E-voting is like global thermonuclear war. Call me old fashioned, but I like the idea of marking a paper ballot with a pen, and putting it a box.
Here in Taiwan, ballots are counted at the precinct level. The counting is done in public, with representatives of the major parties present. The whole process takes a couple of hours.
The whole idea of "machine voting" is stupid. It's worse than a waste of money, it invites all kinds of suspicion and dispute. There has to be a paper trail. No exceptions.
Using a machine-countable ballot may save time, and that's ok. But at least it leaves a record that can be double-checked by hand.
My thoughts exactly! In fact, I had assumed that Apple licensed the multi-touch interface from Han, since his TED talk preceded the iPhone's release by half a year or more. How the HELL could the patent office have missed that?
Re:BitCoins are simply a hobby, not a currency
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PS: About those anomalous 30% swings... those were manufactured by the private central bank at the time, for the purpose of bankrupting debtors in order to snatch up their property. This is why Andrew Jackson was so vehemently opposed to the bank, and worked so hard to revoke its charter.
Re:BitCoins are simply a hobby, not a currency
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Bitcoin Price Crashes
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You're missing my point... the reason we have to constantly inflate our money supply is because we borrow it from a private institution (the Fed) at interest, and so the only way to repay the principle plus interest is to "grow" the economy enough to justify printing more money (ie: borrowing more from the Fed) so that we'll have enough to pay the debt. (Note: the "growth" here is imaginary, since it is calculated in units of a devalued currency.)
The GP is correct in raising the Red Queen Hypothesis, but misses the reality behind it... we are in a race we can never win, since we will NEVER be able to borrow enough money (at interest) to pay off the previous debts.
Re:BitCoins are simply a hobby, not a currency
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Bitcoin Price Crashes
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What made me laugh, specifically, was the notion that the Fed has "kept the dollar remarkably stable... compared to what came before."
Growth is not dependent on monetary inflation. And if you factor out all the "innovative" accounting tricks (eg: hedonics) that are used to "adjust" our GDP calculations, in fact we've been in a recession since long before the crisis of 2008.
As for "what came before," there were periods of stability and growth as well as periods of instability. The greenback currency introduced by Lincoln was quite popular in the reconstruction era... enough so that it had a political party named after it.
The point of the CPI graph was to show that growth != inflation. Inflation was more or less flat throughout the 19th century, and yet during that same period we had the entire industrial revolution.
On the general question of fiat currencies and central banks: England used a tally stick system from medieval times through the building of its global empire. But once they set up a central bank in 1694, they soon started to see massive inflation.
Since Congress seems unable or unwilling to audit the Fed, maybe these guys can handle the job. At least that would be a useful application of their "l33t skillz" for a change.
Maybe the/. editors had the same problem, which is why they forgot that this story already ran a few days ago.
Re:BitCoins are simply a hobby, not a currency
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Mod parent up: +5 Funny
>Say what you will about the Federal Reserve, they have kept the dollar >remarkably stable in terms of inflation and deflation compared to what came before.
Thanks for the LOLz...;-)
Here's a chart of the CPI since 1800 (based on 1967 reference). Note the "hockey-stick" spike in the graph starting in 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window. Note also that the dollars in your pocket are worth less than 10% of what they were when the Federal Reserve Act was signed into law. (More details on the history of inflation here.)
The USA has gone off and on a "private central bank" system several times over its history. The period you seem to be talking about in the early 1800's was one of the "on" times. Andrew "Stonewall" Jackson considered it one of his greatest achievements as president to have "killed the bank."
For more on the history of money and central banks, check out some of Bill Still's documentaries.
You seem to be contradicting yourself... asking for a focus-follows-mouse model that reads your mind well enough to know when you're reaching for the global menu bar and not just switching focus to another window. Personally I could never figure out how anyone could work with focus-follows-mouse. My normal reflex after clicking into a text window is to move the mouse cursor out of the way so I can see what I'm typing. But with FFM that often means I end up entering text into a window that isn't even in the foreground. (Also, if your mouse cord is a bit stiff/springy, you may get "mouse drift" and suddenly find yourself typing in a completely different window.)
How anyone could ever actually prefer FFM is beyond my comprehension. It used to be the X default on some early distros (mid 90's), and I couldn't stand it.
From TFA: "Let's start with the meaning of Natty. Here in the States, Natty is short for Anheuser-Busch's bottom-shelf line of 'Natural' beers." From Mirriam-Webster: "Natty: trimly neat and tidy. ('He's quite a natty dresser.')"
After every other name in the series taking the form [adjective + noun], why would they suddenly switch to [noun + noun]?? Other than that, great article.
Excellent idea! For implementation, I propose that google add a "newsdate:" keyword... just specify a date, and you get the news (or the entire www, if that's possible) as it appeared on that day. That would be useful in a lot of ways for a lot of things.
Seriously, how many people were buying storage by the GIGAbyte back then? The first time I ever heard of a "hard disk drive" was around 1984 (give or take) and it was a 10MB drive that cost about $3k. A friend told me about it, and said it was wicked fast. When I asked him "how fast," he expressed it in terms of the load time for PC-Write.
HIM: "You know how, when you load PC-Write, it takes about 10 or 15 seconds to read it off the floppy disk? Well, when you have this 'hard disk' thing, you type pcwrite, hit ENTER, and the hard disk goes 'zzzzt' and then the PC-Write screen pops up all at once."
ME: "Whoa.... Cool!!"
Now we buy terabytes for the cost of a few-dozen floppies in that time. At least we're doing something well.
Since it's called the "Tiananmen Massacre" everybody assumes it happened in Tiananmen Square, when really this was just an easy shorthand, since it was a response to the Tiananmen Protest, which had been going on for several weeks by then.
I know several people who were there that night, and this "new revelation" is nothing new, as you said.
> What I remember is the video of a protester standing down a column of tanks inside the square.
Actually the "tank man" footage was shot from the Beijing Hotel, looking WSW down Changan E. Rd.. The vantage point is (IIRC) a few hundred yards east of the square.
True enough. But at least Win users had the advantage of hardware vendors actually trying to provide drivers that worked. (Maybe the difference was that Linux geeks had to "Pay-n-Pray" instead...;-) But I think a lot of that was simply due to changes in the industry. Heck, they were still selling 80286's into the early 90's, and the ISA bus was already groaning under the strain of all the new hardware hitting the market.
Can't remember the last time I had to manually set an IRQ vector... damn glad about that too.
LOL! Yeah, almost... I remember a lot of hair-pulling back in the mid 90's just trying to get X to run. Graphics cards were less reliable and seldom had good technical docs; most drivers had to be reverse engineered, with unpredictable results. Then KDE and Gnome came along in the late 90's and "Linux Desktop Dominance" has been "just around the corner" ever since.
Personally, after all these years, I don't much give a shit anymore about how many other people are using Linux (desktop or otherwise), I'm just glad I don't have to buy two or three VGA cards before I find one that works these days. That's what I call progress.
I'd been wondering why M$ seemed somewhat less evil in recent years. That explains it. Oddly it reaffirms my faith in the universe to learn that. Thank you.
>all this means is someone doesn't fully understand what 'Computer Science' is
Except the OP "timothy" claims to already have both a B.S. and an M.S. in CompSci. Oops.
Actually I'd find it rather odd if his younger siblings didn't already know some things about word processing and spreadsheets. Perhaps he simply means a more rigorous and thorough exploration of these tools.
Same here. I've been using Gnu/Linux since 1995 (before KDE and Gnome), and things kept getting steadily better. I started using Kubuntu several years ago, but switched to Ubuntu when KDE4 came out, because that newfangled interface was incomprehensible to me. Now that Gnome 3 is here, I've switched to Xubuntu. No frills. No cruft. It just works.
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E-voting is like global thermonuclear war. Call me old fashioned, but I like the idea of marking a paper ballot with a pen, and putting it a box.
Here in Taiwan, ballots are counted at the precinct level. The counting is done in public, with representatives of the major parties present. The whole process takes a couple of hours.
The whole idea of "machine voting" is stupid. It's worse than a waste of money, it invites all kinds of suspicion and dispute. There has to be a paper trail. No exceptions.
Using a machine-countable ballot may save time, and that's ok. But at least it leaves a record that can be double-checked by hand.
That may be so, but it begs the question... if you invent something in 2001, why would you wait until 2007 to file your patent application?
My thoughts exactly! In fact, I had assumed that Apple licensed the multi-touch interface from Han, since his TED talk preceded the iPhone's release by half a year or more. How the HELL could the patent office have missed that?
Important safety tip: Don't cross the streams!
PS: About those anomalous 30% swings... those were manufactured by the private central bank at the time, for the purpose of bankrupting debtors in order to snatch up their property. This is why Andrew Jackson was so vehemently opposed to the bank, and worked so hard to revoke its charter.
You're missing my point... the reason we have to constantly inflate our money supply is because we borrow it from a private institution (the Fed) at interest, and so the only way to repay the principle plus interest is to "grow" the economy enough to justify printing more money (ie: borrowing more from the Fed) so that we'll have enough to pay the debt. (Note: the "growth" here is imaginary, since it is calculated in units of a devalued currency.)
The GP is correct in raising the Red Queen Hypothesis, but misses the reality behind it... we are in a race we can never win, since we will NEVER be able to borrow enough money (at interest) to pay off the previous debts.
What made me laugh, specifically, was the notion that the Fed has "kept the dollar remarkably stable ... compared to what came before."
Growth is not dependent on monetary inflation. And if you factor out all the "innovative" accounting tricks (eg: hedonics) that are used to "adjust" our GDP calculations, in fact we've been in a recession since long before the crisis of 2008.
As for "what came before," there were periods of stability and growth as well as periods of instability. The greenback currency introduced by Lincoln was quite popular in the reconstruction era... enough so that it had a political party named after it.
The point of the CPI graph was to show that growth != inflation. Inflation was more or less flat throughout the 19th century, and yet during that same period we had the entire industrial revolution.
On the general question of fiat currencies and central banks: England used a tally stick system from medieval times through the building of its global empire. But once they set up a central bank in 1694, they soon started to see massive inflation.
Since Congress seems unable or unwilling to audit the Fed, maybe these guys can handle the job. At least that would be a useful application of their "l33t skillz" for a change.
Maybe the /. editors had the same problem, which is why they forgot that this story already ran a few days ago.
Mod parent up: +5 Funny
>Say what you will about the Federal Reserve, they have kept the dollar
>remarkably stable in terms of inflation and deflation compared to what came before.
Thanks for the LOLz... ;-)
Here's a chart of the CPI since 1800 (based on 1967 reference). Note the "hockey-stick" spike in the graph starting in 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window. Note also that the dollars in your pocket are worth less than 10% of what they were when the Federal Reserve Act was signed into law. (More details on the history of inflation here.)
The USA has gone off and on a "private central bank" system several times over its history. The period you seem to be talking about in the early 1800's was one of the "on" times. Andrew "Stonewall" Jackson considered it one of his greatest achievements as president to have "killed the bank."
For more on the history of money and central banks, check out some of Bill Still's documentaries.
You seem to be contradicting yourself... asking for a focus-follows-mouse model that reads your mind well enough to know when you're reaching for the global menu bar and not just switching focus to another window. Personally I could never figure out how anyone could work with focus-follows-mouse. My normal reflex after clicking into a text window is to move the mouse cursor out of the way so I can see what I'm typing. But with FFM that often means I end up entering text into a window that isn't even in the foreground. (Also, if your mouse cord is a bit stiff/springy, you may get "mouse drift" and suddenly find yourself typing in a completely different window.)
How anyone could ever actually prefer FFM is beyond my comprehension. It used to be the X default on some early distros (mid 90's), and I couldn't stand it.
From TFA: "Let's start with the meaning of Natty. Here in the States, Natty is short for Anheuser-Busch's bottom-shelf line of 'Natural' beers."
From Mirriam-Webster: "Natty: trimly neat and tidy. ('He's quite a natty dresser.')"
After every other name in the series taking the form [adjective + noun], why would they suddenly switch to [noun + noun]??
Other than that, great article.
Makes sense. Nature has a habit of reusing "hardware" for multiple functions, especially in the brain.
Excellent idea! For implementation, I propose that google add a "newsdate:" keyword... just specify a date, and you get the news (or the entire www, if that's possible) as it appeared on that day. That would be useful in a lot of ways for a lot of things.
Seriously, how many people were buying storage by the GIGAbyte back then? The first time I ever heard of a "hard disk drive" was around 1984 (give or take) and it was a 10MB drive that cost about $3k. A friend told me about it, and said it was wicked fast. When I asked him "how fast," he expressed it in terms of the load time for PC-Write.
HIM: "You know how, when you load PC-Write, it takes about 10 or 15 seconds to read it off the floppy disk? Well, when you have this 'hard disk' thing, you type pcwrite, hit ENTER, and the hard disk goes 'zzzzt' and then the PC-Write screen pops up all at once."
ME: "Whoa.... Cool!!"
Now we buy terabytes for the cost of a few-dozen floppies in that time. At least we're doing something well.
Since it's called the "Tiananmen Massacre" everybody assumes it happened in Tiananmen Square, when really this was just an easy shorthand, since it was a response to the Tiananmen Protest, which had been going on for several weeks by then.
I know several people who were there that night, and this "new revelation" is nothing new, as you said.
> What I remember is the video of a protester standing down a column of tanks inside the square.
Actually the "tank man" footage was shot from the Beijing Hotel, looking WSW down Changan E. Rd.. The vantage point is (IIRC) a few hundred yards east of the square.
I've been wondering the same thing for the last week or so.
True enough. But at least Win users had the advantage of hardware vendors actually trying to provide drivers that worked. (Maybe the difference was that Linux geeks had to "Pay-n-Pray" instead...;-) But I think a lot of that was simply due to changes in the industry. Heck, they were still selling 80286's into the early 90's, and the ISA bus was already groaning under the strain of all the new hardware hitting the market.
Can't remember the last time I had to manually set an IRQ vector... damn glad about that too.
Heh... or "Plug-n-Pray" as we called it back then... as you no doubt remember, given your 4-digit id. ;-)
LOL! Yeah, almost... I remember a lot of hair-pulling back in the mid 90's just trying to get X to run. Graphics cards were less reliable and seldom had good technical docs; most drivers had to be reverse engineered, with unpredictable results. Then KDE and Gnome came along in the late 90's and "Linux Desktop Dominance" has been "just around the corner" ever since.
Personally, after all these years, I don't much give a shit anymore about how many other people are using Linux (desktop or otherwise), I'm just glad I don't have to buy two or three VGA cards before I find one that works these days. That's what I call progress.
Baby steps...
I'd been wondering why M$ seemed somewhat less evil in recent years. That explains it. Oddly it reaffirms my faith in the universe to learn that. Thank you.
>all this means is someone doesn't fully understand what 'Computer Science' is
Except the OP "timothy" claims to already have both a B.S. and an M.S. in CompSci. Oops.
Actually I'd find it rather odd if his younger siblings didn't already know some things about word processing and spreadsheets. Perhaps he simply means a more rigorous and thorough exploration of these tools.
They've been doing this sort of thing with hardware vendors for quite a while. Nothing new here. Move along...
Same here. I've been using Gnu/Linux since 1995 (before KDE and Gnome), and things kept getting steadily better. I started using Kubuntu several years ago, but switched to Ubuntu when KDE4 came out, because that newfangled interface was incomprehensible to me. Now that Gnome 3 is here, I've switched to Xubuntu. No frills. No cruft. It just works.