Except that there are a lot of people who play chess obsessively enough to get really, really good at it... and most of them don't have reputations as raving anti-Semitic whackos. In fact, this is true in a lot of intellectual fields. When some famous scientist or artist turns out to be completely insane, people shrug and say, well, what do you expect, the great ones are always mad -- except it's not true. There are a lot more sane, hard-working people out there doing great things with their minds than there are insane ones who managed to keep the insanity under control just long enough to accomplish something. And then there are those who don't manage to keep it under control, who might have the talent to do great things but end up getting drunk in alleys and muttering about the conspiracy that destroyed them.
Genius and madness are orthogonal. You can be smart and sane, smart and crazy, dumb and sane, or dumb and crazy. By and large, it's the smart sane ones who actually get things done.
Five minutes alone with a ballot box, and you can change the count for that ballot box; it may be enough to change the results for the precinct (or it may not) but it probably won't be enough to throw a statewide election. Five minutes (or much less) of entering commands to an electronic voting system, and you damn sure can change the results of a statewide election, and furthermore, you can do it in a way that leaves no physical evidence. The "every step is an open book" and the "zillion geeks and computer scientist [who] have nothing better to do than spend hours picking nits with your system" idea is a red herring, since electronic voting systems aren't designed that way and probably never will be. They're all proprietary, with the inner workings protected as a trade secret, and given the insane state of US IP law and corporate/governmental mutual backscratching, that's not going to change.
The most reasonable assumption is that at some point, no matter what voting system you use, someone will compromise it at some point, so the best thing to do is design the system so that the least damage will result. Paper ballots fit this requirement much better than electronic systems do.
I don't think anyone claims that using paper ballots is a sure-fire guarantee that fraud won't take place. But electronic voting machines make fraud easier, and it's absurd to pretend otherwise. With paper ballots, you have to have a much larger number of people in on the scheme to change a large number of votes and cover your tracks afterward.
I've been an ACLU member for years, and I was just about to renew my membership when this came up. Here's what I sent them:
===
The Associated Press reports today that the ACLU is pressing Cuyahoga County, Ohio, not to go through with a planned switch from electronic voting machines to optical-scan paper ballots. This is a terrible position to take, and it is honestly enough to make me question whether or not I should renew my membership for the year.
While I appreciate the ACLU's hard work for voting rights in many areas, the simple fact is that electronic voting machines may be the single most pressing problem our electoral system faces. They are by their very nature unaccountable and amenable to large-scale election fraud. Any move to abandon these machines (which are manufactured and operated almost exclusively by private companies with right-wing ties) should be applauded, not suppressed. This is an issue of particular note in Ohio, given that electronic voting machine fraud in that state in 2004 may well have been responsible for the outcome of that year's Presidential race, with its terrible consequences for our nation.
I sincerely hope that the ACLU will reverse its position on this case and take a strong stand in favor of paper ballots. Silence on this issue is a barely acceptable position for America's leading civil rights organization; supporting the wrong side in this battle is not acceptable at all, to me and I suspect to many other people who have supported the ACLU for years. If the ACLU persists in opposing the planned Cuyahoga County move, I will regretfully conclude that I can no longer support this great organization.
Finally I'll be able to find others with an abnormally small penis!
Prior to this I had been hanging around sports car dealerships.
Well, that explains why you haven't been able to find others of your kind. Your information is sadly out of date. The micropenis crowd is found in the SUV section these days. If you want to meet some folks who will make you feel like Ron Jeremy by comparison, try a Hummer dealership.
Ask a psychiatrist, if none is available, a psychologist would be fine as well.
Oh, please. We don't call people crazy when they pay shitloads of money for some piece of abstract art that looks like something done by a moderately talented three-year-old with finger paints, but happens to have a famous name attached to it. (Mind you, I think it's kind of dumb, but it's not crazy.) And we very definitely wouldn't call them crazy if they then found out it was a fake, and got pretty upset about it.
People put substantial monetary value on all kinds of things which have little actual utility. If this is crazy, it's a type of insanity which afflicts a large proportion (perhaps a majority) of the human race.
High school athletics are a training simulator for getting killed in someone else's plan for conquering and destroying, etc. Would-be grunts play football. Would-be Caesars play chess.
Yes, that's true, and I suspect it will be a horrible unintended consequence of these increasing Draconian laws. IIRC, there used to be a federal law imposing the death penalty for child kidnapping (of any kind, not just abduction for the purpose of sexual abuse) and it was repealed for precisely that reason -- they found that kidnappers whose demands weren't met were much, much more likely to kill their victims.
It's the same stupid mentality that kicks in every time anyone suggests that diplomacy might be a better way than war to deal with problems in the Middle East, or that rehab for drug addicts might be more useful than prison. "We will not negotiate with terrorists!" "We can't coddle these criminals!" Etc. Politicians have this idea that if you just pass a tougher law, if you unleash the awesome armed force of the state on some problem, whatever that problem may be, the problem will magically go away. And, let's face it, they think that way (or act like they do, anyway) because a hell of a lot of voters do too.
Yeah, I was thinking that if a bunch of people reading this story set up a daily cron job to pull some random combination of words out of the dictionary and do a whois (or just mimic a URL bar search) it would be a real public service. Probably a legal risk, though, if some bought-and-paid-for prosecutor decided to go after it as a DDoS attack.
These machines were put in an oversized case because marketing decided shoppers would think size=power.
Heh, yeah. I remember about fifteen years ago when I bought my first laptop. It was a pretty hot-shit machine for the time, better than many contemporary desktops: 2 MB RAM, 1.2 MHz 486 CPU, 60 MB hard drive, beautiful screen (grayscale, but high resolution and fast refresh -- I don't remember the exact specs, but people were oohing and aahing when I brought it to work.) And I got it for a bargain price. Not too long after I bought it, I had a conversation that went something like this:
"Hey, is that a laptop computer?"
"Yep, just got it. Nice, huh?"
"Yeah, it's pretty cool. How much was it?"
"Got a good price. Only $1500 or so."
"Oh... I don't know, that seems like a lot of money for something so small."
Good thing this was in the days before penis enlargement spam; I'd have been tempted to get creative.;)
No, it's not wacky at all; there are many people working on exactly the sort of thing you describe; do a Google search on, say, "mathematical models of cancer" to see some of the current work in the field. However, speaking as a bioinformaticist, I can tell you that we're a long way from being able to model everything with the precision and comprehensive coverage needed to do what you describe. We need faster computers and better algorithms, yes; we also need the biological data to put into the model to avoid GIGO, and while we know a lot about cancer biology, there's still a hell of a lot more we don't know. My guess is that we're talking a timescale of decades.
We're getting so sheltered and pussywhipped that we won't be able to function as an independent species within a few decades.
Humans haven't "function[ed] as an independent species" since cavemen first chipped tools out of flint. Technology is what makes us human beings rather than just rather weak, slow, hairless apes.
"In somewhat upgraded form" our spacecraft are also still flying. In fact, it is such a wonderful all-encompassing expression -- "in somewhat upgraded form" -- that, pretty much, everything qualifies...
Apollo tech is dead. The vehicles we can put up there now have essentially nothing in common with it. In contrast, current Russian space tech is a direct descendant of what they were flying in the 60's. If we'd kept going with Apollo, building the planned successors to the Saturn V, upgrading a bit at every step the way the Russians did, we'd have something much better than anything they have, no doubt -- but we didn't. We had the lead, and we gave it up.
Back when the whole world was glued to their TV-screens watching in awe as the Americans were walking on the Moon, the Soviet TV-viewers were shown some old footage of ballet... This is something your father would not be able to tell you.
And your point is what, exactly? The USSR fed its citizens a lot of propaganda? Thanks for the news flash.
You also conveniently skipped our Mars explorers -- do ask your father, how those are inferior to a Russian tractor or something and get back to me...
The Mars rovers are very good, yes. You may also remember that we've had some spectacular failures. I will admit that right now, we're well ahead of Russia in Mars exploration, but that really doesn't have a whole lot to do with what's going on in Earth orbit, where navigation satellites are.
You may need a refresher, on what "straw man" means.
No, I really don't. You set up a false argument, and then showed to your satisfaction that it was false; that's exactly what a straw man is.
You should also look up, what "kicking butt" means too -- Russian GLONASS remains vaporware, and yet you refuse to submit, that even in the field of GPS (ubiquitously available for years) America is ahead of the Soviets/Russians.
Since you're so keen on the "you should look up X" argument, maybe you should look up what "vaporware" means. Hint: a working product that is in the process of being upgraded ain't it.
Right. And when you grow up, you'll really-really kick that guy's ass. But today he is kicking yours...
There's a big difference between "one of these days..." and having an actual, workable plan building on a good track record. I'm sure both NASA and Roskosmos understand this. You, on the other hand, seem to be stuck in a fantasy world Russia simply can't build good space tech, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.
The Moon landings were a stunt, and I say that as someone whose father worked on the Apollo program. What they wanted to build was a sustainable program that would serve as a base for eventual colonization. What they were ordered to build instead was essentially a one-off. Technically impressive, sure, but Russian space tech from that era, in somewhat upgraded form, is still flying; American space tech from that era exists only as rusting static displays. We could have built something far better than anything the USSR could have come up with, I have no doubt, but we chose not to.
to bring us back to the subject at hand, developing a reliable GPS technology (what we are discussing here, is a system with no practically usable devices yet, and covering only the territory of Russia itself).
Straw man. The fact that they haven't built a worldwide GPS equivalent doesn't mean they're not going to do so; and given their track record, it's highly believable that they will. In areas where it has coverage, GLONASS works, right now, and adding more satellites will provide more coverage. It's really that simple.
That's a silly, artifical divide. Pretty much all the issues discussed in the article are both tech and social issues; so are net neutrality and other issues near and dear to techies' hearts. If Congress were focusing on "pure" tech issues, we'd have legislators trying to tell us how to program, what CPU's to use, etc. Do you want that? I sure as hell don't.
IP is all about credit where credit is due, no more, no less.
If giving credit where credit is due were all that IP law required, hardly anyone would have a problem with it. But the reality is that IP law in its current form goes much, much farther than that; please don't claim that you're unaware of this.
Our country is founded on the principal of religious freedom, which means that your right to express your view, as Mr. Norris' right to express his view, is protected. In short, your offense, doesn't matter. Mr. Norris' offense has no more significance than your own, but his venue of expressing it was in context, where your expression here is fanatical.
Norris has the right to express his viewpoint, and so does the AC; that's how free speech works. You have the right to say what you want, and I have the right to tell you you're an asshole for saying it. And in the case of what the AC wrote, I don't think it's fanatical at all -- it is entirely reasonable for him, having watched his parents die a slow horrible death, to be offended when someone else suggests that if they'd just prayed a little harder, they wouldn't have had to suffer. People who believe that anyone should be able to say anything they want without censure (note the choice of words: censure != censorship) just because they couch it in religious language are fanatics themselves, and not at all in favor of religious liberty.
You're right, other people wrote the jokes -- "other people" who are not the guy publishing the book, and (presumably) not Chuck Norris. So it seems to me there's an issue of standing here; Norris himself is not the aggrieved party if the rationale behind the suit is, "Hey, he's ripping off other people's work!" If Norris wants to sue on the basis of slander, or of misappropriation of his name and likeness (neither of which I think is valid: public figure, satire, etc.) that's his business, but any claim that he's suing on behalf of the many contributors to "Chuck Norris Facts" has about as much credibility as the claim that RIAA lawsuits are filed on behalf of musicians.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that there are a lot of people who play chess obsessively enough to get really, really good at it ... and most of them don't have reputations as raving anti-Semitic whackos. In fact, this is true in a lot of intellectual fields. When some famous scientist or artist turns out to be completely insane, people shrug and say, well, what do you expect, the great ones are always mad -- except it's not true. There are a lot more sane, hard-working people out there doing great things with their minds than there are insane ones who managed to keep the insanity under control just long enough to accomplish something. And then there are those who don't manage to keep it under control, who might have the talent to do great things but end up getting drunk in alleys and muttering about the conspiracy that destroyed them.
Genius and madness are orthogonal. You can be smart and sane, smart and crazy, dumb and sane, or dumb and crazy. By and large, it's the smart sane ones who actually get things done.
Five minutes alone with a ballot box, and you can change the count for that ballot box; it may be enough to change the results for the precinct (or it may not) but it probably won't be enough to throw a statewide election. Five minutes (or much less) of entering commands to an electronic voting system, and you damn sure can change the results of a statewide election, and furthermore, you can do it in a way that leaves no physical evidence. The "every step is an open book" and the "zillion geeks and computer scientist [who] have nothing better to do than spend hours picking nits with your system" idea is a red herring, since electronic voting systems aren't designed that way and probably never will be. They're all proprietary, with the inner workings protected as a trade secret, and given the insane state of US IP law and corporate/governmental mutual backscratching, that's not going to change.
The most reasonable assumption is that at some point, no matter what voting system you use, someone will compromise it at some point, so the best thing to do is design the system so that the least damage will result. Paper ballots fit this requirement much better than electronic systems do.
I don't think anyone claims that using paper ballots is a sure-fire guarantee that fraud won't take place. But electronic voting machines make fraud easier, and it's absurd to pretend otherwise. With paper ballots, you have to have a much larger number of people in on the scheme to change a large number of votes and cover your tracks afterward.
I've been an ACLU member for years, and I was just about to renew my membership when this came up. Here's what I sent them:
===
The Associated Press reports today that the ACLU is pressing Cuyahoga County, Ohio, not to go through with a planned switch from electronic voting machines to optical-scan paper ballots. This is a terrible position to take, and it is honestly enough to make me question whether or not I should renew my membership for the year.
While I appreciate the ACLU's hard work for voting rights in many areas, the simple fact is that electronic voting machines may be the single most pressing problem our electoral system faces. They are by their very nature unaccountable and amenable to large-scale election fraud. Any move to abandon these machines (which are manufactured and operated almost exclusively by private companies with right-wing ties) should be applauded, not suppressed. This is an issue of particular note in Ohio, given that electronic voting machine fraud in that state in 2004 may well have been responsible for the outcome of that year's Presidential race, with its terrible consequences for our nation.
I sincerely hope that the ACLU will reverse its position on this case and take a strong stand in favor of paper ballots. Silence on this issue is a barely acceptable position for America's leading civil rights organization; supporting the wrong side in this battle is not acceptable at all, to me and I suspect to many other people who have supported the ACLU for years. If the ACLU persists in opposing the planned Cuyahoga County move, I will regretfully conclude that I can no longer support this great organization.
Finally I'll be able to find others with an abnormally small penis!
Prior to this I had been hanging around sports car dealerships.
Well, that explains why you haven't been able to find others of your kind. Your information is sadly out of date. The micropenis crowd is found in the SUV section these days. If you want to meet some folks who will make you feel like Ron Jeremy by comparison, try a Hummer dealership.
Me, I'll be outside working on my Toyota Corolla.
Ask a psychiatrist, if none is available, a psychologist would be fine as well.
Oh, please. We don't call people crazy when they pay shitloads of money for some piece of abstract art that looks like something done by a moderately talented three-year-old with finger paints, but happens to have a famous name attached to it. (Mind you, I think it's kind of dumb, but it's not crazy.) And we very definitely wouldn't call them crazy if they then found out it was a fake, and got pretty upset about it.
People put substantial monetary value on all kinds of things which have little actual utility. If this is crazy, it's a type of insanity which afflicts a large proportion (perhaps a majority) of the human race.
Didn't know any girls were ever into star trek, but whatever.
You have got to be kidding.
High school athletics are a training simulator for getting killed in someone else's plan for conquering and destroying, etc. Would-be grunts play football. Would-be Caesars play chess.
Yes, that's true, and I suspect it will be a horrible unintended consequence of these increasing Draconian laws. IIRC, there used to be a federal law imposing the death penalty for child kidnapping (of any kind, not just abduction for the purpose of sexual abuse) and it was repealed for precisely that reason -- they found that kidnappers whose demands weren't met were much, much more likely to kill their victims.
It's the same stupid mentality that kicks in every time anyone suggests that diplomacy might be a better way than war to deal with problems in the Middle East, or that rehab for drug addicts might be more useful than prison. "We will not negotiate with terrorists!" "We can't coddle these criminals!" Etc. Politicians have this idea that if you just pass a tougher law, if you unleash the awesome armed force of the state on some problem, whatever that problem may be, the problem will magically go away. And, let's face it, they think that way (or act like they do, anyway) because a hell of a lot of voters do too.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Slashdot user WizMaster, who is Exhibit 193062847 in the series "What's Wrong With America Today."
Yeah, I was thinking that if a bunch of people reading this story set up a daily cron job to pull some random combination of words out of the dictionary and do a whois (or just mimic a URL bar search) it would be a real public service. Probably a legal risk, though, if some bought-and-paid-for prosecutor decided to go after it as a DDoS attack.
These machines were put in an oversized case because marketing decided shoppers would think size=power.
... I don't know, that seems like a lot of money for something so small."
;)
Heh, yeah. I remember about fifteen years ago when I bought my first laptop. It was a pretty hot-shit machine for the time, better than many contemporary desktops: 2 MB RAM, 1.2 MHz 486 CPU, 60 MB hard drive, beautiful screen (grayscale, but high resolution and fast refresh -- I don't remember the exact specs, but people were oohing and aahing when I brought it to work.) And I got it for a bargain price. Not too long after I bought it, I had a conversation that went something like this:
"Hey, is that a laptop computer?"
"Yep, just got it. Nice, huh?"
"Yeah, it's pretty cool. How much was it?"
"Got a good price. Only $1500 or so."
"Oh
Good thing this was in the days before penis enlargement spam; I'd have been tempted to get creative.
No, it's not wacky at all; there are many people working on exactly the sort of thing you describe; do a Google search on, say, "mathematical models of cancer" to see some of the current work in the field. However, speaking as a bioinformaticist, I can tell you that we're a long way from being able to model everything with the precision and comprehensive coverage needed to do what you describe. We need faster computers and better algorithms, yes; we also need the biological data to put into the model to avoid GIGO, and while we know a lot about cancer biology, there's still a hell of a lot more we don't know. My guess is that we're talking a timescale of decades.
There will also be those moral enough not to break the law.
Lawbreaking != immorality.
We're getting so sheltered and pussywhipped that we won't be able to function as an independent species within a few decades.
Humans haven't "function[ed] as an independent species" since cavemen first chipped tools out of flint. Technology is what makes us human beings rather than just rather weak, slow, hairless apes.
"In somewhat upgraded form" our spacecraft are also still flying. In fact, it is such a wonderful all-encompassing expression -- "in somewhat upgraded form" -- that, pretty much, everything qualifies...
..." and having an actual, workable plan building on a good track record. I'm sure both NASA and Roskosmos understand this. You, on the other hand, seem to be stuck in a fantasy world Russia simply can't build good space tech, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.
Apollo tech is dead. The vehicles we can put up there now have essentially nothing in common with it. In contrast, current Russian space tech is a direct descendant of what they were flying in the 60's. If we'd kept going with Apollo, building the planned successors to the Saturn V, upgrading a bit at every step the way the Russians did, we'd have something much better than anything they have, no doubt -- but we didn't. We had the lead, and we gave it up.
Back when the whole world was glued to their TV-screens watching in awe as the Americans were walking on the Moon, the Soviet TV-viewers were shown some old footage of ballet... This is something your father would not be able to tell you.
And your point is what, exactly? The USSR fed its citizens a lot of propaganda? Thanks for the news flash.
You also conveniently skipped our Mars explorers -- do ask your father, how those are inferior to a Russian tractor or something and get back to me...
The Mars rovers are very good, yes. You may also remember that we've had some spectacular failures. I will admit that right now, we're well ahead of Russia in Mars exploration, but that really doesn't have a whole lot to do with what's going on in Earth orbit, where navigation satellites are.
You may need a refresher, on what "straw man" means.
No, I really don't. You set up a false argument, and then showed to your satisfaction that it was false; that's exactly what a straw man is.
You should also look up, what "kicking butt" means too -- Russian GLONASS remains vaporware, and yet you refuse to submit, that even in the field of GPS (ubiquitously available for years) America is ahead of the Soviets/Russians.
Since you're so keen on the "you should look up X" argument, maybe you should look up what "vaporware" means. Hint: a working product that is in the process of being upgraded ain't it.
Right. And when you grow up, you'll really-really kick that guy's ass. But today he is kicking yours...
There's a big difference between "one of these days
I think your "logic" just killed my last brain cells.
Well, if you're not familiar with the stuff, it can be pretty heady your first time.
The Moon landings were a stunt, and I say that as someone whose father worked on the Apollo program. What they wanted to build was a sustainable program that would serve as a base for eventual colonization. What they were ordered to build instead was essentially a one-off. Technically impressive, sure, but Russian space tech from that era, in somewhat upgraded form, is still flying; American space tech from that era exists only as rusting static displays. We could have built something far better than anything the USSR could have come up with, I have no doubt, but we chose not to.
to bring us back to the subject at hand, developing a reliable GPS technology (what we are discussing here, is a system with no practically usable devices yet, and covering only the territory of Russia itself).
Straw man. The fact that they haven't built a worldwide GPS equivalent doesn't mean they're not going to do so; and given their track record, it's highly believable that they will. In areas where it has coverage, GLONASS works, right now, and adding more satellites will provide more coverage. It's really that simple.
Of course, the Russians have been kicking our asses in space technology ever since Sputnik.
You're racist scum.
That's a silly, artifical divide. Pretty much all the issues discussed in the article are both tech and social issues; so are net neutrality and other issues near and dear to techies' hearts. If Congress were focusing on "pure" tech issues, we'd have legislators trying to tell us how to program, what CPU's to use, etc. Do you want that? I sure as hell don't.
IP is all about credit where credit is due, no more, no less.
If giving credit where credit is due were all that IP law required, hardly anyone would have a problem with it. But the reality is that IP law in its current form goes much, much farther than that; please don't claim that you're unaware of this.
Our country is founded on the principal of religious freedom, which means that your right to express your view, as Mr. Norris' right to express his view, is protected. In short, your offense, doesn't matter. Mr. Norris' offense has no more significance than your own, but his venue of expressing it was in context, where your expression here is fanatical.
Norris has the right to express his viewpoint, and so does the AC; that's how free speech works. You have the right to say what you want, and I have the right to tell you you're an asshole for saying it. And in the case of what the AC wrote, I don't think it's fanatical at all -- it is entirely reasonable for him, having watched his parents die a slow horrible death, to be offended when someone else suggests that if they'd just prayed a little harder, they wouldn't have had to suffer. People who believe that anyone should be able to say anything they want without censure (note the choice of words: censure != censorship) just because they couch it in religious language are fanatics themselves, and not at all in favor of religious liberty.
You're right, other people wrote the jokes -- "other people" who are not the guy publishing the book, and (presumably) not Chuck Norris. So it seems to me there's an issue of standing here; Norris himself is not the aggrieved party if the rationale behind the suit is, "Hey, he's ripping off other people's work!" If Norris wants to sue on the basis of slander, or of misappropriation of his name and likeness (neither of which I think is valid: public figure, satire, etc.) that's his business, but any claim that he's suing on behalf of the many contributors to "Chuck Norris Facts" has about as much credibility as the claim that RIAA lawsuits are filed on behalf of musicians.
it's easy and cheap to hire sales droids and difficult and expensive to hire good management
And Circuit City's experience would seem to indicate that hiring bad management is easier still.