Recording votes in the ACT is not as simple as "++ some variable".
Calculating the outcome is not as simple as "max(...)".
Why not take 5 minutes to find out what exactly the software does before deciding that you are so much smarter/productive than the people who created it in the first place.
Remember to include things like independent code audits...
A lot of people might, but I still think *most* people don't.
Of course I would love for the wife to get into video editing, since then I could buy her a computer that actually had enough grunt to run a game more recent than Baldur's Gate...
I interpreted the reply as being to the bind8 portion of the post. As would anyone who had heard of the vulnerability being pointed out (and as would those who hadn't heard of it but read the linked page).
Clearly that comes under the "grunt work" I mentioned. In fact I'd classify it under "computer generated animation" which I specifically mentioned.
[Aside: I've done video editing (with Premiere, which I suspect was a particularly inefficient application) on a Power Mac 7100 (I think, may have been a 6100 or an 8100...) - we went home for the weekend while it rendered and hoped it didn't crash]
In fact I'm using my laptop right now, because the significantly better desktop machine at the in-laws place (which is where I am) has an especially bad mouse (and to make it worse not enough "mousing space" on the tiny desk) - so bad that my laptop touchpad is nicer to use...
As I wait for the skin to grow back on my eyes from this horrible colour scheme
Didn't that skin make it hard to see the colour scheme?
But back to the actual topic...
CPU speeds are just stupid for most people. I write code for a living (at the moment anyway) and the 400Mhz "Mobile PII" I'm using at the moment is adequate for that.
I understand that if your job involved compiling Mozilla or X11 a lot then more CPU (and more importantly more and faster RAM) would make you more productive.
I understand that if you are doing computer generated animation or physics modelling or whatever then more grunt would make you more productive.
But for most people, computers were fast enough a long time ago. This 400Mhz laptop is my fastest machine - both home computers are 300Mhz or so. One of them runs Windows XP Pro just fine, runs Office just fine, runs firefox and IE just fine, runs gimp just fine and even does all of those at the same time just fine.
Every time someone asks me for advice on buying a computer, I ask "do you want to play games?", and if the answer is no then my answer is "buy the slowest CPU model they sell and spend any extra money on RAM".
i can hardly demonize YOU for an off-topic discussion on an off-topic website in an off-topic thread about an off-topic comment about a comic book movie
Darn, I want the super powers that I assume would accompany demonhood, then again having to battle heroes day-in-day-out would get tiresome I guess.
Have you ever thought that maybe I don't care about fusion power. Maybe it doesn't interest me. Maybe I'm a nasty person who really doesn't care about the environment and doesn't mind toxic smoke being belched into the atmosphere. Maybe I think nuclear power is just fine and dandy. Maybe I think the market will decide. Maybe I just don't think...
I haven't put forward a view on fusion based power generation. I'm interested in that other part of your post, the bit with the patently false claim in it. Yes that's irrelevant to what you care about. Yes the claim is only false because an assumption went unstated. Yes it really doesn't matter to any of the points you were making. Yes it's pedantic and non-serious and all about a little joke.
But that's the bit that tweaked my interest. You don't have to care about it, you don't have to reply. I'm not "opposing" you, I just found one little part of your post vaguely interesting and gosh-darn I replied about it. Better call the off-topic police, someone didn't care about the topic of your post...
Maybe I don't care about the "good fight" against the evil that is hollywood and their technophobia (well hollywood inherited it from a long tradition, but that's beside the point).
The point to my posts was simply that I found one statement humourous when taken out of context (and hence having an unstated assumption). Sadly enough there do exist people in the world who find tiny little asides more interesting than hollywood's demonisation of nuclear fusion.
Anyway, Thursday is "fight the [insert evil empire]" day.
Which part of "Hollywood demonises... nuclear power" followed by my short guess as to why didn't address your point?
I happen to think that the fact that hollywood demonises things is uninteresting, but one paragraph of one of your posts was of interest to me and I commented on that. I take it I'm not allowed to do such a thing, but must bow to your superiority and talk about only the things which you think are important.
I thought you might actually want to clear up the vague language and be precise rather than just make sweeping generalisations that clearly aren't true.
Hollywood demonises most things, from Arabs to Russians to nuclear power to spy satelites to bees to tomatoes.
After all, "safe" things are a pretty boring topic for an "action" movie. You really need dangerous things.
But don't mine me, just keep going with the generalisations and hysteria.
Yes. It's evil to exploit the work of a poor country, with no living wage, no health standards, and no regulations, for a buck. I'm sure the price of products these days wouldn't be so high if the average wage of CEOs wasn't rising at 4 times the rate of the average worker.
Much better to keep the poor country poor? Subsistance farming and scavaging is way fun, isn't it...
After all employing some of the people might actually help in the country getting "a living wage", "health standards", and "regulations". But better Americans' have more jobs, than millions of people get the chance of having a "living wage".
Obviously if the CEO was paid less then costs are lower and hence prices should be (capitalism doesn't always wotk the way it should, of course). But compared with the costs savings by outsourcing it might be a drop in the bucket (saving $5,000 ten thousand times is better for the bottom line than saving $20,000,000 once after all).
You said "NEVER". You said "fusion reaction". You didn't mention anything about size constraints.
Atomic bombs do a good job of blowing up large areas, by the way. The fact that they are a fusion reaction doesn't seem to stop them, and neither does that fact they are a little smaller than most stars. (and before you reuse your previous reply, you said "reaction" not "reactor").
And also, this is a movie based on the premise that being bitten by a genetically engineered spider gives you super powers. Taking any of the science seriously would be pretty stupid, but of course people are on average pretty stupid...
People often write a book in order to convince others to agree with them about something.
See religious books, textbooks, "popular science" books, travel guides, etc. for examples.
A lot of fictional works also exist in part so that the author can try to convince others of something (you know the "moral of the story"...)
In fact I suspect most works of art (using the term art generally) do this. Sure some paintings exist solely so that the painter could try a technique out, but many of them are also making a point be it political, social, philosophical, or just an observation.
In fact lots of works of art were created with the main goal being the "preaching of a message". See those hollywood films of WWII vintage that were made in order to "raise moralle" and inspire the populace to fight against the forces of evil.
Simcity says something about the costs and benefits of various power generation techniques (whether it is vaguely correct or not), and "the environment" is certainly a political issue these days. Simearth did so (the environment not power generation) to an even greater degree.
Making a game in which the "message" is the primary motivator isn't an issue to me, lots of other things are made that way...
There's The Political Machine which seems to be a modifcation of "The Corporate Machine" (by the same company), but it's only about the election campaign and is as boring as The Corporate Machine was.
Yes, given one message to classify as spam or ham you are going to get it right 100% of the time.
Given 8000 messages to classify the wonders of boredom is going to mean you make a mistake every so often (not an "oops I clicked the wrong button" mistake, but an "oops I put it in the wrong folder because the subject looked spammy and I couldn't be bothered checking the body" mistake).
In practice though, those stats on human accuracy are provided by having one person classify email that has been classified by others - which of course means some of the mistakes in fact be disagreements...
Having more machines than you actually need, and randomly choosing which ones get used on election day while the remaining ones are subjected to such pretend voting behaviours (the machine of course won't know that it isn't being used for actual real live voting).
It only takes *one* machine choosing *one* person in the entire election to try that on who is paying attention (and possibly acting intentionally as a "half-blind arthritic senior citizen") and the fine tooth comb comes out on the entire election. That fine tooth comb is applied to the software and hardware of the machines you have physical possesion of.
"it must have been an isolated glitch" doesn't cut it in elections, well actually it does going by US elections of late, but it shouldn't.
You pick a percentage (trading off time and effort against chance of missing something) and do a count of the paper receipts from that number of randomly selected polling places.
If the numbers don't match for a particular booth by more than some margin of error (again a trade off of time and effort and chance of missing) - the margin could be 0 if the paper receipts are able to be reliably counted (they are machine generated after all, so there shouldn't be the problems with pencil and paper ballots of tick slightly outside of boxes, multiple ticks, etc) - then you do a paper recount of the *entire* election.
If the combined numbers of all the randomly selected polling places don't match by a smaller margin of error (skip this if the margin is 0 above) then you do a paper recount of the *entire* election.
Paper counts trump the machine counts. If the result of the election differs in the case of the recount the company who did the electronic voting machines can foot the bill and be investigated by some arm of law enforcement.
One thing that needs to watched is receipts not matching votes, if anyone complains of that then rhose machines need to be analysed with a fine tooth comb and people thrown in jail and another election held.
If suffieciently paranoid you could do a paper of the entire election everytime - you trust the machine counts if the random recounts pass, and take your time with a full recount. If the count differs people go to jail, and you hold new elections.
You employ some statisticians to work out the details.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you give an snippet of example code showing a style using whitespace to improve code readability that doesn't work in python?
In an imperative language, since that's what python is...
Recording votes in the ACT is not as simple as "++ some variable".
Calculating the outcome is not as simple as "max(...)".
Why not take 5 minutes to find out what exactly the software does before deciding that you are so much smarter/productive than the people who created it in the first place.
Remember to include things like independent code audits...
A lot of people might, but I still think *most* people don't.
Of course I would love for the wife to get into video editing, since then I could buy her a computer that actually had enough grunt to run a game more recent than Baldur's Gate...
I interpreted the reply as being to the bind8 portion of the post. As would anyone who had heard of the vulnerability being pointed out (and as would those who hadn't heard of it but read the linked page).
Clearly that comes under the "grunt work" I mentioned. In fact I'd classify it under "computer generated animation" which I specifically mentioned.
[Aside: I've done video editing (with Premiere, which I suspect was a particularly inefficient application) on a Power Mac 7100 (I think, may have been a 6100 or an 8100...) - we went home for the weekend while it rendered and hoped it didn't crash]
Except of course that you said "bind8", which clearly isn't such a version.
A very good point.
In fact I'm using my laptop right now, because the significantly better desktop machine at the in-laws place (which is where I am) has an especially bad mouse (and to make it worse not enough "mousing space" on the tiny desk) - so bad that my laptop touchpad is nicer to use...
As I wait for the skin to grow back on my eyes from this horrible colour scheme
Didn't that skin make it hard to see the colour scheme?
But back to the actual topic...
CPU speeds are just stupid for most people. I write code for a living (at the moment anyway) and the 400Mhz "Mobile PII" I'm using at the moment is adequate for that.
I understand that if your job involved compiling Mozilla or X11 a lot then more CPU (and more importantly more and faster RAM) would make you more productive.
I understand that if you are doing computer generated animation or physics modelling or whatever then more grunt would make you more productive.
But for most people, computers were fast enough a long time ago. This 400Mhz laptop is my fastest machine - both home computers are 300Mhz or so. One of them runs Windows XP Pro just fine, runs Office just fine, runs firefox and IE just fine, runs gimp just fine and even does all of those at the same time just fine.
Every time someone asks me for advice on buying a computer, I ask "do you want to play games?", and if the answer is no then my answer is "buy the slowest CPU model they sell and spend any extra money on RAM".
Australia is geographically the same size as the United States
Most people know that: 7617930 != 9161923
and hence they aren't "the same size". Over 80% of the size, yes. Almost the same size, yes. But not just "the same size".
A country of ~20 million people cannot support the same number of commercial stations as a country of ~200 million
That's true, it remains true even though the US population is ~300 million (290 million+ makes ~200 million a bit off).
[we now return to your less pedantic programming]
i can hardly demonize YOU for an off-topic discussion on an off-topic website in an off-topic thread about an off-topic comment about a comic book movie
Darn, I want the super powers that I assume would accompany demonhood, then again having to battle heroes day-in-day-out would get tiresome I guess.
Have you ever thought that maybe I don't care about fusion power. Maybe it doesn't interest me. Maybe I'm a nasty person who really doesn't care about the environment and doesn't mind toxic smoke being belched into the atmosphere. Maybe I think nuclear power is just fine and dandy. Maybe I think the market will decide. Maybe I just don't think...
I haven't put forward a view on fusion based power generation. I'm interested in that other part of your post, the bit with the patently false claim in it. Yes that's irrelevant to what you care about. Yes the claim is only false because an assumption went unstated. Yes it really doesn't matter to any of the points you were making. Yes it's pedantic and non-serious and all about a little joke.
But that's the bit that tweaked my interest. You don't have to care about it, you don't have to reply. I'm not "opposing" you, I just found one little part of your post vaguely interesting and gosh-darn I replied about it. Better call the off-topic police, someone didn't care about the topic of your post...
Maybe I don't care about the "good fight" against the evil that is hollywood and their technophobia (well hollywood inherited it from a long tradition, but that's beside the point).
The point to my posts was simply that I found one statement humourous when taken out of context (and hence having an unstated assumption). Sadly enough there do exist people in the world who find tiny little asides more interesting than hollywood's demonisation of nuclear fusion.
Anyway, Thursday is "fight the [insert evil empire]" day.
Which part of "Hollywood demonises ... nuclear power" followed by my short guess as to why didn't address your point?
I happen to think that the fact that hollywood demonises things is uninteresting, but one paragraph of one of your posts was of interest to me and I commented on that. I take it I'm not allowed to do such a thing, but must bow to your superiority and talk about only the things which you think are important.
Sorry.
I thought you might actually want to clear up the vague language and be precise rather than just make sweeping generalisations that clearly aren't true.
Hollywood demonises most things, from Arabs to Russians to nuclear power to spy satelites to bees to tomatoes.
After all, "safe" things are a pretty boring topic for an "action" movie. You really need dangerous things.
But don't mine me, just keep going with the generalisations and hysteria.
Yes. It's evil to exploit the work of a poor country, with no living wage, no health standards, and no regulations, for a buck. I'm sure the price of products these days wouldn't be so high if the average wage of CEOs wasn't rising at 4 times the rate of the average worker.
Much better to keep the poor country poor? Subsistance farming and scavaging is way fun, isn't it...
After all employing some of the people might actually help in the country getting "a living wage", "health standards", and "regulations". But better Americans' have more jobs, than millions of people get the chance of having a "living wage".
Obviously if the CEO was paid less then costs are lower and hence prices should be (capitalism doesn't always wotk the way it should, of course). But compared with the costs savings by outsourcing it might be a drop in the bucket (saving $5,000 ten thousand times is better for the bottom line than saving $20,000,000 once after all).
You said "NEVER". You said "fusion reaction". You didn't mention anything about size constraints.
Atomic bombs do a good job of blowing up large areas, by the way. The fact that they are a fusion reaction doesn't seem to stop them, and neither does that fact they are a little smaller than most stars. (and before you reuse your previous reply, you said "reaction" not "reactor").
And also, this is a movie based on the premise that being bitten by a genetically engineered spider gives you super powers. Taking any of the science seriously would be pretty stupid, but of course people are on average pretty stupid...
Outsourcing, it's easy to measure, just count the jobs that have gone overseas that could have easily been done here.
So employing people who happen to have brown skin is evil?
Helping to raise the standard of living and stability of poorer nations is evil?
Reducing the prices that people have to pay for goods and services is evil?
Really?
People often write a book in order to convince others to agree with them about something.
See religious books, textbooks, "popular science" books, travel guides, etc. for examples.
A lot of fictional works also exist in part so that the author can try to convince others of something (you know the "moral of the story"...)
In fact I suspect most works of art (using the term art generally) do this. Sure some paintings exist solely so that the painter could try a technique out, but many of them are also making a point be it political, social, philosophical, or just an observation.
In fact lots of works of art were created with the main goal being the "preaching of a message". See those hollywood films of WWII vintage that were made in order to "raise moralle" and inspire the populace to fight against the forces of evil.
Simcity says something about the costs and benefits of various power generation techniques (whether it is vaguely correct or not), and "the environment" is certainly a political issue these days. Simearth did so (the environment not power generation) to an even greater degree.
Making a game in which the "message" is the primary motivator isn't an issue to me, lots of other things are made that way...
There's The Political Machine which seems to be a modifcation of "The Corporate Machine" (by the same company), but it's only about the election campaign and is as boring as The Corporate Machine was.
And you know it uses the correct conversion factors, because...?
Isn't the point that searching in your favourite search engine may very well turn up a page with the incorrect conversion factor?
People make mistakes.
Yes, given one message to classify as spam or ham you are going to get it right 100% of the time.
Given 8000 messages to classify the wonders of boredom is going to mean you make a mistake every so often (not an "oops I clicked the wrong button" mistake, but an "oops I put it in the wrong folder because the subject looked spammy and I couldn't be bothered checking the body" mistake).
In practice though, those stats on human accuracy are provided by having one person classify email that has been classified by others - which of course means some of the mistakes in fact be disagreements...
I did a *much* smaller test of spam filters earlier this year (which was published in hakin9 but not in English).
I also found that crm114 gave poor results in comparison to other filters - but figured I must have set something up incorrectly...
Having more machines than you actually need, and randomly choosing which ones get used on election day while the remaining ones are subjected to such pretend voting behaviours (the machine of course won't know that it isn't being used for actual real live voting).
It only takes *one* machine choosing *one* person in the entire election to try that on who is paying attention (and possibly acting intentionally as a "half-blind arthritic senior citizen") and the fine tooth comb comes out on the entire election. That fine tooth comb is applied to the software and hardware of the machines you have physical possesion of.
"it must have been an isolated glitch" doesn't cut it in elections, well actually it does going by US elections of late, but it shouldn't.
You pick a percentage (trading off time and effort against chance of missing something) and do a count of the paper receipts from that number of randomly selected polling places.
If the numbers don't match for a particular booth by more than some margin of error (again a trade off of time and effort and chance of missing) - the margin could be 0 if the paper receipts are able to be reliably counted (they are machine generated after all, so there shouldn't be the problems with pencil and paper ballots of tick slightly outside of boxes, multiple ticks, etc) - then you do a paper recount of the *entire* election.
If the combined numbers of all the randomly selected polling places don't match by a smaller margin of error (skip this if the margin is 0 above) then you do a paper recount of the *entire* election.
Paper counts trump the machine counts. If the result of the election differs in the case of the recount the company who did the electronic voting machines can foot the bill and be investigated by some arm of law enforcement.
One thing that needs to watched is receipts not matching votes, if anyone complains of that then rhose machines need to be analysed with a fine tooth comb and people thrown in jail and another election held.
If suffieciently paranoid you could do a paper of the entire election everytime - you trust the machine counts if the random recounts pass, and take your time with a full recount. If the count differs people go to jail, and you hold new elections.
You employ some statisticians to work out the details.