Interesting point about the pen versus pencil. But I don't think it would make any difference. This morning I used the provided little yellow golf pencil to mark my "X" and then hand in my paper ballot. Each ballot has a unique number which the volunteer receiving my ballot ripped off, and recorded on the voters' list next to my name. Then I shoved my ballot in the cardboard box, and walked out.
The whole time, scrutineers from various political parties sat behind the volunteers, watching, making sure nothing untoward was going on (I didn't see any erasers on the table, and the volunteers are not allowed to look at my ballot). They will also be involved later tonight, when volunteers at the returning office sort and count the ballots.
The whole process is well-planned and leaves little or no room for funny business. Of course, in a country like, say, Zimbabwe where the entire returning office could be bribed or coerced to mess with the results, this wouldn't work. But then neither would hackable computerized voting systems.
This time of year, true, because all our crotchety seniors are packing every single Dennys and Country Kitchen Buffet in Florida! Ha ha, take that, America's wang!
that makes things easier to do by hand
It's just so cold and lonely... we can't help but "do things by hand" if you know what I mean. I'd say "things... like your mom" but I don't know if we stoop to such things on Slashdot.
Free software for free votes, what a great match-up. Plus, it beats the Diebold machines running on Windows CE that kept crashing.
Incidentally, I just voted in our Canadian federal election and we're still using the pencil-and-paper and human-counted voting method. Slower, but still the most reliable and secure method IMO.
Flame me if you want, but in my opinion Blizzard is evolving into Disney - they used to make great, polished and unique products, but now they just make polished-but-soulless sequels.
For what it's worth, I've enjoyed Blizzard games since the days of Blackthorne and Lost Vikings. But I want something new, not yet another foray into the Warcraft or Starcraft or Diablo universes.
I just can't get excited about any news from Blizzcon. However, thanks to the author for a comprehensive and informative report.
I'll probably get flamed or modded down for this, but oh well.
I agree with you, I like playing hybrid classes. The Dungeon Siege series tried to make this viable, but it just didn't work. I hated how there was only a finite number of monsters to kill, so every single hit you made with your character to level up your skills was precious. I tried to play a combat magic-fighter hybrid but he was just a gimp compared to the "pure" classes in my party.
Titan Quest, on the other hand, is one of only two games on my computer at the moment because it's fun, caters to the Diablo loot lust factor and lets you play hybrid classes. Want to be a warrior-storm mage (a thane)? Sure. Want to be a hunter-nature mage (a ranger)? OK. Want to be a defensive-earth mage (a juggernaut)? You can do that too. In fact there are 36 different combinations to play.
There's quite a few combinations (more with the expansion pack) and the hybrid classes are powerful, not gimped. And if you put your points down the wrong tree there's a guy in almost every city who you can pay to reallocate your skill points.
I'm sure Diablo 3 will be great, but I've never actually played any of the Diablo games, just games labelled as "clones" (Just because a game is in the same genre does that make it a clone? Are all 3D WWII FPS games "Wolfenstein" clones?). I never liked the "oh so gothic and evil" atmosphere of Diablo.
However, Titan Quest was the perfect action RPG for me because I love the setting and it let me play hybrid classes however I wanted to.
Keyboard AND Mouse? Duke Nukem 3D? That's not old-school! Why you young pups, I remember when mouselook was just a crazy gleam in a programmer's eye. You think aiming sucks with an analog stick? Try using the freaking number pad.
And I remember REAL old-school first person shooters, the ones where we ran around the backyard pointing sticks at each other going "pew pew" and arguing over who got hit first.
MacOSX does it well: prompt for the root password when needed for sudo'ish type things.
Which also has its annoying moments, like when I try and change the time on my workstation Mac and I need a password. Or when I want to update the flash player for my web browser. Or install Firefox instead of Safari. Or install any of the latest security updates or the new iTunes.
Good thing I surreptitiously took note of the password last time the IT guy visited from head office.
It's better than UAC prompts, but it's still annoying, especially when you have to grovel for permission to install Firefox on your workstation.
I wouldn't call it terrible reporting. It says right on the first page of the ABC article who was being eavesdropped on, specifically American soldiers, reporters and diplomatic personnel in Baghdad's "Green Zone."
However, I think more should be made of the fact that reporters were on the eavesdrop list. Journalists had to give up a lot of freedom of the press to be "embedded" in Iraq, the fact they were also eavesdropped on shows how tightly the government was trying to control the media message.
It's no wonder there's been less critical, fact-based reporting (not just opinions) of the war in Iraq than Gulf War I.
You're right. I didn't count that because I can't even begin to guess what that would cost.
I just wanted to point out that downloading music/movies versus a traditional physical product delivery model isn't immediately better for the environment. But the comparison has to be made in terms of indirect pollution versus throwing junk in the landfill.
I should have clarified I focused on electricity because we don't think about where it comes from. The electricity we use could have been generated at a coal-fired power plant, a wind farm or a hydro dam, it's impossible to distinguish. But the bulk of our electricity comes from fossil fuel sources, so when we use electricity, until every coal-fired and natural gas-fired plant in North America is shut down, we are indirectly contributing to global warming.
On the other hand, when we buy a DVD at the store, there are a few things we can do to keep plastic out of the landfill. The DVD comes in a recyclable plastic or cardboard case (although CD cases still aren't recyclable last time I checked) and although the disc itself will eventually end up in a landfill, I'm not throwing it away anytime soon, I paid $20 for that thing. And that $20 covers the cost of manufacturing, the cost of production, studio, etc. as well as the store's transportation, electricity and labour costs.
Downloading music is cheaper for a customer (especially if you're downloading a torrent of something you didn't pay for), but the argument that it's environmentally better is flawed because of the electricity consumption and also because we upgrade our computers every so often, where does that obsolete video card or worn-out keyboard go? Electronics recycling is still not that wide-spread.
There still remains a lot of research to be done on the environmental impact of a digital age. Is it better or worse to use more energy but keep more stuff out of the landfill? Personally I think it's worse. Our personal energy consumption is rising. The number I quoted earlier, about $268 per year to run my computer, is way more than the gas money I spend per year on shopping trips.
However, my wife's van would tell a different story...
I look at it as going green - I'm reducing my environmental footprint by not encouraging authors to make and sell plastic.
Let's torture some numbers here.
Assume you have an average desktop PC consuming roughly 500 watts of power (power supply, 3D GPU, router, cable or DSL modem but no monitor turned on while you're downloading a torrent because you're trying to be environmentally-responsible).
Now let's assume you pay 14 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity.
Finally let's assume you spend one hour downloading a torrent of a new album or movie or whatever.
Using the formula (watts x hours used)/1000 x cost-per-kilowatt-hour you discover the one hour download has cost you seven cents in electricity. Not bad, eh?
In comparison, let's assume it costs 25 cents to create a CD. That includes manufacturing and copying costs. Seven cents in electricity versus 25 cents in manufacturing costs (electricity, materials) is looking pretty environmentally-friendly.
Until you think about how long you leave your computer on. An eight-hour night of downloading torrents will cost 56 cents. And if, like me, you leave your computer on all the time, those pennies start adding up.
We have way cheaper electricity rates in B.C. than the rest of North America (6.15 cents per kilowatt-hour) but according to my calculations, I still pay $268.63 per year just to run my computer.
In comparison, I burn nothing but calories walking up and down the aisles at HMV looking for a new movie or CD. And all the electricity used to run the store is for every product in the store, not just one download, so the cost is really spread out (and included in the final price of the item anyway).
I'm not trying to make fun of your idea, but just to point out that while downloading music and movies COULD be more environmentally-friendly, it would require some real strict regulation of when the computer is on/off to really make it pay off.
This sort of abuse of statistics happens all the time. Ars Technica's article was an excellent investigation into a very simple question - where do these numbers come from? It's scary how many government agencies just assumed they were true.
However the question is more interesting than the answer because no one has bothered to ask it before. Everyone just assumes that because the numbers come from government sources, they must be legitimate. This question should have been asked years ago.
Instead, as happens time and time again, this shows that if someone throws out a number with enough confidence, people will believe it. And once the number gets an air of legitimacy attached to it because of who's quoting it, no one will question it.
Plus TFA says the original image was blurred using the Photoshop "mosaic" filter. So this approach, while interesting for text blurred using that exact filter, is probably useless in most real-world approaches, such as trying to recover text obliterated with the rubber-stamp tool, or like you suggest, a black box.
It doesn't mean they move in the same direction, or that the leader one time is the leader again next time. It's pretty much random, like watching people applaud at a kids' Christmas concert. One person starts clapping at random, then a split-second later everyone's clapping despite the fact that no one enjoyed hearing "Here comes Santa Claus" being butchered by the inexperienced clarinet section.
As a fellow former farm labourer I completely agree with you. This is a waste of time and money and a few cowboys can do the job better and cheaper.
This quote from the summary says it all:
Much of the research has focused on how cattlemen can identify which cattle in their herds are the ones that the others follow.
I imagine this line of research was a failure because cows don't follow any leader for any good reason. They see one cow moving and think, "she move, I move too" and that's about it.
You can't lead cows. Unless you have blackstrap molasses in your pockets. Then you'd better run like hell.
Damn straight. People should not be punished for being honest.
Government agencies, however, should be publicly punished for being incompetent.
I imagine that if the man had given the camera to the media, the police could have swooped down on the news outlet and confiscated their computers, but then they would be in a much bigger fight with the Fifth Estate rather than some poor schlub who can't fight back.
Here's hoping the free press continues to stay free.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting point about the pen versus pencil. But I don't think it would make any difference. This morning I used the provided little yellow golf pencil to mark my "X" and then hand in my paper ballot. Each ballot has a unique number which the volunteer receiving my ballot ripped off, and recorded on the voters' list next to my name. Then I shoved my ballot in the cardboard box, and walked out.
The whole time, scrutineers from various political parties sat behind the volunteers, watching, making sure nothing untoward was going on (I didn't see any erasers on the table, and the volunteers are not allowed to look at my ballot). They will also be involved later tonight, when volunteers at the returning office sort and count the ballots.
The whole process is well-planned and leaves little or no room for funny business. Of course, in a country like, say, Zimbabwe where the entire returning office could be bribed or coerced to mess with the results, this wouldn't work. But then neither would hackable computerized voting systems.
I have a friend who constantly gets those mixed up... "it's not brain science" she says, or "it's not rocket surgery."
I think she does it deliberately to irritate people.
there's only like 47 people living in Canada
This time of year, true, because all our crotchety seniors are packing every single Dennys and Country Kitchen Buffet in Florida! Ha ha, take that, America's wang!
that makes things easier to do by hand
It's just so cold and lonely... we can't help but "do things by hand" if you know what I mean. I'd say "things... like your mom" but I don't know if we stoop to such things on Slashdot.
Free software for free votes, what a great match-up. Plus, it beats the Diebold machines running on Windows CE that kept crashing.
Incidentally, I just voted in our Canadian federal election and we're still using the pencil-and-paper and human-counted voting method. Slower, but still the most reliable and secure method IMO.
The sequel so great it took 60 years to make? Yeah. I gave that one a miss.
I'm still waiting for Sleeping Beauty 2: Back to Sleep" though.
Flame me if you want, but in my opinion Blizzard is evolving into Disney - they used to make great, polished and unique products, but now they just make polished-but-soulless sequels.
For what it's worth, I've enjoyed Blizzard games since the days of Blackthorne and Lost Vikings. But I want something new, not yet another foray into the Warcraft or Starcraft or Diablo universes.
I just can't get excited about any news from Blizzcon. However, thanks to the author for a comprehensive and informative report.
Wow, that took me back and sounded REAL familiar... you didn't grow up on my street, didja?
you work for paranoid idiots
That, I think, is the core of the problem.
I'll probably get flamed or modded down for this, but oh well.
I agree with you, I like playing hybrid classes. The Dungeon Siege series tried to make this viable, but it just didn't work. I hated how there was only a finite number of monsters to kill, so every single hit you made with your character to level up your skills was precious. I tried to play a combat magic-fighter hybrid but he was just a gimp compared to the "pure" classes in my party.
Titan Quest, on the other hand, is one of only two games on my computer at the moment because it's fun, caters to the Diablo loot lust factor and lets you play hybrid classes. Want to be a warrior-storm mage (a thane)? Sure. Want to be a hunter-nature mage (a ranger)? OK. Want to be a defensive-earth mage (a juggernaut)? You can do that too. In fact there are 36 different combinations to play.
There's quite a few combinations (more with the expansion pack) and the hybrid classes are powerful, not gimped. And if you put your points down the wrong tree there's a guy in almost every city who you can pay to reallocate your skill points.
I'm sure Diablo 3 will be great, but I've never actually played any of the Diablo games, just games labelled as "clones" (Just because a game is in the same genre does that make it a clone? Are all 3D WWII FPS games "Wolfenstein" clones?). I never liked the "oh so gothic and evil" atmosphere of Diablo.
However, Titan Quest was the perfect action RPG for me because I love the setting and it let me play hybrid classes however I wanted to.
Haha or "I killed you... TO INFINITY"
Keyboard AND Mouse? Duke Nukem 3D? That's not old-school! Why you young pups, I remember when mouselook was just a crazy gleam in a programmer's eye. You think aiming sucks with an analog stick? Try using the freaking number pad.
And I remember REAL old-school first person shooters, the ones where we ran around the backyard pointing sticks at each other going "pew pew" and arguing over who got hit first.
I guess I should add "get off my lawn."
MacOSX does it well: prompt for the root password when needed for sudo'ish type things.
Which also has its annoying moments, like when I try and change the time on my workstation Mac and I need a password. Or when I want to update the flash player for my web browser. Or install Firefox instead of Safari. Or install any of the latest security updates or the new iTunes.
Good thing I surreptitiously took note of the password last time the IT guy visited from head office.
It's better than UAC prompts, but it's still annoying, especially when you have to grovel for permission to install Firefox on your workstation.
I wouldn't call it terrible reporting. It says right on the first page of the ABC article who was being eavesdropped on, specifically American soldiers, reporters and diplomatic personnel in Baghdad's "Green Zone."
However, I think more should be made of the fact that reporters were on the eavesdrop list. Journalists had to give up a lot of freedom of the press to be "embedded" in Iraq, the fact they were also eavesdropped on shows how tightly the government was trying to control the media message.
It's no wonder there's been less critical, fact-based reporting (not just opinions) of the war in Iraq than Gulf War I.
You're right. I didn't count that because I can't even begin to guess what that would cost.
I just wanted to point out that downloading music/movies versus a traditional physical product delivery model isn't immediately better for the environment. But the comparison has to be made in terms of indirect pollution versus throwing junk in the landfill.
I should have clarified I focused on electricity because we don't think about where it comes from. The electricity we use could have been generated at a coal-fired power plant, a wind farm or a hydro dam, it's impossible to distinguish. But the bulk of our electricity comes from fossil fuel sources, so when we use electricity, until every coal-fired and natural gas-fired plant in North America is shut down, we are indirectly contributing to global warming.
On the other hand, when we buy a DVD at the store, there are a few things we can do to keep plastic out of the landfill. The DVD comes in a recyclable plastic or cardboard case (although CD cases still aren't recyclable last time I checked) and although the disc itself will eventually end up in a landfill, I'm not throwing it away anytime soon, I paid $20 for that thing. And that $20 covers the cost of manufacturing, the cost of production, studio, etc. as well as the store's transportation, electricity and labour costs.
Downloading music is cheaper for a customer (especially if you're downloading a torrent of something you didn't pay for), but the argument that it's environmentally better is flawed because of the electricity consumption and also because we upgrade our computers every so often, where does that obsolete video card or worn-out keyboard go? Electronics recycling is still not that wide-spread.
There still remains a lot of research to be done on the environmental impact of a digital age. Is it better or worse to use more energy but keep more stuff out of the landfill? Personally I think it's worse. Our personal energy consumption is rising. The number I quoted earlier, about $268 per year to run my computer, is way more than the gas money I spend per year on shopping trips.
However, my wife's van would tell a different story...
I look at it as going green - I'm reducing my environmental footprint by not encouraging authors to make and sell plastic.
Let's torture some numbers here.
Assume you have an average desktop PC consuming roughly 500 watts of power (power supply, 3D GPU, router, cable or DSL modem but no monitor turned on while you're downloading a torrent because you're trying to be environmentally-responsible).
Now let's assume you pay 14 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity.
Finally let's assume you spend one hour downloading a torrent of a new album or movie or whatever. Using the formula (watts x hours used)/1000 x cost-per-kilowatt-hour you discover the one hour download has cost you seven cents in electricity. Not bad, eh?
In comparison, let's assume it costs 25 cents to create a CD. That includes manufacturing and copying costs. Seven cents in electricity versus 25 cents in manufacturing costs (electricity, materials) is looking pretty environmentally-friendly.
Until you think about how long you leave your computer on. An eight-hour night of downloading torrents will cost 56 cents. And if, like me, you leave your computer on all the time, those pennies start adding up.
We have way cheaper electricity rates in B.C. than the rest of North America (6.15 cents per kilowatt-hour) but according to my calculations, I still pay $268.63 per year just to run my computer.
In comparison, I burn nothing but calories walking up and down the aisles at HMV looking for a new movie or CD. And all the electricity used to run the store is for every product in the store, not just one download, so the cost is really spread out (and included in the final price of the item anyway).
I'm not trying to make fun of your idea, but just to point out that while downloading music and movies COULD be more environmentally-friendly, it would require some real strict regulation of when the computer is on/off to really make it pay off.
This sort of abuse of statistics happens all the time. Ars Technica's article was an excellent investigation into a very simple question - where do these numbers come from? It's scary how many government agencies just assumed they were true.
However the question is more interesting than the answer because no one has bothered to ask it before. Everyone just assumes that because the numbers come from government sources, they must be legitimate. This question should have been asked years ago.
Instead, as happens time and time again, this shows that if someone throws out a number with enough confidence, people will believe it. And once the number gets an air of legitimacy attached to it because of who's quoting it, no one will question it.
It's speaking something into being that didn't exist before, and enough people believe in it it is, in essence, true. Like the Hogfather in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.
the most impressive part is that he slapped this together using a single popular off-the-shelf program and a few lines of JavaScript code.
Oh, I totally agree. Imagine what he could do if he had access to the algorithms that drive the mosaic filter.
Absolutely agree.
Plus TFA says the original image was blurred using the Photoshop "mosaic" filter. So this approach, while interesting for text blurred using that exact filter, is probably useless in most real-world approaches, such as trying to recover text obliterated with the rubber-stamp tool, or like you suggest, a black box.
It doesn't mean they move in the same direction, or that the leader one time is the leader again next time. It's pretty much random, like watching people applaud at a kids' Christmas concert. One person starts clapping at random, then a split-second later everyone's clapping despite the fact that no one enjoyed hearing "Here comes Santa Claus" being butchered by the inexperienced clarinet section.
To Paul Sams:
Does Blizzard have any plans to create any new franchises or expand into any new (to Blizzard) game genres after Starcraft II and Diablo III launch?
As a fellow former farm labourer I completely agree with you. This is a waste of time and money and a few cowboys can do the job better and cheaper.
This quote from the summary says it all:
Much of the research has focused on how cattlemen can identify which cattle in their herds are the ones that the others follow.
I imagine this line of research was a failure because cows don't follow any leader for any good reason. They see one cow moving and think, "she move, I move too" and that's about it.
You can't lead cows. Unless you have blackstrap molasses in your pockets. Then you'd better run like hell.
That depends - will it freeze when it encounters a bad driver?
I would have voted for "Windows Nimbus."
This should be the next poll.
Damn straight. People should not be punished for being honest.
Government agencies, however, should be publicly punished for being incompetent.
I imagine that if the man had given the camera to the media, the police could have swooped down on the news outlet and confiscated their computers, but then they would be in a much bigger fight with the Fifth Estate rather than some poor schlub who can't fight back.
Here's hoping the free press continues to stay free.
Good explanation, and you should get modded up for correctly using the word "strategery."