I agree with you about halfway. It is unavoidable. But your conclusion is that we should just accept it and move on. I disagree. We should not accept it. If voting machines can't be built by people who have no conflict of interest then they should not be built at all. Plenty of other large democracies get by fine with paper voting, and so can we. If that's what it takes to get rid of the conflict of interest then that's what we should do.
Multiple safeguards are the name of the game. The machines should be inspected and every other reasonable precaution should be taken to ensure that they don't come biased in the first place. Belt and suspenders and some rope too.
I'm confused as to why the people voting weren't given access to an on site authority or technician that could verify this was occurring.
I can't speak for everywhere, but where I voted last time there were about half a dozen electronic voting machines and about half a dozen old people running the show. The place served perhaps a few thousand voters. There are, I imagine, tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of voting locations around the country. Putting an on-call technician at each one is completely impractical.
Have to put in the disclaimer. Very aware of the famous quote about "delivering the election to George Bush" by Diebold's CEO. It was in his capacity as a Republic business leader, but still a very, very, very poor showing on his part, and ridiculous appearance of a conflict of interest, even if none actually exists in reality.
I just want to point out that the conflict of interest does exist in this case. It doesn't matter how honorable the guy is. Conflict of interest is a matter of position, not character. He could be the most honorable guy in the world and never let his CEO position conflict with his Republican position, but the conflict of interest is still there.
As a practical matter, nobody is 100% honorable, and somebody who's in charge of building voting machines should not be politically active.
More importantly, we should switch to a form of voting in which a single company is not in a position to completely screw up the entire election.
Somebody once pointed at a picture of a frosted birthday cake on my web site from a forum. So I grabbed my image editor and built a special edition of the cake just for him, where the frosting read "Don't link to my images!"
I also have a specially crafted JPEG which is under 1000 bytes but which produces a 20,000x20,000 pixel image filled with black. It will totally screw up the layout of any page linking to it if they haven't entered an explicit size for the tag.
The thing is that if you're internet-literate, reporting about Twitter is like reporting about the different sizes of paper your adversary might use to send a letter.
It's all the internet. What you use on the internet is much less significant. E-mail, IM, Twitter, it's all essentially the same. Twitter is absolutely nothing special. It could be torn down and replaced with something else tomorrow. A report which talks about "Twitter" would then be completely invalidated. But a report which simply talks about "the internet" would remain valid. That's really what's silly about this.
I agree that clinical trials of more surgical procedures would be a good idea. But I disagree with the original implication (which you didn't make, and perhaps I misinterpreted) that this means that surgical procedures in general are not worthwhile. But it would be great to have better statistics on them like we do with most drugs.
As for homeopathy, I stand corrected. Half of India and China alone is enough to qualify.
Thank you for confirming the essential worthlessness of your position. The only reason to keep this spectrum for TV is because TV was here first. Never mind that it's a limited public resource that could be put to better use. You got here first and that's all that matters!
You think that your free television trumps the myriad of useful applications that could be placed in that spectrum. That, in a word, is selfishness, pure and simple.
Wow, you beg the question in so many ways there. (In the old-school sense of assuming the conclusion, not in the new sense of "raise the question".) Let me count the ways:
You assume the worth of television. Is television worthwhile? Is Heroes worthwhile? Is Heroes HD worthwhile? My answer to all of these things is: no. Television is a blight on society and we'd all be better off without it, even if that spectrum remained off-limits. Eliminating broadcast TV and opening that spectrum for other things is a double bonus.
You assume that 30 million people watch the HD version. This I seriously doubt. HDTV uptake is still pretty slow. Most of those 30 million people are watching the SD version.
You assume that 30 million people watch the HD version on broadcast TV. Everybody I know who watches TV uses cable TV, not broadcast TV. No doubt some people are watching Heroes over the air. Some of them are even watching the HD version over the air. How many? Not 30 million! Probably not even 3 million.
You assume that whitespace devices will interfere with cable TV. Given that broadcast TV doesn't interfere with cable TV, this is complete, utter bullshit.
Your position may have some merit, but if it does, you certainly haven't demonstrated it. Please come up with some better arguments than this crap.
Now, would I expect a controlled study of cataract surgery to show that it is more effective than a placebo technique? Yes, I'd put my money on that. But as a matter of sound scientific knowledge, we can't say it's a proven technique; we have to admit the possibility that there's some other factor at work.
Well, we really agree. This is the crucial part. Do they work? Almost certainly yes. Are they proven beyond any doubt? No.
This is not what the original post said, however. The original post claimed that "And many times, when there is [peer review], the procedure is found to be ineffective at best" and implied that surgery as a whole is not very useful.
Most surgical procedures are highly effective. Maybe not in the "is it absolutely certain that there isn't something else going on" sense, but in the "would I pay a gigantic pile of money to have it done to me if I needed it" sense they are. If surgeries which are clinically studied tend to be ineffective, it's because of a selection effect on which surgeries get studied, not because surgery as a whole is a bunch of crap.
And an aside: homeopathy, wildly popular? Not in my universe.
I'm aware that anecdotes do not constitute evidence. But there's an enormous difference between taking some homeopathic remedy and "feeling better" (meanwhile thousands take them and feel nothing) and having a large and immediate success rate with something like lens replacement surgery for cataracts. Cataracts do not get better by themselves, not even with a placebo. Surgery to replace the clouded lens produces rapid and highly effective results.
To my mind, what you're saying is essentially like saying that the sun rising in the East because of the Earth's rotation is scientifically unproven because nobody has ever tried stopping the Earth's rotation to see if it actually changes anything.
I'll certainly grant that surgical procedures should be tested for validity and that there are some which do not have the desired effect or a success rate to justify performing them. But most surgeries correct blatantly obvious mechanical defects. Has anyone ever performed a scientific study on the effectiveness of replacing a worn-out car transmission? Have you ever doubted that a transmission replacement is effective when it's clear that the original transmission is broken?
Regarding your post and your signature, IMO what's incredibly stupid is reserving enormous blocks of the spectrum for something as worthless as broadcast television instead of freeing it up for more useful activities.
Yes. You're changing your trust from a small secretive cabal of voting machine executives to an enormous number of people divided into disparate groups each of which would just love to catch the other group doing something dirty. Can you not see why the second is vastly preferable to the first?
Every surgical procedure that has been been tested versus placebo surgery, has proven to be no better than the placebo.
And just how many have been so studied? Has surgery for removing wisdom teeth, replacing a lens full of cataracts with an artificial one, or removing the appendix been studied? Because those are all procedures which have been done on people I know quite well, and which have been enormously effective in the end. If what you say is true then it is because only a small number of surgical procedures have been so studied, and the ones that get studied are the ones for which there is already a great deal of doubt over their effectiveness.
If someone's appendix is infected and about to burst and this is surgically removed, are you going to tell me that it's no better than a placebo surgery which leaves the infected appendix in the abdomen? If someone can't see because their eyes are full of cataracts, are you going to tell me that surgery to replace their lens and restore clear vision is no better than a placebo surgery? Seriously?
Thanks. So now there's one procedure which may be ineffective, and about a million extremely effective ones. Not quite enough to prove the original poster's point. I suppose it's a start though.
What the fuck is wrong with you? Nowhere did I criticize the Wikipedia article. I just answered this guy's question. Good god. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!
There is no requirement that a Golomb ruler can measure all distances up to its length, but if it does, it is called a perfect Golomb ruler. It has been proven that no perfect Golomb ruler exists for five or more marks.
And then links to a page which contains the proof.
Cite! I know plenty of people who have received useless drugs. I cannot think of a single person I know who have had surgery that did not immediately have a dramatic positive effect on their condition.
Just in the interests of accuracy, I note that the "navigate to a site that hacks your browser and jailbreaks your phone" jailbreaker has been dead for quite a long time. Modern jailbreakers work by exploiting the phone as it's connected to the computer over the USB cable. I think they perform a software restore and convince it to load a hacked OS, but I'm not sure.
None of this detracts in any way from your overall point, though. The "hack your browser" jailbreaker no longer works because Apple patched the bug it exploited, not because the browser no longer runs as root.
But it's not! It's like saying that once you've build one house, building a second house is "almost a twofer" because you can use all that knowledge you gained from the first one. I have no doubt that building a second house is quite a bit easier because of that, but it's still a hell of a lot of work!
I and millions of other professional software developers out there will disagree with you rather strongly. You certainly can make a fine living writing software. It's not remotely like being an actor.
If you develop an OS X app and an iPhone app you might be able to share some of the model layer code. But most of the code will have to be rewritten. It's a bit easier in that it's the same language and the same concepts, but it's hardly a two-for-one deal as was implied.
You don't have to break your contract to use your phone on another network. For example, maybe you have an AT&T contract but like to use a local carrier when you visit other countries. I don't think that unlocking the phone is a DMCA violation though.
It will literally take you a day or two if you already know C and are familiar with object oriented programming. It will also give you some new perspectives on programming which will more than pay for the time invested.
Slashdot Mirror
AT&T or not, all iPhones are GSM.
I agree with you about halfway. It is unavoidable. But your conclusion is that we should just accept it and move on. I disagree. We should not accept it. If voting machines can't be built by people who have no conflict of interest then they should not be built at all. Plenty of other large democracies get by fine with paper voting, and so can we. If that's what it takes to get rid of the conflict of interest then that's what we should do.
Multiple safeguards are the name of the game. The machines should be inspected and every other reasonable precaution should be taken to ensure that they don't come biased in the first place. Belt and suspenders and some rope too.
I'm confused as to why the people voting weren't given access to an on site authority or technician that could verify this was occurring.
I can't speak for everywhere, but where I voted last time there were about half a dozen electronic voting machines and about half a dozen old people running the show. The place served perhaps a few thousand voters. There are, I imagine, tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of voting locations around the country. Putting an on-call technician at each one is completely impractical.
Have to put in the disclaimer. Very aware of the famous quote about "delivering the election to George Bush" by Diebold's CEO. It was in his capacity as a Republic business leader, but still a very, very, very poor showing on his part, and ridiculous appearance of a conflict of interest, even if none actually exists in reality.
I just want to point out that the conflict of interest does exist in this case. It doesn't matter how honorable the guy is. Conflict of interest is a matter of position, not character. He could be the most honorable guy in the world and never let his CEO position conflict with his Republican position, but the conflict of interest is still there.
As a practical matter, nobody is 100% honorable, and somebody who's in charge of building voting machines should not be politically active.
More importantly, we should switch to a form of voting in which a single company is not in a position to completely screw up the entire election.
Somebody once pointed at a picture of a frosted birthday cake on my web site from a forum. So I grabbed my image editor and built a special edition of the cake just for him, where the frosting read "Don't link to my images!"
I also have a specially crafted JPEG which is under 1000 bytes but which produces a 20,000x20,000 pixel image filled with black. It will totally screw up the layout of any page linking to it if they haven't entered an explicit size for the tag.
The thing is that if you're internet-literate, reporting about Twitter is like reporting about the different sizes of paper your adversary might use to send a letter.
It's all the internet. What you use on the internet is much less significant. E-mail, IM, Twitter, it's all essentially the same. Twitter is absolutely nothing special. It could be torn down and replaced with something else tomorrow. A report which talks about "Twitter" would then be completely invalidated. But a report which simply talks about "the internet" would remain valid. That's really what's silly about this.
I agree that clinical trials of more surgical procedures would be a good idea. But I disagree with the original implication (which you didn't make, and perhaps I misinterpreted) that this means that surgical procedures in general are not worthwhile. But it would be great to have better statistics on them like we do with most drugs.
As for homeopathy, I stand corrected. Half of India and China alone is enough to qualify.
Thank you for confirming the essential worthlessness of your position. The only reason to keep this spectrum for TV is because TV was here first. Never mind that it's a limited public resource that could be put to better use. You got here first and that's all that matters!
You think that your free television trumps the myriad of useful applications that could be placed in that spectrum. That, in a word, is selfishness, pure and simple.
Wow, you beg the question in so many ways there. (In the old-school sense of assuming the conclusion, not in the new sense of "raise the question".) Let me count the ways:
Your position may have some merit, but if it does, you certainly haven't demonstrated it. Please come up with some better arguments than this crap.
Now, would I expect a controlled study of cataract surgery to show that it is more effective than a placebo technique? Yes, I'd put my money on that. But as a matter of sound scientific knowledge, we can't say it's a proven technique; we have to admit the possibility that there's some other factor at work.
Well, we really agree. This is the crucial part. Do they work? Almost certainly yes. Are they proven beyond any doubt? No.
This is not what the original post said, however. The original post claimed that "And many times, when there is [peer review], the procedure is found to be ineffective at best" and implied that surgery as a whole is not very useful.
Most surgical procedures are highly effective. Maybe not in the "is it absolutely certain that there isn't something else going on" sense, but in the "would I pay a gigantic pile of money to have it done to me if I needed it" sense they are. If surgeries which are clinically studied tend to be ineffective, it's because of a selection effect on which surgeries get studied, not because surgery as a whole is a bunch of crap.
And an aside: homeopathy, wildly popular? Not in my universe.
I'm aware that anecdotes do not constitute evidence. But there's an enormous difference between taking some homeopathic remedy and "feeling better" (meanwhile thousands take them and feel nothing) and having a large and immediate success rate with something like lens replacement surgery for cataracts. Cataracts do not get better by themselves, not even with a placebo. Surgery to replace the clouded lens produces rapid and highly effective results.
To my mind, what you're saying is essentially like saying that the sun rising in the East because of the Earth's rotation is scientifically unproven because nobody has ever tried stopping the Earth's rotation to see if it actually changes anything.
I'll certainly grant that surgical procedures should be tested for validity and that there are some which do not have the desired effect or a success rate to justify performing them. But most surgeries correct blatantly obvious mechanical defects. Has anyone ever performed a scientific study on the effectiveness of replacing a worn-out car transmission? Have you ever doubted that a transmission replacement is effective when it's clear that the original transmission is broken?
Regarding your post and your signature, IMO what's incredibly stupid is reserving enormous blocks of the spectrum for something as worthless as broadcast television instead of freeing it up for more useful activities.
Yes. You're changing your trust from a small secretive cabal of voting machine executives to an enormous number of people divided into disparate groups each of which would just love to catch the other group doing something dirty. Can you not see why the second is vastly preferable to the first?
Every surgical procedure that has been been tested versus placebo surgery, has proven to be no better than the placebo.
And just how many have been so studied? Has surgery for removing wisdom teeth, replacing a lens full of cataracts with an artificial one, or removing the appendix been studied? Because those are all procedures which have been done on people I know quite well, and which have been enormously effective in the end. If what you say is true then it is because only a small number of surgical procedures have been so studied, and the ones that get studied are the ones for which there is already a great deal of doubt over their effectiveness.
If someone's appendix is infected and about to burst and this is surgically removed, are you going to tell me that it's no better than a placebo surgery which leaves the infected appendix in the abdomen? If someone can't see because their eyes are full of cataracts, are you going to tell me that surgery to replace their lens and restore clear vision is no better than a placebo surgery? Seriously?
Thanks. So now there's one procedure which may be ineffective, and about a million extremely effective ones. Not quite enough to prove the original poster's point. I suppose it's a start though.
What the fuck is wrong with you? Nowhere did I criticize the Wikipedia article. I just answered this guy's question. Good god. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!
Wikipedia says:
There is no requirement that a Golomb ruler can measure all distances up to its length, but if it does, it is called a perfect Golomb ruler. It has been proven that no perfect Golomb ruler exists for five or more marks.
And then links to a page which contains the proof.
Cite! I know plenty of people who have received useless drugs. I cannot think of a single person I know who have had surgery that did not immediately have a dramatic positive effect on their condition.
Just in the interests of accuracy, I note that the "navigate to a site that hacks your browser and jailbreaks your phone" jailbreaker has been dead for quite a long time. Modern jailbreakers work by exploiting the phone as it's connected to the computer over the USB cable. I think they perform a software restore and convince it to load a hacked OS, but I'm not sure.
None of this detracts in any way from your overall point, though. The "hack your browser" jailbreaker no longer works because Apple patched the bug it exploited, not because the browser no longer runs as root.
But it's not! It's like saying that once you've build one house, building a second house is "almost a twofer" because you can use all that knowledge you gained from the first one. I have no doubt that building a second house is quite a bit easier because of that, but it's still a hell of a lot of work!
I and millions of other professional software developers out there will disagree with you rather strongly. You certainly can make a fine living writing software. It's not remotely like being an actor.
Which doesn't make it any more of a "twofer".
If you develop an OS X app and an iPhone app you might be able to share some of the model layer code. But most of the code will have to be rewritten. It's a bit easier in that it's the same language and the same concepts, but it's hardly a two-for-one deal as was implied.
You don't have to break your contract to use your phone on another network. For example, maybe you have an AT&T contract but like to use a local carrier when you visit other countries. I don't think that unlocking the phone is a DMCA violation though.
It will literally take you a day or two if you already know C and are familiar with object oriented programming. It will also give you some new perspectives on programming which will more than pay for the time invested.