Many people seem to still believe what they were taught 30 years ago about the population explosion. What was true then is no longer true - the world is changing rapidly, and one of the many ways it is changing is *reducing* our population growth.
2) the losing party in an election (not just president, but any of the offices and referenda being voted on) will point to provisional ballots that have a) been rejected and b) support the loser's cause to say that "These people were denied the right to vote!" and imply that either the registration system lost their registrations or is just plain crooked
That's not voter fraud. That's just post election politics. People who actually throw out registrations are committing the fraud, if in fact they are.
If there is no proof that a person was in fact registered, then that person has no case for claiming their provisional vote should count, and I would be very surprised if any court supported such a claim.
With new voters, going to the proper polling place for the first time may be tricky. How are they supposed to find out where it is? Perhaps the voter's friends are in another precinct. Perhaps the person who helped the new voter register didn't know where the proper place is for that voter, or perhaps they even misled the new voter about the proper place so they would go to the wrong place and thus invalidate their vote (given Blackwell's policy).
Another thing that happens occasionally that affects both old and new voters is that the polling place may change, even for the same precinct, or the precinct changes out from under the people in the precinct.
So what's the big deal about allowing the person to vote provisionally, and what is the real danger of fraud? Someone must eventually check whether the person is registered in order for the vote to count, and the fact that they did vote must be recorded with the official record for that person. Seems there is less chance of fraud with provisional voting than if a person somehow registered in multiple places, multiple counties or multiple states.
The opposition to provisional voting seems motivated more by a desire to eliminate as many new voters as possible rather than any honest concern for accurate voting.
In my opinion, the only downside of provisional voting is the extra expense of doing the proper followup paperwork.
In addition to the obvious pun, I first thought LINDOWS was one of those recursive acrynoms for "Lindows Is Not DOS Or Windows Stupid".
Hmm, according to Google, only one other person had
the same idea.
Maybe if we spread this meme around, MS will get the message that it is pointless to defend the generic "Windows" term.
If you only build bricks and farm flax, that would indeed be boring. Maybe you were in a far corner of Egypt with no one else around to help you... that would indeed be boring. But if so, you really missed the game entirely.
Did you not see the hundreds of other kinds of buildings that you can make and dozens of technologies you can use? Did you miss the challenges of the tests of the seven disciplines? The early tests are easy, and give you something of the flavor of the later, harder tests, which are often so difficult that you must rally the cooperation of many other players to help you accomplish your goals. Did you miss the collective challenge that, by the end of one year, for each of the seven disciplines, at least one person must complete all of the seven tests?
The game is not without its flaws. But in some cases the flaws are deliberate, and we the players are challenged to collectively figure out how to fix the problems that come up.
Yes, it is an artificial world, set up to work much like real life in a couple ways. And yes, we could be putting similar energy into the real world, but here is why I do it. 1. I already do put similar energy into the real world, and it is nice to take a break from that. 2. There are many things very unlike the real world that are fun to play with. 3. We get to change how the game itself works, by passing laws and voting on new features. 4. I don't care for the combat games - I don't need that particular thrill.
There is no other online game like it (cooperative, evolving, overarching goals, in a massive online multiplayer environment), not that I know of. Please post if you know of others - I'd like to play more games like this.
Why not wider cable, made of cheaper materials?
on
The Space Elevator
·
· Score: 1
The constraint of a 2m wide cable seems unnecessary in the first place. What is wrong with having a much thicker structure at the point of greatest stress near the LEO, and thinning out the farther it is from that center point, both up and down? The combined strength of many parallel cables made of cheaper materials such as steel, kevlar, or fiberglass should be equivalent to nanotubes (or nanoscrolls), and the redundancy of more parallelism will add to its safety as well.
How wide would it need to be? Maybe 200m or 2km is enough. I don't know; you tell me. But I doubt there is any physical reason that it can't be as wide as necessary to hold the remainder of the structure. The obstacle may be a practical constraint involving how this structure can be assembled, or how much material it would require, which implies economic constraints.
The construction process suggested in "The Space Elevator" involves a thin ribbon of nanotube material. If that were to work, the same process would apply to my suggestion as well, but instead of adding more nanotube cables along the whole length, first thicken up the middle with short strings, and then gradually thicken up longer portions of the cable. This also has the advantage of not requiring the first climbers to lift strings that are a large fraction of the weight of the whole ribbon.
But another process, that doesn't rely on any initial ribbon hanging down to Earth, would start at the LEO point and grow both up and down, always thickening in the middle enough to support the structure in both directions. The problem with this approach is where does the material come from? Lifting it up from Earth by rockets is what we want to avoid, hence the idea of mining it from an astroid.
Here's a related experiment that someone should try: Imagine flying a kite with a really long string, and after 10 meters or so you attach another kite with its own string, thus doubling the string width. Repeat after another 10 meters, etc. You should be able to keep doing this without using thicker strings because each kite only needs to lift its own string. The constraint is that the wind will only hold up a certain weight of string for each kite, and you run out of air after a while anyway. But each kite lower on the string will help hold up the string for the higher kites as well as holding up their own shorter length of string. So how high could the first kite go?
I'm glad you mentioned Personal Rapid Transit in this context. In contrast to most large-vehicle systems, such as buses, trains, and this evacuated tube transport system, PRT systems have advantages on practically all measures:
Large-vehicle system PRT -------------------- --- 5-30 min between vehicles < 1 minute shorter service hours 24x7 few stations widely spaced many stations nearby more stops = longer transit non-stop trips driver required per vehicle automated cars large heavy vehicles small light cars large expensive tracks smaller cheaper tracks large visual impact smaller visual impact
PRT systems have many of the advantages of automobile systems, but without the enviromental and safety hazards. Only 1/6 as many PRT cars would be required as automobiles (which mostly sit around in parking lots all day).
See the more complete details at: http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/PRT/Background2.html and http://www.cprt.org/FactSheet.htm
Maybe we'll be less tolerant of racism, child
abuse, slavery, dictators, monopolies,
pollution...
Curiously, most of those things are a form of intolerance themselves. Racism is an intolerant disrespect for members of another race. Child abuse is often due to an intolerance of a child's innocent behavior that provokes the abuser. Dictators are intolerant of the democratic wishes of the people. Monopolies are intolerant of competition.
I admit I become intolerant when faced with intolerance. I do try to be reasonable with intolerant people, but it doesn't usually last long, partly because the intolerance is often so irrational that there is little room for reason. So I end up angry and frustrated.
My hope is that more communication will at least get people thinking about more variety of ideas at an earlier age, and they will thus be more open to thiking about the alternatives. But it may take a couple more generations of global communication before we see much visible effect in the average level of civilization.
Although the information age may encourage more moderation over time, it could also foster more extremists, because more people will be able to find a community of support for exactly their brand of extremism.
Hey, hey. The Boston Globe reports
Pentagon planning to aid Afghans! So they liked my idea, not that they got it from me. This gives me confidence that they really are trying to do the right thing, if they could just figure out what it is.
I suggested elsewhere that we drop food to feed the hungry Afghans and win them over rather than killing them or letting them starve.
In addition, maybe we should bug the food to listen in on millions of conversations about "Where's bin Laden?". Billions of robot bugs that crawl into corners or hide under rocks might be a good way to conduct surveillance of terrorist activities in hostile territories.
I can imagine the look of fear as the bombers fly over Kabul and out drops hundreds of parachuted bundles of food. Would the Afghan people appreciate this joke on the Taliban? It might convince a few people that we're not trying to kill the Mulims - just encourage peace throughout the world, as they also espouse.
Of course, it should not be Big Macs but the food they are already accustomed to. Dropping more and more food and medical supplies all over the country might eventually make them dependent on us, but that should not be our long-term goal either. Once the Taliban are kicked out by well-fed but fed-up Afghans, then we should help them rebuild their country however they want to.
People have raised two problems that are caused by the single store mechanism: the need to keep backup copies in case one gets corrupted, and the surprising growth of disk usage when writing small changes to large shared files.
I thought of a variation in the single store mechanism that would solve both problems. While it is good to reduce many redundant copies of files, it is not essential that the number be reduced to only one for each file. Instead of a single store per file, how about a small number, on the order of two or three? This could be done even if there were only one use of a file, just to provide automatic redundancy. Putting the copies on different disks would make it even better - disk is fairly cheap after all. RAID makes a lot of sense for the same reason.
When a change is made to a file that has duplicates (maybe not the right word; "shared" is not right either; "mirrors", "clones", "replicas"?), then one of the duplicates can be used rather than making a new file. This reduces the number of duplicates by one, but if you are short of disk space, you can live with it for a while.
Storing differences would make sense too, though with even more complexity in the file system trying to make it transparent.
One other thing I haven't seen mention of: The article suggests that the process first looks for redundant copies, and then makes a signature of the file which is stored in a database. But the signature would not be useful (except for verifying integrity) unless it were compared to that of other files. So the process is most likely that it looks for duplicates by first computing the signature of a file and looking that up in the database to see if any other file has the same.
Looking for similar though not identical files could be done in a similar way, by computing signatures of blocks of the file. When there is an insertion in the middle of a file, we can keep data in blocks aligned by inserting new blocks rather than shifting all the content of following blocks.
I don't know much about compressed file systems, but I would guess they are approaching the same kind of solution from another direction. But I wonder if any compressed file system tries to build in some small amount of redundancy for reliability while it is saving you from grossly wasteful redundancy.
Slashdot Mirror
Many people seem to still believe what they were taught 30 years ago about the population explosion. What was true then is no longer true - the world is changing rapidly, and one of the many ways it is changing is *reducing* our population growth.
Hans Rosling's videos are excellent, as well as engaging. I reference a couple others, and explore the issue of world population quite a bit more in this blog: http://globalconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/08/29/world-population-is-stabilizing/
Ah, I meant to post as myself, but checked the checkbox next to my name, which actually means "Post Anonymously". Someone should fix that.
If there is no proof that a person was in fact registered, then that person has no case for claiming their provisional vote should count, and I would be very surprised if any court supported such a claim.
With new voters, going to the proper polling place for the first time may be tricky. How are they supposed to find out where it is? Perhaps the voter's friends are in another precinct. Perhaps the person who helped the new voter register didn't know where the proper place is for that voter, or perhaps they even misled the new voter about the proper place so they would go to the wrong place and thus invalidate their vote (given Blackwell's policy).
Another thing that happens occasionally that affects both old and new voters is that the polling place may change, even for the same precinct, or the precinct changes out from under the people in the precinct.
So what's the big deal about allowing the person to vote provisionally, and what is the real danger of fraud? Someone must eventually check whether the person is registered in order for the vote to count, and the fact that they did vote must be recorded with the official record for that person. Seems there is less chance of fraud with provisional voting than if a person somehow registered in multiple places, multiple counties or multiple states.
The opposition to provisional voting seems motivated more by a desire to eliminate as many new voters as possible rather than any honest concern for accurate voting.
In my opinion, the only downside of provisional voting is the extra expense of doing the proper followup paperwork.
Hmm, according to Google, only one other person had the same idea. Maybe if we spread this meme around, MS will get the message that it is pointless to defend the generic "Windows" term.
If you only build bricks and farm flax, that would indeed be boring. Maybe you were in a far corner of Egypt with no one else around to help you... that would indeed be boring. But if so, you really missed the game entirely.
Did you not see the hundreds of other kinds of buildings that you can make and dozens of technologies you can use? Did you miss the challenges of the tests of the seven disciplines? The early tests are easy, and give you something of the flavor of the later, harder tests, which are often so difficult that you must rally the cooperation of many other players to help you accomplish your goals. Did you miss the collective challenge that, by the end of one year, for each of the seven disciplines, at least one person must complete all of the seven tests?
The game is not without its flaws. But in some cases the flaws are deliberate, and we the players are challenged to collectively figure out how to fix the problems that come up.
Yes, it is an artificial world, set up to work much like real life in a couple ways. And yes, we could be putting similar energy into the real world, but here is why I do it. 1. I already do put similar energy into the real world, and it is nice to take a break from that. 2. There are many things very unlike the real world that are fun to play with. 3. We get to change how the game itself works, by passing laws and voting on new features. 4. I don't care for the combat games - I don't need that particular thrill.
There is no other online game like it (cooperative, evolving, overarching goals, in a massive online multiplayer environment), not that I know of. Please post if you know of others - I'd like to play more games like this.
The constraint of a 2m wide cable seems unnecessary in the first place. What is wrong with having a much thicker structure at the point of greatest stress near the LEO, and thinning out the farther it is from that center point, both up and down? The combined strength of many parallel cables made of cheaper materials such as steel, kevlar, or fiberglass should be equivalent to nanotubes (or nanoscrolls), and the redundancy of more parallelism will add to its safety as well.
How wide would it need to be? Maybe 200m or 2km is enough. I don't know; you tell me. But I doubt there is any physical reason that it can't be as wide as necessary to hold the remainder of the structure. The obstacle may be a practical constraint involving how this structure can be assembled, or how much material it would require, which implies economic constraints.
The construction process suggested in "The Space Elevator" involves a thin ribbon of nanotube material. If that were to work, the same process would apply to my suggestion as well, but instead of adding more nanotube cables along the whole length, first thicken up the middle with short strings, and then gradually thicken up longer portions of the cable. This also has the advantage of not requiring the first climbers to lift strings that are a large fraction of the weight of the whole ribbon.
But another process, that doesn't rely on any initial ribbon hanging down to Earth, would start at the LEO point and grow both up and down, always thickening in the middle enough to support the structure in both directions. The problem with this approach is where does the material come from? Lifting it up from Earth by rockets is what we want to avoid, hence the idea of mining it from an astroid.
Here's a related experiment that someone should try: Imagine flying a kite with a really long string, and after 10 meters or so you attach another kite with its own string, thus doubling the string width. Repeat after another 10 meters, etc. You should be able to keep doing this without using thicker strings because each kite only needs to lift its own string. The constraint is that the wind will only hold up a certain weight of string for each kite, and you run out of air after a while anyway. But each kite lower on the string will help hold up the string for the higher kites as well as holding up their own shorter length of string. So how high could the first kite go?
I'm glad you mentioned Personal Rapid Transit in this context. In contrast to most large-vehicle systems, such as buses, trains, and this evacuated tube transport system, PRT systems have advantages on practically all measures:
T /Background2.html
Large-vehicle system PRT
-------------------- ---
5-30 min between vehicles < 1 minute
shorter service hours 24x7
few stations widely spaced many stations nearby
more stops = longer transit non-stop trips
driver required per vehicle automated cars
large heavy vehicles small light cars
large expensive tracks smaller cheaper tracks
large visual impact smaller visual impact
PRT systems have many of the advantages of automobile systems, but without the enviromental and safety hazards. Only 1/6 as many PRT cars would be required as automobiles (which mostly sit around in parking lots all day).
See the more complete details at:
http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/PR
and http://www.cprt.org/FactSheet.htm
Maybe we'll be less tolerant of racism, child
abuse, slavery, dictators, monopolies,
pollution...
Curiously, most of those things are a form of intolerance themselves. Racism is an intolerant disrespect for members of another race. Child abuse is often due to an intolerance of a child's innocent behavior that provokes the abuser. Dictators are intolerant of the democratic wishes of the people. Monopolies are intolerant of competition.
I admit I become intolerant when faced with intolerance. I do try to be reasonable with intolerant people, but it doesn't usually last long, partly because the intolerance is often so irrational that there is little room for reason. So I end up angry and frustrated.
My hope is that more communication will at least get people thinking about more variety of ideas at an earlier age, and they will thus be more open to thiking about the alternatives. But it may take a couple more generations of global communication before we see much visible effect in the average level of civilization.
Although the information age may encourage more moderation over time, it could also foster more extremists, because more people will be able to find a community of support for exactly their brand of extremism.
Hey, hey. The Boston Globe reports Pentagon planning to aid Afghans! So they liked my idea, not that they got it from me. This gives me confidence that they really are trying to do the right thing, if they could just figure out what it is.
In addition, maybe we should bug the food to listen in on millions of conversations about "Where's bin Laden?". Billions of robot bugs that crawl into corners or hide under rocks might be a good way to conduct surveillance of terrorist activities in hostile territories.
I can imagine the look of fear as the bombers fly over Kabul and out drops hundreds of parachuted bundles of food. Would the Afghan people appreciate this joke on the Taliban? It might convince a few people that we're not trying to kill the Mulims - just encourage peace throughout the world, as they also espouse.
Of course, it should not be Big Macs but the food they are already accustomed to. Dropping more and more food and medical supplies all over the country might eventually make them dependent on us, but that should not be our long-term goal either. Once the Taliban are kicked out by well-fed but fed-up Afghans, then we should help them rebuild their country however they want to.
People have raised two problems that are caused by the single store mechanism: the need to keep backup copies in case one gets corrupted, and the surprising growth of disk usage when writing small changes to large shared files.
I thought of a variation in the single store mechanism that would solve both problems. While it is good to reduce many redundant copies of files, it is not essential that the number be reduced to only one for each file. Instead of a single store per file, how about a small number, on the order of two or three? This could be done even if there were only one use of a file, just to provide automatic redundancy. Putting the copies on different disks would make it even better - disk is fairly cheap after all. RAID makes a lot of sense for the same reason.
When a change is made to a file that has duplicates (maybe not the right word; "shared" is not right either; "mirrors", "clones", "replicas"?), then one of the duplicates can be used rather than making a new file. This reduces the number of duplicates by one, but if you are short of disk space, you can live with it for a while.
Storing differences would make sense too, though with even more complexity in the file system trying to make it transparent.
One other thing I haven't seen mention of: The article suggests that the process first looks for redundant copies, and then makes a signature of the file which is stored in a database. But the signature would not be useful (except for verifying integrity) unless it were compared to that of other files. So the process is most likely that it looks for duplicates by first computing the signature of a file and looking that up in the database to see if any other file has the same.
Looking for similar though not identical files could be done in a similar way, by computing signatures of blocks of the file. When there is an insertion in the middle of a file, we can keep data in blocks aligned by inserting new blocks rather than shifting all the content of following blocks.
I don't know much about compressed file systems, but I would guess they are approaching the same kind of solution from another direction. But I wonder if any compressed file system tries to build in some small amount of redundancy for reliability while it is saving you from grossly wasteful redundancy.