And how the fuck does buying computers, which have to be replaced every decade or so, and require more training and more people, save any money?
All that stuff you listed has to be done anyway. You still need polling sites, you still need election workers, you still need all that.
And then you need computers and servers. The county you mentioned has 23 precincts, so pretending that each voting machine was $1000 (Which is absurdly low), they'd cost more than then the entire rest of the election if each precinct only bought one.
Which is not how it works. Each precinct, I know from experience, has at least two. I vote in a totally empty precinct in Georgia and mine has two. And they cost closer to $3000. Which is $144,000.
Pretending they had no other costs themselves (Which is idiotic, at minimum you have more training, and the cost of programming the machines), and removed all other costs of the election. (We'll do it outside, in the open air, with no staff.), they'd pay off in 6.5 elections, which is right about the time they'd break and need replacing.
In reality, you can save, at most, half the current cost of running an election...you still need locations, you still need roughly the same amount of staff, you still have to figure out the ballots. So it takes 13 years or so to pay off, and even that's somewhat idealized.
No place has ever saved any money by electronic voting.
I don't know what video you're talking about, but voters can 'change their vote' using computer printed ballots the same way they can with with hand-printed ones:
They hand it back in, it gets marked in some manner as VOID and placed somewhere to be counted later, and they get another ballot.
In the case of computer printed ballots, the machine would presumably be reset to allow it to print another, just like for a new voter, although I like the idea of having voters physically carry blank ballots into the booth and stick them in the printer, instead of having a printer with the paper already in it.
This makes the system work exactly like normal voting, except with a computer instead of a pencil, and you have exactly the same, known, security issues. I.e., you protect the blank ballots, it doesn't matter what the hell the computer thinks is going on. it doesn't matter how you fake out the computer, you can't vote more than once. (Whereas if the computer is providing the paper, tricking the computer could let you print a dozen ballots to slip into the ballot box.)
All you really need to do, added security-wise, is add a forced ballot reset to the computer when people enter the booth, so that people can't vote, and then vote again 'halfway' in the hope that someone else comes in and continues that partial vote. I guess the easiest thing is to reset any partial ballots when someone puts in the ballot paper, and require people to do that when first entering the booth.
But all this talk about computer assisted ballots is getting us away from the issue of computer voting, and we really really really should not confuse those issues or pretend they are related at all. One is just a new way of filling out ballots and seems to be a good idea, allowing the least confusion about ballots plus letting the disabled vote easier, the other is a profoundly bad idea.
That isn't an 'electronic voting' machine, you idiot.
It's an 'electronic ballot printer'.
It's idiots like you defending 'electronic voting' and saying 'it can work okay if done right', that are the reason places like where I live are subject to such horribly broken electronic voting machines, because you've decided to apply the exact same terms to a totally broken system and a perfectly functional one, and the goddamn public doesn't know enough to make the difference.
We're complaining about lynching and you've decided to use the same term to describe a legal trial by jury, and saying 'lynching is okay if done right'.
Use the right fucking words or shut the fuck up and get the hell out of this discussion. I'm sick and tired of morons like you defending the unaccountable and treasonous systems like Diebold sell because you say "Oh, electronic voting can work, because I've decided to call 'assistance with filling out a ballot' by the term 'electronic voting', because I'm an idiot."
Am I the only person who thinks non-owned interactive movies will just make the audience angry?
The entire point of this, according to the patent summary, is to up the 'replay' value? It's like an RPG, where you play again using a different class. Makes sense.
That makes sense for individuals, but it seems it would really piss people off if they went to see the movie, saw one plotline, went back to see another...and were outvoted, and saw the same damn thing.
Also, it seems the entire thing falls apart before that, when you expect people to pay full movie price to see a movie that they've already seem 2/3rds of. Even if they do get to see a new 1/3rd and don't get outvoted.
Larry the Lobster didn't do multiplying using the computing device
Your theory is that calls to the 1-900 number were tallied by hand?
Or that telephone systems don't connect people using computers?
Or that telephone systems don't bill people using computers?
It did not use the computing device to exclude votes
Yes, it did. Or do you think that the telephone system operates by mechanical bull?
There are computers that stop people from other countries from connecting to 1-900 numbers. In 1982, they'd be rather dumb computers, but they were, in fact, computers. Even 'general purpose computers', although I will point out the patent office doesn't make that distinction.
I'm confused as to where you think 'the computing device' didn't show up in those. Or are you trying to argue it was more that one device?
That isn't really that relevant. The computer that sells people a ticket is hardly going to be the same computer that selects the movie, either. You can neither get around patents or exclude prior art on the idea 'they were two computer hooked together instead of one computer'.
Although the idea you can is sorta funny and renders this entire patent moot. 'No, no, I don't have the media version matrix on the computing device, I have it on this other computing device which is networked to 'the' computer device mentioned prior. Hence I'm not infringing.'. That actually renders a lot of patents moot.
the computing device did not generate the media version matrix
I do not think you know what a matrix is. A 'matrix' is just another way to say 'array'. Having two pre-recorded endings is a 'matrix', it's a two-cell one-dimensional matrix. Any 'Press 1 or 2 to see a branch of a movie' is using a matrix. They're just allowing for having branches where any combination of multiple things can happen, like 1-1, 1-2, 2-1, or 2-2, but even one dimension is a matrix.
Granted, in this example, it was for a live show, and hence there was no matrix, as there was no content beforehand.
But, as I said, there's been plenty of other versions of this, like 'Accidental Lovers', which did use prerecorded video, in a 'matrix'. In fact, 'Accidental Lovers' used a two-dimensional ones. You could vote if X would fall in love with Y, if Y with X, or if both with both. That's a two dimensional matrix.(1) It even has a plotline missing (neither in love with neither), which the patent explicitly mentions as possible and having to find the nearest valid option.
1) You can also list those choices using a one-dimensional matrix, but all finite matrixes, no matter the dimensions, can be easily 'flattened' to one-dimensional matrixes. You just enumerate them. (And, strictly speaking, so can infinite ones, but that's more complicated and not relevant here.)
I don't see anything in the patent that describes how to 'implement' it beyond stuff like 'You'll need to give everyone a keypad or a phone or maybe let them vote in a booth'. (The Futurama story had a keypad, and obviously phones have been used for mass voting on plots forever. I don't think the idea of 'voting in a booth' needs to dignified with a response.)
Or insanely obvious stuff like 'You'll have to hook a computer to the playback device to tally the votes, a computer which people can contact using (insert list of half a dozen ways that people already contact computers)'.
There is no actual engineering in the patent at all. Most of it appears to be describing how votes could be tallied.
Wait, they don't fully describe everything sufficient to enable someone skilled in the art to build those things?
No, but considering that this patent doesn't either, and that people skilled in the art have built exactly this system repeatedly, that's sorta a moot point.
You clearly haven't read the patent. It's essentially 'Hook a computer to a projector, and here's a big list of ways that the computer could decide what to show next. For example, if not enough people vote in time, it could use a regional default.'. No explanation at all on how to do any of this.
You are correct, this isn't just 'choose your own adventure movies'.
But it doesn't actually seem deserving of a patent anyway.
someone presumably can cite an extant choose-your-own-adventure movie where (just from looking at the first claim) the storyline is controlled by audience voting (basic), where some votes are automatically discarded "based on voter characteristics", and votes are weighted by a factor "based on voter characteristics, the weighting factor being based on at least ticket pricing" (yeah -- pay twice as much, get twice (or 10x, or 0.5x) as much say in the adventure!)
someone presumably can cite an extant choose-your-own-adventure movie
It's a 'motion picture' under the law, so it's a 'movie', even though broadcast on TV. Check.
the storyline is controlled by audience voting (basic)
Check.
where some votes are automatically discarded "based on voter characteristics"
People outside the US can't vote because they can't call 1-900 numbers. Check. (I'm not sure you can patent the ability to not count a vote, anyway.)
the weighting factor being based on at least ticket pricing" (yeah -- pay twice as much, get twice (or 10x, or 0.5x)
You get as much vote as you pay for, although you don't have a 'ticket' per se. Indeed, you can select how much you pay in real time, instead of having to do it in advance under IBM's method.
And that's just one example, the earliest. There's examples using pre-recorded video if that's somehow relevant, and other examples using free voting.
Although it is equally stupid. It appears to be a patent on voting for the outcome, including stuff like having people charges for a vote.
So, it's essentially a patent for an 'interactive movie', except with a group of voters deciding the outcome. This exact premise has been used in science fiction before, which should be enough to deny it a patent.
In fact, it's actually been done over TV before, even with the 'pay for a vote' aspect. American Idol does a version of it, but it's been done with prerecorded stuff before, which people could call in and influence one way or another. Forexample. Or a very early live example.
I'm not certain how something that happened in 1982 over television should be patentable simply because it's in a movie theater.
But someone needs to find a scifi story that has people go into a movie theater and picking what story they want to see by voting with buttons on their chair. Hell, early scifi had that stuff all the time, before it was clear that home media consumption would take off. People were always going to movie theaters and whatnot.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'not necessarily true'.
The grandparent seemed to think that people complaining about HDCP were people who wanted to make illegal copies, which he called 'trying to pirate'. ('pirate' is a bit confusing in this context, as means producing or consuming copyright violations, which is why I tend to use the word 'copier' to mean 'producing'.)
Those copiers don't care about HDCP, as they've got some cable tuner that produces what they need in their computer. Tapping into an encrypted HDMI stream, decoding it, and capturing it that way is just silly.
You, OTOH, don't sound like you're trying to make illegal copies at all. You're just trying to play stuff on television.
That stuff might, sometimes, be illegal copies, but, as I mentioned, HDCP has no idea of the source of videos you're playing on your computer. It isn't some 'copyright violation detector'...HDMI is supposed to work for you, and it's not.
The result of HDCP along with the dropping of component (already happened for sky TV here, planned for blu-ray in the not too distant future) is that people who want to make copies for thier friends or record stuff from cable/sat and keep more of it than thier box can store will be largely limited to doing it in SD.
Uh, no. Read what I wrote.
No copier is using HDMI streamed, encoded or decoded, to make rips. None of them.
They are ripping straight from digital cable, or satellite, or from DVD or Blueray. Yes, all those are encrypted, but, heh, whatever. HDCP is an attempt to stop a form of copying that doesn't exist, because they believed they'd already stopped copying at the source, which they had not.
For an analogy, HDCP is like welding metal on the bottom of a car, because they believed people would soon be stealing cars by crawling under them because they'd made it impossible to hotwire them from the inside. This is, um, an incorrect belief about how cars are stolen, and thus a rather pointless security measure. (With the added bonus of people figuring out a way around the metal plate for fun.)
And, thanks to current technology making it so hard, there's almost no 'casual copying' of television already. There are dedicated copiers, who rip a specific set of shows, and then hand them off to a release group, where they get to the world fairly quickly. Practically no one's ripping and trading TV shows with their friends.
There might be a short-term price increase, but if demand is constant, the supply will correct itself as non-marginal producers will produce more. Increased costs don't magically lower the supply forever. If the market is feasible for companies to operate in at all, it's feasible for more companies to operate in.
Granted, this can take rather a long time. Of course, it can take a rather long time to start, too! It takes companies a while to get out of manufacturing that has become less profitable, so it will take a long time for supply to go down...and usually someone's figured that out and stepped in with a new supply. (Hell, half the time, the latter just bought the former's factory.)
And, in the broader sense, everything is passed on to the consumer. And businesses. And the government. We don't have some magical economy where parts of it don't affect other parts.
'Costs will be passed on to the consumer' is one of those statements that is true, false, and meaningless.
But the people repeating 'passed on to consumers' always seem to have this image of companies going 'Oh, we've decided our profits should be 20%, so if it costs us 5% more to operate, we should raise all prices by 5% to make sure our profits are the same', which is a totally delusional way about thinking how companies operate. If they could raise prices by 5%, they already would have.
At most, after a tax increase on them, six months down the road there will be a slightly diminished supply because the tax increase put other people out of business and they can slightly raise the price. They are not, in any real sense, 'passing on' what was done to them. They are reacting to what was done to some other company.
Yes, but it's not 3 year olds who want to play GTA. It would be pretty impressive if a 3 year old could play GTA, but, regardless, they don't run down to Gamestop and buy the game, or pirate it online.
When people are talking about 'minors' getting access to violent video games, they're talking about ten and above, really.
Incidentally, studies have show it's not a problem 'distinguishing fantasy from reality'. Even very very young children, despite common knowledge, can tell real things from imaginary things, and know what is happening on TV isn't real.
The problem is that knowing it's not real doesn't mean they won't take social clues from it. They don't know the difference between an adult telling them 'Don't hit' and a TV show showing people hitting...they're both, strictly speaking, 'pretend'. They don't know the difference between hypothetical instructions and fictional stories.
However, they probably can't tell real life playacting, which humans distinguish by deliberate overacting, from reality.
People who are concerned about availability of violent games (to minors) should be lobbying the retailers, not the government.
People who are concerned about availability of violent games (to minors) should probably checked out by mental health professionals, as they are somewhat delusional.
This is a goddamn non-problem. We already have ratings on games, and kids can't buy them because stores won't sell them.
No one who is complaining about HDCP is trying to pirate. Cracking HDCP is utterly useless for pirates, and HDCP doesn't stop anything they're trying to do.
The HDCP 'protection' was a delusional attempt by the content providers to get a step ahead of pirate-copy-makers. They fantasized that their current media protection was 'perfect', so figured pirates would start copying from the video connection.
Of course, their protection wasn't perfect, so copier have continued to just strip the DRM off the provided media instead of rigging weird setups to copy from a monitor cable.
Which copiers could do anyway, as HDCP decoders have existed forever. This crack was the master key...before that, you had to buy a 'licensed' piece of hardware that could strip HDCP, which is fairly easy to get, although you have to order from overseas. With this crack, now, you can simply record the encrypted signal and decode it, I guess. (Maybe not, though.)
But no copier did that, or will start doing that. They'll just remove the BlueRay or cable encryption instead, like they've been doing.
In short, HDCP was 'second-level' DRM, which required, as a base assumption, that no one would be able to decode DRM before it get outputted, so HDCP was an attempt to protect the output. As people can decode the DRM before output, it's, um, utterly pointless to crack.
Even if copiers were copying from there, none of that has anything to do with 99.9999% of pirates, who download copied movies,and thus could give a flying fuck where the copy came from. Any HDCP connections will display a pirated video as well anything else.
We need to make sure that people don't start accepting that they've bought a movie and it doesn't play on the movie player for no obvious reason.
And we need to make sure that they know that when that happens, someone did it deliberately, because, remember how DVDs and CDs used to just work magically? CDs and DVDs were also fancy digital things, but you could just hook them up to your TV and stereo and they magically worked. (It's probably best not to mention DVD CSS, as that did mostly work and will just confuse them.)
Remind people how it used to work.
And point out, technologically, there was nothing stopping companies from just putting more data on the disc, giving a better picture, requiring a new DVD player, but otherwise exactly the same and working exactly as well.
And then mention the reason it's not working is that companies added something to try to keep people from copying the movies, and that thing broke. They added shit, added a bunch of complexity where wires now have encrypted signals and devices have to 'allow' other devices and it's this big complicated mess, and somewhere in there it didn't work and their fancy new BlueRay is playing a sucky resolution because of it.
Make sure they know this isn't some inherent technological problem, companies could have just made 'supersized DVDs', that the brokenness is a 'feature' companies added to stop them from copying, which screws them over some of the time.
Then mention that this entire thing was pointless, as people can still copy movies.
Us slashdot readers, the presumably technologically literate people, have to keep expectations high, or in a decade we'll end up where people have to check all sorts of requirements and nothing works together and people get used to some stuff not working some of the time, like with PCs currently. Don't let them get away with that.
Yeah, that whole 'passed on to customers' meme is idiotic.
It's called supply and demand, people. Companies don't base prices on how much it costs them to make, they base prices based on what the market will pay.
I work for a company that sells a few similar products online. Let me generalize and say one of them is $100, one $200, one $250, etc.
We sell all of the things in the product line, because customers are often looking for a specific one. We'd much rather sell the $100 one, as, because of a special deal with the wholeseller, we make like $50 dollars on that, vs. about $45 dollars on the $200.
But we're not idiots and haven't raised the price of the others, because the market won't stand it! The pricing is utterly unrelated to our cost, it's what everyone else is selling for. If we tried to raise the price, people would shop elsewhere. Likewise, we don't lower the cost of the $100, because people buy it at the current price! (We've tried, we don't get statistically more customers. We do use coupons, though, that works to some extent.)
Pricing is entirely based on what people will pay for things, not what it 'costs' to make. (Obviously, companies aren't going to sell things for less than the cost to make them, but that pushes them out of the market entirely, not makes them sell for more.)
And it's the same idiotic concept in the other direction, that lower corporate taxes let them hire more people. Um, companies hire exactly how many people they think they need to do what they're trying to do. Period. They don't hire 'extra' people because they have money laying around.
Them having more money might, if they were already planning on expanding, allow them to expand sooner, but, hell, that could operate just as easily the other way, jobwise...they now might have the cash to shut down their production line for a month to revamp, resulting in no work for a month and less jobs afterward. 'They might expand' is an idiotic hypothesis...they might automate jobs away with that money instead, if we're in hypothetical land. In reality, 99% of the time, the money is just added profit.
The real fun idea is that less taxes on the superrich might result in more jobs...because the superrich, if they take home more money after taxes, ask to have their salaries lowered so a company can hire some pointless workers, which manages to be an idiotic premise twice over.
Indeed. If I wanted to play a modern video game, I'd play a modern one, dammit. If I'm playing Super Mario Bros, I am, by definition, playing something with shitty graphics. That's the point.
I really need to fix and hook back up my NES. Stupid tray loading design, have to take the damn thing apart every five years and fix the metal contacts.
I got one of them convection based ones , it looks like a cylinder , takes in air through the bottom and I'm quite disappointed in it's performance.
Those have always seemed like scams to me. In theory, yes, you can get magical faster air movement...if, and only if, the air in the room is cold, and the heater hot enough that it heats it very fast, and a bunch of other things.
In reality, no. If you want to move heat around, either get a heater with a fan built in, or just aim a fan at a heater.
Having said all that i think I'm going to get one of those oil filled heaters you speak of , my current one seems to smell funny when turned on.
The smell isn't a burning smell, is it? If so, that's just the dust on it. That always happens to me when I first plug it in. You can wipe it off with a wet rag once in a while to help reduce that. (When it's off, obviously.)
If you're actually smelling the oil, which can sometimes happen, you can instead get 'flat panel' convection heaters, which are a lot like oil ones, except they heat a single flat sheet.
But they don't store anywhere near as much heat as oil-based ones. They're essentially oil-based ones except they're heating up a sheet of metal or mica. (I think they heat from the sides, I don't really know.)
Actually, they're a lot like those cylinder ones, except flat.
Incidentally, good thing to do with the oil ones: They have nice flat tops (Well, the fins are even, at least.), so you can put a pot of water on them. Especially useful if the air is very dry.
Yeah, that was the sticking point on the '100% efficient' one time...if heaters are 100% efficient, what's the point of a heat pump?
Well, burning hydrogen is 100% efficient at producing water (Yeah, yeah, the reaction is exothermic, but whatever. All hydrogen is turned into water.), yet we find it cheaper to get water from already existing sources via a pump, instead of bringing in hydrogen and operating 'water generators' in our house.;) Same with heat.
The real fun part is when you try to explain the less heat a heat pump generates, the more efficient it is, even if it manages to put all generated heat inside.
Wouldn't it make more sense to give the evidence to Russia and let them deal with him?
It is sometimes impossible for countries to do what they need to do for political reasons.
Unless, of course, we exchange happened with Russia's blessing, in which case shooting the diplomat would be pointless, since Russia would simply use other people to continue.
Well, not pointless. But at that point we'd semi-openly be at war with Russia, so we might as well admit it.
Or you could declare it openly and officially. What is Russia going to do, nuke you?
No, but internal political pressure could force them to remove support from you.
I think you're reading too much into this example. I was just using this an example of one of the few covert ops we probably shouldn't declassify for five years or so....which we should have to classify via Congress, not just someone slapping a label on it.
Under no circumstances should the people who made the decision, or carried it out, be in charge of if anyone knows about it. All incident reports or whatever the military and CIA calls them should be automatically be released two or three months later, with redacting of names only, unless Congress does something about it.
What sort of covert ops are allowable or even a good idea is a different question.
Indeed, the 'state secret' privilege is an entire fraud, as is 95% of the stuff we have classified.
The only thing the government should be able to keep secret are future or active military operations, still-living intelligent assets, and some stuff like military blueprints and things.
There is no military operation older than a month in the past that should be kept secret. What, are our enemies using carrier snails? I think they've pretty much figured out what happened. All reports generated should be public, period.
There will be moron who talk about classified 'tactics' and crap. They're lying. Our military has no secret skills that let them do things. Ask a soldier. There's stuff they don't want to talk about in advance, before the enemy figures out they can do it, but once you start doing things in a war, um, duh, the enemy knows it.
No, the reason the military keeps operations secret is not a damn thing to do with tactics, which the enemy can figure out pretty easily. It's to do with the fact the military makes blunt statements about innocents getting killed, and, um, the public doesn't like that.
Yes, the military would not, due to public pressure, be able to fight any recent wars if everything it did was open to the public...and that's a good thing. If the public doesn't like an action the government does, perhaps the government shouldn't fucking do it. Not speak vaguely about what it does and pretend everything is some huge important secret.
Now, I'll agree that sometimes we do need to keep secrets that are outside that. For example, perhaps we have evidence some Russia diplomat is selling nuclear secrets to Iran, and the CIA shoots him. Well, okay, we don't want that public, okay. Not to keep it from Russia, who probably figured it out, but to keep it officially from Russia.
But if there's something like that that does need to be kept secret, it should have to go through a fucking closed session of Congress and specifically be classified that way. No, not 'notify' half a dozen people, and threaten them if they tell anyone, the congress should actually vote on it, or decide to just tell everyone. Giving the damn branch of government, hell, the specific group that did it, the power to classify it, is utterly absurd. And it's doubly absurd to let them assert they have a right to keep it secret in court.
Granted, this incident seems pretty reasonable. This isn't the government keeping anything secret, but working with a publisher and author to voluntarily keep information secret. The problem isn't the 'secret' stuff we hear about.
Strictly speaking, infrared heaters can be slightly less efficient, because you can lose a little bit out windows as light. Same with any heater that creates a visible glow. But we're talking a loss of maybe 0.001%.;)
But, yes. There are different designs that work better for different environments.
The kind I always get is the oil-filled radiator ones, which I get because they're very safe...no external part of them gets hot enough to catch anything on fire, or even burn you if you touch them. (Well, not before you can jerk your hand away.)
If I want them to blow around, or to heat more, I just aim a fan through them at a slight angle, bounce the air off the fins, and tada. (By removing heat with the fan, obviously, they turn on more often.) Also, rule number one of space heaters...run the ceiling fan. If you can put the heater right under the fan, run it normal, otherwise, run it backwards.
You're right in that some designs work much better at heating a person up by aiming heat directly at them, so get get the same result while generating less heat, but I've never really needed that. I was always trying to heat a room.
But, anyway. What I was actually talking about is, and this has happened a few times, when a place had no heat, and thus space heater(s) were to be used to heat it entirely. Multiple rooms. In the winter, as a sole heater, it hardly matters what sort of heater it is...it needs to heat the entire damn place up.
I live in Georgia, so a lot of places just have crappy electrical heaters and heat pumps, not gas or fireplaces or anything, and if it fails, you really can operate with just a few space heaters and some fans. Maybe run the stove also in the morning to heat the house up. You can heat a house for a few days until the repairman gets there, if you don't mind paying slightly higher power bills due to your lack of a heat pump. You can even go the entire winter like that.
Not possible in Minnesota, I'm sure, but certainly possible here in Georgia. I've done it.
And, every time, getting heaters, one of the 'considerations' of the space heaters being bought was to be 'energy efficiency'. Which is normally a reasonable consideration, and something I suggest, but obviously not with heaters. One time this happened I was able to explain that didn't exist, heaters turn electricity into heat at 100% efficiency, and at least one other time I was never able to get that concept across.
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And how the fuck does buying computers, which have to be replaced every decade or so, and require more training and more people, save any money?
All that stuff you listed has to be done anyway. You still need polling sites, you still need election workers, you still need all that.
And then you need computers and servers. The county you mentioned has 23 precincts, so pretending that each voting machine was $1000 (Which is absurdly low), they'd cost more than then the entire rest of the election if each precinct only bought one.
Which is not how it works. Each precinct, I know from experience, has at least two. I vote in a totally empty precinct in Georgia and mine has two. And they cost closer to $3000. Which is $144,000.
Pretending they had no other costs themselves (Which is idiotic, at minimum you have more training, and the cost of programming the machines), and removed all other costs of the election. (We'll do it outside, in the open air, with no staff.), they'd pay off in 6.5 elections, which is right about the time they'd break and need replacing.
In reality, you can save, at most, half the current cost of running an election...you still need locations, you still need roughly the same amount of staff, you still have to figure out the ballots. So it takes 13 years or so to pay off, and even that's somewhat idealized.
No place has ever saved any money by electronic voting.
Erm, huh?
I don't know what video you're talking about, but voters can 'change their vote' using computer printed ballots the same way they can with with hand-printed ones:
They hand it back in, it gets marked in some manner as VOID and placed somewhere to be counted later, and they get another ballot.
In the case of computer printed ballots, the machine would presumably be reset to allow it to print another, just like for a new voter, although I like the idea of having voters physically carry blank ballots into the booth and stick them in the printer, instead of having a printer with the paper already in it.
This makes the system work exactly like normal voting, except with a computer instead of a pencil, and you have exactly the same, known, security issues. I.e., you protect the blank ballots, it doesn't matter what the hell the computer thinks is going on. it doesn't matter how you fake out the computer, you can't vote more than once. (Whereas if the computer is providing the paper, tricking the computer could let you print a dozen ballots to slip into the ballot box.)
All you really need to do, added security-wise, is add a forced ballot reset to the computer when people enter the booth, so that people can't vote, and then vote again 'halfway' in the hope that someone else comes in and continues that partial vote. I guess the easiest thing is to reset any partial ballots when someone puts in the ballot paper, and require people to do that when first entering the booth.
But all this talk about computer assisted ballots is getting us away from the issue of computer voting, and we really really really should not confuse those issues or pretend they are related at all. One is just a new way of filling out ballots and seems to be a good idea, allowing the least confusion about ballots plus letting the disabled vote easier, the other is a profoundly bad idea.
That isn't an 'electronic voting' machine, you idiot.
It's an 'electronic ballot printer'.
It's idiots like you defending 'electronic voting' and saying 'it can work okay if done right', that are the reason places like where I live are subject to such horribly broken electronic voting machines, because you've decided to apply the exact same terms to a totally broken system and a perfectly functional one, and the goddamn public doesn't know enough to make the difference.
We're complaining about lynching and you've decided to use the same term to describe a legal trial by jury, and saying 'lynching is okay if done right'.
Use the right fucking words or shut the fuck up and get the hell out of this discussion. I'm sick and tired of morons like you defending the unaccountable and treasonous systems like Diebold sell because you say "Oh, electronic voting can work, because I've decided to call 'assistance with filling out a ballot' by the term 'electronic voting', because I'm an idiot."
Am I the only person who thinks non-owned interactive movies will just make the audience angry?
The entire point of this, according to the patent summary, is to up the 'replay' value? It's like an RPG, where you play again using a different class. Makes sense.
That makes sense for individuals, but it seems it would really piss people off if they went to see the movie, saw one plotline, went back to see another...and were outvoted, and saw the same damn thing.
Also, it seems the entire thing falls apart before that, when you expect people to pay full movie price to see a movie that they've already seem 2/3rds of. Even if they do get to see a new 1/3rd and don't get outvoted.
Ah yes. I should have realized that Futurama would parody early sci-fi. That episode even has a black and white newsreel at the start of the movie!
Larry the Lobster didn't do multiplying using the computing device
Your theory is that calls to the 1-900 number were tallied by hand?
Or that telephone systems don't connect people using computers?
Or that telephone systems don't bill people using computers?
It did not use the computing device to exclude votes
Yes, it did. Or do you think that the telephone system operates by mechanical bull?
There are computers that stop people from other countries from connecting to 1-900 numbers. In 1982, they'd be rather dumb computers, but they were, in fact, computers. Even 'general purpose computers', although I will point out the patent office doesn't make that distinction.
I'm confused as to where you think 'the computing device' didn't show up in those. Or are you trying to argue it was more that one device?
That isn't really that relevant. The computer that sells people a ticket is hardly going to be the same computer that selects the movie, either. You can neither get around patents or exclude prior art on the idea 'they were two computer hooked together instead of one computer'.
Although the idea you can is sorta funny and renders this entire patent moot. 'No, no, I don't have the media version matrix on the computing device, I have it on this other computing device which is networked to 'the' computer device mentioned prior. Hence I'm not infringing.'. That actually renders a lot of patents moot.
the computing device did not generate the media version matrix
I do not think you know what a matrix is. A 'matrix' is just another way to say 'array'. Having two pre-recorded endings is a 'matrix', it's a two-cell one-dimensional matrix. Any 'Press 1 or 2 to see a branch of a movie' is using a matrix. They're just allowing for having branches where any combination of multiple things can happen, like 1-1, 1-2, 2-1, or 2-2, but even one dimension is a matrix.
Granted, in this example, it was for a live show, and hence there was no matrix, as there was no content beforehand.
But, as I said, there's been plenty of other versions of this, like 'Accidental Lovers', which did use prerecorded video, in a 'matrix'. In fact, 'Accidental Lovers' used a two-dimensional ones. You could vote if X would fall in love with Y, if Y with X, or if both with both. That's a two dimensional matrix.(1) It even has a plotline missing (neither in love with neither), which the patent explicitly mentions as possible and having to find the nearest valid option.
1) You can also list those choices using a one-dimensional matrix, but all finite matrixes, no matter the dimensions, can be easily 'flattened' to one-dimensional matrixes. You just enumerate them. (And, strictly speaking, so can infinite ones, but that's more complicated and not relevant here.)
I don't see anything in the patent that describes how to 'implement' it beyond stuff like 'You'll need to give everyone a keypad or a phone or maybe let them vote in a booth'. (The Futurama story had a keypad, and obviously phones have been used for mass voting on plots forever. I don't think the idea of 'voting in a booth' needs to dignified with a response.)
Or insanely obvious stuff like 'You'll have to hook a computer to the playback device to tally the votes, a computer which people can contact using (insert list of half a dozen ways that people already contact computers)'.
There is no actual engineering in the patent at all. Most of it appears to be describing how votes could be tallied.
Wait, they don't fully describe everything sufficient to enable someone skilled in the art to build those things?
No, but considering that this patent doesn't either, and that people skilled in the art have built exactly this system repeatedly, that's sorta a moot point.
You clearly haven't read the patent. It's essentially 'Hook a computer to a projector, and here's a big list of ways that the computer could decide what to show next. For example, if not enough people vote in time, it could use a regional default.'. No explanation at all on how to do any of this.
You are correct, this isn't just 'choose your own adventure movies'.
But it doesn't actually seem deserving of a patent anyway.
someone presumably can cite an extant choose-your-own-adventure movie where (just from looking at the first claim) the storyline is controlled by audience voting (basic), where some votes are automatically discarded "based on voter characteristics", and votes are weighted by a factor "based on voter characteristics, the weighting factor being based on at least ticket pricing" (yeah -- pay twice as much, get twice (or 10x, or 0.5x) as much say in the adventure!)
I give you: Larry the Lobster.
someone presumably can cite an extant choose-your-own-adventure movie
It's a 'motion picture' under the law, so it's a 'movie', even though broadcast on TV. Check.
the storyline is controlled by audience voting (basic)
Check.
where some votes are automatically discarded "based on voter characteristics"
People outside the US can't vote because they can't call 1-900 numbers. Check. (I'm not sure you can patent the ability to not count a vote, anyway.)
the weighting factor being based on at least ticket pricing" (yeah -- pay twice as much, get twice (or 10x, or 0.5x)
You get as much vote as you pay for, although you don't have a 'ticket' per se. Indeed, you can select how much you pay in real time, instead of having to do it in advance under IBM's method.
And that's just one example, the earliest. There's examples using pre-recorded video if that's somehow relevant, and other examples using free voting.
Although it is equally stupid. It appears to be a patent on voting for the outcome, including stuff like having people charges for a vote.
So, it's essentially a patent for an 'interactive movie', except with a group of voters deciding the outcome. This exact premise has been used in science fiction before, which should be enough to deny it a patent.
In fact, it's actually been done over TV before, even with the 'pay for a vote' aspect. American Idol does a version of it, but it's been done with prerecorded stuff before, which people could call in and influence one way or another. For example. Or a very early live example.
I'm not certain how something that happened in 1982 over television should be patentable simply because it's in a movie theater.
But someone needs to find a scifi story that has people go into a movie theater and picking what story they want to see by voting with buttons on their chair. Hell, early scifi had that stuff all the time, before it was clear that home media consumption would take off. People were always going to movie theaters and whatnot.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'not necessarily true'.
The grandparent seemed to think that people complaining about HDCP were people who wanted to make illegal copies, which he called 'trying to pirate'. ('pirate' is a bit confusing in this context, as means producing or consuming copyright violations, which is why I tend to use the word 'copier' to mean 'producing'.)
Those copiers don't care about HDCP, as they've got some cable tuner that produces what they need in their computer. Tapping into an encrypted HDMI stream, decoding it, and capturing it that way is just silly.
You, OTOH, don't sound like you're trying to make illegal copies at all. You're just trying to play stuff on television.
That stuff might, sometimes, be illegal copies, but, as I mentioned, HDCP has no idea of the source of videos you're playing on your computer. It isn't some 'copyright violation detector'...HDMI is supposed to work for you, and it's not.
The result of HDCP along with the dropping of component (already happened for sky TV here, planned for blu-ray in the not too distant future) is that people who want to make copies for thier friends or record stuff from cable/sat and keep more of it than thier box can store will be largely limited to doing it in SD.
Uh, no. Read what I wrote.
No copier is using HDMI streamed, encoded or decoded, to make rips. None of them.
They are ripping straight from digital cable, or satellite, or from DVD or Blueray. Yes, all those are encrypted, but, heh, whatever. HDCP is an attempt to stop a form of copying that doesn't exist, because they believed they'd already stopped copying at the source, which they had not.
For an analogy, HDCP is like welding metal on the bottom of a car, because they believed people would soon be stealing cars by crawling under them because they'd made it impossible to hotwire them from the inside. This is, um, an incorrect belief about how cars are stolen, and thus a rather pointless security measure. (With the added bonus of people figuring out a way around the metal plate for fun.)
And, thanks to current technology making it so hard, there's almost no 'casual copying' of television already. There are dedicated copiers, who rip a specific set of shows, and then hand them off to a release group, where they get to the world fairly quickly. Practically no one's ripping and trading TV shows with their friends.
Uh, sorta.
There might be a short-term price increase, but if demand is constant, the supply will correct itself as non-marginal producers will produce more. Increased costs don't magically lower the supply forever. If the market is feasible for companies to operate in at all, it's feasible for more companies to operate in.
Granted, this can take rather a long time. Of course, it can take a rather long time to start, too! It takes companies a while to get out of manufacturing that has become less profitable, so it will take a long time for supply to go down...and usually someone's figured that out and stepped in with a new supply. (Hell, half the time, the latter just bought the former's factory.)
And, in the broader sense, everything is passed on to the consumer. And businesses. And the government. We don't have some magical economy where parts of it don't affect other parts.
'Costs will be passed on to the consumer' is one of those statements that is true, false, and meaningless.
But the people repeating 'passed on to consumers' always seem to have this image of companies going 'Oh, we've decided our profits should be 20%, so if it costs us 5% more to operate, we should raise all prices by 5% to make sure our profits are the same', which is a totally delusional way about thinking how companies operate. If they could raise prices by 5%, they already would have.
At most, after a tax increase on them, six months down the road there will be a slightly diminished supply because the tax increase put other people out of business and they can slightly raise the price. They are not, in any real sense, 'passing on' what was done to them. They are reacting to what was done to some other company.
Yes, but it's not 3 year olds who want to play GTA. It would be pretty impressive if a 3 year old could play GTA, but, regardless, they don't run down to Gamestop and buy the game, or pirate it online.
When people are talking about 'minors' getting access to violent video games, they're talking about ten and above, really.
Incidentally, studies have show it's not a problem 'distinguishing fantasy from reality'. Even very very young children, despite common knowledge, can tell real things from imaginary things, and know what is happening on TV isn't real.
The problem is that knowing it's not real doesn't mean they won't take social clues from it. They don't know the difference between an adult telling them 'Don't hit' and a TV show showing people hitting...they're both, strictly speaking, 'pretend'. They don't know the difference between hypothetical instructions and fictional stories.
However, they probably can't tell real life playacting, which humans distinguish by deliberate overacting, from reality.
Really? You've firewalled your computers DVD drive?
Or does your child have no friend who can burn a DVD for him?
People who are concerned about availability of violent games (to minors) should be lobbying the retailers, not the government.
People who are concerned about availability of violent games (to minors) should probably checked out by mental health professionals, as they are somewhat delusional.
This is a goddamn non-problem. We already have ratings on games, and kids can't buy them because stores won't sell them.
No one who is complaining about HDCP is trying to pirate. Cracking HDCP is utterly useless for pirates, and HDCP doesn't stop anything they're trying to do.
The HDCP 'protection' was a delusional attempt by the content providers to get a step ahead of pirate-copy-makers. They fantasized that their current media protection was 'perfect', so figured pirates would start copying from the video connection.
Of course, their protection wasn't perfect, so copier have continued to just strip the DRM off the provided media instead of rigging weird setups to copy from a monitor cable.
Which copiers could do anyway, as HDCP decoders have existed forever. This crack was the master key...before that, you had to buy a 'licensed' piece of hardware that could strip HDCP, which is fairly easy to get, although you have to order from overseas. With this crack, now, you can simply record the encrypted signal and decode it, I guess. (Maybe not, though.)
But no copier did that, or will start doing that. They'll just remove the BlueRay or cable encryption instead, like they've been doing.
In short, HDCP was 'second-level' DRM, which required, as a base assumption, that no one would be able to decode DRM before it get outputted, so HDCP was an attempt to protect the output. As people can decode the DRM before output, it's, um, utterly pointless to crack.
Even if copiers were copying from there, none of that has anything to do with 99.9999% of pirates, who download copied movies,and thus could give a flying fuck where the copy came from. Any HDCP connections will display a pirated video as well anything else.
Indeed.
We need to make sure that people don't start accepting that they've bought a movie and it doesn't play on the movie player for no obvious reason.
And we need to make sure that they know that when that happens, someone did it deliberately, because, remember how DVDs and CDs used to just work magically? CDs and DVDs were also fancy digital things, but you could just hook them up to your TV and stereo and they magically worked. (It's probably best not to mention DVD CSS, as that did mostly work and will just confuse them.)
Remind people how it used to work.
And point out, technologically, there was nothing stopping companies from just putting more data on the disc, giving a better picture, requiring a new DVD player, but otherwise exactly the same and working exactly as well.
And then mention the reason it's not working is that companies added something to try to keep people from copying the movies, and that thing broke. They added shit, added a bunch of complexity where wires now have encrypted signals and devices have to 'allow' other devices and it's this big complicated mess, and somewhere in there it didn't work and their fancy new BlueRay is playing a sucky resolution because of it.
Make sure they know this isn't some inherent technological problem, companies could have just made 'supersized DVDs', that the brokenness is a 'feature' companies added to stop them from copying, which screws them over some of the time.
Then mention that this entire thing was pointless, as people can still copy movies.
Us slashdot readers, the presumably technologically literate people, have to keep expectations high, or in a decade we'll end up where people have to check all sorts of requirements and nothing works together and people get used to some stuff not working some of the time, like with PCs currently. Don't let them get away with that.
Yeah, that whole 'passed on to customers' meme is idiotic.
It's called supply and demand, people. Companies don't base prices on how much it costs them to make, they base prices based on what the market will pay.
I work for a company that sells a few similar products online. Let me generalize and say one of them is $100, one $200, one $250, etc.
We sell all of the things in the product line, because customers are often looking for a specific one. We'd much rather sell the $100 one, as, because of a special deal with the wholeseller, we make like $50 dollars on that, vs. about $45 dollars on the $200.
But we're not idiots and haven't raised the price of the others, because the market won't stand it! The pricing is utterly unrelated to our cost, it's what everyone else is selling for. If we tried to raise the price, people would shop elsewhere. Likewise, we don't lower the cost of the $100, because people buy it at the current price! (We've tried, we don't get statistically more customers. We do use coupons, though, that works to some extent.)
Pricing is entirely based on what people will pay for things, not what it 'costs' to make. (Obviously, companies aren't going to sell things for less than the cost to make them, but that pushes them out of the market entirely, not makes them sell for more.)
And it's the same idiotic concept in the other direction, that lower corporate taxes let them hire more people. Um, companies hire exactly how many people they think they need to do what they're trying to do. Period. They don't hire 'extra' people because they have money laying around.
Them having more money might, if they were already planning on expanding, allow them to expand sooner, but, hell, that could operate just as easily the other way, jobwise...they now might have the cash to shut down their production line for a month to revamp, resulting in no work for a month and less jobs afterward. 'They might expand' is an idiotic hypothesis...they might automate jobs away with that money instead, if we're in hypothetical land. In reality, 99% of the time, the money is just added profit.
The real fun idea is that less taxes on the superrich might result in more jobs...because the superrich, if they take home more money after taxes, ask to have their salaries lowered so a company can hire some pointless workers, which manages to be an idiotic premise twice over.
Indeed. If I wanted to play a modern video game, I'd play a modern one, dammit. If I'm playing Super Mario Bros, I am, by definition, playing something with shitty graphics. That's the point.
I really need to fix and hook back up my NES. Stupid tray loading design, have to take the damn thing apart every five years and fix the metal contacts.
Ah, yes, it's the 'socialist and liberals' who think the military and executive branch aren't abusing 'national security' and 'states secret'.
I got one of them convection based ones , it looks like a cylinder , takes in air through the bottom and I'm quite disappointed in it's performance.
Those have always seemed like scams to me. In theory, yes, you can get magical faster air movement...if, and only if, the air in the room is cold, and the heater hot enough that it heats it very fast, and a bunch of other things.
In reality, no. If you want to move heat around, either get a heater with a fan built in, or just aim a fan at a heater.
Having said all that i think I'm going to get one of those oil filled heaters you speak of , my current one seems to smell funny when turned on.
The smell isn't a burning smell, is it? If so, that's just the dust on it. That always happens to me when I first plug it in. You can wipe it off with a wet rag once in a while to help reduce that. (When it's off, obviously.)
If you're actually smelling the oil, which can sometimes happen, you can instead get 'flat panel' convection heaters, which are a lot like oil ones, except they heat a single flat sheet.
But they don't store anywhere near as much heat as oil-based ones. They're essentially oil-based ones except they're heating up a sheet of metal or mica. (I think they heat from the sides, I don't really know.)
Actually, they're a lot like those cylinder ones, except flat.
Incidentally, good thing to do with the oil ones: They have nice flat tops (Well, the fins are even, at least.), so you can put a pot of water on them. Especially useful if the air is very dry.
Yeah, that was the sticking point on the '100% efficient' one time...if heaters are 100% efficient, what's the point of a heat pump?
Well, burning hydrogen is 100% efficient at producing water (Yeah, yeah, the reaction is exothermic, but whatever. All hydrogen is turned into water.), yet we find it cheaper to get water from already existing sources via a pump, instead of bringing in hydrogen and operating 'water generators' in our house. ;) Same with heat.
The real fun part is when you try to explain the less heat a heat pump generates, the more efficient it is, even if it manages to put all generated heat inside.
Wouldn't it make more sense to give the evidence to Russia and let them deal with him?
It is sometimes impossible for countries to do what they need to do for political reasons.
Unless, of course, we exchange happened with Russia's blessing, in which case shooting the diplomat would be pointless, since Russia would simply use other people to continue.
Well, not pointless. But at that point we'd semi-openly be at war with Russia, so we might as well admit it.
Or you could declare it openly and officially. What is Russia going to do, nuke you?
No, but internal political pressure could force them to remove support from you.
I think you're reading too much into this example. I was just using this an example of one of the few covert ops we probably shouldn't declassify for five years or so....which we should have to classify via Congress, not just someone slapping a label on it.
Under no circumstances should the people who made the decision, or carried it out, be in charge of if anyone knows about it. All incident reports or whatever the military and CIA calls them should be automatically be released two or three months later, with redacting of names only, unless Congress does something about it.
What sort of covert ops are allowable or even a good idea is a different question.
Indeed, the 'state secret' privilege is an entire fraud, as is 95% of the stuff we have classified.
The only thing the government should be able to keep secret are future or active military operations, still-living intelligent assets, and some stuff like military blueprints and things.
There is no military operation older than a month in the past that should be kept secret. What, are our enemies using carrier snails? I think they've pretty much figured out what happened. All reports generated should be public, period.
There will be moron who talk about classified 'tactics' and crap. They're lying. Our military has no secret skills that let them do things. Ask a soldier. There's stuff they don't want to talk about in advance, before the enemy figures out they can do it, but once you start doing things in a war, um, duh, the enemy knows it.
No, the reason the military keeps operations secret is not a damn thing to do with tactics, which the enemy can figure out pretty easily. It's to do with the fact the military makes blunt statements about innocents getting killed, and, um, the public doesn't like that.
Yes, the military would not, due to public pressure, be able to fight any recent wars if everything it did was open to the public...and that's a good thing. If the public doesn't like an action the government does, perhaps the government shouldn't fucking do it. Not speak vaguely about what it does and pretend everything is some huge important secret.
Now, I'll agree that sometimes we do need to keep secrets that are outside that. For example, perhaps we have evidence some Russia diplomat is selling nuclear secrets to Iran, and the CIA shoots him. Well, okay, we don't want that public, okay. Not to keep it from Russia, who probably figured it out, but to keep it officially from Russia.
But if there's something like that that does need to be kept secret, it should have to go through a fucking closed session of Congress and specifically be classified that way. No, not 'notify' half a dozen people, and threaten them if they tell anyone, the congress should actually vote on it, or decide to just tell everyone. Giving the damn branch of government, hell, the specific group that did it, the power to classify it, is utterly absurd. And it's doubly absurd to let them assert they have a right to keep it secret in court.
Granted, this incident seems pretty reasonable. This isn't the government keeping anything secret, but working with a publisher and author to voluntarily keep information secret. The problem isn't the 'secret' stuff we hear about.
Strictly speaking, infrared heaters can be slightly less efficient, because you can lose a little bit out windows as light. Same with any heater that creates a visible glow. But we're talking a loss of maybe 0.001%. ;)
But, yes. There are different designs that work better for different environments.
The kind I always get is the oil-filled radiator ones, which I get because they're very safe...no external part of them gets hot enough to catch anything on fire, or even burn you if you touch them. (Well, not before you can jerk your hand away.)
If I want them to blow around, or to heat more, I just aim a fan through them at a slight angle, bounce the air off the fins, and tada. (By removing heat with the fan, obviously, they turn on more often.) Also, rule number one of space heaters...run the ceiling fan. If you can put the heater right under the fan, run it normal, otherwise, run it backwards.
You're right in that some designs work much better at heating a person up by aiming heat directly at them, so get get the same result while generating less heat, but I've never really needed that. I was always trying to heat a room.
But, anyway. What I was actually talking about is, and this has happened a few times, when a place had no heat, and thus space heater(s) were to be used to heat it entirely. Multiple rooms. In the winter, as a sole heater, it hardly matters what sort of heater it is...it needs to heat the entire damn place up.
I live in Georgia, so a lot of places just have crappy electrical heaters and heat pumps, not gas or fireplaces or anything, and if it fails, you really can operate with just a few space heaters and some fans. Maybe run the stove also in the morning to heat the house up. You can heat a house for a few days until the repairman gets there, if you don't mind paying slightly higher power bills due to your lack of a heat pump. You can even go the entire winter like that.
Not possible in Minnesota, I'm sure, but certainly possible here in Georgia. I've done it.
And, every time, getting heaters, one of the 'considerations' of the space heaters being bought was to be 'energy efficiency'. Which is normally a reasonable consideration, and something I suggest, but obviously not with heaters. One time this happened I was able to explain that didn't exist, heaters turn electricity into heat at 100% efficiency, and at least one other time I was never able to get that concept across.