"you shout "archers to the big tower!" and they do"
That's like so slow. What's so useful about that? Have you seen the top players play starcraft or other similar games? Control with voice would hardly help them much - maybe only about as much as having an additional usable finger.
Voice is way overrated for control of computers, esp for specialized control applications (like games).
Brain interfaces would be much better for control. A skilled operator would be able to control 50 different keys. Or control 4 pointers at the same time.
That would be immensely hard to do with a single voice.
Trouble with much of this research
on
Flying By Brain
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Is while some of the popular paths they take can lead to something academically interesting they often don't lead to significantly better understanding, nor really useful.
You stick a bunch of neurons to a computer and after a period of training it does _mostly_ what you want. But once they get to a certain stage of complexity, they don't really know why it works that way - they can't summarize/simplify things (no E=MC^2). It's more like alchemy of old. Stir in a bunch of stuff, and you while know that A+B gets you C but you don't know much else.
Doh stick neurons together and they can learn. Oh wow... Like we didn't know that already. Poke a needle in a frog and it twitches.
Sure you will still have to experiment with neurons, I'm not saying stop science. But lots of this is not good science, nor necessary either (it's only necessary so the scientist can publish some paper and get grants etc).
Sure Alchemy developed into Chemistry and other sciences. But maybe this time scientists knowing what they do should be a bit more scientific, given the possible far-reaching impact of their work. The path many are taking is just like mixing random brews and hoping it works. Hope we skip the consuming mercury, uranium part etc.
As is, for many of the things being researched, we might as well use existing animals as they are, or augment them accordingly instead. For instance, you could use a bunch of trained dolphins in shift to help control and process sonar for a submarine. Same for using dogs to sniff for explosives. It really isn't that hard. You can already interface brains with computers already. In short there are tons of existing prepackaged neurons + supporting "hardware" that do much of what we want.
The dolphins/dogs will get bored? Sure, but once you start using tons of neurons hooked up in complex interlinks (for more features) how'd you know what will happen either, or what is actually happening? Cruel to the dolphins? Maybe. But how about those neurons?
Many animals are pretty good at what they do. And they have very similar requirements to humans (which often means they are well suited to helping us). We can relate to them and they can relate to us (in our limited ways).
If you wire up an animal, you know it is hurting if you are do something bad to it. Whether that is necessary in the big picture is for us to decide, but at least we know we are doing something bad to it.
Whereas if you just keep chucking together more and more neurons together and create symbiotes with rather different requirements and perceptions, things might not be so good, nor go as well.
I've tried the shoulder thing and it hurts, plus not very effective coz I'm light - kinda bounce off! I'm definitely no expert - I've only kicked open about two doors - fortunately they opened inwards ( I probably shouldn't try shoudering/kicking open doors if they open outwards;) ).
How strong are these things anyway? AFAIK most are pretty flimsy. If my relative was inside and seriously incapacitated, and the door was locked only with one of these things, I'd just kick the door in. Much faster than using a key or fumbling with your hand inside.
Of course one would have to be sure that the said relative was not lying close to the trajectory of the door that one is kicking in;).
p.s. only do the kicking stuff if you are wearing good boots/shoes and jeans/thick trousers, so in event the door splinters you don't end up being yet another incapacitated relative. The shoulder charge thing might work - but I'd prefer kicking.
Well he can get a P4 and use it as a toaster- I'm sure one can make a computer that "Makes Toast".
Seriously though, computers give you a far greater number of choices than toasters. More choices = more decisions for users to make. The more powerful a computer system, the more choices you can make. The more decisions you have to make the more mistakes can be made.
Read email? "press a button". Ok so how do you hide/delete email (spam)? Mark emails for future reference? The more things you want to do, the more choices you have to make.
Bring up a website = Press a button? Which website out of the billions?
An easy to use computer system would be designed so that the popularly desired choices would be easy, and you don't have to make many decisions to do what you want.
A toaster only gives you a few choices. So it is easy.
You can set up a computer to be a physical appliance (webTV, tivo), but you'd end up running out of physical space if you wanted to do lots of different stuff.
What your friend has to understand is that the appliances are IN the computer system.
A computer will be like a toaster the day an entire chef's kitchen is like a toaster. An easy to use computer is like a well laid out kitchen, not a toaster.
Even if computers get to the stage where they can read your mind so you don't even need to push any buttons, if you can't think straight and don't know what you want, your mind becomes redundant or even counterproductive in the process. If it ever gets to that stage there will still be different levels of computer users - the differences would be well-laid-out _minds_ for interfacing with computers. It's like people with good coordination and people without.
"One of the reasons why Singapore even has to consider this is, is because they actually pay for the river water that comes through Malaysia. The problem is Malaysia wants more money, which is kinda wierd, considering the water is just going to flow to the ocean anyways"
Singapore is getting water from Malaysia at a very low price (as part of two contracts/agreements IIRC).
"The water is just going to flow to the ocean anyways" is a really silly reason to justify supplying it to another country at a very low price (or even another state for that matter).
Prices are usually based mainly on what the market can bear, not mainly on cost. Even if you want to get rid of stuff, if you can charge for it, you charge for it.
Even if there is excess water now, is no guarantee of there being excess water in the future. Johor (the Malaysian state where the water comes from) is a fairly populous state with quite a number of industries. Future contracts should take that into account if the Malaysian parties in future negotiations do their job properly.
If you divert water from a river the river becomes smaller - that is not something to take lightly either - divert enough and the impact could be significant.
Also, supplying the water from the river to Singapore involves pipes and other infrastructure, that's not super cheap either.
Finally even if the water is really just going to flow to the ocean and never ever anywhere else, it's fresh water. Blood has been spilled for much less.
Suck stuff out of your body? You say it like its a bad thing. One of the reasons humans drink water is to help flush stuff out of the body.
You'd get far more minerals (esp biologically usable minerals) from food than you'd get from water that's fit for drinking.
So drinking really pure water is perfectly fine and likely to be even healthier than mineral water or other water (esp given the amounts of sodium present in some bottled waters).
"For those that are cold - you can always add more clothing".
While I do mostly agree, for modern day white-collar office work you'd need special mittens to keep your hands and fingers warm whilst still allowing you to type without errors.
I'm also not so sure about the efficacy of such mittens and whether they negatively affect typing.
That's coz I live in a tropical country, where we have the reverse problem. If the airconditioning breaks down, work practically stops - it gets too warm to do anything. Even if you wear less it is still too warm (and there are limits to how little you can wear:)...).
Lee Kuan Yew, the ex-Prime Minister of Singapore said the greatest invention of the 20th century was air conditioning. Well, for sure Singapore wouldn't be what it is today without air conditioning.
TCP has no problems saturating links in most real world conditions.
It has problems saturating links when you have a single _short_life_ TCP connection over a very high bandwidth link and high latency link.
When you have MANY tcp connections from many users it works fine. And this is the situation for us (the many), and I forsee it will remain so - e.g. the bandwidth demands of a hundred million customers vs the bandwidth demand of a bunch of researchers.
Researchers in academic labs can go whip up whatever protocol for their own use.
So I don't see this replacing TCP, especially given the limitations of using FEC.
FEC has costs - you need to transmit redundant data - so you can't use 100% of the bandwidth. You probably need to interleave packets so that a burst doesn't wipe everything out - this leads to latency. The interleaving has to take account of the longest typical/common error burst/interruption will last.
Where I see this being useful is multicast/broadcast or extremely high latency links:
**Multicast Say you are multicasting a 1Mbps stream to 1 million users, since you use multicast you don't need 1 Tbps. But believe me you don't want to receive Acks from 1 million users! Neither do you want tens of thousand users (with suboptimal home systems) asking you to resend packets - because you just don't have spare bandwidth to do resends.
This is where FEC can be useful. You send a stream with enough redundant data so that clients can reconstruct it. e.g. you send a 1.5Mbps stream.
However this means clients _ABSOLUTELY_MUST_ now have at least 1Mbps to 1.5Mbps spare capacity (depends on FEC used) - otherwise good luck regenerating the 1Mbps stream! Of course this is the naive case, with some math and smart people you can probably come up with a protocol to cater for users with slower connections - but there will be tradeoffs and it will be "special case" (it'll probably start to look more like download to harddisk first then playing it e.g. super high latency, and a lot less like streaming ).
This is the problem - there are many low-bandwidth clients on the Internet.
**Extremely High latency links. If you have a space vehicle 10 light hours away, retransmissions and Acks do NOT work very well...
But if you can't wait 1 second, then FEC still isn't going to be a magic bullet to solve the problem of transcontinental link latency and still maintain high bandwidth.
You'd need MULTIPLE genuinely independent transcontinental links. Then you synchronize and send your FEC streams over those links. That way spurious interruptions and errors are unlikely to affect all the links.
But that seems like such a special case.
Maybe someone can think of how this would be useful to most of us here.
I believe one of the reasons why more people don't vote is because the voting system doesn't let them express themselves the way they want.
Since they are talking about the disenfranchised, I daresay the disenfranchised are feeling negative and would like to say NO!
But the voting system only allows "Yes" votes. So if they take part, they have to say "Yes" to somebody, or spoil their votes. They may not feel like getting off their butts to pick either option.
Whereas my hypothesis is if you had a range voting system where voters are allowed vote options of No (-1), Don't care (0), Yes (+1), and get to use these for each and all of the candidates, they might actually bother going to vote.
The votes will be totalled up, and the candidate with the most positive total (or least negative) will win.
The subtotals of the No, Don't cares and Yes can also be shown in the results and thus provide a better picture of what the voters think.
Sure the candidate you dislike could still win. BUT, imagine if he/she wins with a NEGATIVE total (or a very substantial negative subtotal). Think of the resulting interviews with the Foreign Media/Press...
"Mr President, how can you say you've been given mandate or have support of the people - the elections show that most people don't want you, you're just the least unwanted candidate".
Would the disenfranchised get off their butts for this?
The people (especially Academics) who say it's the same as Approval Voting don't get it. It's not the same at all - giving everyone Zeroes is NOT the same as giving everyone -1. It's harder to spin a big negative score, as it is to spin a near zero score. Or a slight negative score vs a below midrange positive score.
Actually it's a bit like another sales channel. And your sales person hardly needs to spend any time at all.
People copy the software, install it (without support), use it. Get dependent on it. Then all you need to do is get them to hand over money for some itsy bits of paper or even just itsy bits.
In fact apparently the Microsoft Boss in my country scolded his staff for taking the hardline against infringers. He said something to the effect of "These are happy users of our software, they have done all the work of installing, configuring it themselves, now all we have to do is get them to hand over the money, why are you taking them to court?".
And the sales-proposition is pretty simple: coz over here if they don't license it is about 10x to 100x the cost in fines per infringing copy, plus the bosses risk _jail_time_. Yep jail time for managers and bosses.
Jail-time really gets management's attention. Fines come out of the Company's coffers, jail-time comes out of _your_own_ life.
Which would you rather happen - people buy your competitors stuff and get used to its idiosyncracies? Or you let everyone copy your stuff, and you just go up to those with money and ask them to hand some over?
It works really well if there are network-effects. e.g. multiplayer games, proprietary protocols/document formats, communications software.
Since most of these public figures aren't actually that stupid/ignorant, they are probably assuming their target audience is.
CEOs (and many other smart public figures) don't speak to individuals. They speak to targetted masses. They manipulate masses not individuals.
When public figures (which CEOs are) get away or even rewarded for saying stupid things it doesn't prove or show that they are stupid, it is the public who are stupid. And so far many of such public figures are being rewarded for doing such things (notable politicians and leaders included).
I believe this is an act of cynicism not stupidity.
It's fun to watch when they miscalculate. But nowadays it's quite disgusting how boundlessly stupid/ignorant the public is.
Wow no AMD vs Intel wars:). Hardly even see any Java vs.Net...
On a serious side, I'm curious about java benchmarks on Itanium. I've seen a tender where the specs were java on Itanium for production and java on x86 for development (d'oh).
Anyone have benchmarks comparing Java performance on Itanium vs x86? I've seen some on the SPEC website, any others?
"Do you have any idea what it would cost to locate, establish and lease all of those lines?"
A lot less than it cost to send troops to Iraq, locate Saddam etc.
Picking leaders in Iraq more important to the US than making a good show of picking the leaders in the USA? Maybe most people not tuned in to that channel?
Maybe if someone marketed the US Elections to the US public as a "Reality TV" show people might pay more attention to discrepancies and dubious stuff.
Netscape used to crash very often. Looks like the Mozilla people didn't learn much from it.
Mozilla is just as sucky security-wise as the old non-mozilla Netscape (3.x 4.x). Whether it is OSS or not doesn't make it secure/insecure, it's the programmers that count. Look at Sendmail and Bind (and many other ISC software), security problems year after year for many years. Look at PHPNuke - security problems month after month for years. Look at OpenSSL and OpenSSH and Apache 2.x - not very good track records. Compare with Postfix and qmail, djbdns.
Most programmers should stick to writing their programs in languages where the equivalent of "spelling and grammar" errors don't cause execution of arbitrary attacker-code. Sure after a while some writers learn how to spell and their grammar improves but it sometimes takes years. For security you need _perfection_ in critical areas, and you need to be able to identify and isolate the critical areas _perfectly_ in your architecture.
To the ignorant people who don't get it. Crashing is bad. A crash occurs when the (browser) process write/read data from areas where it shouldn't be touching, or tries to execute code where it shouldn't be executing. This often occurs when the process somehow mistakenly executes _data_ supplied by the attacker/bug finder, or returns to addresses supplied by the attacker...
This sort of thing is what allows people to take over your browser, and screw up your data (and possibly take over your computer if you run the browser using an account with too many privileges).
So while the FireFox people get their code up to scratch maybe people should reconsider IE - IE isn't so dangerous when configured correctly. Unfortunately it's not that simple to do that.
To make even unpatched IE browsers invulnerable to 95% of the IE problems just turn off Active Scripting and ActiveX for all zones except very trusted zones which will never have malicious data. Since I don't trust Microsoft's trusted zone (XP has *.microsoft.com as trusted even though it doesn't show up in the menus), I create a custom zone and make that MY trusted zone.
By all zones I mean you must turn those stuff off for the My Computer zone as well - but that screws up Windows Explorer in the default view mode (which is unsafe anyway).
For more info read this: <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kb id=182569">Description of Internet Explorer security zones registry entries</a>
To make the My Computer zone visible change: (for computer wide policy) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Win dows\Curr entVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0\Flags
To: 0x00000001
(for just a particular user) HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Window s\Curre ntVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0\Flags
To: 0x00000001
If you don't want to edit the registry and make the My Computer zone visible, you can still control the My Computer Zone settings from the group policy editor (gpedit.msc) or the active directory policy editor.
You just have to know some Microsoft stuff. But hey, securing an OSS O/S and _keeping_ it secure (esp when u need to run lots of 3rd party software) also requires some in-depth knowledge.
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There's a difference between being good at something you want to do and being good at something you have to do.
Not all smart people are good drivers.
Not all smart people are good at managing their computer systems.
Just wondering - what are the differences between opteron 8xx chips and opteron 2xx chips?
How big are the Itanium chips? Compared to Opterons?
"you shout "archers to the big tower!" and they do"
That's like so slow. What's so useful about that? Have you seen the top players play starcraft or other similar games? Control with voice would hardly help them much - maybe only about as much as having an additional usable finger.
Voice is way overrated for control of computers, esp for specialized control applications (like games).
Brain interfaces would be much better for control. A skilled operator would be able to control 50 different keys. Or control 4 pointers at the same time.
That would be immensely hard to do with a single voice.
Is while some of the popular paths they take can lead to something academically interesting they often don't lead to significantly better understanding, nor really useful.
You stick a bunch of neurons to a computer and after a period of training it does _mostly_ what you want. But once they get to a certain stage of complexity, they don't really know why it works that way - they can't summarize/simplify things (no E=MC^2). It's more like alchemy of old. Stir in a bunch of stuff, and you while know that A+B gets you C but you don't know much else.
Doh stick neurons together and they can learn. Oh wow... Like we didn't know that already. Poke a needle in a frog and it twitches.
Sure you will still have to experiment with neurons, I'm not saying stop science. But lots of this is not good science, nor necessary either (it's only necessary so the scientist can publish some paper and get grants etc).
Sure Alchemy developed into Chemistry and other sciences. But maybe this time scientists knowing what they do should be a bit more scientific, given the possible far-reaching impact of their work. The path many are taking is just like mixing random brews and hoping it works. Hope we skip the consuming mercury, uranium part etc.
As is, for many of the things being researched, we might as well use existing animals as they are, or augment them accordingly instead. For instance, you could use a bunch of trained dolphins in shift to help control and process sonar for a submarine. Same for using dogs to sniff for explosives. It really isn't that hard. You can already interface brains with computers already. In short there are tons of existing prepackaged neurons + supporting "hardware" that do much of what we want.
The dolphins/dogs will get bored? Sure, but once you start using tons of neurons hooked up in complex interlinks (for more features) how'd you know what will happen either, or what is actually happening? Cruel to the dolphins? Maybe. But how about those neurons?
Many animals are pretty good at what they do. And they have very similar requirements to humans (which often means they are well suited to helping us). We can relate to them and they can relate to us (in our limited ways).
If you wire up an animal, you know it is hurting if you are do something bad to it. Whether that is necessary in the big picture is for us to decide, but at least we know we are doing something bad to it.
Whereas if you just keep chucking together more and more neurons together and create symbiotes with rather different requirements and perceptions, things might not be so good, nor go as well.
Cue the Raman effect jokes...
I've tried the shoulder thing and it hurts, plus not very effective coz I'm light - kinda bounce off! I'm definitely no expert - I've only kicked open about two doors - fortunately they opened inwards ( I probably shouldn't try shoudering/kicking open doors if they open outwards ;) ).
How strong are these things anyway? AFAIK most are pretty flimsy. If my relative was inside and seriously incapacitated, and the door was locked only with one of these things, I'd just kick the door in. Much faster than using a key or fumbling with your hand inside.
;).
Of course one would have to be sure that the said relative was not lying close to the trajectory of the door that one is kicking in
p.s. only do the kicking stuff if you are wearing good boots/shoes and jeans/thick trousers, so in event the door splinters you don't end up being yet another incapacitated relative. The shoulder charge thing might work - but I'd prefer kicking.
The article wasn't talking about guerrilla warfare.
It was talking about an actual conventional warfare situation where the technology somehow didn't help the US soldiers in the frontline.
"However, the American veterinary system shows that you can have a private, for-profit, cheap, and efficient health-care system"
That's fine if you don't mind involuntary euthanasia...
Yeah. Even now the British have the cheek to hold something called the "Commonwealth Games".
And you know what? Most of the previously colonized countries actually bother to take part!
Sure the British weren't that great, but in many colonized nations the existing indigenous rulers were actually far worse.
Compare this with the Dutch commonwealth games: "Netherlands, Curacao, Aruba and Suriname". They definitely colonized many other nations.
The other imperialist nations obviously didn't do as good a job as the British.
Well he can get a P4 and use it as a toaster- I'm sure one can make a computer that "Makes Toast".
Seriously though, computers give you a far greater number of choices than toasters. More choices = more decisions for users to make. The more powerful a computer system, the more choices you can make. The more decisions you have to make the more mistakes can be made.
Read email? "press a button". Ok so how do you hide/delete email (spam)? Mark emails for future reference? The more things you want to do, the more choices you have to make.
Bring up a website = Press a button? Which website out of the billions?
An easy to use computer system would be designed so that the popularly desired choices would be easy, and you don't have to make many decisions to do what you want.
A toaster only gives you a few choices. So it is easy.
You can set up a computer to be a physical appliance (webTV, tivo), but you'd end up running out of physical space if you wanted to do lots of different stuff.
What your friend has to understand is that the appliances are IN the computer system.
A computer will be like a toaster the day an entire chef's kitchen is like a toaster. An easy to use computer is like a well laid out kitchen, not a toaster.
Even if computers get to the stage where they can read your mind so you don't even need to push any buttons, if you can't think straight and don't know what you want, your mind becomes redundant or even counterproductive in the process. If it ever gets to that stage there will still be different levels of computer users - the differences would be well-laid-out _minds_ for interfacing with computers. It's like people with good coordination and people without.
I haven't tasted really pure water, but RO and distilled water taste good to me - hardly any taste (if any).
If I wanted my water to have flavour I'd drink some other beverage.
"One of the reasons why Singapore even has to consider this is, is because they actually pay for the river water that comes through Malaysia. The problem is Malaysia wants more money, which is kinda wierd, considering the water is just going to flow to the ocean anyways"
Singapore is getting water from Malaysia at a very low price (as part of two contracts/agreements IIRC).
"The water is just going to flow to the ocean anyways" is a really silly reason to justify supplying it to another country at a very low price (or even another state for that matter).
Prices are usually based mainly on what the market can bear, not mainly on cost. Even if you want to get rid of stuff, if you can charge for it, you charge for it.
Even if there is excess water now, is no guarantee of there being excess water in the future. Johor (the Malaysian state where the water comes from) is a fairly populous state with quite a number of industries. Future contracts should take that into account if the Malaysian parties in future negotiations do their job properly.
If you divert water from a river the river becomes smaller - that is not something to take lightly either - divert enough and the impact could be significant.
Also, supplying the water from the river to Singapore involves pipes and other infrastructure, that's not super cheap either.
Finally even if the water is really just going to flow to the ocean and never ever anywhere else, it's fresh water. Blood has been spilled for much less.
Suck stuff out of your body? You say it like its a bad thing. One of the reasons humans drink water is to help flush stuff out of the body.
You'd get far more minerals (esp biologically usable minerals) from food than you'd get from water that's fit for drinking.
So drinking really pure water is perfectly fine and likely to be even healthier than mineral water or other water (esp given the amounts of sodium present in some bottled waters).
"For those that are cold - you can always add more clothing".
:) ...).
While I do mostly agree, for modern day white-collar office work you'd need special mittens to keep your hands and fingers warm whilst still allowing you to type without errors.
I'm also not so sure about the efficacy of such mittens and whether they negatively affect typing.
That's coz I live in a tropical country, where we have the reverse problem. If the airconditioning breaks down, work practically stops - it gets too warm to do anything. Even if you wear less it is still too warm (and there are limits to how little you can wear
Lee Kuan Yew, the ex-Prime Minister of Singapore said the greatest invention of the 20th century was air conditioning. Well, for sure Singapore wouldn't be what it is today without air conditioning.
Summary: comfortable offices boost productivity. Doh.
Your brain's "overclocked"! Looks like you need a copper heatsink with peltier cooling!
Reminds me of one of the Pratchett Discworld books where a troll starts getting smarter and smarter in a very cold room.
TCP has no problems saturating links in most real world conditions.
It has problems saturating links when you have a single _short_life_ TCP connection over a very high bandwidth link and high latency link.
When you have MANY tcp connections from many users it works fine. And this is the situation for us (the many), and I forsee it will remain so - e.g. the bandwidth demands of a hundred million customers vs the bandwidth demand of a bunch of researchers.
Researchers in academic labs can go whip up whatever protocol for their own use.
So I don't see this replacing TCP, especially given the limitations of using FEC.
FEC has costs - you need to transmit redundant data - so you can't use 100% of the bandwidth. You probably need to interleave packets so that a burst doesn't wipe everything out - this leads to latency. The interleaving has to take account of the longest typical/common error burst/interruption will last.
Where I see this being useful is multicast/broadcast or extremely high latency links:
**Multicast
Say you are multicasting a 1Mbps stream to 1 million users, since you use multicast you don't need 1 Tbps. But believe me you don't want to receive Acks from 1 million users! Neither do you want tens of thousand users (with suboptimal home systems) asking you to resend packets - because you just don't have spare bandwidth to do resends.
This is where FEC can be useful. You send a stream with enough redundant data so that clients can reconstruct it. e.g. you send a 1.5Mbps stream.
However this means clients _ABSOLUTELY_MUST_ now have at least 1Mbps to 1.5Mbps spare capacity (depends on FEC used) - otherwise good luck regenerating the 1Mbps stream! Of course this is the naive case, with some math and smart people you can probably come up with a protocol to cater for users with slower connections - but there will be tradeoffs and it will be "special case" (it'll probably start to look more like download to harddisk first then playing it e.g. super high latency, and a lot less like streaming ).
This is the problem - there are many low-bandwidth clients on the Internet.
**Extremely High latency links.
If you have a space vehicle 10 light hours away, retransmissions and Acks do NOT work very well...
But if you can't wait 1 second, then FEC still isn't going to be a magic bullet to solve the problem of transcontinental link latency and still maintain high bandwidth.
You'd need MULTIPLE genuinely independent transcontinental links. Then you synchronize and send your FEC streams over those links. That way spurious interruptions and errors are unlikely to affect all the links.
But that seems like such a special case.
Maybe someone can think of how this would be useful to most of us here.
"Practically, it's a huge waste and expense for all your fellow citizen-taxpayers to bear, as well. Thanks a bunch, man"
Wouldn't it be still worth it? Iraq costs more (and the bill is still running).
It's funny to "officially" say that pretending to have leaders in Iraq elected is more important than pretending to have leaders in the US elected.
At least pay to have the show done properly... Currently Diebold and friends are worse than embarassing.
I believe one of the reasons why more people don't vote is because the voting system doesn't let them express themselves the way they want.
Since they are talking about the disenfranchised, I daresay the disenfranchised are feeling negative and would like to say NO!
But the voting system only allows "Yes" votes. So if they take part, they have to say "Yes" to somebody, or spoil their votes. They may not feel like getting off their butts to pick either option.
Whereas my hypothesis is if you had a range voting system where voters are allowed vote options of No (-1), Don't care (0), Yes (+1), and get to use these for each and all of the candidates, they might actually bother going to vote.
The votes will be totalled up, and the candidate with the most positive total (or least negative) will win.
The subtotals of the No, Don't cares and Yes can also be shown in the results and thus provide a better picture of what the voters think.
Sure the candidate you dislike could still win. BUT, imagine if he/she wins with a NEGATIVE total (or a very substantial negative subtotal). Think of the resulting interviews with the Foreign Media/Press...
"Mr President, how can you say you've been given mandate or have support of the people - the elections show that most people don't want you, you're just the least unwanted candidate".
Would the disenfranchised get off their butts for this?
The people (especially Academics) who say it's the same as Approval Voting don't get it. It's not the same at all - giving everyone Zeroes is NOT the same as giving everyone -1. It's harder to spin a big negative score, as it is to spin a near zero score. Or a slight negative score vs a below midrange positive score.
Actually it's a bit like another sales channel. And your sales person hardly needs to spend any time at all.
People copy the software, install it (without support), use it. Get dependent on it. Then all you need to do is get them to hand over money for some itsy bits of paper or even just itsy bits.
In fact apparently the Microsoft Boss in my country scolded his staff for taking the hardline against infringers. He said something to the effect of "These are happy users of our software, they have done all the work of installing, configuring it themselves, now all we have to do is get them to hand over the money, why are you taking them to court?".
And the sales-proposition is pretty simple: coz over here if they don't license it is about 10x to 100x the cost in fines per infringing copy, plus the bosses risk _jail_time_. Yep jail time for managers and bosses.
Jail-time really gets management's attention. Fines come out of the Company's coffers, jail-time comes out of _your_own_ life.
Which would you rather happen - people buy your competitors stuff and get used to its idiosyncracies? Or you let everyone copy your stuff, and you just go up to those with money and ask them to hand some over?
It works really well if there are network-effects. e.g. multiplayer games, proprietary protocols/document formats, communications software.
Since most of these public figures aren't actually that stupid/ignorant, they are probably assuming their target audience is.
CEOs (and many other smart public figures) don't speak to individuals. They speak to targetted masses. They manipulate masses not individuals.
When public figures (which CEOs are) get away or even rewarded for saying stupid things it doesn't prove or show that they are stupid, it is the public who are stupid. And so far many of such public figures are being rewarded for doing such things (notable politicians and leaders included).
I believe this is an act of cynicism not stupidity.
It's fun to watch when they miscalculate. But nowadays it's quite disgusting how boundlessly stupid/ignorant the public is.
Wow no AMD vs Intel wars :). Hardly even see any Java vs .Net...
On a serious side, I'm curious about java benchmarks on Itanium. I've seen a tender where the specs were java on Itanium for production and java on x86 for development (d'oh).
Anyone have benchmarks comparing Java performance on Itanium vs x86? I've seen some on the SPEC website, any others?
"Do you have any idea what it would cost to locate, establish and lease all of those lines?"
A lot less than it cost to send troops to Iraq, locate Saddam etc.
Picking leaders in Iraq more important to the US than making a good show of picking the leaders in the USA? Maybe most people not tuned in to that channel?
Maybe if someone marketed the US Elections to the US public as a "Reality TV" show people might pay more attention to discrepancies and dubious stuff.
People always talking about Left, Right, More Left, More Right.
:)
Anyone tried Forward/Backward?
Netscape used to crash very often. Looks like the Mozilla people didn't learn much from it.
b id=182569">Description of Internet Explorer security zones registry entries</a>
n dows\Curr entVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0\Flags
w s\Curre ntVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0\Flags
Mozilla is just as sucky security-wise as the old non-mozilla Netscape (3.x 4.x). Whether it is OSS or not doesn't make it secure/insecure, it's the programmers that count. Look at Sendmail and Bind (and many other ISC software), security problems year after year for many years. Look at PHPNuke - security problems month after month for years. Look at OpenSSL and OpenSSH and Apache 2.x - not very good track records. Compare with Postfix and qmail, djbdns.
Most programmers should stick to writing their programs in languages where the equivalent of "spelling and grammar" errors don't cause execution of arbitrary attacker-code. Sure after a while some writers learn how to spell and their grammar improves but it sometimes takes years. For security you need _perfection_ in critical areas, and you need to be able to identify and isolate the critical areas _perfectly_ in your architecture.
To the ignorant people who don't get it. Crashing is bad. A crash occurs when the (browser) process write/read data from areas where it shouldn't be touching, or tries to execute code where it shouldn't be executing. This often occurs when the process somehow mistakenly executes _data_ supplied by the attacker/bug finder, or returns to addresses supplied by the attacker...
This sort of thing is what allows people to take over your browser, and screw up your data (and possibly take over your computer if you run the browser using an account with too many privileges).
So while the FireFox people get their code up to scratch maybe people should reconsider IE - IE isn't so dangerous when configured correctly. Unfortunately it's not that simple to do that.
To make even unpatched IE browsers invulnerable to 95% of the IE problems just turn off Active Scripting and ActiveX for all zones except very trusted zones which will never have malicious data. Since I don't trust Microsoft's trusted zone (XP has *.microsoft.com as trusted even though it doesn't show up in the menus), I create a custom zone and make that MY trusted zone.
By all zones I mean you must turn those stuff off for the My Computer zone as well - but that screws up Windows Explorer in the default view mode (which is unsafe anyway).
For more info read this: <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?k
To make the My Computer zone visible change:
(for computer wide policy)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Wi
To: 0x00000001
(for just a particular user)
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windo
To: 0x00000001
If you don't want to edit the registry and make the My Computer zone visible, you can still control the My Computer Zone settings from the group policy editor (gpedit.msc) or the active directory policy editor.
You just have to know some Microsoft stuff. But hey, securing an OSS O/S and _keeping_ it secure (esp when u need to run lots of 3rd party software) also requires some in-depth knowledge.