Instead of a modern electronic system, overseas voters are going to be stuck with the haphazard and flawed, manual system based upon absentee ballots. That's like saying the motor-car is just too dangerous, here's a nice horse instead.
You should file a formal complaint with the FCC and Michigan's Public Utility Commission. There is no excuse for a telephone system that can't keep running during a blackout.
In a way, it doesn't surprise me, although it is sad. The ex-Bell telephone companies have been dumping experienced employees and cutting corners for decades. Reliability costs money, and the telephone companies are run by bean-counters, not engineers. Like the railroads and steel companies, they are letting their core business deteriorate, investing the profits in non-regulated businesses that are more attractive.
If you want reliable, universal and affordable telephone service, you have to be willing to apply political pressure to your state government and its utility regulators. They are the ones who can force the telephone company to live up to its service obligations.
The telephone company has huge batteries, suitable for powering submarines, that provide power to their own equipment and the subscriber's telephone. If you measure a phone line with a multimeter, you should see about -48V on the line. This is all you need to power a standard telephone. The problem is that many of the telephones being sold today will not work without an AC adaptor. The FCC should make the manufacturers put large "Will not work during a power failure!" stickers on these telephones.
Many young people, and web page designers, have the mistaken idea that smaller is better when it comes to fonts.
The goal is to communicate to the reader, not to cram as many letters as possible on the page.
Years ago, I read some accounts of sabotage operations against North Vietnam. Special Forces soldiers infiltrated North Vietnamese ammunition dumps and modified the fuzes on mortar and artillery shells so that they would detonate while still inside the barrel of the weapon. The North Vietnamese never discovered the operation, instead they wrote it off as the result of poor Chinese quality control.
Technology theft was a very big deal back in the 70s and 80s. There were many cases where Soviet chips were direct ripoffs of American designs, even to the point of including non-functional details from the American designs. The KGB and GRU invested huge amounts of effort into stealing Western technology. Stolen Western computer designs also allowed the Soviet Union to steal Western computer software.
The Junkers Jumo 004 jet engine used in the Me-262 had an engine life of little more than 10 hours. The main problem was the low quality of the steel that was available to the manufacturer. See here for more details. The engine was marginally acceptable for wartime use.
An ATSC (HDTV) tuner is a very complex gadget. They are still working the bugs out of the RF and digital sections. The other problem is that they are not sold in large volumes, unlike satellite receivers which have been commoditized.
Sometimes it is useful to look at the mechanical predecessors of modern devices, before the microcontroller became common. My old mechanical 35mm SLR cameras were relatively easy to use. There might have been a few "mystery buttons", but most of the controls were straightforward. The camera was too stupid to have 12 modes. Each control was mechanically linked to the appropriate mechanism inside the camera. This prevented the engineers from making one button do 5 different things, dependent on the phase of the Moon.
Re:And they make phones harder to use
on
KISS
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· Score: 1
It isn't just cell phones. Take a look at the HP-33S
scientific calculator. Some idiot decided to make it look trendy, rather than easy to use.
The author is a loon. He has a history of constructing elaborate conspiracies on a foundation of conjecture and incomplete evidence. He isn't a reporter, he's an advocate for a particular point of view. That's why he is so popular in certain quarters.
If the ballots were limited to a few items, I would agree with you. The problem is that the number of items on many ballots is huge. That is why the Canadian system would not work very well in the United States.
I care if it is going to be stored on a shelf as a spare part, rather than immediately installed in a PC. I want packaging that is going to protect the part from damage in storage and handling until it is ready to be installed.
The hardware is identical. The software (Backup Flight System) was written by Rockwell. The primary computers run software (Primary Avionics Software System) written by IBM.
Many HP calculators have their own version of ctrl-alt-del, which can be used to reset the calculator to a known state, as it was when shipped from the factory.
Try pressing and holding the key in the lower-left corner, and then simultaneously press the key in the top-left corner and the key in the top-right corner.
Disposable rockets blow up too. In comparison to expendable launch vehicles, the Shuttle has a good safety record. We never lost a Saturn V, but it was only used for 13 launches, as compared to 113 for the Shuttle.
After Challenger, I had a feeling that NASA would eventually lose another orbiter. Even under the best circumstances, space travel is dangerous. I wouldn't have expected it to be caused by damage to the wing. My fear has always been that one of the SSMEs (Space Shuttle Main Engine) would suffer a catastrophic disassembly during ascent due to turbopump failure, leading to the loss of all three SSMEs.
Your references simply reinforce my point. I wasn't using replica in the literal sense. Whether the meter bar is made of platinum, platinum-iridium, 1650763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line of krypton-86, or the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in the time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second, it's still an arbitrary base unit. The kilogram is still defined by a lump of platinum-iridium in a vault in Sevres, France.
The meter was originally defined as 1/10E6 the distance between the North Pole and the Equator, based on questionable measurements of an arbitrary planet, that upon close examination, isn't spherical. Seems pretty arbitrary to me, especially considering that the concept of the meter was soon replaced for practical purposes with a platinum bar. All subsequent definitions of the meter have been improved replicas of that platinum bar. There is nothing "fundamental" about the basis of the metric system.
From what I've seen, it takes a year or two of full-time work experience for a new programmer or engineer to get up to speed on these types of systems. It takes even longer to be really good at it.
Venus is an interesting planet. The trick is how to design something that will survive for more than a half-hour on the planet's surface. NASA has already done extensive radar mapping of the planet's surface from spacecraft in orbit around Venus.
Slashdot Mirror
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
In a way, it doesn't surprise me, although it is sad. The ex-Bell telephone companies have been dumping experienced employees and cutting corners for decades. Reliability costs money, and the telephone companies are run by bean-counters, not engineers. Like the railroads and steel companies, they are letting their core business deteriorate, investing the profits in non-regulated businesses that are more attractive.
If you want reliable, universal and affordable telephone service, you have to be willing to apply political pressure to your state government and its utility regulators. They are the ones who can force the telephone company to live up to its service obligations.
The telephone company has huge batteries, suitable for powering submarines, that provide power to their own equipment and the subscriber's telephone. If you measure a phone line with a multimeter, you should see about -48V on the line. This is all you need to power a standard telephone. The problem is that many of the telephones being sold today will not work without an AC adaptor. The FCC should make the manufacturers put large "Will not work during a power failure!" stickers on these telephones.
Many young people, and web page designers, have the mistaken idea that smaller is better when it comes to fonts. The goal is to communicate to the reader, not to cram as many letters as possible on the page.
Technology theft was a very big deal back in the 70s and 80s. There were many cases where Soviet chips were direct ripoffs of American designs, even to the point of including non-functional details from the American designs. The KGB and GRU invested huge amounts of effort into stealing Western technology. Stolen Western computer designs also allowed the Soviet Union to steal Western computer software.
The Junkers Jumo 004 jet engine used in the Me-262 had an engine life of little more than 10 hours. The main problem was the low quality of the steel that was available to the manufacturer. See here for more details. The engine was marginally acceptable for wartime use.
The foul minions of the VRWC are spreading lies, distortions, and falsehoods, attacking the foundations and orthodoxies of the one true faith.
An ATSC (HDTV) tuner is a very complex gadget. They are still working the bugs out of the RF and digital sections. The other problem is that they are not sold in large volumes, unlike satellite receivers which have been commoditized.
Sometimes it is useful to look at the mechanical predecessors of modern devices, before the microcontroller became common. My old mechanical 35mm SLR cameras were relatively easy to use. There might have been a few "mystery buttons", but most of the controls were straightforward. The camera was too stupid to have 12 modes. Each control was mechanically linked to the appropriate mechanism inside the camera. This prevented the engineers from making one button do 5 different things, dependent on the phase of the Moon.
It isn't just cell phones. Take a look at the HP-33S scientific calculator. Some idiot decided to make it look trendy, rather than easy to use.
The author is a loon. He has a history of constructing elaborate conspiracies on a foundation of conjecture and incomplete evidence. He isn't a reporter, he's an advocate for a particular point of view. That's why he is so popular in certain quarters.
If the ballots were limited to a few items, I would agree with you. The problem is that the number of items on many ballots is huge. That is why the Canadian system would not work very well in the United States.
So was divination by reading the entrails of a chicken.
I care if it is going to be stored on a shelf as a spare part, rather than immediately installed in a PC. I want packaging that is going to protect the part from damage in storage and handling until it is ready to be installed.
A nice, recyclable corrugated box provides much more protection against damage than a plastic bag.
The hardware is identical. The software (Backup Flight System) was written by Rockwell. The primary computers run software (Primary Avionics Software System) written by IBM.
Pu238 is an alpha emitter, which requires minimal shielding.
Many HP calculators have their own version of ctrl-alt-del, which can be used to reset the calculator to a known state, as it was when shipped from the factory. Try pressing and holding the key in the lower-left corner, and then simultaneously press the key in the top-left corner and the key in the top-right corner.
After Challenger, I had a feeling that NASA would eventually lose another orbiter. Even under the best circumstances, space travel is dangerous. I wouldn't have expected it to be caused by damage to the wing. My fear has always been that one of the SSMEs (Space Shuttle Main Engine) would suffer a catastrophic disassembly during ascent due to turbopump failure, leading to the loss of all three SSMEs.
Much of the design of DOS was a direct ripoff of CP/M-80, an operating system for the 8-bit Intel 8080A.
Your references simply reinforce my point. I wasn't using replica in the literal sense. Whether the meter bar is made of platinum, platinum-iridium, 1650763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line of krypton-86, or the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in the time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second, it's still an arbitrary base unit. The kilogram is still defined by a lump of platinum-iridium in a vault in Sevres, France.
The meter was originally defined as 1/10E6 the distance between the North Pole and the Equator, based on questionable measurements of an arbitrary planet, that upon close examination, isn't spherical. Seems pretty arbitrary to me, especially considering that the concept of the meter was soon replaced for practical purposes with a platinum bar. All subsequent definitions of the meter have been improved replicas of that platinum bar. There is nothing "fundamental" about the basis of the metric system.
Make the sender find a new Mersenne prime. That would solve your spam problems.
From what I've seen, it takes a year or two of full-time work experience for a new programmer or engineer to get up to speed on these types of systems. It takes even longer to be really good at it.
Venus is an interesting planet. The trick is how to design something that will survive for more than a half-hour on the planet's surface. NASA has already done extensive radar mapping of the planet's surface from spacecraft in orbit around Venus.