An interesting waste of time and money on the part of Broward County, since it will never be implemented. The Florida Legislature in the last session mandated the use of optically scanned ballots by all the counties, and appropriated the money for each county to purchase optical scanners for each polling place. The machines they're buying have the ability to kick the ballot back at the voter if they've made a mistake. Write-ins and questionable ballots are dumped in a seperate hopper for later processing.
In the 80's Russia was part of the "Evil Empire" known as the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was resoundingly condemned in the U.S. for censorship and the police state tactics of the KGB. Now we're in the new century and a Russian citizen comes here to present a paper and is arrested for presenting a technical paper at a conference. There's an irony here that would be funny, if it weren't for the fact that we U.S. citizens are the ones who have to live with this. Let's hope the DMCA gets before the Supreme Court soon!
Mixed Response on This One
on
Congress@Work
·
· Score: 2
I have mixed emotions on this one. My wife having been subjected to a particularly nasty barage of hateful anonymous e-mail from an unknown person at our church, leaves me with serious questions about the necessity of anonymous mail sites. The only reason we know the e-mails were from someone at church was because of some of the detailed information they contained. The First Amendment guarantees our right to free speech without fear of repurcussions, with the possible exception of slander or shouting fire in a crowded theater. With that right comes responsibility. If your want to say something shouldn't you have the guts to identify yourself. The right to say something is not the same as the right to remain anonymous. I don't remember seeing anything about the right to anonymity in the Constituion.
Linus has hit the nail on the head. Most businesses' intellectual properties are built on the work of others, those in academia and government whose work is in the public domain. If you look at the bulk of the technological advances in the U.S. in the latter half of the 20th Century, you find the the core technology was enabled by Government investment in R&D, that was then "leveraged" by industry for commercial use. The entire computing industry is the result of initial investments by the DoD in WWII on computing machines for number crunching projects like artillery ballistics and the Manhattan Project. The Internet is the result of DARPA's R&D investment in a robust, redundant communications infrastructure. Almost everything these companies claim as corporate intellectual properties are exploitations of core technologies developed by Government or Academia (typically under Government funding).
I doubt there is any substantial weight savings in the superconducting cabling system. While the superconductor is substantially lighter than the copper, the cooling jacket (we're probably talking a vacuum insulated LN2 jacket) is probably quite heavy.
There are also some technology/safety issues related to the operation of superconductors. A superconducting line carrying a large amount of current can do some pretty catastrophic things if the temperature rises above the critical superconducting temperature. The transition from no resistance to substantive resistance can turn the wire into a nice big heater element inside an LN2 cooled system. Explosive vaporization of the superconducting element has happened in laboratories before. The other problem to be alert for is critical current. Superconductors are only superconducting up to a critical current level. Attempts to pump more than the critical current through the wire will result in it transitioning from superconducting to normal conductivity with the same results as above.
I'm sure the engineers who have designed the system have taken this into account. But the deployment of a crygogenically cooled power distribution system is far from a trivial exercise.
BTW, I've been told that power distribution systems consume almost half of the power generated just in getting the power from the plant to our homes/offices. Also while the superconducting lines can save a lot of energy, it takes a lot of energy to make LN2.
A day late and a dollar short
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
If you really think about it, there is nothing in an Apple (with the exception of the PowerPC chip) that is unique. They all include PCI buses and IDE drives now. Granted the packaging is different than on the x86 boxes, but that is it.
Apple is and always has been a software house that ties their software to a hardware purchase. It wasn't the hardware that was the draw so much as their OS. In the late 80s and early 90s there wasn't a personal computer OS available with the abilities of a Mac, yet MS-DOS and Win 3.1 outsold Macs. Why? The answer is simple, hardware cost and momentum.
If Apple had opened the system specifications and sold their OS as a standalone product, they would be the ones in anti-trust court not Microsoft. Instead of making a few hundred dollars on a few million machines, they could be making thirty to fifty dollars on a few hundred million copies of their OS and control the software market.
But market momentum means a lot. Its hurdle that Linux is having to overcome with Windows. Installed base can mean more than providing a superior product. If Apple were to release OS X for x86 machines, they would need to overcome not just the installed base of Windows but the growing ranks of Linux users. Granted people who have switched to Linux are more likely to be receptive to experimenting with a new OS, but the question is: What is the motivation? Another pretty interface?
Lest we forget about the election as whole, Florida's irregularities are being brought to light by the recount. A number of regularities exist in other states as well (such as the problem in St Louis).
If you looked at the popular vote as whole Gore is ahead by 150,000 according to the current results. If the nation as a whole were held to the same law Florida is requiring an automatic recount if the results differ by less 0.5% then the whole nation would be doing a recount, and wouldn't you see some serious allegations of irregularity then.
One irregularity that doesn't seem to be getting much press in Florida is that some polls in Broward and Dade counties (the major stronghold of Democrats along with Palm Beach) stayed open well past the required 7PM closing time. Similar to the problem in St Louis but without a judge interfering this time. It those polls had closed on time then Bush might have been even further ahead.
Why not have a DeCSS scavenger hunt. Publish a different piece of the code on different web sites with keywords for easy location and identification. Since a fraction of the code is insufficient to create a functioning decoder, none of the web sites would be in violation of the DMCA. Any attempt to sue would surely result in First Amendment restraint since each snippet of code would constitute an expression of free speech.
Lawyers love this sort of thing. Patent attorneys get fabulously wealthy on stuff like this. Regardless, of what the technical community thinks, the Patent Office, obviously can find no prior art, nor considers this to be obvious. The major flaw here being the technical qualifications of personnel in the Patent Office.
Patents were meant to allow a person to reap the benefits of their talents and personal investment in an invention/process. In the beginning, Thomas Jefferson and the Patent Office were very skeptical of issuing new patents, and you could count the number of patents issued in the first 20 years of the US on your fingers. Unfortunately, today if you have time to write it up and pay the patent fees, they'll issue you patent.
The Clinton Administration doesn't make this any better. Mr. Clinton's stated response to the ever increasing conflicts between technology and patents and copyrights, is to let the parties fight it out in court (typical lawyer response). This leads to the never ending saga of lawsuits, since each case is decided on its own merits versus an existing law to cover everything. More importantly, it allows those with the money to litigate others into bankruptcy reaping the benefits of a flawed patent system. As a taxpayer and consumer I would prefer the Patent Office be held to more stringent standards than have to bear the extra expense of these legal battles and have to pay increased prices on products resulting royalties on questionable patents.
Unfortunately, Congress isn't any better as evidenced by increases in patent and copyright duration, and such laws as the DMCA.
Photo ID for net purchase? Pretty questionable.
on
A Matter Of Trust?
·
· Score: 1
The whole thing seems rather pointless, and the possibility of criminal intent is very real. If you make an electronic purchase and then send an electronic image of your ID and credit card, How does this provide verification of actually owning the card. Even most credit card companies don't know what you look like, and photo editing software makes it easy to fake a card and ID. The second problem is that if your personal data (card number, etc.) is subject to be stolen from an e-commerce site, why wouldn't they off with your image as well. Not a very good idea. Maybe we need some sort of public key encrypted personal ID number, something that can be checked but not forged.
I doubt you'll be seing any Gimp plug-ins from Corel. Last time I checked their Linux Distribution they didn't have the development packages for either Gimp or GTK.
Granted, doing your taxes should be a simple matter for a spreadsheet. However, unless you file the EZ form the glut of rules and exceptions that a software package must account for is unbelievable. Several issues exist for anyone trying to write a software package, that lead me to believe no one will ever develop one for an open source OS unless they expect large volume sales. Notably: 1. By the IRS's own admission even their own telephone support personnel give frequently incorrect information. 2. The need to account for the literaly thousands of tax code changes every year. 3. People like Quicken maintain an extensive staff of CPAs and tax attorneys to assist in writing the rules for the software. 4. Liability. Commercial tax firms guarantee the correctness of your return (assuming you have correctly and accurately entered all of the relevant data), and will pay all penalties a customer incurs if its found their software made a mistake. How hard can it be? The problem isn't the complexity of the software, its the complexity of our tax system.
This sort of thing is a prime example as to why Hollywood should avoid getting involved in certain subjects. Broadcasting this less than a month and a half before the New Year is irresponsible. Most of us in the high tech world are fully cognizant of the ramifications of Y2K and the likely problems, and hence aren't really worried about anything other than a few minor (annoying possibly) aberrations that may result. Unfortunately, your average individual is not as technically savvy and is being pumped full of this nonsense, not just by the movie industry, but also by the news media, in what can only be termed irresponsible coverage. The reality of Y2K isn't what computers will do, but what people will do based on their perception of what computers will do. We already see evidence of people hording and going "survivalist". Remember that the Wall Street Crash and the run on the banks in the 20s was a result of perception more than the actual reality. I have faith in the intelligence of the average individual, but my past experience is that the collective intelligence of a group of people is equal to the average intelligence divided by the number of people in the group. In this case the collective intelligence approaches zero. Poorly done movies exploiting the ignorance of the masses, can make Y2K a self-fulfilling prophecy. Beware the herd mentality.
Be very careful when dealing with the topic of hate crime laws. Remember we have laws in the US that dictate the penalty for crimes. A person can commit murder for a variety of reasons, and hence we have various penalties and charges, manslaughter, 2nd and 1st degree murder to deal with the motivation of the murderer. The penalty phase of a criminal conviction is the appropriate place to deal with a criminals motives. To often we are finding that Hate Crime Statutes are being used to circumvent the double jeopardy clause of the Constitution. The prosecution fails to convict a person on the criminal charge (murder, assault, rape, etc.) and therefore proceeds with a second trial using a Hate Crime Statute. In other words, the person is absolved of the crime, but convicted for motive. This smacks just a little too much of the Thought Police. Committing a violent act against another individual is abhorent in the extreme. Yet it happens everyday. But no amount of legislation can change the way people think, nor should it. People need to come to the realization that hating others for their differences is wrong on their own. Lets try to avoid legislating how people should think.
Remember the Bush Whitehouse had PCs. The Clinton/Gore Whitehouse has Macs. Therefore VP Gore has no experience with the CTL-ALT-DELETE gesture. Sort of you gives you a feel for exactly how technically astute they really are.
Hollywood appears to be generally clueless when it comes to technology. Of course, they tend to be generally clueless on any profession or lifestyle that exists outside of the LA metropolitan area. Its gotten to the point that when I go to the movies, I work at ignoring the stupidity and try to enjoy the general story line (assuming that isn't the stupid part). Hollywood's cluelessness probably explains celebrity support of inane or ridiculous causes with little regard for truly important issues.
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting waste of time and money on the part of Broward County, since it will never be implemented. The Florida Legislature in the last session mandated the use of optically scanned ballots by all the counties, and appropriated the money for each county to purchase optical scanners for each polling place. The machines they're buying have the ability to kick the ballot back at the voter if they've made a mistake. Write-ins and questionable ballots are dumped in a seperate hopper for later processing.
In the 80's Russia was part of the "Evil Empire" known as the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was resoundingly condemned in the U.S. for censorship and the police state tactics of the KGB. Now we're in the new century and a Russian citizen comes here to present a paper and is arrested for presenting a technical paper at a conference. There's an irony here that would be funny, if it weren't for the fact that we U.S. citizens are the ones who have to live with this. Let's hope the DMCA gets before the Supreme Court soon!
I have mixed emotions on this one. My wife having been subjected to a particularly nasty barage of hateful anonymous e-mail from an unknown person at our church, leaves me with serious questions about the necessity of anonymous mail sites. The only reason we know the e-mails were from someone at church was because of some of the detailed information they contained. The First Amendment guarantees our right to free speech without fear of repurcussions, with the possible exception of slander or shouting fire in a crowded theater. With that right comes responsibility. If your want to say something shouldn't you have the guts to identify yourself. The right to say something is not the same as the right to remain anonymous. I don't remember seeing anything about the right to anonymity in the Constituion.
Linus has hit the nail on the head. Most businesses' intellectual properties are built on the work of others, those in academia and government whose work is in the public domain. If you look at the bulk of the technological advances in the U.S. in the latter half of the 20th Century, you find the the core technology was enabled by Government investment in R&D, that was then "leveraged" by industry for commercial use. The entire computing industry is the result of initial investments by the DoD in WWII on computing machines for number crunching projects like artillery ballistics and the Manhattan Project. The Internet is the result of DARPA's R&D investment in a robust, redundant communications infrastructure. Almost everything these companies claim as corporate intellectual properties are exploitations of core technologies developed by Government or Academia (typically under Government funding).
I doubt there is any substantial weight savings in the superconducting cabling system. While the superconductor is substantially lighter than the copper, the cooling jacket (we're probably talking a vacuum insulated LN2 jacket) is probably quite heavy.
There are also some technology/safety issues related to the operation of superconductors. A superconducting line carrying a large amount of current can do some pretty catastrophic things if the temperature rises above the critical superconducting temperature. The transition from no resistance to substantive resistance can turn the wire into a nice big heater element inside an LN2 cooled system. Explosive vaporization of the superconducting element has happened in laboratories before. The other problem to be alert for is critical current. Superconductors are only superconducting up to a critical current level. Attempts to pump more than the critical current through the wire will result in it transitioning from superconducting to normal conductivity with the same results as above.
I'm sure the engineers who have designed the system have taken this into account. But the deployment of a crygogenically cooled power distribution system is far from a trivial exercise.
BTW, I've been told that power distribution systems consume almost half of the power generated just in getting the power from the plant to our homes/offices. Also while the superconducting lines can save a lot of energy, it takes a lot of energy to make LN2.
If you really think about it, there is nothing in an Apple (with the exception of the PowerPC chip) that is unique. They all include PCI buses and IDE drives now. Granted the packaging is different than on the x86 boxes, but that is it. Apple is and always has been a software house that ties their software to a hardware purchase. It wasn't the hardware that was the draw so much as their OS. In the late 80s and early 90s there wasn't a personal computer OS available with the abilities of a Mac, yet MS-DOS and Win 3.1 outsold Macs. Why? The answer is simple, hardware cost and momentum. If Apple had opened the system specifications and sold their OS as a standalone product, they would be the ones in anti-trust court not Microsoft. Instead of making a few hundred dollars on a few million machines, they could be making thirty to fifty dollars on a few hundred million copies of their OS and control the software market. But market momentum means a lot. Its hurdle that Linux is having to overcome with Windows. Installed base can mean more than providing a superior product. If Apple were to release OS X for x86 machines, they would need to overcome not just the installed base of Windows but the growing ranks of Linux users. Granted people who have switched to Linux are more likely to be receptive to experimenting with a new OS, but the question is: What is the motivation? Another pretty interface?
Lest we forget about the election as whole, Florida's irregularities are being brought to light by the recount. A number of regularities exist in other states as well (such as the problem in St Louis). If you looked at the popular vote as whole Gore is ahead by 150,000 according to the current results. If the nation as a whole were held to the same law Florida is requiring an automatic recount if the results differ by less 0.5% then the whole nation would be doing a recount, and wouldn't you see some serious allegations of irregularity then. One irregularity that doesn't seem to be getting much press in Florida is that some polls in Broward and Dade counties (the major stronghold of Democrats along with Palm Beach) stayed open well past the required 7PM closing time. Similar to the problem in St Louis but without a judge interfering this time. It those polls had closed on time then Bush might have been even further ahead.
Why not have a DeCSS scavenger hunt. Publish a different piece of the code on different web sites with keywords for easy location and identification. Since a fraction of the code is insufficient to create a functioning decoder, none of the web sites would be in violation of the DMCA. Any attempt to sue would surely result in First Amendment restraint since each snippet of code would constitute an expression of free speech.
Lawyers love this sort of thing. Patent attorneys get fabulously wealthy on stuff like this. Regardless, of what the technical community thinks, the Patent Office, obviously can find no prior art, nor considers this to be obvious. The major flaw here being the technical qualifications of personnel in the Patent Office. Patents were meant to allow a person to reap the benefits of their talents and personal investment in an invention/process. In the beginning, Thomas Jefferson and the Patent Office were very skeptical of issuing new patents, and you could count the number of patents issued in the first 20 years of the US on your fingers. Unfortunately, today if you have time to write it up and pay the patent fees, they'll issue you patent. The Clinton Administration doesn't make this any better. Mr. Clinton's stated response to the ever increasing conflicts between technology and patents and copyrights, is to let the parties fight it out in court (typical lawyer response). This leads to the never ending saga of lawsuits, since each case is decided on its own merits versus an existing law to cover everything. More importantly, it allows those with the money to litigate others into bankruptcy reaping the benefits of a flawed patent system. As a taxpayer and consumer I would prefer the Patent Office be held to more stringent standards than have to bear the extra expense of these legal battles and have to pay increased prices on products resulting royalties on questionable patents. Unfortunately, Congress isn't any better as evidenced by increases in patent and copyright duration, and such laws as the DMCA.
The whole thing seems rather pointless, and the possibility of criminal intent is very real. If you make an electronic purchase and then send an electronic image of your ID and credit card, How does this provide verification of actually owning the card. Even most credit card companies don't know what you look like, and photo editing software makes it easy to fake a card and ID. The second problem is that if your personal data (card number, etc.) is subject to be stolen from an e-commerce site, why wouldn't they off with your image as well. Not a very good idea. Maybe we need some sort of public key encrypted personal ID number, something that can be checked but not forged.
I doubt you'll be seing any Gimp plug-ins from Corel. Last time I checked their Linux Distribution they didn't have the development packages for either Gimp or GTK.
Granted, doing your taxes should be a simple matter for a spreadsheet. However, unless you file the EZ form the glut of rules and exceptions that a software package must account for is unbelievable. Several issues exist for anyone trying to write a software package, that lead me to believe no one will ever develop one for an open source OS unless they expect large volume sales. Notably: 1. By the IRS's own admission even their own telephone support personnel give frequently incorrect information. 2. The need to account for the literaly thousands of tax code changes every year. 3. People like Quicken maintain an extensive staff of CPAs and tax attorneys to assist in writing the rules for the software. 4. Liability. Commercial tax firms guarantee the correctness of your return (assuming you have correctly and accurately entered all of the relevant data), and will pay all penalties a customer incurs if its found their software made a mistake. How hard can it be? The problem isn't the complexity of the software, its the complexity of our tax system.
This sort of thing is a prime example as to why Hollywood should avoid getting involved in certain subjects. Broadcasting this less than a month and a half before the New Year is irresponsible. Most of us in the high tech world are fully cognizant of the ramifications of Y2K and the likely problems, and hence aren't really worried about anything other than a few minor (annoying possibly) aberrations that may result. Unfortunately, your average individual is not as technically savvy and is being pumped full of this nonsense, not just by the movie industry, but also by the news media, in what can only be termed irresponsible coverage. The reality of Y2K isn't what computers will do, but what people will do based on their perception of what computers will do. We already see evidence of people hording and going "survivalist". Remember that the Wall Street Crash and the run on the banks in the 20s was a result of perception more than the actual reality. I have faith in the intelligence of the average individual, but my past experience is that the collective intelligence of a group of people is equal to the average intelligence divided by the number of people in the group. In this case the collective intelligence approaches zero. Poorly done movies exploiting the ignorance of the masses, can make Y2K a self-fulfilling prophecy. Beware the herd mentality.
Be very careful when dealing with the topic of hate crime laws. Remember we have laws in the US that dictate the penalty for crimes. A person can commit murder for a variety of reasons, and hence we have various penalties and charges, manslaughter, 2nd and 1st degree murder to deal with the motivation of the murderer. The penalty phase of a criminal conviction is the appropriate place to deal with a criminals motives. To often we are finding that Hate Crime Statutes are being used to circumvent the double jeopardy clause of the Constitution. The prosecution fails to convict a person on the criminal charge (murder, assault, rape, etc.) and therefore proceeds with a second trial using a Hate Crime Statute. In other words, the person is absolved of the crime, but convicted for motive. This smacks just a little too much of the Thought Police. Committing a violent act against another individual is abhorent in the extreme. Yet it happens everyday. But no amount of legislation can change the way people think, nor should it. People need to come to the realization that hating others for their differences is wrong on their own. Lets try to avoid legislating how people should think.
Remember the Bush Whitehouse had PCs. The Clinton/Gore Whitehouse has Macs. Therefore VP Gore has no experience with the CTL-ALT-DELETE gesture. Sort of you gives you a feel for exactly how technically astute they really are.
Hollywood appears to be generally clueless when it comes to technology. Of course, they tend to be generally clueless on any profession or lifestyle that exists outside of the LA metropolitan area. Its gotten to the point that when I go to the movies, I work at ignoring the stupidity and try to enjoy the general story line (assuming that isn't the stupid part). Hollywood's cluelessness probably explains celebrity support of inane or ridiculous causes with little regard for truly important issues.