There are very cleverly designed systems that allow you to take home a receipt that will allow you to verify that you vote was counted, yet will not divulge who you voted for to anyone, so it cannot be used to bribe or coerce you.
One example is Punchscan, a system where you vote by marking your choice on a double sheet of paper with holes punched through the top sheet so that you simultaneously mark both sheets. The top sheet, which has the candidates' names on it, is destroyed, the other is scanned and then taken home. The sheets you take home doesn't have the names of the candidates on them (they are referred to by randomly ordered letters), so nobody can tell who you voted for, but you can later look up the scanned version online to verify that the markings match and your vote was counted.
Here in the Netherlands a large cable TV and Internet service provider called Ziggo is doing a pilot program with turning everybody's home cable modem into a public wireless access point. They plan on rolling this out to their entire service area. Of course the public traffic is kept completely separated from the cable modem owner's private Internet connection, and Ziggo say that it won't affect their connection speed. I don't know whether the public Internet access offered this way is actually free (I suspect not, you'll probably have to pay Ziggo). More information: http://www.speedguide.net/news/companies-to-provide-wireless-internet-access-by-4933.
What happened to the satellite it was supposed to bring into orbit, but couldn't because one of the engines failed during lift off? Did they manage to get that in its proper orbit?
Slashdot is faltering, and it's not the users who has brought it down.
It's the moderators, such as Samzenpus, who have failed to carry out their job duty, in a professional manner.
What else is new? That's been a problem around here for as long as I can remember. It's a shame the editors of Slashdot are so sloppy and unprofessional, and it's the reason I don't pay for a subscription.
I don't have any suggestions, but I am very curious about the background of this question. Could you elaborate a little? Why and for whom are you building this lab? Are you putting your own money into it, and if so, why is it worth so much money to you and why do you need such a high-tech lab? Just curious.
I'm 38 and from the Netherlands. In the later classes of primary school (1980 - 1986), computer education was becoming part of the curriculum (although by initiative of the school, it wasn't national or centralised yet). My father worked at IBM and actually helped my school set up a computer class (although not with IBM computers, they were Philips P2000's, a home computer with a built-in high quality keyboard and mini cassette tape deck, as well as pluggable cartridges that contain BASIC, a word processor, educational games, etc.). They used them to teach us the basics of computers, writing simple programs, using a word processor, etc.
In secondary education ("high school", 1986 - 1992) PC's were just being introduced when I was there. They weren't in the classes though, there were just a few of them in the library and you couldn't do much with them. They were networked together but had no connection outside the school and the Internet hardly existed yet. We had some cursory computer education classes teaching us how to use WordPerfect, things like that. No programming or anything like that. Actually the classes I had in primary school were probably more useful for going into computer science...
Next I did two years of university (at Delft), which was very disappointing to me because the first half year we literally did not even touch a computer, despite having taken informatica ("computer science"). It was bone dry and incredibly boring and theoretical and I didn't even manage to gain my propedeuse. Nevertheless this was the place where I encountered the first networked PC's that were actually connected to the Internet. It was also the first time I had a school email address and facilities such as network printing, etc..
I switched to a hogeschool (1994 - 1998; also called university in Anglo-Saxon education systems, but more geared toward a practical education instead of pure research). They had a similar set up of networked PC's (and much more interesting stuff of course, various UNIX boxen, mini computers, etc.) with a school email address, facilities for network printing and managing all kinds of information via computer, and I remember surfing the web with NCSA Mosaic, and Gopher, reading and sending email with Eudora, etc.. There wasn't "computer class" as such, but as I was taking telematica (computer science and telecommunications) the entire education was of course geared towards teaching everything there was to know about computers, from building them to writing operating systems, databases, interactive programs, communication protocols such as TPC/IP, etc.. You were already expected to know the basics, such as using a keyboard and mouse, how to operate a computer in general, etc. It's funny how that may have been a more valid assumption then than it is now.
So all in all I pretty much rode the wave of the introduction of computer education in every level of education I passed through.
I recently had a reunion at my old primary school and was shocked to discover actual full fledged desktop PC's, with keyboard and mouse, in the lowest classes (four and five year olds).
The site is down again. It says "This site is currently unavailable. If you are the account holder, please contact customer service."
Slashdotted? Spineless hosting company?
This reminds me of the slightly related story of Sir Patrick Moore. He's the host of The Sky At Night, a TV program about astronomy on the BBC, and a pretty amazing individual himself. He has famously met in person the first man to fly (Orville Wright; his brother had died before he was born), the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) and the first man to walk on the moon.
He's 89 and still going strong. He has presented The Sky at Night every month since its inception in 1957, only missing one episode due to food poisoning. The Sky at Night is the longest running television show with the same presenter in the world.
I see TeamViewer mentioned a lot. Another proprietary but free as in beer alternative is CrossLoop: http://www.crossloop.com/. I have no experience with TeamViewer, but I am very happy with CrossLoop, which is also free for personal use, very easy to use (start it, and read a name and twelve digit code over the phone), automagically punches through NAT routers and firewalls, and is based on VNC under water. They don't have a native client for Linux, but the Windows version runs fine under Wine.
What everybody seems to be missing: it is the twist lengths that are different! Not the wire lengths.
I find this whole argument ludicrous. You can pump a hundred millions bits of information per second over a cat 5 cable using Ethernet, but for a few hundred thousand bits of audio per second you suddenly need $495 worth of snake oil to be added?
Why nobody was able to find any alien civilizations yet ?
I think it's because high intelligence is apparently rare. It only evolved once on our planet, out of millions of species. There's probably plenty of life out there, just very little intelligent life.
You can't use the words "large corporations" and "common sense" in the same sentence...
Common sense is something individual human beings have (at least potentially). Large corporations are lumbering beasts that aren't governed by such rules.
Wow. Who modded this tripe "insightful"? That's the highest concentration of bullshit I've seen in a long time!
Yes, most of you as individuals are arrogant as well as ignorant; a very dangerous combination. Your post is an excellent illustration of the point. "Europe" does some of the same things as the US. Because you are ignorant you have no idea why this happens, and because you are arrogant you just assume it must be Europe following the US.
To pick one: Europe did not follow the US into Iraq. The only European country with any significant contribution to the illegal war there was the UK. The rest of Europe recognized that it was a dumb idea and wisely stayed out of it. Only now that the US has thoroughly fucked it up and made the world a more dangerous place are countries stepping in to help pick up the pieces.
To pick another: Europe is not following the US with regards to copyright legislation. Both the US and Europe are implementing the same international WIPO copyright treaty.
To pick yet a third: Europe is doing the opposite of adopting American patent law, for instance when it comes to software patents, which are not enforceable in Europe.
There was a time when the US was world-leading when it came to freedom and democracy. That time is long gone. Now the US is just using its lingering economic and military power to meddle and interfere in the rest of the world. Don't mistake that for "leading".
Slashdot Mirror
One example is Punchscan, a system where you vote by marking your choice on a double sheet of paper with holes punched through the top sheet so that you simultaneously mark both sheets. The top sheet, which has the candidates' names on it, is destroyed, the other is scanned and then taken home. The sheets you take home doesn't have the names of the candidates on them (they are referred to by randomly ordered letters), so nobody can tell who you voted for, but you can later look up the scanned version online to verify that the markings match and your vote was counted.
http://punchscan.org/
Here in the Netherlands a large cable TV and Internet service provider called Ziggo is doing a pilot program with turning everybody's home cable modem into a public wireless access point. They plan on rolling this out to their entire service area. Of course the public traffic is kept completely separated from the cable modem owner's private Internet connection, and Ziggo say that it won't affect their connection speed. I don't know whether the public Internet access offered this way is actually free (I suspect not, you'll probably have to pay Ziggo). More information: http://www.speedguide.net/news/companies-to-provide-wireless-internet-access-by-4933.
What happened to the satellite it was supposed to bring into orbit, but couldn't because one of the engines failed during lift off? Did they manage to get that in its proper orbit?
What else is new? That's been a problem around here for as long as I can remember. It's a shame the editors of Slashdot are so sloppy and unprofessional, and it's the reason I don't pay for a subscription.
Well I'll be damned!
Oh great. *This* will server consumers well: competing standards, a fragmented market, and many years delay in widespread adoption. Nice work, Apple.
I don't have any suggestions, but I am very curious about the background of this question. Could you elaborate a little? Why and for whom are you building this lab? Are you putting your own money into it, and if so, why is it worth so much money to you and why do you need such a high-tech lab? Just curious.
I'm 38 and from the Netherlands. In the later classes of primary school (1980 - 1986), computer education was becoming part of the curriculum (although by initiative of the school, it wasn't national or centralised yet). My father worked at IBM and actually helped my school set up a computer class (although not with IBM computers, they were Philips P2000's, a home computer with a built-in high quality keyboard and mini cassette tape deck, as well as pluggable cartridges that contain BASIC, a word processor, educational games, etc.). They used them to teach us the basics of computers, writing simple programs, using a word processor, etc.
In secondary education ("high school", 1986 - 1992) PC's were just being introduced when I was there. They weren't in the classes though, there were just a few of them in the library and you couldn't do much with them. They were networked together but had no connection outside the school and the Internet hardly existed yet. We had some cursory computer education classes teaching us how to use WordPerfect, things like that. No programming or anything like that. Actually the classes I had in primary school were probably more useful for going into computer science...
Next I did two years of university (at Delft), which was very disappointing to me because the first half year we literally did not even touch a computer, despite having taken informatica ("computer science"). It was bone dry and incredibly boring and theoretical and I didn't even manage to gain my propedeuse. Nevertheless this was the place where I encountered the first networked PC's that were actually connected to the Internet. It was also the first time I had a school email address and facilities such as network printing, etc..
I switched to a hogeschool (1994 - 1998; also called university in Anglo-Saxon education systems, but more geared toward a practical education instead of pure research). They had a similar set up of networked PC's (and much more interesting stuff of course, various UNIX boxen, mini computers, etc.) with a school email address, facilities for network printing and managing all kinds of information via computer, and I remember surfing the web with NCSA Mosaic, and Gopher, reading and sending email with Eudora, etc.. There wasn't "computer class" as such, but as I was taking telematica (computer science and telecommunications) the entire education was of course geared towards teaching everything there was to know about computers, from building them to writing operating systems, databases, interactive programs, communication protocols such as TPC/IP, etc.. You were already expected to know the basics, such as using a keyboard and mouse, how to operate a computer in general, etc. It's funny how that may have been a more valid assumption then than it is now.
So all in all I pretty much rode the wave of the introduction of computer education in every level of education I passed through.
I recently had a reunion at my old primary school and was shocked to discover actual full fledged desktop PC's, with keyboard and mouse, in the lowest classes (four and five year olds).
Did you mean "trawls"?
I'm curious as to why this article has a Facebook icon...
Sounds like somebody should make this.
Unfortunately these days it is not needless to say this...
FOUR in-flight accidents? I'm only aware of the two Shuttle disasters. What are the other two (I'm assuming you're not counting Apollo 1)?
The site is down again. It says "This site is currently unavailable. If you are the account holder, please contact customer service." Slashdotted? Spineless hosting company?
This reminds me of the slightly related story of Sir Patrick Moore. He's the host of The Sky At Night, a TV program about astronomy on the BBC, and a pretty amazing individual himself. He has famously met in person the first man to fly (Orville Wright; his brother had died before he was born), the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) and the first man to walk on the moon.
He's 89 and still going strong. He has presented The Sky at Night every month since its inception in 1957, only missing one episode due to food poisoning. The Sky at Night is the longest running television show with the same presenter in the world.
I see TeamViewer mentioned a lot. Another proprietary but free as in beer alternative is CrossLoop: http://www.crossloop.com/. I have no experience with TeamViewer, but I am very happy with CrossLoop, which is also free for personal use, very easy to use (start it, and read a name and twelve digit code over the phone), automagically punches through NAT routers and firewalls, and is based on VNC under water. They don't have a native client for Linux, but the Windows version runs fine under Wine.
The terrorists have already won.
What was it that Hilton had said the price per pound would have to be before they would build a hotel in space?
I find this whole argument ludicrous. You can pump a hundred millions bits of information per second over a cat 5 cable using Ethernet, but for a few hundred thousand bits of audio per second you suddenly need $495 worth of snake oil to be added?
Why a "virtual" hotspot? What's virtual about it? If this turns a Windows PC into a Wi-Fi access point, then surely that's a hotspot plain and simple?
Why nobody was able to find any alien civilizations yet ?
I think it's because high intelligence is apparently rare. It only evolved once on our planet, out of millions of species. There's probably plenty of life out there, just very little intelligent life.
Common sense is something individual human beings have (at least potentially). Large corporations are lumbering beasts that aren't governed by such rules.
My guess is that's why it was mentioned.
I assume so. I just thought it was odd that the poster danced around exactly which show did it ("crime drama").
Presumably that was to sound cool by slipping in an obscure reference...
What, you mean like this one?
Wow. Who modded this tripe "insightful"? That's the highest concentration of bullshit I've seen in a long time!
Yes, most of you as individuals are arrogant as well as ignorant; a very dangerous combination. Your post is an excellent illustration of the point. "Europe" does some of the same things as the US. Because you are ignorant you have no idea why this happens, and because you are arrogant you just assume it must be Europe following the US.
To pick one: Europe did not follow the US into Iraq. The only European country with any significant contribution to the illegal war there was the UK. The rest of Europe recognized that it was a dumb idea and wisely stayed out of it. Only now that the US has thoroughly fucked it up and made the world a more dangerous place are countries stepping in to help pick up the pieces.
To pick another: Europe is not following the US with regards to copyright legislation. Both the US and Europe are implementing the same international WIPO copyright treaty.
To pick yet a third: Europe is doing the opposite of adopting American patent law, for instance when it comes to software patents, which are not enforceable in Europe.
There was a time when the US was world-leading when it came to freedom and democracy. That time is long gone. Now the US is just using its lingering economic and military power to meddle and interfere in the rest of the world. Don't mistake that for "leading".