Eh, perhaps. We came up with various ways to make light, and each one was an improvement over the last. The Edison bulb was simple, cheap, easy to make, portable, and so on so we used it for a few generations until we found a way to improve on it. Now other technologies have caught up and are surpassing its value, so we're starting to convert. One of the reasons it's taking so long is that the existing technology is entrenched; people want to keep using their old equipment, and they don't want to change how they're using it, so the new technology has to LOOK just like the old technology, while still providing an obvious improvement. e.g. It's easier to design a new lamp around LED technology than it is to design a replacement Edison base LED bulb that throws as much light as a 100W incandescent, but people want to replace their bulbs without replacing all their lamps.
So anybody with any sense of perspective will actually be able to figure it out. Otherwise the same could be said for ANY techological advance. Recording audio on sticky tape and rust? How stupid is that? Solid state makes MUCH more sense!
These days, switching power supplies are easy. I think the REAL hard part is heat dissipation. That's especially true when you're trying to make your light bulb fit into an existing socket; your form is limited by the function of an older technology. Whereas if you get to design the lamp from the ground up, you've got a bit more leeway.
And it's why high-wattage replacements are harder to find, very expensive and weigh a ton. I don't think I've seen anything higher than 100W equivalent in an Edison screw base yet.
"And it's revolutionized other industries - aircraft lighting is rapidly going LEDs..."
Absolutely. Probably the airport runway stuff too. I've seen lots of LEDs on commercial trucks, especially the marker lights, and a lot of newer car models use them for signaling. Also I've noticed a lot of traffic lights have gone LED. I think that's a tremendous savings. Not just the power, but consider how much it costs to change one of those suckers. (Remember: you have to roll a truck with a cherry picker, and redirect traffic... at least.) Swap one out every 20 years instead of, I dunno, once every year or two? And they can take damage and keep running -- I once saw one doing a perfectly adequate job with about 1/3 of the LEDs dark. Try THAT with an incandescent.
LEDs (the component) are actually dimmable, and it works pretty well. There are two main ways to do it.
One secret is to control the current, not the voltage. The response isn't linear, but it's close enough. (Also: what are you comparing to? How linear are incandescents?)
The other method is to use Pulse-Width Modulation, which is basically turning the LEDs off-and-on very rapidly. The ratio of on-time to off-time controls the brightness. It's quite linear. (Actually there are other modulation methods, PWM is the simplest and most commonly used. And easy enough to look up.)
Of course, assuming you're planning to use a standard dimmer control, both of these require some extra circuitry to measure the incoming voltage, then use that to apply the techniques in a way that approximate an incandescent dimming. It also requires the bulb to be able to light using a relatively wide range of incoming voltages. But honestly, neither of these is particularly arduous.
Also, no noise, no matter how dim it gets. Incandescents get very inefficient as you dim them (a greater percentage of the power goes to heat); LED bulb efficiency won't change much, and the color will stay the same.
I can't speak for anything currently on the market, but in theory, it should be possible to create an LED bulb that dims very well.
I find it interesting to note that your entire argument centers around, not running servers, but abusing bandwidth. One does not necessarily lead to the other, and the latter can be done without doing the former. (And your example doesn't even involve running a server, but instead involves running a client.)
If they want to avoid subscribers abusing bandwidth, then they should say so, instead of prohibiting one kind of thing that could possibly be used to abuse bandwidth, but is often useful without being abusive.
Classic case of medicating the symptoms instead of looking for a cure.
I feel sorry for people that will never know the joy of typing on an ASR-33 teletype. Composing anything with that awesome "KACHUNK KACHUNK KACHUNK"...
...erm...
...oh, um, on second thought, forget I said that.
Hah hah, no, seriously. You're right, the old IBM keyboards were AWESOME. Great tactile feedback, impervious to damage, and in a pinch you could use it as a blunt weapon. Against a bear. And when you were finished bludgeoning the bear into submission, hose off the blood and fur and go back to typing.
Or you could have end-to-end verification of your vote. Doesn't guarantee the software is the same, but at least you'd know that YOUR vote got there intact. And if not, presumably there'd be something you could do about it. Enough people complaining might get paid attention to.
"...planned to test an experimental feature where the voter can check via a physically separate channel (smart phone) if his or her vote has been registered correctly." Yep, that's the kind of thing I had in mind. It'd have to be done properly, of course, but somebody is apparently thinking along the same lines.
The fact that the government is asking for help with the software suggests to me that they're making an honest effort. But if you start from the premise that the government is automatically and irredeemably dishonest, and this is just being done as a distraction, then there's not much you can do short of overthrowing it.
You guys are all over-thinking this. Unless you have a large, dedicated cadre of people gaming the bittorrents, any contribution of this sort is likely to be statistically insignificant.
If only 2 people are downloading a movie, making it look like, say, 12 people are won't really make the movie look much more popular. And if it's already in the thousands, an extra few won't be noticeable. How many of these downloads can a few people fake before they run out of resources, or patience? How many before they significantly skew the statistics? How much money will you have to spend to close that gap, and is it worth the effort?
You're better off using a hacked tracker to provide false information, or using some kind of hacked client that fakes huge numbers of downloads. And I bet somebody will figure out how to detect both of those....
Generally if a system can be gamed, it will be gamed, but at this point in time I don't think it's going to be a problem.
As always, MHO, and probably pulled out of my shorts anyway.:)
I've recently installed both Ubuntu and Mint Linuxes on my desktop computer (and yes, I know they're practically the same thing, I had my reasons), and I have to say that they both Just Worked. The only thing I had to install manually was the latest beta NVidia driver in order to get my Steam games working.
Quite inferior to Windows 7, of course. There I only had to install the OS, then pull out the motherboard's driver disc and install half a dozen drivers (with frequent reboots), then I had to download and install NVidia's drivers.
...though they'd like you to think that. That's the record industry. Music is alive and well and making tons of money in ways that are not necessarily bound to sales of small plastic discs.
Re:GIMP vs. Ps (If PS is free!)
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"Should." Doesn't prohibit other use from what I can see.
OTOH, realistically speaking, it's an old version that they don't really want to keep supporting, and from what I understand, doesn't work on Windows past XP.
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Me, I glue them into the socket. When I have to change the bulb, by God, I'm gonna replace the entire fixture!
Pisses off the landlord, too. Nothing is better for knocking bux off your deposit return short of trashing the place!
For my next trick, I'm going to pull up all the carpet and staple it to the ceiling. That way it stays clean and I won't wear it out.
Eh, perhaps. We came up with various ways to make light, and each one was an improvement over the last. The Edison bulb was simple, cheap, easy to make, portable, and so on so we used it for a few generations until we found a way to improve on it. Now other technologies have caught up and are surpassing its value, so we're starting to convert. One of the reasons it's taking so long is that the existing technology is entrenched; people want to keep using their old equipment, and they don't want to change how they're using it, so the new technology has to LOOK just like the old technology, while still providing an obvious improvement. e.g. It's easier to design a new lamp around LED technology than it is to design a replacement Edison base LED bulb that throws as much light as a 100W incandescent, but people want to replace their bulbs without replacing all their lamps.
So anybody with any sense of perspective will actually be able to figure it out. Otherwise the same could be said for ANY techological advance. Recording audio on sticky tape and rust? How stupid is that? Solid state makes MUCH more sense!
"the only hard part is a switching power supply".
These days, switching power supplies are easy. I think the REAL hard part is heat dissipation. That's especially true when you're trying to make your light bulb fit into an existing socket; your form is limited by the function of an older technology. Whereas if you get to design the lamp from the ground up, you've got a bit more leeway.
And it's why high-wattage replacements are harder to find, very expensive and weigh a ton. I don't think I've seen anything higher than 100W equivalent in an Edison screw base yet.
"And it's revolutionized other industries - aircraft lighting is rapidly going LEDs..."
Absolutely. Probably the airport runway stuff too. I've seen lots of LEDs on commercial trucks, especially the marker lights, and a lot of newer car models use them for signaling. Also I've noticed a lot of traffic lights have gone LED. I think that's a tremendous savings. Not just the power, but consider how much it costs to change one of those suckers. (Remember: you have to roll a truck with a cherry picker, and redirect traffic... at least.) Swap one out every 20 years instead of, I dunno, once every year or two? And they can take damage and keep running -- I once saw one doing a perfectly adequate job with about 1/3 of the LEDs dark. Try THAT with an incandescent.
LEDs (the component) are actually dimmable, and it works pretty well. There are two main ways to do it.
One secret is to control the current, not the voltage. The response isn't linear, but it's close enough. (Also: what are you comparing to? How linear are incandescents?)
The other method is to use Pulse-Width Modulation, which is basically turning the LEDs off-and-on very rapidly. The ratio of on-time to off-time controls the brightness. It's quite linear. (Actually there are other modulation methods, PWM is the simplest and most commonly used. And easy enough to look up.)
Of course, assuming you're planning to use a standard dimmer control, both of these require some extra circuitry to measure the incoming voltage, then use that to apply the techniques in a way that approximate an incandescent dimming. It also requires the bulb to be able to light using a relatively wide range of incoming voltages. But honestly, neither of these is particularly arduous.
Also, no noise, no matter how dim it gets. Incandescents get very inefficient as you dim them (a greater percentage of the power goes to heat); LED bulb efficiency won't change much, and the color will stay the same.
I can't speak for anything currently on the market, but in theory, it should be possible to create an LED bulb that dims very well.
Economies of scale.
I find it interesting to note that your entire argument centers around, not running servers, but abusing bandwidth. One does not necessarily lead to the other, and the latter can be done without doing the former. (And your example doesn't even involve running a server, but instead involves running a client.)
If they want to avoid subscribers abusing bandwidth, then they should say so, instead of prohibiting one kind of thing that could possibly be used to abuse bandwidth, but is often useful without being abusive.
Classic case of medicating the symptoms instead of looking for a cure.
Anybody using the word "literally" figuratively needs to be taken out and shot. Literally.
I feel sorry for people that will never know the joy of typing on an ASR-33 teletype. Composing anything with that awesome "KACHUNK KACHUNK KACHUNK"...
Hah hah, no, seriously. You're right, the old IBM keyboards were AWESOME. Great tactile feedback, impervious to damage, and in a pinch you could use it as a blunt weapon. Against a bear. And when you were finished bludgeoning the bear into submission, hose off the blood and fur and go back to typing.
Reading comprehension is fine. Attention span is... ooh! Shiny!
... and C) all the other parties, which somehow everybody managed to ignore. No matter what their platforms.
Or you could have end-to-end verification of your vote. Doesn't guarantee the software is the same, but at least you'd know that YOUR vote got there intact. And if not, presumably there'd be something you could do about it. Enough people complaining might get paid attention to.
"...planned to test an experimental feature where the voter can check via a physically separate channel (smart phone) if his or her vote has been registered correctly." Yep, that's the kind of thing I had in mind. It'd have to be done properly, of course, but somebody is apparently thinking along the same lines.
The fact that the government is asking for help with the software suggests to me that they're making an honest effort. But if you start from the premise that the government is automatically and irredeemably dishonest, and this is just being done as a distraction, then there's not much you can do short of overthrowing it.
Per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth#Safety_considerations the food grade stuff has got little to no crystalline silica. Of course, even without silica, you don't want to be breathing a fine, abrasive powder.
Diatomaceous earth
What is your objection to diatomaceous earth?
... More stuff for me to ignore from EA, aside from mocking them.
Ah, one of my favorite Python sketches.
... I'm not sure if this is funny or sick. I'm leaning towards "both".
We had to carve our own ICs out of wood.
Get over yourself.
"Flailing around?" I don't flail. But then, I know how to drive a stick.
Obviously you've never seen it done competently.
"...burn out the clutch." Heh. I rest my case.
You guys are all over-thinking this. Unless you have a large, dedicated cadre of people gaming the bittorrents, any contribution of this sort is likely to be statistically insignificant.
If only 2 people are downloading a movie, making it look like, say, 12 people are won't really make the movie look much more popular. And if it's already in the thousands, an extra few won't be noticeable. How many of these downloads can a few people fake before they run out of resources, or patience? How many before they significantly skew the statistics? How much money will you have to spend to close that gap, and is it worth the effort?
You're better off using a hacked tracker to provide false information, or using some kind of hacked client that fakes huge numbers of downloads. And I bet somebody will figure out how to detect both of those....
Generally if a system can be gamed, it will be gamed, but at this point in time I don't think it's going to be a problem.
As always, MHO, and probably pulled out of my shorts anyway. :)
I've recently installed both Ubuntu and Mint Linuxes on my desktop computer (and yes, I know they're practically the same thing, I had my reasons), and I have to say that they both Just Worked. The only thing I had to install manually was the latest beta NVidia driver in order to get my Steam games working.
Quite inferior to Windows 7, of course. There I only had to install the OS, then pull out the motherboard's driver disc and install half a dozen drivers (with frequent reboots), then I had to download and install NVidia's drivers.
Windows is MUCH better.
Mmmm! Minty fresh!
...though they'd like you to think that. That's the record industry. Music is alive and well and making tons of money in ways that are not necessarily bound to sales of small plastic discs.
"Should." Doesn't prohibit other use from what I can see.
OTOH, realistically speaking, it's an old version that they don't really want to keep supporting, and from what I understand, doesn't work on Windows past XP.