I would laugh, but take Sony and substitute Apple, HPaq, Dell or Toshiba, and you could describe any product made.
Maybe I'm just innured because I HAVE the sony handycam, the digital camera, work buys me a new Sony Vaio every couple of years, I love my PS/2, and I've managed to tweak the 2.6 kernel so my new Clie syncs correctly... and...
Alright, I'm a Sony Zealot, deal.
But our CEO is hooked on them too. He only destroys them half as often as the Dells we used to buy him.
The new elecronic voting machines work just like the old mechanical ones. The ballot is a giant 3x3' printout spread over a pushbutton and LED panel. You press next to a candidate (or ballot question) where you used to flip a switch, and an LED glows telling you it understood your selection.
There are 2 big buttons at the bottom of the device. A red "CANCEL" button, and a green "VOTE" button, right where you used to pull the handle.
Votes are tallied using the same procedures as the old voting machines. There is an electronic odometer for every putton on the device, that is recorded at the start of the election, and the end of the election, and periodically during the course of an election.
They election officials record (seperately) how many people cast votes on each machine. At the end of the day, you know if all of your numbers match up.
Sure these devices cost money to build, but I am willing to wager they are still a hell of a lot cheaper than the touch-screens.
In Pennsylvania we actually have a write-in slot and a "no vote" button on our electronic machines. They aren't touch screens, they are solid-state push-button and LED devices that are drop-in replacements for our old mechanical voting machines.
I just get the feeling that whoever designed these bloody touchscreens didn't know a damn thing about elections.
In Pennsylvania we have electronic voting machines. They are walls of membrane buttons with little LED's that light when you make a selection. They started using them in 1992, and have since replaced all the old mechanical machines. In fact, they are simply an electronic replacement for the old machanical voting machines, they work the same way. (Just pushing buttons instead of flipping switches.) Instead of pulling the handle to register your vote, you press a pig green "VOTE" button.
They even tally the votes the same way, through counters that are read off periodically throughout the day.
One of the selections in every category is "I am not casting a vote." I recall that at the top there is an option to cast a completely blank ballot. (The party lever has been removed, thankfully.)
"engineers disease": The delusion because you're ubercompetent in your chosen field, you're automatically an expert on everything else.
What Engineers are you talking about? An Engineer who understands a field in any sufficient detail knows it is built upon a set of "work in progress" theorums, and that at any moment a new discovery could change the rules of the game.
What you are describing is an 80/20 moron. The guy with 20% of the information that answer 80% of the questions. The other 20% of life is stuff they don't have the patience to study in depth and so they extrapolate what they do know to humerous ends.
Experts are fools with credentials, no matter what their chosen field is.
I'm a TCL nazi. Back when I started (hint, the Pentium Bug was news) we would have to compile critical sections of our programs in C to get any kind of acceptable performance.
Today, everything is in script because it's not worth the bother anymore. In 1998 I had to write my own affine transformation code in C to get a GUI to work at anywhere near real-time. Today I can run a planetarium simulator (read LOTS of calculations) at an acceptable speed in just script.
Nobody wants to hear that the best solutions are the simple ones, I'm afraid.
The straightforward and simple ones. Hell, Lao Tzu said as much a few thousand years ago. There is a portion of our population that is just plain devious. They think that by being clever they can make the rules not apply to them.
That's why we like the first matrix movie so much. The heros could do what we always wished we could do, literally 'think' their way out of our normal physical bounds. Come on, everyone admit it. Ok, that and Kate Moss in spandex.
Having baked my noodle on cryptology classes during my ill-fated time as an Electrical Engineering student, I would also like to point out that most of the science is based on theorums that are unproven.
There is nothing to say the next week some kid in Norway can't figure out a simple way to bypass the brute force math on public-key encryption using a new technique.
Computer encryption today is like the enigma machine in WWII. In 1930, a mechanical cipher was almost unbreakable. Today I can model all of it's functions on a graphing calculator available at staples, and probably have a cipher worked out in a matter of weeks.
SETI, scanning the EM spectrum for radio transmissions has found a few interesting blips, but nothing concrete in almost 10 years.
Telescopes measuring the wobble of stars for planets are turning up a new one almost every week. And alien race looking to colonize the universe would not be looking for radio. The would be looking for water.
Sure, at present we can only detect planets the size of Jupiter. Who is to say what the technique will yield after another few decades of development?
I toured the NAWC in Willow Grove 11 years ago as part of an Engineer class. They were researching reclined seating for pilots at the time, and on the end of the centrifuge arm that had strapped a complete mockup of an aircraft cockpit. It was my understanding that the test pilots could control the simulator in the manner in which this article describes.
Maybe I'm half remembering the facts. Any slashdotters out there who worked in the G-LOC (Gravity-induced Loss of Conciousness) research program know better? (I'm not sure if the work continues there, most of the NAWC was closed and the work shipped to Maryland.)
The motor was huge. That much I do remember. The recordings they played back of pilots blacking out also sticks in my mind.
Re:The same physics still applies
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Lonely Planets
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You forgot the most intelligent form of life: Lab Mice.
They have us trained to deliver food to them when they press buttons. (With apologies to Douglas Adams).
Re:In another universe, maybe...
on
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In either case, it's like worrying about the stock market when you don't own shares in anything.
Better to focus on where we can make a difference. Right here.
On the parellel universe bit, optimists believe that this is the best of all possible worlds. Pessmists know that it is.
Re:Take care of your own planet!
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It's a common misconception that Robotic life would somehow be more long-lived than human life.
You don't simply build a robot and it works forever. They require constant repairs and upkeep. Not to mention programming upgrades to deal with the increasingly complex world we live in. If you look at the lifespan of our long-range probes, you would see that all of them lost functions over time to mechanical failure. Almost all deep space probes required reprogramming en-route to their destination.
Oh sure, you could have robots repair the robots that repair the factory that build the parts the repair the robots. But said factory would require a constant influx of materials and energy to stay in operation. New factories would have to be built around new deposits of resources. New facility design requires an awful lot of abstract thinking, even if you are copying from a template. Locating resources is not a systematic process (just look at the oil industry.) Humans would have to be involved.
If the robots have any kind of continuous improvement process, you would eventually have death by obsolencence. The factory just plain doesn't make that critical part for you anymore. If you lock all components in time, you preclude improvement.
I'll stick with your plan: make the Earth a better place to live. I'm a fan of pushing heavy industry to the Moon so we can stop fussing with pollution, and either adopting a low-power lifestyle so we can life on what the sun delivers, or commit to useing Nuclear power.
Intelligent life is nowhere else in our Galaxy. I give our planet as proof. We have not been colonized yet.
Our planet has been habitable for our type of like for well over 2.5 billion years, with the advent of Eukerotic organisms employing oxygen metabolisms. The development of photosynthesis, which dumped all that oxygen into the atmosphere killing most life on Earth at the time, I leave for another discussion.
Back to my point. 2.5 billion years. That is plenty of time for some advanced civilization to detect our planet, send probes, send colony ships, terraform, and have a few billion citizens, even if they can't exceed the speed of light.
So far, no ships. Not even transmissions. No alien cities. We have no evidence whatsoever that alien life has even made the attempt, yet alone the trip to visit. They didn't even call.
Why is this significant? Recent research here on Earth has been demonstrating that it is possible to detect candidates for habitable planets in far off systems. It's crude now, but look at it through the prism of a few centuries of development.
Ok, well what if the atmosphere is incompadible? The presence of Oxygen in out atmosphere developed almost overnight following the development of photosynthesic bacteria. An alien race could have easily seeded the oceans with something that will produce air more to their liking. Again, not technically possible now, but concievably in the next few centuries.
What if they exist and they are simply content to live in their own little chunk of the Universe? In that case their existance is right up there with "does the world disappear when you close your eyes." We can't disprove it, but it's not worth the effort or proving.
What if they exist and it's simply not feasible to travel here? They it wouldn't be feasible for us to travel there, see above.
I would not sit up nights wondering if there was life out in space. The Star Trek notion that they are staying just out of view until we have reached a certain state of development is just plain silly.
Now if you will excuse me, I have to go pester my ISP. Their ancible/TCP gateway is dropping packets like mad once they hid a router around Sirius IV, and it's lagging my BattleNet connection.
Actually that's not a Swastika. It's a religious symbol of several native american nations. Of course you still wouldn't want to be seen wearing it because it would seem insensitive for a white chick to be donning the religious emblams of a society her recent ancestors killed and suppresed.
I was asked by a coffee shop to set up wireless internet access. I used a script that pulled MAC numbers from the DHCP server to identify each machine. If the MAC number matched someone who paid for service, IPTABLES was told to NAT traffic for that user.
Unless your MAC number is on my "paid up list" everything else was blocked, except for port 53 and 80. Port 80 was redirected to a local webserver that would allow a user to log in and register his/her presence with the system. Port 53 is left open so you can resolve "gateway".
If figures I was going to link to my website, but something has just knocked out Cavalier's network. http://www.etoyoc.com
Slashdot Mirror
Linus probably has as many mis-attributed quotes as Benjamin Franklin.
It probably is a county-by-county thing. My only experiences have been in Philadelphia and before that Montgomery county. Still, it's a nice system.
What better way to benchmark a new box than by clocking an KDE build in 18 hours instead of my usual 24.
Come on, that's like advertising water as low-carb.
Maybe I'm just innured because I HAVE the sony handycam, the digital camera, work buys me a new Sony Vaio every couple of years, I love my PS/2, and I've managed to tweak the 2.6 kernel so my new Clie syncs correctly... and ...
Alright, I'm a Sony Zealot, deal.
But our CEO is hooked on them too. He only destroys them half as often as the Dells we used to buy him.
Drop a drinking glass from that height and see how well it does.
The new elecronic voting machines work just like the old mechanical ones. The ballot is a giant 3x3' printout spread over a pushbutton and LED panel. You press next to a candidate (or ballot question) where you used to flip a switch, and an LED glows telling you it understood your selection.
There are 2 big buttons at the bottom of the device. A red "CANCEL" button, and a green "VOTE" button, right where you used to pull the handle.
Votes are tallied using the same procedures as the old voting machines. There is an electronic odometer for every putton on the device, that is recorded at the start of the election, and the end of the election, and periodically during the course of an election.
They election officials record (seperately) how many people cast votes on each machine. At the end of the day, you know if all of your numbers match up.
Sure these devices cost money to build, but I am willing to wager they are still a hell of a lot cheaper than the touch-screens.
I just get the feeling that whoever designed these bloody touchscreens didn't know a damn thing about elections.
They even tally the votes the same way, through counters that are read off periodically throughout the day.
One of the selections in every category is "I am not casting a vote." I recall that at the top there is an option to cast a completely blank ballot. (The party lever has been removed, thankfully.)
Sure it's low-tech. But I like it.
What Engineers are you talking about? An Engineer who understands a field in any sufficient detail knows it is built upon a set of "work in progress" theorums, and that at any moment a new discovery could change the rules of the game.
What you are describing is an 80/20 moron. The guy with 20% of the information that answer 80% of the questions. The other 20% of life is stuff they don't have the patience to study in depth and so they extrapolate what they do know to humerous ends.
Experts are fools with credentials, no matter what their chosen field is.
Today, everything is in script because it's not worth the bother anymore. In 1998 I had to write my own affine transformation code in C to get a GUI to work at anywhere near real-time. Today I can run a planetarium simulator (read LOTS of calculations) at an acceptable speed in just script.
I think Linus said it best: I love standards. There are so many to choose from.
I like Erol Flyn like the next guy, but since when are pirate movies newsworthy on SlashDot?
No wait, that's only for financial projections in Excel.
The straightforward and simple ones. Hell, Lao Tzu said as much a few thousand years ago. There is a portion of our population that is just plain devious. They think that by being clever they can make the rules not apply to them.
That's why we like the first matrix movie so much. The heros could do what we always wished we could do, literally 'think' their way out of our normal physical bounds. Come on, everyone admit it. Ok, that and Kate Moss in spandex.
There is nothing to say the next week some kid in Norway can't figure out a simple way to bypass the brute force math on public-key encryption using a new technique.
Computer encryption today is like the enigma machine in WWII. In 1930, a mechanical cipher was almost unbreakable. Today I can model all of it's functions on a graphing calculator available at staples, and probably have a cipher worked out in a matter of weeks.
Code for an HTTP proxy is easily googleable. FTP would be a little more effort, but once you understand the principles...
Telescopes measuring the wobble of stars for planets are turning up a new one almost every week. And alien race looking to colonize the universe would not be looking for radio. The would be looking for water.
Sure, at present we can only detect planets the size of Jupiter. Who is to say what the technique will yield after another few decades of development?
Maybe I'm half remembering the facts. Any slashdotters out there who worked in the G-LOC (Gravity-induced Loss of Conciousness) research program know better? (I'm not sure if the work continues there, most of the NAWC was closed and the work shipped to Maryland.)
The motor was huge. That much I do remember. The recordings they played back of pilots blacking out also sticks in my mind.
They have us trained to deliver food to them when they press buttons. (With apologies to Douglas Adams).
Better to focus on where we can make a difference. Right here.
On the parellel universe bit, optimists believe that this is the best of all possible worlds. Pessmists know that it is.
You don't simply build a robot and it works forever. They require constant repairs and upkeep. Not to mention programming upgrades to deal with the increasingly complex world we live in. If you look at the lifespan of our long-range probes, you would see that all of them lost functions over time to mechanical failure. Almost all deep space probes required reprogramming en-route to their destination.
Oh sure, you could have robots repair the robots that repair the factory that build the parts the repair the robots. But said factory would require a constant influx of materials and energy to stay in operation. New factories would have to be built around new deposits of resources. New facility design requires an awful lot of abstract thinking, even if you are copying from a template. Locating resources is not a systematic process (just look at the oil industry.) Humans would have to be involved.
If the robots have any kind of continuous improvement process, you would eventually have death by obsolencence. The factory just plain doesn't make that critical part for you anymore. If you lock all components in time, you preclude improvement.
I'll stick with your plan: make the Earth a better place to live. I'm a fan of pushing heavy industry to the Moon so we can stop fussing with pollution, and either adopting a low-power lifestyle so we can life on what the sun delivers, or commit to useing Nuclear power.
Our planet has been habitable for our type of like for well over 2.5 billion years, with the advent of Eukerotic organisms employing oxygen metabolisms. The development of photosynthesis, which dumped all that oxygen into the atmosphere killing most life on Earth at the time, I leave for another discussion.
Back to my point. 2.5 billion years. That is plenty of time for some advanced civilization to detect our planet, send probes, send colony ships, terraform, and have a few billion citizens, even if they can't exceed the speed of light.
So far, no ships. Not even transmissions. No alien cities. We have no evidence whatsoever that alien life has even made the attempt, yet alone the trip to visit. They didn't even call.
Why is this significant? Recent research here on Earth has been demonstrating that it is possible to detect candidates for habitable planets in far off systems. It's crude now, but look at it through the prism of a few centuries of development.
Ok, well what if the atmosphere is incompadible? The presence of Oxygen in out atmosphere developed almost overnight following the development of photosynthesic bacteria. An alien race could have easily seeded the oceans with something that will produce air more to their liking. Again, not technically possible now, but concievably in the next few centuries.
What if they exist and they are simply content to live in their own little chunk of the Universe? In that case their existance is right up there with "does the world disappear when you close your eyes." We can't disprove it, but it's not worth the effort or proving.
What if they exist and it's simply not feasible to travel here? They it wouldn't be feasible for us to travel there, see above.
I would not sit up nights wondering if there was life out in space. The Star Trek notion that they are staying just out of view until we have reached a certain state of development is just plain silly.
Now if you will excuse me, I have to go pester my ISP. Their ancible/TCP gateway is dropping packets like mad once they hid a router around Sirius IV, and it's lagging my BattleNet connection.
Actually that's not a Swastika. It's a religious symbol of several native american nations. Of course you still wouldn't want to be seen wearing it because it would seem insensitive for a white chick to be donning the religious emblams of a society her recent ancestors killed and suppresed.
Unless your MAC number is on my "paid up list" everything else was blocked, except for port 53 and 80. Port 80 was redirected to a local webserver that would allow a user to log in and register his/her presence with the system. Port 53 is left open so you can resolve "gateway".
If figures I was going to link to my website, but something has just knocked out Cavalier's network. http://www.etoyoc.com
Follow the link for "wifi".