I couldn't find a confirmation in TFA as to which companies really had machines decertified. Our local (Boulder) paper reported this morning that of the four companies involved, only Premier/Diebold had *no* certification revoked. So that's rather at odds with the summary. Seeing that I couldn't see any confirmation of the summary's statement in TFA, I suspect that the local paper got it right.
Premier (formally known as Diebold) All voting equipment submitted for recertification passed.
Sequoia The optical scan devices, Insight and 400-C, used to count paper ballots both passed, but the electronic voting machines, the Edge II and the Edge II Plus, both failed due to a variety of security risk factors, including that the system is not password protected, has exposed controls potentially giving voters unauthorized access, and lacks an audit trail to detect security violations.
Hart The optical scan devices, eScan and BallotNow, both failed because test results showed that they could not accurately count ballots. The electronic voting machine, eSlate, passed.
ES&S The optical scan devices (M 100 and the M650) both failed because of an inability to determine if the devices work correctly and an inability to complete the testing threshold of 10,000 ballots due to vendor programming errors. The electronic voting machine (iVotronic) failed because it is easily disabled by voters activating the device interface, and the system lacks an audit trail to detect security violations.
Maybe the Colorado Sec of State should go read yesterday's 1,000 pages of bad news: Ohio e-voting report released article over on Ars Technica, then chat with the Ohio Sec of State about the EVEREST Testing Reports, which document high-risk issues with equipment from all the vendors that were tested (including Premier/Diebold).
What was in the package and what was claimed to have been in the package are identical... that's not fraud.
The fraud claim wasn't about the contents of the package - instead, it was based on how the order was placed. According to an article on AlterNet, "The $256 Question":
[Steven] Ferrell, a geneticist and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, allegedly provided Kurtz the organisms for use in an artwork, rather than using them in his own research, thereby violating an agreement he had signed when he purchased the cultures for $256 from the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC).
I think that's an accurate description from Kurtz's point of view, since I found the Alternet article via a link on the Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund's press release page.
So yeah, seems like there was mail fraud, but in a technically-correct-but-really-lame sense of "fraud" that reeks of desperation to pin something - anything - on Kurtz.
Um, I'm probably being incredibly dense here, but I can't see any connection between an early precursor of the cinema and the concept of slowing action down to show individual bullets flying through the air. Did you link to the right article?
GP is not just talking out of his arse, but it's probably easier to understand the link between the zoopraxiscope and bullet time by reading the Bullet Time wiki article - mainly the history section, but also read the technology section if you've never seen a "making of" program about how the bullet time sequences were created.
Sounds like someone's going to be getting Apple Fanboy death threats tonight....
I can see the commercials now...
Mac and PC walk in from opposite sides of the screen. Mac is dressed as a ninja - custom-tailored silks, authentic-looking swords, the works. PC wears his typical clothes, but in a disheveled fashion reminiscent of Michael Douglas in "Falling Down", complete with briefcase in one hand and machine gun in the other. (Although it's painfully obvious that PC's "gun" is a cheesy plastic model acquired from the local toy store.)
Mac: Hi, I'm a Mac Fanboy death threat.
PC: And I'm a PC Fanboy death threat.
Mac: The other day someone claimed an Apple product was less than perfect.
PC: Every day people say I'm no good. Every...damn...day.
Mac: I hear ya, PC. In my case, I've assembled a multimedia production based around video clips taken while discretely stalking the person responsible, as text seamlessly scrolls past detailing the inherent superiority of the product in question and Mozart's "Dies Irae" from his "Requiem in D minor" plays in the background. (Pulls out iPhone and shows to PC - we catch glimpses of the movie and hear a snippet of music.)
PC: I have a powerpoint slide I send the offending party. (Opens briefcase and pulls out a tattered piece of paper, hands to Mac).
Mac: (Reading paper) Hmmmm, "U r a lozer and yu is teh suckz. Im gona hurtz u 4 ur makking fun of me. Micrsfort rulez!" Yes, that should certainly make an impression. Nice use of the WingDings font for the dagger.
PC: Thank you. Some people think I'm limited to boring text, but I do have access to some pretty snazzy graphics.
Mac: Yes, I've never seen anything quite like it. Oh well, I'm off to infiltrate the home of the person who offended me, silently scaling the outside wall, entering through an open skylight, and performing a triple-backflip as I drop to the floor, where I'll leave my threat nestled in a bouquet of lotus flowers.
PC: (Rolls eyes, clearly unimpressed.) Whatever. I'm going to catch the midtown bus, and nail my threat to the person's front door. And if they give me any lip, I've got this!
(PC brandishes toy gun, pulls trigger. Gun plays a few seconds of 80s-era laser sounds, which trail off as the batteries die.)
PC: Darn, why does this always happen? Now I've got to get a new weapon.
Mac: Do you want to call a few places, see what's in stock? (Offers iPhone to PC)
PC: Thanks, I... (starts to reach for iPhone, changes mind.) Ummm, no, actually I'm good. Everything's just fine. Okay, gotta go.
(PC shuffles dejectedly offscreen. Mac watches PC leave, then does a backflip out of frame.)
The odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 5,051 in your whole lifetime. To give you some perspective, you're 5 times more likely to drown, 23 times more likely to fall to your death, and 60 times more likely to die in a car accident.
Therefore, a far more useful article would be "How to survive driving off a seaside cliff into the ocean."
The answer is self-evident - as you're driving off the cliff, simply aim your car at a passing airplane. Once you've embedded your car into the side of the plane, your odds of dying drop dramatically.
I would be more concerned if this was found in China, they'd probably inject it with melamine, lead and diethylene glycol then ship it the U.S labeled as beef jerky.
Still, that's better ingredients than you'd find in a Slim Jim.:-P
"Some of them might be waking up now," Rosenfield said, "wondering who they got in bed with." I guess this is a new spelling of the name Mossberg that I was previously unfamiliar with.
Yes, Mossberg's name is spelled "Rosenfield", but it's pronounced "Throat-Warbler Mangrove".
I don't follow you. Can you try again with a car analogy?
Okay, so, like, imagine you take your car. And you leave the key in the ignition with the doors unlocked and the windows down.
But that's like totally okay, because you're actually in the car, driving it.
So, like, then imagine you drive your car to a library. You know, like the kind with books. And, like, with photocopiers. I'm sure you see where this is going, right? So you take a book down off the shelf - say, an illustrated guide to Disney movies, so it's all still protected by copyright. And you bring it over to the photocopier.
And you, like, just leave the book there, sitting right next to the photocopier. And you've left it open to a picture from a movie, like one from...ummm...from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (Because this is a car analogy, right?) And you just leave it sitting there, right where everyone can see it. And you also leave a quarter sitting there on the book. I'm assuming that the photocopier takes quarters - maybe it takes dimes or something. In any case, you leave enough money that anyone passing by could not only see the picture, but could also - through funds that you yourself provided, make a copy of that picture. I mean, you see where I'm going with this, right?
And then you get back in your car, because you're hungry. And you take your car over to the drive-thru at McDonalds. It's actually right next door to the library, but you take your car because this is a car analogy. But when you go to place your order - here's where things really come together - you order a Whopper. And they tell you that they don't serve Whoppers, but ask if a Big Mac would be okay. And you say yes, and pull around to the pickup window. And you try to pay with Monopoly money, because, like, you wanted a Whopper, and they made you accept a substitute for what you wanted, so you ought to be able to pay with, like a substitute for what they want, right?
And they won't give you the Big Mac. So you drive back home.
He'll go do the test, pass it (although probably give the psychologist giving the test some interesting data to work on), and then make a huge PR event out of the fact that he's legally sane.
If someone feels the need to hold a press conference just to announce that they're legally sane, you know everything you need to know about their sanity.
I was going to suggest that since most terrorists are male, we simply request vaginaprints. If you cannot produce a valid vaginaprint you cannot get on the plane or enter the country.
Now that's just silly - I've heard you can fool those scanners by using a simple gelatin copy of a valid v-print.
(...flash forward 2 weeks to my next airport visit...)
TSA agent: Well well well, what have we here? Trying to subvert airline security are we, Mr. Raven?
Me: Oh heavens, no - it's just a...errr... a marital aid.
TSA agent: Sir, I submit to you that this is a v-print circumvention device. And not a terribly good one, at that.
Me: No no no. Clearly what it is, is a...ummm... a sex toy kind of thing. You know, a nudge-nudge-wink-wink "artifical beaver". And what do you mean that it's not very good?
TSA agent: Sir, are you, in fact, married?
Me: Well, not as such, but...
TSA agent: I rather thought not. It may interest you to know that the colloquial meaning of the term "beaver" is not, in fact, a semi-aquatic rodent that gnaws down trees.
Me: Damn Google and its "I'm feeling lucky" button! I spent ages trying to get the teeth right.
TSA agent: Nicely done, sir. Quite good detailing on the tail as well.
Me: Oh, thanks very much!
TSA agent: However, your choice of material...
Me: What? I happen to like lime Jell-O!
TSA agent: As do we all, sir, as do we all. The coloring, however, is not particularly realistic for any of the myriad definitions of the term "beaver".
Me: Wow, so the scanner actually takes color into account? Wish I'd known that a few days ago.
TSA agent: No, the scanner is actually greyscale. But at least now you've admitted that you created this...object... to use against our v-scanner.
Me: Oh damn. Well, it's a fair cop.
TSA agent: Appreciate your understanding, sir. Security! Seize this man!
Will Wright is dead. They're just delaying the game because they don't want to upset anyone.
I thought the delay was due to them using the game to re-evolve a replacement Will Wright. Last I'd heard they've achieved a coder with three brains and six eyes, but only one foot and no hands. They've been trying to teach it to code by hopping up and down on a large keyboard, but it's not working out very well. (I believe they've nicknamed the creature "Won't Write".)
Ankh-Morpork people, said the [Confectioners] guild, were hearty, no-nonsense folk who did not want chocolate that was stuffed with cocoa liquor and were certainly not like effete la-di-dah foreigners who wanted cream in everything. In fact, they actually preferred chocolate made mostly from milk, sugar, suet, hooves, lips, miscellaneous squeezings, rat droppings, plaster, flies, tallow, bits of tree, hair, lint, spiders, and powdered cocoa husks. This meant that, according to the food standards of the great chocolate centers in Borogravia and Quirm, Ankh-Morpork chocolate was formally classed as "cheese" and only escaped, through being the wrong color, being defined as "tile grout."
It would be more interesting to find out what would happen if the key to the Sony standalone BluRay players was discovered.
They'd probably do what standalone DVD player vendors do - release a firmware update as a disc image that customers could download, burn, and insert into their standalone player. From there, it works much the same way as flashing a desktop computer's BIOS - the DVD player starts to load the disc, recognizes it as an update, and flashes its firmware. (For example, Pansonic has nearly two dozen updates like this available in the DVD Firmware section of their support site.)
From a quick check on the Sony support site, they've already released a disc-based firmware upgrade for their BDP-S1 BluRay Player, so this seems like the route Sony would use if they ever had to push out new keys.
Actually that's not a well constructed poll. It's asking 2 things at once in a single yes/no question (Is evolution well supported, is evolution well accepted). So of the people who said no are they saying no to one of the questions or both?
I'm curious, when did Airbus start putting rear view mirrors in their planes? I have never known it possible in any recent commercial airliner for the pilots to see back behind them.
It's possible that the description of "behind" meant something other than "directly behind". Sure, in commercial aircraft cockpits you can't see the tail of the plane from the cockpit, but you could certainly see something well past a 90 degree bearing if you lean towards the window. Even from a dinky passenger window your field of view encompasses points that could reasonably be described as "in front of", "behind", "above", and even "below" the plane - and you can do all that without needing windows in the ceiling or floor, or forward-/rear-view mirrors.
So no need for mirrors, external cameras, visuals from other planes, etc - the pilot saw a flaming piece of debris falling down ahead of the plane, planted his face against the side cockpit window to get a wider field of view while scanning the sky, and reported seeing another piece of debris coming down somewhere in the rear quadrant - you know, "behind" the plane.
If you're a tourist in another country, the LAST thing you would normally want to do is advertise that fact.
For whatever reason, this brought to mind part of one of Laurie Anderson's song/stories from her "The Ugly One with the Jewels" album:
[...] I especially remember an interesting list of tips devised by the US embassy in Madrid, and these tips were designed for Americans who found themselves in war-time airports. The idea was not to call ourselves to the attention of the numerous foreign terrorists who were presumably lurking all the way to terminal, so the embassy tips were a list of mostly don'ts. Things like:
don't wear a baseball cap
don't wear a sweat shirt with the name of an American university on it
don't wear Timberlands with no socks
don't chew gum
don't yell "Ethel, our plane is leaving!"
I mean it's weird when your entire culture can be summed up in eight giveaway characteristics.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if they took that danged cat out of the box, they'd have enough room...
Looks like your local paper got it right - according to this News Release from the Colorado Secretary of State, the results were:
Maybe the Colorado Sec of State should go read yesterday's 1,000 pages of bad news: Ohio e-voting report released article over on Ars Technica, then chat with the Ohio Sec of State about the EVEREST Testing Reports, which document high-risk issues with equipment from all the vendors that were tested (including Premier/Diebold).
I downloaded the MP3 and piped the audio output into my printer. Ended up with a copy of Da Vinci's "Last Supper".
Silly, the astronauts would be asleep at night. :-P
The fraud claim wasn't about the contents of the package - instead, it was based on how the order was placed. According to an article on AlterNet, "The $256 Question" :
I think that's an accurate description from Kurtz's point of view, since I found the Alternet article via a link on the Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund's press release page.
So yeah, seems like there was mail fraud, but in a technically-correct-but-really-lame sense of "fraud" that reeks of desperation to pin something - anything - on Kurtz.
GP is not just talking out of his arse, but it's probably easier to understand the link between the zoopraxiscope and bullet time by reading the Bullet Time wiki article - mainly the history section, but also read the technology section if you've never seen a "making of" program about how the bullet time sequences were created.
I can see the commercials now...
Mac and PC walk in from opposite sides of the screen. Mac is dressed as a ninja - custom-tailored silks, authentic-looking swords, the works. PC wears his typical clothes, but in a disheveled fashion reminiscent of Michael Douglas in "Falling Down", complete with briefcase in one hand and machine gun in the other. (Although it's painfully obvious that PC's "gun" is a cheesy plastic model acquired from the local toy store.)
The answer is self-evident - as you're driving off the cliff, simply aim your car at a passing airplane. Once you've embedded your car into the side of the plane, your odds of dying drop dramatically.
I was afraid something like that would happen...
Still, that's better ingredients than you'd find in a Slim Jim. :-P
Yes, Mossberg's name is spelled "Rosenfield", but it's pronounced "Throat-Warbler Mangrove".
Canada has very strong labour laws, eh ...?
There, fixed that for you. :-P
Okay, so, like, imagine you take your car. And you leave the key in the ignition with the doors unlocked and the windows down.
But that's like totally okay, because you're actually in the car, driving it.
So, like, then imagine you drive your car to a library. You know, like the kind with books. And, like, with photocopiers. I'm sure you see where this is going, right? So you take a book down off the shelf - say, an illustrated guide to Disney movies, so it's all still protected by copyright. And you bring it over to the photocopier.
And you, like, just leave the book there, sitting right next to the photocopier. And you've left it open to a picture from a movie, like one from...ummm...from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (Because this is a car analogy, right?) And you just leave it sitting there, right where everyone can see it. And you also leave a quarter sitting there on the book. I'm assuming that the photocopier takes quarters - maybe it takes dimes or something. In any case, you leave enough money that anyone passing by could not only see the picture, but could also - through funds that you yourself provided, make a copy of that picture. I mean, you see where I'm going with this, right?
And then you get back in your car, because you're hungry. And you take your car over to the drive-thru at McDonalds. It's actually right next door to the library, but you take your car because this is a car analogy. But when you go to place your order - here's where things really come together - you order a Whopper. And they tell you that they don't serve Whoppers, but ask if a Big Mac would be okay. And you say yes, and pull around to the pickup window. And you try to pay with Monopoly money, because, like, you wanted a Whopper, and they made you accept a substitute for what you wanted, so you ought to be able to pay with, like a substitute for what they want, right?
And they won't give you the Big Mac. So you drive back home.
So, is it all clear now?
If someone feels the need to hold a press conference just to announce that they're legally sane, you know everything you need to know about their sanity.
Now that's just silly - I've heard you can fool those scanners by using a simple gelatin copy of a valid v-print.
(...flash forward 2 weeks to my next airport visit...)
She'll bite his nuts off. (Maybe a few of his bolts as well...)
Just so long as he wasn't running with scissors - you could poke someone's eye out with those things.
A Slashdot thread without a flawed analogy is like a frozen fishstick without a train conductor.
I thought the delay was due to them using the game to re-evolve a replacement Will Wright. Last I'd heard they've achieved a coder with three brains and six eyes, but only one foot and no hands. They've been trying to teach it to code by hopping up and down on a large keyboard, but it's not working out very well. (I believe they've nicknamed the creature "Won't Write".)
Terry Pratchett, "Thief of Time"
They'd probably do what standalone DVD player vendors do - release a firmware update as a disc image that customers could download, burn, and insert into their standalone player. From there, it works much the same way as flashing a desktop computer's BIOS - the DVD player starts to load the disc, recognizes it as an update, and flashes its firmware. (For example, Pansonic has nearly two dozen updates like this available in the DVD Firmware section of their support site.)
From a quick check on the Sony support site, they've already released a disc-based firmware upgrade for their BDP-S1 BluRay Player, so this seems like the route Sony would use if they ever had to push out new keys.
Yes.
It's possible that the description of "behind" meant something other than "directly behind". Sure, in commercial aircraft cockpits you can't see the tail of the plane from the cockpit, but you could certainly see something well past a 90 degree bearing if you lean towards the window. Even from a dinky passenger window your field of view encompasses points that could reasonably be described as "in front of", "behind", "above", and even "below" the plane - and you can do all that without needing windows in the ceiling or floor, or forward-/rear-view mirrors.
So no need for mirrors, external cameras, visuals from other planes, etc - the pilot saw a flaming piece of debris falling down ahead of the plane, planted his face against the side cockpit window to get a wider field of view while scanning the sky, and reported seeing another piece of debris coming down somewhere in the rear quadrant - you know, "behind" the plane.
Occam's Razor - it's not just for shaving!
For whatever reason, this brought to mind part of one of Laurie Anderson's song/stories from her "The Ugly One with the Jewels" album: