No, the inflation in real estate is insane. If you already bought a home more than a few years ago, it's guaranteed better than anything you can buy on the market today, even with the slowing real estate market. The lack of housing means that new buyers will go farther and farther out to find affordable housing if they have to have a single family house with a yard. The farthest suburbs are 70 miles or more out. That is what's causing a lot the traffic.
In the case of a hand counted paper ballot, all that is neccesary to commit fraud is a switch of the actual ballots prior to the tally. With the TSx machine (with the attached printer) the audit log of the election (including timestamps and actual votes cast) is present in 3 locations (the actual voting machine, the memory card, and the written record). In order to withstand an audit, all three of these items must be altered to perfectly match the result whereas with paper ballots there is only one record that must be altered.
While it's obviously true that the machines could be programmed in advance to fix an election, keep in mind that voter registration is a completely different process from the actual vote tallying, and that voter turnout is still done by hand. In order for the electronic record to be altered, it would have to be done in such a way as to mirror the actual voter turnout PER POLLING LOCATION, a number which is independant of the voting machines and in any jurisdiction of consequence this number would be effectively impossible to predict. In the case of hand count you need only have a total number of ballots cast as there is no tracking of the votes per polling location whereas with the voting machines this record is kept in each machine.
That may be true, but it only protects against vote stuffing, not vote flipping. By vote stuffing, I would include overwriting the database with a new file. Malicious code could contain an algorithm to flip a small percentage of votes while they're being cast. In that case, the total number of votes in the machines will equal the number of voters who signed in with the pollworkers. A VVAT will protect against that though, if the paper receipts are actually audited.
You are correct about process and oversight being more important than any technical vulnerabilities.
The engineers talk about Energy Return on Investment (EROI), the ratio between energy output and energy input. In the case of corn ethanol, it's pretty low, about 1.25:1. You get 1.25 units of energy out for every 1 unit of energy you put in, and for corn farming, the energy inputs will be fossil fuels. Ethanol from sugar cane has a much higher EROI. I've heard as high as 8:1, but I haven't seen the studies. If it's true, sugar cane ethanol would definitely be worth it. Then there's the more exotic processes like cellulosic ethanol and biodiesel from algae. They're all experimental but are more efficient than corn. The problem with biofuels though is that likely production rates will never keep up with our current consumption of oil for transportation. The problem is flow rate, not production cost.
Before all this Diebold was well known for making ATMs. However, that's completely different from the division that makes voting machines. Diebold acquired Global Election Systems in 2002. ATMs are generally secure devices with reliable paper receipt printers and security that's been refined over decades of attack and defence. Just look at the rigorous security requirements for the PIN entry keypad. In comparison, Global Election Systems has been completely amateurish in their approach to security. I would agree that Diebold, as a company, probably isn't conspiring to throw the elections. They're just hucksters charging Cadillac prices for their Yugo quality junk. However, the result of all this amateurish security is that it only takes one or two malicious insiders to hack an election. This is even more troublesome when you consider the lack of criminal background checks on employees and executives of these companies. Diebold and ES&S are both known to have employed convicted felons.
It used to be that paying big bucks for the star was playing it safe because their popularity alone was enough to draw the fans, and it's just one part of the formulaic, play-it-safe mentality: Spend lots of money to license a sequel/comic book/old TV show/bestseller book. Spend lots of money on special effects and blockbuster production values. Spend lots of money to advertise the hell out of it for opening weekend. It all adds up to some pretty mediocre shit, and audiences aren't buying.
Nothing is cheap in London, if it's not the congestion charge, it'll be the high cost of parking and fuel (even if some source of cheap energy saves us, space for parking and roads will never be cheap in places like London). If you read The Long Emergency, by Kunstler, this is one of the possible consequences of Peak Oil. The masses who can't afford to drive any more will be resentful of rich people who can still afford it resulting in vandalism against cars and abuse against drivers. It'll happen sooner or later. If regular Joes like you and me want to *feel* rich by driving around in our motorcars, that's fine. Just remember this cheap oil party is a one-time gift from the bounty of the Earth. It's not normal.
Well, it's not exactly a free market. People bought trucks as passenger vehicles because fuel economy standards are higher for passenger cars and made it harder to buy large cars (Yes, I know that's a government regulation that distorts the market). You seem to think all the SUVs on the road are the result of a fair and free market, but that ignores the huge government sudsidies for driving like road construction (roads cost a lot more than what drivers pay in from gas tax and registration) and a trillion dollar military to "secure access to energy" (although that's not at all a given. The atheist, infidel Chinese seem to have no problem making commercial arrangements with Middle Eastern producers without dominating them militarily).
There's a huge difference between the due process of the UCMJ and the "due process" of the military tribunals at Guantanamo. Here's a quick summary from the obviously biased BBC (/sarcasm). Pay attention to this part and tell me if this is due process:
The Pentagon says it is a "misconception" to think that every prisoner at Guantanamo Bay is due a trial by military commission. It sees the main purpose of the camp as stopping "enemy combatants" returning to the field of combat, although there is dispute over whether many of those held are actually combatants.
At this point I'd just be happy with stable 2D drivers. I don't game in Linux, and XGL is nice, but just something to play with for now.
I had an ATI X700 in my desktop PC. It was almost a year old. The open source xorg radeon driver didn't work, but it almost did in xorg 7.0. The fglrx driver worked fine for 2D, but I didn't run it much in 3D. I tried the Kororaa liveCD with XGL and fglrx, and it locked up a few times. I've since upgraded to an NVIDIA 7900GT. The open source xorg nv driver works fine for 2D. The binary nvidia driver works fine for 3D.
For the dual booters and Windows gamers, I think working open source 2D drivers are a minimum. I'm not a Free Software idealogue, but I would definitely prefer open source drivers if only for 2D.
My main concern was running a critical control loop in a multitasking OS, but if you want to talk CPU requirements it's more complicated than that. Let's assume you want to control ignition timing to within 1 degree of crank rotation. So multiply by 360 and you're up to 864 KHz. Big assumption, but let's say you need 500 ops to run one iteration of the control loop. Now you're up to 362 MHz. I know I made some assumptions with the numbers and there may be ways to simply calculations too.
There is little or no value for an engine ECU like this to run an OS at all, the acme of simplicity in time and safety critcal software is a single hardcoded loop... far less opportunity for bugs and (pun) race conditions.
That's what I would think too. Sure, you could use a WinCE kernel as a supervisor to run the telemetry and interface with the buttons on the steering wheel, but it sounds risky to run the control loop for the fuel injection and ignition as a process in a multitasking OS, and don't forget it spins up to 18000 rpm.
It's different because a passenger is in the car. So either from watching the road or watching for non-verbal cues from the driver, he'll see when the driver needs to pay more attention to something and pause the conversation. Try having a conversation with a passenger who talks on and on with no regard to the driver or the road. It's much more distracting.
Geez, you didn't even have to RTFA. It was in the summary. All three drivers who rear-ended the car in the simulator were on the phone. None of the drunk drivers did.
It's the same trap that Hollywood movies have fallen into. The production values are very high now. Lots of eye candy and polished artwork. However the huge budgets mean that studios have to play it safe. That means lots of sequels and licensed franchises. No originality.
You're right about marketing. They're marketing geniuses. Compared to most retail, an Apple Store is a magical place like Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory. You can almost imagine the Oopma Loompas or the elves in Santa's workshop. Well, this story pulls the curtain back on the wizard. Apple is just like everyone else.
People are so far removed from the nuts and bolts of what actually delivers our modern conveniences. I like affordable electronics and delicious steaks. I'll probably keep buying them, but at least I'm aware of the suffering that goes into making them, although I'm not sure if I ever saw the inside of a slaughterhouse.
To put things simply, third world countries have inferior infrastructure, inferior education levels, inferior political stability and a non-existing domestic market, when compared to a first world country. The _only_ thing most third world countries have going for them is cheap labour.
I respectfully disagree. Although it's being pushed to the limit, China has infrastructure, education and political stability. They also have a huge population of rural peasants which provides a pool of cheap labor. That's how they've become the 800lb gorilla of low-cost manufacturing.
"Your second mistake is treating upload/download as if they cancel each other out. Are you suggesting that people who mostly download (average web surfers) are somehow freeing up available bandwidth?"
He's talking about the peering points where the different backbone carriers exchange traffic. If an ISP hosts a comparable volume of content providers and end users, they'll end up exchanging a similar amount of traffic with other ISPs through the peering points.
That's because a lot of our wealth is tied up in the speculative valuation of company stocks. People are betting on who will be the next Microsoft. If something comes around and returns us to a competitive market, the speculative bubble pops and there's somewhat of an avalanche effect through the market.
When Betamax and MD were new people may have complained about proprietary media but not about quality. These days the quality and reliability of Sony electronics have gone downhill too. That is new.
RAID is always a little tricky. I have a RAID1 on my NForce4 system. It's really just a software RAID that's configured through BIOS. The Suse 10.1 and Fedora Core 5 installers both found the NVIDIA RAID, but I was too nervous to actually install them. The Ubuntu 6.06 installer sees the individual drives. The only distro I have on there now is Gentoo which I hacked with a custom initrd to mirror the partitions on the two drives with dm-mirror.
I think the ISPs will extend professional courtesy to the other backbone carriers. What ISPs really want is to charge content providers (who are not their bandwidth customers) for speedy access to their retail customers. Things would have to get pretty nasty for them to throttle bandwidth to the point where text content like HTML or SMTP becomes unusable.
Sure, if we didn't need to secure their oil for our energy companies, we could disengage from the Middle East. However that still leaves the question of Israel. I don't see how we'll resolve that issue to the satisfaction of the Arab world short of resettling all of Israel on land donated by Europe or America (lots of federal BLM land in the west).
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No, the inflation in real estate is insane. If you already bought a home more than a few years ago, it's guaranteed better than anything you can buy on the market today, even with the slowing real estate market. The lack of housing means that new buyers will go farther and farther out to find affordable housing if they have to have a single family house with a yard. The farthest suburbs are 70 miles or more out. That is what's causing a lot the traffic.
That may be true, but it only protects against vote stuffing, not vote flipping. By vote stuffing, I would include overwriting the database with a new file. Malicious code could contain an algorithm to flip a small percentage of votes while they're being cast. In that case, the total number of votes in the machines will equal the number of voters who signed in with the pollworkers. A VVAT will protect against that though, if the paper receipts are actually audited.
You are correct about process and oversight being more important than any technical vulnerabilities.
Because they don't hold any office important enough to attract big campaign contributions?
The engineers talk about Energy Return on Investment (EROI), the ratio between energy output and energy input. In the case of corn ethanol, it's pretty low, about 1.25:1. You get 1.25 units of energy out for every 1 unit of energy you put in, and for corn farming, the energy inputs will be fossil fuels. Ethanol from sugar cane has a much higher EROI. I've heard as high as 8:1, but I haven't seen the studies. If it's true, sugar cane ethanol would definitely be worth it. Then there's the more exotic processes like cellulosic ethanol and biodiesel from algae. They're all experimental but are more efficient than corn. The problem with biofuels though is that likely production rates will never keep up with our current consumption of oil for transportation. The problem is flow rate, not production cost.
Before all this Diebold was well known for making ATMs. However, that's completely different from the division that makes voting machines. Diebold acquired Global Election Systems in 2002. ATMs are generally secure devices with reliable paper receipt printers and security that's been refined over decades of attack and defence. Just look at the rigorous security requirements for the PIN entry keypad. In comparison, Global Election Systems has been completely amateurish in their approach to security. I would agree that Diebold, as a company, probably isn't conspiring to throw the elections. They're just hucksters charging Cadillac prices for their Yugo quality junk. However, the result of all this amateurish security is that it only takes one or two malicious insiders to hack an election. This is even more troublesome when you consider the lack of criminal background checks on employees and executives of these companies. Diebold and ES&S are both known to have employed convicted felons.
It used to be that paying big bucks for the star was playing it safe because their popularity alone was enough to draw the fans, and it's just one part of the formulaic, play-it-safe mentality: Spend lots of money to license a sequel/comic book/old TV show/bestseller book. Spend lots of money on special effects and blockbuster production values. Spend lots of money to advertise the hell out of it for opening weekend. It all adds up to some pretty mediocre shit, and audiences aren't buying.
Nothing is cheap in London, if it's not the congestion charge, it'll be the high cost of parking and fuel (even if some source of cheap energy saves us, space for parking and roads will never be cheap in places like London). If you read The Long Emergency, by Kunstler, this is one of the possible consequences of Peak Oil. The masses who can't afford to drive any more will be resentful of rich people who can still afford it resulting in vandalism against cars and abuse against drivers. It'll happen sooner or later. If regular Joes like you and me want to *feel* rich by driving around in our motorcars, that's fine. Just remember this cheap oil party is a one-time gift from the bounty of the Earth. It's not normal.
Well, it's not exactly a free market. People bought trucks as passenger vehicles because fuel economy standards are higher for passenger cars and made it harder to buy large cars (Yes, I know that's a government regulation that distorts the market). You seem to think all the SUVs on the road are the result of a fair and free market, but that ignores the huge government sudsidies for driving like road construction (roads cost a lot more than what drivers pay in from gas tax and registration) and a trillion dollar military to "secure access to energy" (although that's not at all a given. The atheist, infidel Chinese seem to have no problem making commercial arrangements with Middle Eastern producers without dominating them militarily).
At this point I'd just be happy with stable 2D drivers. I don't game in Linux, and XGL is nice, but just something to play with for now.
I had an ATI X700 in my desktop PC. It was almost a year old. The open source xorg radeon driver didn't work, but it almost did in xorg 7.0. The fglrx driver worked fine for 2D, but I didn't run it much in 3D. I tried the Kororaa liveCD with XGL and fglrx, and it locked up a few times. I've since upgraded to an NVIDIA 7900GT. The open source xorg nv driver works fine for 2D. The binary nvidia driver works fine for 3D.
For the dual booters and Windows gamers, I think working open source 2D drivers are a minimum. I'm not a Free Software idealogue, but I would definitely prefer open source drivers if only for 2D.
My main concern was running a critical control loop in a multitasking OS, but if you want to talk CPU requirements it's more complicated than that. Let's assume you want to control ignition timing to within 1 degree of crank rotation. So multiply by 360 and you're up to 864 KHz. Big assumption, but let's say you need 500 ops to run one iteration of the control loop. Now you're up to 362 MHz. I know I made some assumptions with the numbers and there may be ways to simply calculations too.
That's what I would think too. Sure, you could use a WinCE kernel as a supervisor to run the telemetry and interface with the buttons on the steering wheel, but it sounds risky to run the control loop for the fuel injection and ignition as a process in a multitasking OS, and don't forget it spins up to 18000 rpm.
It's different because a passenger is in the car. So either from watching the road or watching for non-verbal cues from the driver, he'll see when the driver needs to pay more attention to something and pause the conversation. Try having a conversation with a passenger who talks on and on with no regard to the driver or the road. It's much more distracting.
Geez, you didn't even have to RTFA. It was in the summary. All three drivers who rear-ended the car in the simulator were on the phone. None of the drunk drivers did.
Windows 2000 won't be end of life'ed until 2010. Earlier ones are unsupported and won't get new security fixes.
It's the same trap that Hollywood movies have fallen into. The production values are very high now. Lots of eye candy and polished artwork. However the huge budgets mean that studios have to play it safe. That means lots of sequels and licensed franchises. No originality.
"This means that spies could just design and use cameras which look non-suspicious by the sensors."
You mean like a digital SLR with a mechanical mirror shutter? The CCD is completely blocked off until you take the picture.
You're right about marketing. They're marketing geniuses. Compared to most retail, an Apple Store is a magical place like Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory. You can almost imagine the Oopma Loompas or the elves in Santa's workshop. Well, this story pulls the curtain back on the wizard. Apple is just like everyone else.
People are so far removed from the nuts and bolts of what actually delivers our modern conveniences. I like affordable electronics and delicious steaks. I'll probably keep buying them, but at least I'm aware of the suffering that goes into making them, although I'm not sure if I ever saw the inside of a slaughterhouse.
I respectfully disagree. Although it's being pushed to the limit, China has infrastructure, education and political stability. They also have a huge population of rural peasants which provides a pool of cheap labor. That's how they've become the 800lb gorilla of low-cost manufacturing.
"Your second mistake is treating upload/download as if they cancel each other out. Are you suggesting that people who mostly download (average web surfers) are somehow freeing up available bandwidth?"
He's talking about the peering points where the different backbone carriers exchange traffic. If an ISP hosts a comparable volume of content providers and end users, they'll end up exchanging a similar amount of traffic with other ISPs through the peering points.
That's because a lot of our wealth is tied up in the speculative valuation of company stocks. People are betting on who will be the next Microsoft. If something comes around and returns us to a competitive market, the speculative bubble pops and there's somewhat of an avalanche effect through the market.
When Betamax and MD were new people may have complained about proprietary media but not about quality. These days the quality and reliability of Sony electronics have gone downhill too. That is new.
RAID is always a little tricky. I have a RAID1 on my NForce4 system. It's really just a software RAID that's configured through BIOS. The Suse 10.1 and Fedora Core 5 installers both found the NVIDIA RAID, but I was too nervous to actually install them. The Ubuntu 6.06 installer sees the individual drives. The only distro I have on there now is Gentoo which I hacked with a custom initrd to mirror the partitions on the two drives with dm-mirror.
I think the ISPs will extend professional courtesy to the other backbone carriers. What ISPs really want is to charge content providers (who are not their bandwidth customers) for speedy access to their retail customers. Things would have to get pretty nasty for them to throttle bandwidth to the point where text content like HTML or SMTP becomes unusable.
Sure, if we didn't need to secure their oil for our energy companies, we could disengage from the Middle East. However that still leaves the question of Israel. I don't see how we'll resolve that issue to the satisfaction of the Arab world short of resettling all of Israel on land donated by Europe or America (lots of federal BLM land in the west).