryptonomicon to drive home its full soul-crushing meaning.
I've been re-reading Cryptonomicon in preparation for Quicksilver (almost done, Randy and Avi just visited Tokyo), I should receive my pre-order sometime next week.
You're kidding, right? UPS, in my experience, only successfully delivers a package on time to the correct address about one time in three.
I haven't had such trouble but I've never lived somewhere where I could recieve packages anyway, I have them sent to work. Anyhow, no, I'm not kidding when I say that I don't think UPS will have trouble delivering packages to your local "The UPS Store."
USPS packages can be tracked and as someone else mentioned they'll "take responsibility" if you insure the delivery.
I didn't agree with Cringley's characterization, his mail wasn't lost, it was stolen while on his property. All of that is unrelated to someone in the USPS fucking up the vacation hold. Since in this case that contributed to the theft (like a worker you let into your home but who then leaves your door unlocked), I think the USPS should do *something* but I don't know what. Establishing what was lost and its value could be difficult (except for the book, he's got the documentation on that).
Let's take the case of the extreme abuse of resources. You have someone who's not going to any illicit sites, isn't using company e-mail, but spends all day writing/responding to friends from a HotMail account.
Okay, you're talking about traffic analysis. It's a big leap from having a record of how many hits Alice makes on hotmail.com and reading the email she downloads from there. As I suggested in another post, there is some blurring when the traffic alone "gives away" somethng (hits on hotjobs.com, monster.com, www.labor.state.ny.us, etc.) but that could be considered an inintended consequence and it's not like the employee has no recourse in avoiding it.
Part of the problem is the lack of explicit corporate policies. In a lot of places there's no way to know what's okay, what's not, and what kind of monitoring goes on. While I think we need laws firmly establishing rights to privacy we seem to have lost, I think we at very least need a law to require businesses to tell employees what kind of monitoring they do.
Why is this "flawed logic"? In the specific case of computer networks, I can see a valid argument being made that your employer has the right to review your use of their resources. The situation is similar for phone service. This is not the same as saying you have no right to privacy at work.
If you write a letter using a sheet a paper taken from the copier, does that give your employer the right to read it? Is it okay to bug a room to listen in on conversations because they're using the "resources" of the room? And with network communication it's often worse because they're invading the privacy of their employee *and* the person with whom the employee is commicating.
The employer absolutely has the right to monitor traffic (source, destination, time, number of bytes). This is necessary both for computer security and to prevent excessive use of limit resources (bandwidth). I don't think they should monitor content. Now in the case of things like URLs the line between traffic and content blurs. "analsluts.com:80" is traffic but is "freesites.com:80/analsluts/?" While I'm more concerned, in the case of networks, with privacy of one's speech, there's the matter of privacy when seeking information such as webmd.com/Search.cgi?keyword=Chronic+depression."
I do tech support for faculty & staff but still get calls related to student computers, especially at the beginning of the school year. It's not unusual for a father to be setting up his daughter's computer or even the daughter's email account (they don't say it outright but I can tell). I even had a parent call from *home* about their child's computer because ResNet was non-responsive to calls and they were just trying to find *someone* to help.
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This is entirely made up.
I don't understand how a piece of paper equals coercion.
If you marked a paper ballot with a pen, and dropped the ballot in a box, then that would also be coercion? Seems like that's the way its been done for centuries.
What makes it different if the paper comes out of the voting machine before it gets dropped in the box?
It doesn't, what you're describing is a ballot, not a receipt. A ballot receipt would be something the voter takes with them. If the voter takes anything with them which shows who they voted for, they could be threatened beforehand to vote a certain way and they would have to produce the evidence afterward. More common would probably be the selling of votes since the voter could prove they voted a certain way.
In fact, there is no difference. Why do we even need the voting machine?
I think carefully designed electronic voting machines could be very helpful for improving voting accessibility and preventing voter mistakes. An electronic system could provide the ballot in many formats; large print, different languages, audio (with headphones) and include pictures of candidates. It could prevent people from voting for more than one person for a position and make it harder to accidentally not vote for any candidate for an office. They could be especially helpful when there are lots of choices, such as in the California recall election or when there are many ballot initiatives.
The machine can also make tabulation of votes very fast but ultimately it must print out the voter's ballot on paper which is placed in a secure box by the voter. That (anonymous) piece of paper is, at least, the official ballot in any instance of a dispute over the electronic result. The paper itself should be machine readable but also fully human readable (like the filled in bubbles on standardized tests, not barcodes which are not human readable).
Yes - ballot receipts are a huge mistake if and only if the voter keeps the receipt when leaving the polling station.
That's not a paper reciept, that's a paper ballot. The electronic results could be used, especially in the case of a blowout but the paper ballot would/should be the official ballot.
Yes, and around the same time he was buying up the digital rights to huge amounts of fine and commerical art. I thought Corbis was owned by Microsoft but apparently it's something he did on the side. I think it started by buying up an existing image supply company or two. Yahoo! Finance link
"Founded by Bill Gates in 1989, Corbis is headquartered in Seattle, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Paris, Dusseldorf, Vienna, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Tokyo."
Does COBRA really protect against that?
As long as you get the new insurance without letting the old insurance lapse, yes. As it was explained to me, "pre-existing condition" is defined as a condition for which you've received uninsured treatment in the six months prior to your application. So basically, never be without health insurance, and you're okay on that point. But this is serious stuff so don't rely on the advice of some random person online.
It wasn't always this way, the "pre-existing" thing came about around when COBRA did, I believe, in the early or mid-90s. COBRA makes it more affordable to maintain insurance (and doctors) in-between jobs. It would be interesting if companies could provide the funds for health insurance but to have them go to the insurer of the individual's choice, pre-tax. For there to be a change in the dominance of employer-pays insurance, there will need to be changes to a number of (mostly tax) laws, at least as a first step.
As someone else mentioned, all but the smallest businesses can get better rates on insurance than an individual can on their own.
And, if I do lose my job, I'll still be insured.
So will I, thanks to COBRA. The details matter but basically it lets an individual keep their health insurance for up to 18 months if they lose their job, the individual just pays the amount the employer paid. My partner lost her job with a medium-sized non-profit (~100 people). In 2002 we paid $223/month for her coverage (Blue Cross Blue Shield, non-smoker, 30-somthing). She went to school and was insured through the school but if we paid the full amount for the same coverage, it was going to be $380/month. That's almost $1900 more per year.
Besides, if they're sending it overseas, their encryption options are going to be very limited.
Why? I think you're thinking the old "encryption is munitions" rules are still in effect. Basically, as long as the other country isn't on the "naughty" list, you can export encryption software to it. Since they're talking about transcription of English, there's no need for the software to be available in a local language.
It *is* unusual that it's not mentioned in their description of the G4 iBook but the eMac tech specs mentions "Velocity Engine." I bet it's either an oversight or just a marketing change to stop pushing the "Velocity Engine" as a marketing term.
Simple, you don't proscribe one of these things right off the bat. You start the person on something more conventional like a pill or injection (injection assumes a hospital setting where a bad reaction could be dealt with). If the person does okay on the other delivery method, they can then switch to the implanted slow-release "chip."
Apple is in Austin too and over the years Macs have had a solid presence on campus. Austin is Dell's headquarters but there are a lot of big tech firms in Austin, including IBM, so I don't think being neighbors was a significant factor.
Ah, just Google it. 310-228-3665
I haven't checked the stats recently but Netscape 4.x and earlier does not supports Unicode. Pretty much all browsers can handle the HTML entities given in other examples. You may not care.
If you don't need access to your data at all times, you could get away with one 4bay enclosure + removable trays for each drive, then pop in the drive you need.
I think you hit on the solution for this guy. He doesn't need it all online all the time, he should use some kind of hot-swappable drive bay. The question is how cheap can you find the drive trays, sometimes those things cost as much as the drives themselves (well, not if they're 200GB drives).
Just buy an Xserve and Xserve raid unit, turn on NFS or SMB, and call it a day. They're brain-dead easy to set up, relatively cheap (not much more than building your own), and supported.
Cheap? I don't think so. The Xserve RAID with 1TB of space (7 180GB drives RAID5) is $7500 alone. The fibre channel card you need to put in the Mac connected to the RAID unit is another $500. If you want more than a 1 year warranty, that's another $999. If you look at the configurator, Apple wants $500 for each 180GB PATA drive (and they won't sell you just the drive trays). I haven't even gotten to buying the Mac yet. You probably could put the fibre channel card in a PC but then you can't use their monitoring and admin software.
Xserve RAID is cost competitive compared to similar Dell or HP offerings but not to a BTO computer with PATA or SATA drives. And if he wants to keep it simple (assuming he knows Windows better than UNIX), he can put Windows on it and use Microsoft's SMB. If it's Windows 2000/03 Server, he can use its software RAID5 (not that I would). 1TB in a BTO is easy to do for less than $3500.
My project is for long term (but still online) storage, no video encoding. It really doesn't require high end performance. In this case I value SATA for its cabling, not for it's supposed performance improvement. Also maybe I shouldn't have a better attitude about SATA hardware RAID cards compared to PATA, but I do.
I don't have a problem with Samsung but they don't have anything bigger than 160GB at this point. 8 drives for ~1TB makes it a lot harder to leave room for a 2nd terabyte in a case. Cheap is good, cool is good, quiet actually doesn't matter this time.
250GB PATA Drives $299x5
3ware Escalade 7506-12 ATA RAID $512
PATA would save me $130 on the drives (total), $214 on the card. That's not much a premium for SATA, I'll pay it.
These storage systems are just JBOD and they'll sell you RAID software but it only does 0 or 1. RAID0 is fine as scratch space for video editors but it's playing Russian Roulette for data you want to keep. Their only option for redundancy seems to be 4 pairs of RAID1 (in the 8 bay tower). If you get the 200GB drives that's 800GB of storage. You'd probably be better off using Linux (or Windows Server) and using the OS's RAID5 for 1400GB capacity.
Since it uses software RAID I think it spoils it's primary appeal, the ability to be detached and attached to another computer.
I've been looking at hardware to build a terabyte sized file server for work and this is basic hardware I've been looking at (prices may not be the absolute best, I didn't shop around):
:)
Western Digital 250GB SATA 8 MB Cache 7200 RPM $325.00 QTY 5 [Using RAID5 gets you close to 1TB]
Sub-total $1625
3Ware Escalade 8506-8 Serial ATA RAID
$490.00 QTY 1
SuperMicro SATA Mobile RackCSE-M35T1
$140 QTY:1
Total $2255+tax
The SuperMicro "RAID cage" holds 5 1" SATA drives in the space of 3 5.25" bays. I haven't found anything else that packs this many drives in such a small space. I'd be very interested to hear of people's experiences with this or other RAID cages.
If you have a big enough case, you could add this to your existing computer and be good to go. If the case isn't big enough, just get a bigger case and move the guts of the computer into it, like a hermit crab
Alternately, you could buy/build a cheap computer with 4 5.25" bays (need one for the optical drive) and use it as a file server. Budget about $500 for it if it's really dedicated to just serving files, you can skimp on the processor, video card and the little extras. I would choose Linux for the file server but Windows would probably be okay if your main OS is Windows (but then you have to buy a Windows license which skews the cost of the file server). You would probably want to spend a little extra and get a extra pair of gigabit Ethernet NICs, one for the server, one for your desktop PC.
The whole thing should be around $3000 which is not too shabby. It could be even cheaper if you used smaller drives but more of them.
5 250GB @$325 = $1625
6 200GB @$260 =$1560
8 160GB @$156 = $1248
The 8 drive option would probably require bigger (more expensive) case than the other two.
For my project I'm planning on getting a 7 bay case and the 3Ware Escalade 8506-12 so I can just buy 5 more drives and another RAID cage to move up to 2TB. Woo!
The Sumerian myth stuff probably came straight from Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which was pretty much where he got the Snow Crash's take on NLP. Jaynes' book has a "out there" thesis with rather weak evidence but it was interesting to read oh so long ago. Jaynes is a psychologist, not a historian, archeologist, or other professional who should know more about Sumerian myths.
the one catchprase from that book that sticks out in my mind at work is "increase shareholder value"
And it's ugly sibling, "due diligence." I'm sure I had heard the phrase before reading the book but it took Cryptonomicon to drive home its full soul-crushing meaning.
I've been re-reading Cryptonomicon in preparation for Quicksilver (almost done, Randy and Avi just visited Tokyo), I should receive my pre-order sometime next week.
You're kidding, right? UPS, in my experience, only successfully delivers a package on time to the correct address about one time in three.
I haven't had such trouble but I've never lived somewhere where I could recieve packages anyway, I have them sent to work. Anyhow, no, I'm not kidding when I say that I don't think UPS will have trouble delivering packages to your local "The UPS Store."
USPS packages can be tracked and as someone else mentioned they'll "take responsibility" if you insure the delivery.
I didn't agree with Cringley's characterization, his mail wasn't lost, it was stolen while on his property. All of that is unrelated to someone in the USPS fucking up the vacation hold. Since in this case that contributed to the theft (like a worker you let into your home but who then leaves your door unlocked), I think the USPS should do *something* but I don't know what. Establishing what was lost and its value could be difficult (except for the book, he's got the documentation on that).
Mailboxes, Etc. was purchased by UPS so I don't think they'll have any problem doing deliveries there.
Let's take the case of the extreme abuse of resources. You have someone who's not going to any illicit sites, isn't using company e-mail, but spends all day writing/responding to friends from a HotMail account.
Okay, you're talking about traffic analysis. It's a big leap from having a record of how many hits Alice makes on hotmail.com and reading the email she downloads from there. As I suggested in another post, there is some blurring when the traffic alone "gives away" somethng (hits on hotjobs.com, monster.com, www.labor.state.ny.us, etc.) but that could be considered an inintended consequence and it's not like the employee has no recourse in avoiding it.
Part of the problem is the lack of explicit corporate policies. In a lot of places there's no way to know what's okay, what's not, and what kind of monitoring goes on. While I think we need laws firmly establishing rights to privacy we seem to have lost, I think we at very least need a law to require businesses to tell employees what kind of monitoring they do.
Why is this "flawed logic"? In the specific case of computer networks, I can see a valid argument being made that your employer has the right to review your use of their resources. The situation is similar for phone service. This is not the same as saying you have no right to privacy at work.
If you write a letter using a sheet a paper taken from the copier, does that give your employer the right to read it? Is it okay to bug a room to listen in on conversations because they're using the "resources" of the room? And with network communication it's often worse because they're invading the privacy of their employee *and* the person with whom the employee is commicating.
The employer absolutely has the right to monitor traffic (source, destination, time, number of bytes). This is necessary both for computer security and to prevent excessive use of limit resources (bandwidth). I don't think they should monitor content. Now in the case of things like URLs the line between traffic and content blurs. "analsluts.com:80" is traffic but is "freesites.com:80/analsluts/?" While I'm more concerned, in the case of networks, with privacy of one's speech, there's the matter of privacy when seeking information such as webmd.com/Search.cgi?keyword=Chronic+depression."
I do tech support for faculty & staff but still get calls related to student computers, especially at the beginning of the school year. It's not unusual for a father to be setting up his daughter's computer or even the daughter's email account (they don't say it outright but I can tell). I even had a parent call from *home* about their child's computer because ResNet was non-responsive to calls and they were just trying to find *someone* to help.