Extreme precision is the key to automated driving vehicles, so without that you can forget letting the car drive itself.
And probably the best use of a self-driving vehicle is in the middle of nowhere on a limited-access freeway (i.e., an Interstate highway). If you limit the precision of GPS then forget about letting the car drive through Nebraska.
Of course that is the best use, why if you were to fall asleep and have your car crash itself, it would surely be best that you do it in a location so remote that your body wouldn't be found for hours or days.
The spectrum they bought was probably dirt cheap. No way to make a profit with spectrum that is more in demand.
Dirt cheap because nobody else would touch it (for good reason).
Did you miss the part in TFA where it explained that "LightSquared invested $4 billion in airwaves"? 4 Billion is still a lot of money, at least where I come from. I suppose for a nationwide network it probably pales in comparison to what AT&T or Verizon hold, but it is still a substantial investment. I wonder if the FCC will give them a refund on all those unused EM rays?
Also, I looked at the zoomable image and zoomed in all the way in and.... saw mostly macroblocks? Is that still "amazing detail" in a sense that eludes me?
That particular Gigapan upload was 1.12Gpix which suggests that they did some sort of interpolation to make it appear more grandiose. And the rust-orange is because that is the most creative thing the russians could think of to use the IR band for (heck with making it some shade of dark green...)
Agreed, why not just set the infrared "vegetation" band to some hue near green so that it can at least look a little like the real thing? Or maybe just leave the IR pass out altogether? I like my Nasa-made "ghettopixel" blue marble image much better, thanks.
There are "studies", and then there is observation, modelling, prediction, model testing which is this thing called science. "Studies" are bullshit. Scientific research functions as it should. I believe the OP's article is just a chunck of sensationalist BS, or utterly ignorant of what science is (and is not).
You forgot to mention that it is yet another piece of published work that suffers from positive bias...
If your biological schedule doesn't match up with the rest of your area, it will be hard to find a job that matches your schedule. All I can do is watch my weight and eat/exercise accordingly.
Controlling when you sleep (making it consistent) and when you are exposed to bright light (again, consistency PLUS avoiding it 3 hours before bed time) will get you on track without a heroic effort, unless of course you work a non-traditional shift like 8pm-5am and can't avoid being awake from 5am to 1pm on some days (if you are in the rhythm to sleep those hours 7 days a week you can get along just fine). That kind of schedule swing is a serious bitch.
The problem with 'pure' e-voting is that there is no way to provide any checks or balances to enable vote-rigging to be detected or caught.
Instances of lost/stolen ballot boxes are easily detected as the box is *missing*. Instances of replaced ballot boxes *should* be easily detected by some unique identifier in/on each box that can't be known before the box is sealed at the start of the day. Instances of forged ballots can be (and often are) caught when the results don't mesh with the exit polls, or when the ballots are examined.
With pure e-voting, none of that can happen, because the only copy of the vote can be changed invisibly, leaving no trace.
The best method is an e-voting system which prints a human-readable paper ballot *with* a computer-readable code. They can be counted quickly by computer. They can be spot-checked to ensure that the computer- and human-readable components match, and the human readable portion, which can be confirmed by the voter before dropping it into the ballot box, is the authoritative portion of the ballot. (Also, it's much more difficult to confuse 'Republican - McCain' for 'Democrat - Clinton' than it is to argue over the meaning of a hanging or dimpled chad, or whether there is or isn't a smudge here which means something.
The problem is that a missing ballot box doesn't really mean anything. It happens all the time and as long as a federal case isnt made of it (literally) then nothing happens, the OTHER votes are counted and the voters who dropped their ballots into a missing box are basically unheard.
The story dwells on one person's story. There are any number of people (both Americans and immigrants) who take any available job and try to work their way up, but opportunities never appear.
The story is a story? OMG! Let me spell this out for you, in case you missed the first paragraph of TFS: immigrants represent twice their share of the entrepreneurial population, and the path of Christian Gheorghe is at least slightly representative of the background that immigrants have that might cause them to become entrepreneurs.
The real "gotcha" here isn't that "oh well people in the US can do that too;" it's that unsuccessful would-be immigrants typically either never leave their home country (willingness to move internationally is a pretty obvious proxy for other ambitions) or they end up moving back to their native land if things don't go their way in the US. In other words, in order to make it as an immigrant you basically NEED to follow the entrepreneur's path.
Ultimately what this means is that there is a creaming effect on immigrants, the "best and brightest" of other nations seek out the US to make a life and name for themselves and the process of doing so separates the wheat from the chaff. This is a process that really should be encouraged (along with home-grown entrepreneurship) because what it ultimately means is that innovation is still strong(est) in the US leading to many obvious benefits.
There is a fundamental problem with elections in the US and many other places, regardless of electronic versus paper. The problem is that once the election is over it is OVER.
This is a fundamental problem of all fixed term office. Once someone is elected, there's nothing to stop them turning around and literally saying "fuck you" to the people who elected them. They'll still be in power for the next 4 years, whatever anyone wants to say about it.
With the exception of gubernatorial recalls which are possible in most states. And, one of the (few) benefits of a two party system is that a rogue candidate basically shits all over his party if he decides to do this, which many people have a vested interest in preventing/stopping.
Actually, in Canada, if you can demonstrate that the irregularities were high enough to have brought an election result into question a judge can order the election results vacated and a new election runs. I'd like to think that if 30% of the votes were lost that the *independent* (there's a keyword right there) election commission would go to a judge and ask exactly that, that the election results be vacated and a new election called. And Canada may find out soon, as evidence of robocall interference may call the results of at least a few ridings into question, which means even if it ends up being a year or more since the election, those results can be discarded and a new election fought.
30% loss? Is 29% really an inconsequential number of votes? Lots of elections in the US are determined by single digit margins; it becomes really easy for fraud to take place that is down in the margin of error and under the radar, and still have an impact on the outcome. Until a better system is worked out, this will always be an issue.
ATMs are incredibly reliable these days. The fact that these POS voting machines are built, in large part, by the same people who build ATMs indicates strongly that Occam's Razor beats Hanlon's (or Napoleon's) Razor here; malice, rather than stupidity or incompetence, is the simplest and most likely explanation.
The problem is that even after Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell famously said on the record that "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to [George W Bush]." no one really took pause and wondered what the implications were of a voting machine company being blatantly partisan. Instead, they went back to bickering about gay marriage and the "death tax". Still not sure where the real issue is?
And here pen-and-paper-voting shines, and no other voting system comes close. Nearly each part of the voting process can be in the open: the ballot box can be opened to the public, controlled by everyone to be completely empty, sealed and be watched all the time by everyone who likes to watch. The breaking of the seal and the counting can (and should) be performed in public, and again everyone who wants to can watch it. The result for the local election office is announced publicly, and publicly written down into the forms and sealed, the votes are put back in the controlledly empty ballot box and sealed again, and the ballot box is then transported (and accompagnied by whoever wants) to the central election office, where the votes according to the sealed forms are tallied and the complete result is announced.
Saying "can" or "can (and should)" is not really a substitute for saying "is" which really creates a problem. How often are all of these processes followed to the letter? Given the sheer number of individual voting precincts across the US, your odds are not very good at all. Pen and paper votes are so amazingly easy to tamper with. Oops a heavily [R,D] district box got lost on the way to the office! Oops! a heavily [R,D] person hand counting flipped through and "misread" a few of the oppositions' votes! If you think stuff like that hasn't been going on since the beginning of voting, boy are you in for a letdown.
If only the electronic votes are counted, then the physical record doesn't matter at all. If receipts are counted, the electronic voting has merely added a pointless step.
A huge percentage of votes across the US are already tabulated (and have been for DECADES) electro-mechanically through punch cards or bubble readers. Manual vote counting has only been used for spot check auditing to ensure the tabulation has been reliable. Why would that work any differently with an all electronic machine and a printer?
Paper voting means a physical verifiable record. As to hanging chads the issue is complex and poorly designed ballots.
As to the speed of counting ballots, so what? You have to wait a few hours, or on tight races, a few days. Sounds like a reasonable sacrifice for not having fucked up elections due to equipment failure.
You are blatantly overlooking the reason why everything else (and I do mean *everything*) is done electronically these days. Electrons don't fade or smudge or blow away or get wet or suffer obfuscation when duplicated. Voting is nothing more than coalescing information (each individual's desire for a particular candidate or issue) and if it were more reliable and effective to coalesce information using paper checks, paper money, paper punch cards, or any of the other many former uses for paper we have gotten rid of (or are working hard to get rid of), then their use wouldn't be in sharp decline. The bottom line is it's simply not more effective to use paper for anything when a reliable electronic equivalent is designed and implemented.
Specifically in the case of paper voting, ballot boxes end up lost (or stolen,) ballots get miscounted, ballots get forged; all of the graft that those against electronic voting are up in arms about is ALREADY HERE. The evoting "scrappers" who want to go back to the good old days just want to exchange the new form of voter disenfranchisement with the old one. It was no better back then, if you don't realize that then you really need to check some history books.
Improvement will come not with the system we choose to represent the information (paper, plastic, electrons) but with WHO we choose to be responsible for the information. Demand bipartisan (or, gasp, nonpartisan) staffers from the state's Secretaries of State office all the way down to the committee who chooses the vendors and on into the vendors themselves. The real problem is the same as it has ALWAYAS been; people don't really care to pay attention to "uninteresting" things like voting processes when they can instead bicker on about gay marriage (or whatever the debate du jour is) so you end up with politicians who basically do whatever they want with all the rest of the real issues.
I don't know how much of the modern obsesity problem is attributable to this phenomenon, but I'm guessing it's a non-trivial amount.
It's certainly more than the amount to which people make themselves overweight via 800 calorie coffee drinks and 1,600 calorie "meals" of saturated fat and soy protein. Oh, wait, fast food and frappucinos have been around forever, whereas skinny people are a new thing, right?
I chuckled when they commented that it would "be priced at a modest premium vs classic mid-range wallpaper". Actual decorator mid-range wallpaper (nothing like the shit you will find at big box stores) is anywhere from $2 to $25 per *square foot*. That means a tiny 10x10 room can be anywhere from $640 to $8,000 to do the whole thing. This is why Americans generally eschew wallpaper (at least full-room designs) in favor of a nice coat of paint (about $50 for the whole room and you might have some left over.)
The current problem with digital photos is that they need ongoing ACTIVE maintainance to not be lost
I'm not sure that I'd consider keeping all your photos in one folder to be "active", but I get your gist. A one-time setup of CrashPlan, Mozy, etc. is no more "active" than the one-time act of printing out the photos and putting them in a drawer.
I suspect SpinyNorman is actually referring to the fact that data formats shift every few years, so if you don't format shift your images periodically, you could end up with unreadable images. Every few years when you get a new computer or replace the drive the photos are stored on, you have to migrate your old photos over. You have to periodically verify that the current storage medium has not suffered any data loss (or else your backups just amount to backing up corrupt data), including from human error, medium failure, or something more nefarious such as a virus or worm. And you have to verify your backups are indeed working correctly (actually a pretty easy task to get wrong for relatively static data).
I'm an amateur photographer, and data loss is my biggest nightmare. I back up three different ways on-premises, and I also back up to Amazon S3 as a means to have an off-site disaster recovery plan. I still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and feel compelled to spot check my photos. Twice, I've discovered problems that put my data at risk, and if I hadn't been actively engaged in protecting this data, it would have been disastrous.
Data at rest is data at risk, don't be fooled into believing otherwise.
I am probably too cavalier but in the 10 or so years I have been maintaining a growing digital archive, the one and only risky thing that happened was basically a human error that caused a backup that mirrored the wrong way and started deleting data from the master that wasn't on the slave yet. This was a non-issue since it was stopped pretty quickly and the deleted files were easily picked up off the master disk by Recuva. Knock on wood, but well maintained machines pretty much just work. The "hassle" of shifting medium every 10 or so years (an easy lifespan for an offline hard disk or recordable optical media) is really brain dead simple and the lifetime cost is pretty darn low too. It doesn't hurt to be paranoid, but a simple, well thought out plan will work too.
> I can see what's going to happen in the future: all of the digital photos people take now are going to either end up on a website that won't be around in 20+ years, or get stuck on disks or flash memory that won't last, or for which interfacing with the media will become difficult or impossible.
They aren't planning on destroying their digital copies. They're just planning on having a physical copy of their photos in case of obsolescence.
This is called begging the question. Online digital services like photo sharing sites haven't yet really experienced something like that (most have just merged into others) and physical media (if kept safe and sound) is a lot more reliable than most think. So, there is no reason to suspect either thing is actually true; it's just conjecture and it's leading to a classic misunderstanding of risk (something humans do a lot of).
The issue I have with digital is you cant hang them or carry them, etc.
My parents and grandparents have lots of old photos the are still in good shape... Most of them just being stuck in a box and put in the basement or a closet. Pull the box out and you have access to them all.
Now compare that to digital. Why they are on Facebook and such is its just easier for the wife to do that. Take the picture with the phone and upload it. Done.
My concern is I still have my old commodore 64, and the floppies from when I was young as well (we're talking around 25 years old. Some work, some barely work, but if the drive craps out I'm SOL unless I can find one online. Modern hard drives seem to be crap compared to drives from years past. I have a bunch of old 100MB drives that have been just tossed into a box, moved/tossed around during past moves and what not and they still mostly work. I also have modern drives that have took a crap in a year or two of use. Plus with changing tech, who's to say in 20+ years (or like my grandfathers photos 70+ years) I'll still be able to access them. Granted I can move the images when the old and new technologies overlap, as long as the old is still operating correctly.
What I'd like to do is make photo albums (as others have mentioned) so we have physical hard copies. I plan on storing digital copies as well and shift them as they storage changes, but should I forget or whatever may happen.. I don't want to lose them.
It sounds like Cosco or Walmart sounds like the best option (I was just never sure how their processes hold up any more). Sounds like that's the route I'll be taking, thanks!
(as aside note my wife and I have a bunch of old photos of our parents, grand parents, and their parents handing on the wall. Some of them are those old oval frames with the curved glass from way back when.
Good luck to you! I am in pretty much the exact same situation (overflowing digital memories from a new family) so I have given this a lot of thought. Data recovery/migration is not as expensive or hard to find as some think, and there is no reason to suspect that will be any different in 25 or 50 or 75 years. Make good backups, keep them safe, and get back to enjoying the present!
The first thing I thought of is "god, if only my parents had digital copies of all of those pictures they gave me"... Focus on finding a long lasting DIGITAL storage solution (there are plenty of ways to store things reliably) instead. Don't you dare get a stack of 4x6 prints that you can shove in the basement next to all of the ones you probably got from YOUR parents that are next to useless until you put weeks and weeks of work into scanning and retouching.
Let's suppose your parents DID give you digital copies. Where are you going to find a 9-track tape machine to access them with? Or, if they were a little more modern, something to insert that Sparq cartridge or 12" Sony WORM disk into? You'd probably have trouble even finding a machine to access a 5.25" floppy, which was a really widespread technology (but watch out for those hard-sectored ones).
You think the digital formats you use now are going to be different, that history has stopped?
The thing is that you don't need to own or even have an easy time "finding access to" those formats. You need to do it once. And if the option was either scanning and retouching about 500 still prints and 500 projector slides, or finding/paying for access ONCE on an archaic machine (they are still plentiful, trust me) then you would be a fool not to choose the latter.
Of course, what was I thinking, seeking perspective is "trolling" and hyperbole is "informative". Just another day on slashdot. Enjoy your war with the TSA, but just so you know, you are losing it thanks to rants like this. Learn how to make an informed argument and you might contribute constructively to the debate.
Karma? Don't need it.
Anecdote 1, meet Anecdote 2. Short story here is that the pump stopped working some time around when she went through the checkpoint. Why? Who knows. Was it the TSAs fault? Of course! This is slashdot!
I fly weekly with a pump and have for over 10 years. I've never had any problems with the pump or met a TSA person who didn't "get" it. Also, she's getting more radiation on the plane itself than from anything on the ground. Plus, the new scanners are the best thing to happen to pump people. They are microwaves, not Xrays and they make the process super fast. I hold the pump in my hand, show it to them, walk through, no problem. I suspect this young lady may have had some bad luck, a little confusion on everyone's part and a little paranoia.
Slashdot Mirror
Extreme precision is the key to automated driving vehicles, so without that you can forget letting the car drive itself.
And probably the best use of a self-driving vehicle is in the middle of nowhere on a limited-access freeway (i.e., an Interstate highway). If you limit the precision of GPS then forget about letting the car drive through Nebraska.
Of course that is the best use, why if you were to fall asleep and have your car crash itself, it would surely be best that you do it in a location so remote that your body wouldn't be found for hours or days.
The spectrum they bought was probably dirt cheap. No way to make a profit with spectrum that is more in demand.
Dirt cheap because nobody else would touch it (for good reason).
Did you miss the part in TFA where it explained that "LightSquared invested $4 billion in airwaves"? 4 Billion is still a lot of money, at least where I come from. I suppose for a nationwide network it probably pales in comparison to what AT&T or Verizon hold, but it is still a substantial investment. I wonder if the FCC will give them a refund on all those unused EM rays?
Also, I looked at the zoomable image and zoomed in all the way in and.... saw mostly macroblocks? Is that still "amazing detail" in a sense that eludes me?
That particular Gigapan upload was 1.12Gpix which suggests that they did some sort of interpolation to make it appear more grandiose. And the rust-orange is because that is the most creative thing the russians could think of to use the IR band for (heck with making it some shade of dark green...)
Agreed, why not just set the infrared "vegetation" band to some hue near green so that it can at least look a little like the real thing? Or maybe just leave the IR pass out altogether? I like my Nasa-made "ghettopixel" blue marble image much better, thanks.
There are "studies", and then there is observation, modelling, prediction, model testing which is this thing called science. "Studies" are bullshit. Scientific research functions as it should. I believe the OP's article is just a chunck of sensationalist BS, or utterly ignorant of what science is (and is not).
You forgot to mention that it is yet another piece of published work that suffers from positive bias...
If your biological schedule doesn't match up with the rest of your area, it will be hard to find a job that matches your schedule. All I can do is watch my weight and eat/exercise accordingly.
Controlling when you sleep (making it consistent) and when you are exposed to bright light (again, consistency PLUS avoiding it 3 hours before bed time) will get you on track without a heroic effort, unless of course you work a non-traditional shift like 8pm-5am and can't avoid being awake from 5am to 1pm on some days (if you are in the rhythm to sleep those hours 7 days a week you can get along just fine). That kind of schedule swing is a serious bitch.
The problem with 'pure' e-voting is that there is no way to provide any checks or balances to enable vote-rigging to be detected or caught.
Instances of lost/stolen ballot boxes are easily detected as the box is *missing*. Instances of replaced ballot boxes *should* be easily detected by some unique identifier in/on each box that can't be known before the box is sealed at the start of the day. Instances of forged ballots can be (and often are) caught when the results don't mesh with the exit polls, or when the ballots are examined.
With pure e-voting, none of that can happen, because the only copy of the vote can be changed invisibly, leaving no trace.
The best method is an e-voting system which prints a human-readable paper ballot *with* a computer-readable code. They can be counted quickly by computer. They can be spot-checked to ensure that the computer- and human-readable components match, and the human readable portion, which can be confirmed by the voter before dropping it into the ballot box, is the authoritative portion of the ballot. (Also, it's much more difficult to confuse 'Republican - McCain' for 'Democrat - Clinton' than it is to argue over the meaning of a hanging or dimpled chad, or whether there is or isn't a smudge here which means something.
The problem is that a missing ballot box doesn't really mean anything. It happens all the time and as long as a federal case isnt made of it (literally) then nothing happens, the OTHER votes are counted and the voters who dropped their ballots into a missing box are basically unheard.
And exit polls? LOL. 2004, brosef!
They took urr jerbs!
Put slightly more specifically, according to the article:
"They made ahh jerb, and den dey took it! Dey took dere jerbs!"
The story dwells on one person's story. There are any number of people (both Americans and immigrants) who take any available job and try to work their way up, but opportunities never appear.
The story is a story? OMG! Let me spell this out for you, in case you missed the first paragraph of TFS: immigrants represent twice their share of the entrepreneurial population, and the path of Christian Gheorghe is at least slightly representative of the background that immigrants have that might cause them to become entrepreneurs.
The real "gotcha" here isn't that "oh well people in the US can do that too;" it's that unsuccessful would-be immigrants typically either never leave their home country (willingness to move internationally is a pretty obvious proxy for other ambitions) or they end up moving back to their native land if things don't go their way in the US. In other words, in order to make it as an immigrant you basically NEED to follow the entrepreneur's path.
Ultimately what this means is that there is a creaming effect on immigrants, the "best and brightest" of other nations seek out the US to make a life and name for themselves and the process of doing so separates the wheat from the chaff. This is a process that really should be encouraged (along with home-grown entrepreneurship) because what it ultimately means is that innovation is still strong(est) in the US leading to many obvious benefits.
There is a fundamental problem with elections in the US and many other places, regardless of electronic versus paper. The problem is that once the election is over it is OVER.
This is a fundamental problem of all fixed term office. Once someone is elected, there's nothing to stop them turning around and literally saying "fuck you" to the people who elected them. They'll still be in power for the next 4 years, whatever anyone wants to say about it.
With the exception of gubernatorial recalls which are possible in most states. And, one of the (few) benefits of a two party system is that a rogue candidate basically shits all over his party if he decides to do this, which many people have a vested interest in preventing/stopping.
Actually, in Canada, if you can demonstrate that the irregularities were high enough to have brought an election result into question a judge can order the election results vacated and a new election runs. I'd like to think that if 30% of the votes were lost that the *independent* (there's a keyword right there) election commission would go to a judge and ask exactly that, that the election results be vacated and a new election called. And Canada may find out soon, as evidence of robocall interference may call the results of at least a few ridings into question, which means even if it ends up being a year or more since the election, those results can be discarded and a new election fought.
30% loss? Is 29% really an inconsequential number of votes? Lots of elections in the US are determined by single digit margins; it becomes really easy for fraud to take place that is down in the margin of error and under the radar, and still have an impact on the outcome. Until a better system is worked out, this will always be an issue.
ATMs are incredibly reliable these days. The fact that these POS voting machines are built, in large part, by the same people who build ATMs indicates strongly that Occam's Razor beats Hanlon's (or Napoleon's) Razor here; malice, rather than stupidity or incompetence, is the simplest and most likely explanation.
The problem is that even after Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell famously said on the record that "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to [George W Bush]." no one really took pause and wondered what the implications were of a voting machine company being blatantly partisan. Instead, they went back to bickering about gay marriage and the "death tax". Still not sure where the real issue is?
Paper voting gives us things like Hanging Chads and people too dumb to follow the pointing arrow from the name to the box to check.
So? People that stupid deserve to have their votes invalidated.
If it was up to me I'd make people pass a basic general knowledge test before being allowed to vote.
Wow what a great idea! Everybody give Jim Crow a round of applause for his fine contribution to the debate.
And here pen-and-paper-voting shines, and no other voting system comes close. Nearly each part of the voting process can be in the open: the ballot box can be opened to the public, controlled by everyone to be completely empty, sealed and be watched all the time by everyone who likes to watch. The breaking of the seal and the counting can (and should) be performed in public, and again everyone who wants to can watch it. The result for the local election office is announced publicly, and publicly written down into the forms and sealed, the votes are put back in the controlledly empty ballot box and sealed again, and the ballot box is then transported (and accompagnied by whoever wants) to the central election office, where the votes according to the sealed forms are tallied and the complete result is announced.
Saying "can" or "can (and should)" is not really a substitute for saying "is" which really creates a problem. How often are all of these processes followed to the letter? Given the sheer number of individual voting precincts across the US, your odds are not very good at all. Pen and paper votes are so amazingly easy to tamper with. Oops a heavily [R,D] district box got lost on the way to the office! Oops! a heavily [R,D] person hand counting flipped through and "misread" a few of the oppositions' votes! If you think stuff like that hasn't been going on since the beginning of voting, boy are you in for a letdown.
If only the electronic votes are counted, then the physical record doesn't matter at all. If receipts are counted, the electronic voting has merely added a pointless step.
A huge percentage of votes across the US are already tabulated (and have been for DECADES) electro-mechanically through punch cards or bubble readers. Manual vote counting has only been used for spot check auditing to ensure the tabulation has been reliable. Why would that work any differently with an all electronic machine and a printer?
Paper voting means a physical verifiable record. As to hanging chads the issue is complex and poorly designed ballots.
As to the speed of counting ballots, so what? You have to wait a few hours, or on tight races, a few days. Sounds like a reasonable sacrifice for not having fucked up elections due to equipment failure.
You are blatantly overlooking the reason why everything else (and I do mean *everything*) is done electronically these days. Electrons don't fade or smudge or blow away or get wet or suffer obfuscation when duplicated. Voting is nothing more than coalescing information (each individual's desire for a particular candidate or issue) and if it were more reliable and effective to coalesce information using paper checks, paper money, paper punch cards, or any of the other many former uses for paper we have gotten rid of (or are working hard to get rid of), then their use wouldn't be in sharp decline. The bottom line is it's simply not more effective to use paper for anything when a reliable electronic equivalent is designed and implemented.
Specifically in the case of paper voting, ballot boxes end up lost (or stolen,) ballots get miscounted, ballots get forged; all of the graft that those against electronic voting are up in arms about is ALREADY HERE. The evoting "scrappers" who want to go back to the good old days just want to exchange the new form of voter disenfranchisement with the old one. It was no better back then, if you don't realize that then you really need to check some history books.
Improvement will come not with the system we choose to represent the information (paper, plastic, electrons) but with WHO we choose to be responsible for the information. Demand bipartisan (or, gasp, nonpartisan) staffers from the state's Secretaries of State office all the way down to the committee who chooses the vendors and on into the vendors themselves. The real problem is the same as it has ALWAYAS been; people don't really care to pay attention to "uninteresting" things like voting processes when they can instead bicker on about gay marriage (or whatever the debate du jour is) so you end up with politicians who basically do whatever they want with all the rest of the real issues.
I don't know how much of the modern obsesity problem is attributable to this phenomenon, but I'm guessing it's a non-trivial amount.
It's certainly more than the amount to which people make themselves overweight via 800 calorie coffee drinks and 1,600 calorie "meals" of saturated fat and soy protein. Oh, wait, fast food and frappucinos have been around forever, whereas skinny people are a new thing, right?
Anecdote 1, meet anecdote 2.
I chuckled when they commented that it would "be priced at a modest premium vs classic mid-range wallpaper". Actual decorator mid-range wallpaper (nothing like the shit you will find at big box stores) is anywhere from $2 to $25 per *square foot*. That means a tiny 10x10 room can be anywhere from $640 to $8,000 to do the whole thing. This is why Americans generally eschew wallpaper (at least full-room designs) in favor of a nice coat of paint (about $50 for the whole room and you might have some left over.)
The current problem with digital photos is that they need ongoing ACTIVE maintainance to not be lost
I'm not sure that I'd consider keeping all your photos in one folder to be "active", but I get your gist. A one-time setup of CrashPlan, Mozy, etc. is no more "active" than the one-time act of printing out the photos and putting them in a drawer.
I suspect SpinyNorman is actually referring to the fact that data formats shift every few years, so if you don't format shift your images periodically, you could end up with unreadable images. Every few years when you get a new computer or replace the drive the photos are stored on, you have to migrate your old photos over. You have to periodically verify that the current storage medium has not suffered any data loss (or else your backups just amount to backing up corrupt data), including from human error, medium failure, or something more nefarious such as a virus or worm. And you have to verify your backups are indeed working correctly (actually a pretty easy task to get wrong for relatively static data).
I'm an amateur photographer, and data loss is my biggest nightmare. I back up three different ways on-premises, and I also back up to Amazon S3 as a means to have an off-site disaster recovery plan. I still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and feel compelled to spot check my photos. Twice, I've discovered problems that put my data at risk, and if I hadn't been actively engaged in protecting this data, it would have been disastrous.
Data at rest is data at risk, don't be fooled into believing otherwise.
I am probably too cavalier but in the 10 or so years I have been maintaining a growing digital archive, the one and only risky thing that happened was basically a human error that caused a backup that mirrored the wrong way and started deleting data from the master that wasn't on the slave yet. This was a non-issue since it was stopped pretty quickly and the deleted files were easily picked up off the master disk by Recuva. Knock on wood, but well maintained machines pretty much just work. The "hassle" of shifting medium every 10 or so years (an easy lifespan for an offline hard disk or recordable optical media) is really brain dead simple and the lifetime cost is pretty darn low too. It doesn't hurt to be paranoid, but a simple, well thought out plan will work too.
You didn't read the whole submission.
> I can see what's going to happen in the future: all of the digital photos people take now are going to either end up on a website that won't be around in 20+ years, or get stuck on disks or flash memory that won't last, or for which interfacing with the media will become difficult or impossible.
They aren't planning on destroying their digital copies. They're just planning on having a physical copy of their photos in case of obsolescence.
This is called begging the question. Online digital services like photo sharing sites haven't yet really experienced something like that (most have just merged into others) and physical media (if kept safe and sound) is a lot more reliable than most think. So, there is no reason to suspect either thing is actually true; it's just conjecture and it's leading to a classic misunderstanding of risk (something humans do a lot of).
The issue I have with digital is you cant hang them or carry them, etc.
My parents and grandparents have lots of old photos the are still in good shape... Most of them just being stuck in a box and put in the basement or a closet. Pull the box out and you have access to them all.
Now compare that to digital. Why they are on Facebook and such is its just easier for the wife to do that. Take the picture with the phone and upload it. Done.
My concern is I still have my old commodore 64, and the floppies from when I was young as well (we're talking around 25 years old. Some work, some barely work, but if the drive craps out I'm SOL unless I can find one online. Modern hard drives seem to be crap compared to drives from years past. I have a bunch of old 100MB drives that have been just tossed into a box, moved/tossed around during past moves and what not and they still mostly work. I also have modern drives that have took a crap in a year or two of use. Plus with changing tech, who's to say in 20+ years (or like my grandfathers photos 70+ years) I'll still be able to access them. Granted I can move the images when the old and new technologies overlap, as long as the old is still operating correctly.
What I'd like to do is make photo albums (as others have mentioned) so we have physical hard copies. I plan on storing digital copies as well and shift them as they storage changes, but should I forget or whatever may happen.. I don't want to lose them.
It sounds like Cosco or Walmart sounds like the best option (I was just never sure how their processes hold up any more). Sounds like that's the route I'll be taking, thanks!
(as aside note my wife and I have a bunch of old photos of our parents, grand parents, and their parents handing on the wall. Some of them are those old oval frames with the curved glass from way back when.
Good luck to you! I am in pretty much the exact same situation (overflowing digital memories from a new family) so I have given this a lot of thought. Data recovery/migration is not as expensive or hard to find as some think, and there is no reason to suspect that will be any different in 25 or 50 or 75 years. Make good backups, keep them safe, and get back to enjoying the present!
The first thing I thought of is "god, if only my parents had digital copies of all of those pictures they gave me"... Focus on finding a long lasting DIGITAL storage solution (there are plenty of ways to store things reliably) instead. Don't you dare get a stack of 4x6 prints that you can shove in the basement next to all of the ones you probably got from YOUR parents that are next to useless until you put weeks and weeks of work into scanning and retouching.
Let's suppose your parents DID give you digital copies. Where are you going to find a 9-track tape machine to access them with? Or, if they were a little more modern, something to insert that Sparq cartridge or 12" Sony WORM disk into? You'd probably have trouble even finding a machine to access a 5.25" floppy, which was a really widespread technology (but watch out for those hard-sectored ones).
You think the digital formats you use now are going to be different, that history has stopped?
The thing is that you don't need to own or even have an easy time "finding access to" those formats. You need to do it once. And if the option was either scanning and retouching about 500 still prints and 500 projector slides, or finding/paying for access ONCE on an archaic machine (they are still plentiful, trust me) then you would be a fool not to choose the latter.
Of course, what was I thinking, seeking perspective is "trolling" and hyperbole is "informative". Just another day on slashdot. Enjoy your war with the TSA, but just so you know, you are losing it thanks to rants like this. Learn how to make an informed argument and you might contribute constructively to the debate. Karma? Don't need it.
I fly weekly with a pump and have for over 10 years. I've never had any problems with the pump or met a TSA person who didn't "get" it. Also, she's getting more radiation on the plane itself than from anything on the ground. Plus, the new scanners are the best thing to happen to pump people. They are microwaves, not Xrays and they make the process super fast. I hold the pump in my hand, show it to them, walk through, no problem. I suspect this young lady may have had some bad luck, a little confusion on everyone's part and a little paranoia.
(taken from TFAs comment page)
Nope, using the search landing page on walmart.com it only shows the $399 bundle.