I *know* that it has been proven that it is often trivial to get these machines to report false information. Do we know that they have done so during an election?
I would say yes: in the 2004 there were statistically significant discrepancies between the uncorrected exit poll data and the actual vote, and these discrepancies correlated with the use of voting machines, and with battleground states.
Either there was something very peculiar going on with the exit polling that year, or machine rigging was used as a tool to give Bush Jr. his second term. Most of the explanations that have been floated vary between grossly implausible ("the reluctant bush respondant" theory) and obvious disinformation (an upswing in bush voters late in the election).
But really, the right answer is why do you care if an election has been rigged, isn't the possibility that it can be rigged a big enough cause for concern? If you're going to talk about election integrity issues, arguing about what has happened can be distraction from the problem of what we should do. Even if I'm totally wrong about the 2004 election, we still need to worry about paper trails and recount procedures. Looking forward: it is absolutely critical to put good people in the state-level "Secretary of State" offices: people like Debra Bowen (in California) and Jennifer Brunner (in Ohio) are heroes of democracy, right up there with Beverly Harrris.
Yeah. And just for you Anonymous, I read it again. There's a hell of a lot of description of what the book covers, and praise for getting what it gets right right. (I was, however, numbering paragraphs from 0. You guys got that, right?)
The OP's summary of the whole review seems pretty much spot on.
And that is a completely ridiculous thing to say.
He mentions here and there what you'd get from reading the table of contents, but there's no critical component beyond criticism of Google Apps itself.
Okay, allow me to give you some help also:
"These how-to chapters are comprehensive; they anticipate and resolve many of the practical problems one would encounter during deployment with directions and advice which is obviously hard-won, based on the real-world expertise of the author. He's clearly done the Apps deal himself, and writes from actual experience, not from the hypothetical."
Hell, even the quote you paste, containing "at its current state of development and fitness for duty", is an obvious jibe at the platform.
Oh my, how dare the reviewer have an opinion different from yours!
But, dammit, I'll give it to you. The word "sure-footed" is actually referring to the book itself.
You're giving it to me all right.
In that babbling mess of nonsense, he's actually used one albeit ill-fitting adjective to comment on the book. Perhaps the fanfic reject actually has some hope beyond being a target of molly-coddling by Special Olympics cheerleaders such as yourself.
Is that an Obama joke?
Every Lenny has his George.
And every slashdot book review has a chorus of internet retards padding out the comments.
Every single review, you get the usual blather from people who'd rather write than read any thing, let alone read a book.
I actually tried to make sense of the review. Rather than being about the book, it's actually about why he doesn't like Google Apps and why he's annoyed that a book on Google Apps doesn't spend its time agreeing with him.
Here, let me help you out by suggesting you read the third paragraph:
That said, it was my only real gripe about Google Apps Deciphered. Taking it at face value, this book is a sure-footed guide to deploying Google Apps at its current state of development and fitness for duty.
I guess it's a cause for celebration when a slash kid makes it through the first two paragraphs, but still. ("Insightful", huh?)
After all, there was no investigation of the tremendous imbalance of put options on companies hurt by the disaster prior to 9/11.
Actually, it was investigated by the 9/11 commission, you just don't like the conclusion they came to. (He who does not see the conspiracy must be part of the conspiracy, right?):
Snopes: Put Paid
(You know, I like a good conspiracy theory myself... but you Truthies really need to give it a rest.)
No, the deregulation in the 90s was just so they could make it profitable later. They made it profitable later on, by having Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "secure" bad mortgages, in the name of helping poor people buy houses.
Remember folks, "Republican" and "dis-information" are practically synonymous.
(Just don't use the "L" word.).
Allow me to quote Paul Krugman (a crazed extremist who's never right about anything, but bear with me):
This is utterly false. Fannie/Freddie did some bad things, and did, it turns out, get to some extent into subprime. But thanks to the accounting scandals, they were actually withdrawing from the market during the height of the housing bubble -- the vast majority of the loans now going bad came from the private sector.
Yet it's now clear that the phony account of the crisis -- that it's all due to Fannie, Freddie, and nasty liberals forcing poor Angelo Mozilo to make loans to Those People -- is setting in as Republican orthodoxy, part of what you have to believe to be a respectable member of the party.
And it never goes away. They spout the bullshit, knowledgeable people cry bullshit, and they just come back with the same line, over-and-over again. If you say it often enough, it must be true.
"The market offers no way to subvert that process."
Other than the janitor placing the bet, then loosening a key bolt the night before he takes a vacation over seas.
Yup. A market in disaster prediction would offer an economic incentive to causing disasters combined with a way of laundering the income from the crime -- and the libertarians in the audience can't see a way that that might cause problems. But isn't human behavior ruled by economic incentives?
(A conspiracy theory that I like -- which is not to say that I believe it -- is that the Three Mile Island accident was caused by an anti-nuclear activist that infiltrated the plant. That's why it just happened to coincide with the release of the movie "The China Syndrome".)
Yes, it's absolutely critical to reproduce the sound of over-cranked Marshall amps so that you hear the precise degree of distortion that god intended.
Before getting all dogmatic about the application of the Nyquist theorem,
you need to be sure you really know what the range of human hearing is,
and the way they measure that range is by putting head phones on people and having them sit in quiet little rooms.
Notice a problem with that? The presumption is that you only hear sound with your ears.
Having watched people humping speaker stacks at raves, I have my doubts that this is strictly true.
Back in the days when I was working for an incarnation of eMusic (several buy-outs ago), I noticed that they had a release from Skullflower in the collection, and I listened to it at work. Skullflower has a pretty seriously noisy sound, but sometimes I like serious noise, and the Skullflower mp3s sounded pretty good to me. That seemed a little funny, because I was pretty sure I'd listened to the CD before down in KZSU's library (I was a DJ at KZSU in those days), and the CD hadn't grabbed me.
But the next time I was on the air, I pulled the Sullflower CD out of the library on impulse, and tried playing a track. It struck me as horribly annoying. Hm, must've picked a bad track. I played around with fading the CD down, fading something else up, and skipping to another Skullflower track. I did that several times, and found them all horribly annoying.
My conclusion: this particular "music" is full of screeching high-frequencies that drive me up the wall, and the mp3 format's compression does a good job of screening them out.
In general I prefer CDs to mp3s, but then, myself I preferred the sound of vinyl to CDs...
There's been a trend in the CD era toward a very clean and bright sound that I don't think very much of. Myself, I prefer a sense of "warmth" and "depth", but for that you need some fairly serious speakers, and along with CDs came a fad for minaturization, and people don't listen to music on those major sound systems much any more.
My conclusion: it's impossible to talk about the merits of different sound formats in isolation, because music production practices change as the characteristics of the formats and audio equipment change. If you expect people to be listening on wimpy speakers via a lossy compression format, then you're going to things like lean on the highs to punch through those barriers. And then if someone takes barriers away, you're going to be blasted by the highs.
Just to hammer the point home: in evaluating someone's opinion about economics, it's far less important whether they have a credentialed degree in the subject than knowing who pays their salary.
Lack of expertise is not the problem (and certainly vandalism is not a serious problem): the real problem is propaganda and subversion.
I sincerely hope that Stephen Hawking isn't wasting his time editing at citizendium, he has better things to do.
For all wikipedia's problems, it is a provable fact that the level of expertise of it's volunteers is adequate for writing introductory level articles. The technical articles at wikipedia may not be perfect, but they are as good or better as the ones from more professional sources...
So, once again, why the obsession with credentials?
I will say this is the first time EVER where I thought a H2 energy culture was even remotely possible.
Can't imagine why. You can split water easily using a source of electricity (e.g. nuclear), ship the hydrogen to where ever, and burn it using local oxygen from the air (fuel cell, internal combustion engine, whatever), and the emissions are limited to water vapor. Essentially, it's a neat way of storing energy -- the hard part is shipping the hydrogen (Do you do it at high pressure? At cryogenic temperature?)
As for ethanol, I still don't understand why we don't use hemp instead of corn.
At the rate we're going, marijuana will be legalized before they get around to hemp, but the bio-fuel dream is always going to be a non-starter: there just isn't enough energy available to the biosphere to think that we can hijack enough of it to run a significant chunk of our industry. Seriously, the estimates I've seen are something like 6 terrawatts in the biosphere, and more than twice that is used by industry:
Drew Endby and Jim Thomas, Long Now talk (mp3)
Coal and oil are very safe, non-toxic materials - as is any reasonable concentration of CO2 - but the reality is that they're not green overall.
You're losing me here. Even before you talk about CO2 emissions, coal power in the US kills thousands of people a year. It's an incredibly dirty, 18th Century energy technology.
There's an important distinction between being highly skilled and being inflexible, bull-headed, or argumentative. If someone lacks good judgment in how much arguing a particular issue is worth before letting it go, or if they lack the skills to convince other people of their views - much less recognize when their own views are wrong, then what other expertise they have as an engineer becomes much less worthwhile to most employers.
No: there is little hope for "multi-language programming", because the barriers are social, not technical. Every time you add a language to a project, you're raising the bar on the number of languages you need to be familiar with to work on that project.
The academic attitude is that you should learn all languages, and all programming methodologies for the sake of the mental exercise involved, but out in the real world people go hog-wild for things like object-relational mappers -- whose main benefit is to save procedural programmers from the horrors of having to shift gears and think relationally.
There is one possible bright spot I know of in the multi-language world: the development of things like the Parrot virtual machine, which is intended to be an efficient backend for all dynamic languages, including (but not limited to) Perl 6. It seems unlikely to me that this technical achievement is going to bridge the social barriers between the camps of language advocates, but you never know, maybe I'm underestimating Larry Wall's social engineering skills.
By the way: the unix "do one thing and do it well" philosophy has almost never been adhered to by anyone. It's more like "do one thing sort of okay, then trick it out with command-line options, configuration files, and customization languages until you can't tell if it's going to fry eggs or go to the bathroom". In reality, piping together small programs is of extremely limited utility: a pipe is too narrow a communication channel -- that's why perl was such a success, it integrated all of the old shell favorites into one process so the pieces could talk to each other much more easily.
(1) There isn't any particular reason to think that credentialed experts are going to want to volunteer their work for free on wikipedia.
Close it off to amateurs, and wikipedia will likely shrivel.
(2) There isn't any evidence that wikipedia is any more unreliable than any other encylopedia -- what studies there have been show them to be roughly comparable.
(3) The problem with volunteerism isn't the average quality of the volunteers -- the actual problem is subversion. As wikipedia, and things like it, grow in importance, than the ability to game the system will grow in importance, and well-funded flacks will overwhelm the volunteers (First, imagine that a Karl Rove has hired dozens of people to open hundreds of accounts, all of which build up their reputations until they're needed to control politically sensitive material. Second, imagine that the Chinese government has decided to take control of the page about China, rather than block the site.)
My prediction: there will come a time when internet anonymity has become more trouble than it's worth, and we'll insist that we know who our volunteers are.
My point is that if you hold all the primaries on the same date, and have a national primary, then the primary will be conducted the same way the national presidential campaign, which is, demonstrably, via television.
If you're trying to tell me we're living in a bold new era of internet campaigns, I'm going to tell you to look again. The net let's people who are already motivated talk to each other -- it is by no means a way of reaching The Undecideds, which is what you need to sway an election.
Hm, how do you figure? I mean, you can buy airtime in Iowa as easily as nation-wide, so why would things change so dramatically?
Because New Hampshire and Iowa are such pip-squeak little places, it is possible for the politicians to get out and press a significant amount of flesh, and so that's what they have to do to compete with each other -- they need to get out there and answer questions at little town meetings and so on. Candidate A may choose to just buy TV ads, but on average they'll lose out to Candidate B if brand B has bought TV ads and also runs around kissing babies.
On the national stage, these kinds of little town meetings would be lost in the noise. You can't possibly appear in enough of them to effect a national vote, so what's the point in trying?
Of course, none of this is a justification for Iowa and New Hampshire being the gate-keepers... I'd probably rather see a lottery system choosing the order of primaries.
Again the whole point of giving a small state more power per-person than a large state is to allow it to defend itself against mob rule. And it works well.
No one is going to complain about the small states controlling their local government. This "mob rule" bit is a bit hyperbolic.
Slashdot Mirror
He must have gotten word from Karl Rove. Those guys love anonymous web comments.
By the way, have you guys seen this one? Clumsy British Centipede Stings Itself To Death In Public
Moderators: mark this "funny".
Hard work like this deserves to be rewarded.
I would say yes: in the 2004 there were statistically significant discrepancies between the uncorrected exit poll data and the actual vote, and these discrepancies correlated with the use of voting machines, and with battleground states.
Either there was something very peculiar going on with the exit polling that year, or machine rigging was used as a tool to give Bush Jr. his second term. Most of the explanations that have been floated vary between grossly implausible ("the reluctant bush respondant" theory) and obvious disinformation (an upswing in bush voters late in the election).
But really, the right answer is why do you care if an election has been rigged, isn't the possibility that it can be rigged a big enough cause for concern? If you're going to talk about election integrity issues, arguing about what has happened can be distraction from the problem of what we should do. Even if I'm totally wrong about the 2004 election, we still need to worry about paper trails and recount procedures. Looking forward: it is absolutely critical to put good people in the state-level "Secretary of State" offices: people like Debra Bowen (in California) and Jennifer Brunner (in Ohio) are heroes of democracy, right up there with Beverly Harrris.
Yeah. And just for you Anonymous, I read it again. There's a hell of a lot of description of what the book covers, and praise for getting what it gets right right. (I was, however, numbering paragraphs from 0. You guys got that, right?)
And that is a completely ridiculous thing to say.
Okay, allow me to give you some help also: "These how-to chapters are comprehensive; they anticipate and resolve many of the practical problems one would encounter during deployment with directions and advice which is obviously hard-won, based on the real-world expertise of the author. He's clearly done the Apps deal himself, and writes from actual experience, not from the hypothetical."
Oh my, how dare the reviewer have an opinion different from yours!
You're giving it to me all right.
Is that an Obama joke?
And every slashdot book review has a chorus of internet retards padding out the comments. Every single review, you get the usual blather from people who'd rather write than read any thing, let alone read a book.
Here, let me help you out by suggesting you read the third paragraph:
I guess it's a cause for celebration when a slash kid makes it through the first two paragraphs, but still. ("Insightful", huh?)
Actually, it was investigated by the 9/11 commission, you just don't like the conclusion they came to. (He who does not see the conspiracy must be part of the conspiracy, right?): Snopes: Put Paid
(You know, I like a good conspiracy theory myself... but you Truthies really need to give it a rest.)
Remember folks, "Republican" and "dis-information" are practically synonymous. (Just don't use the "L" word.).
Allow me to quote Paul Krugman (a crazed extremist who's never right about anything, but bear with me):
And it never goes away. They spout the bullshit, knowledgeable people cry bullshit, and they just come back with the same line, over-and-over again. If you say it often enough, it must be true.
Yup. A market in disaster prediction would offer an economic incentive to causing disasters combined with a way of laundering the income from the crime -- and the libertarians in the audience can't see a way that that might cause problems. But isn't human behavior ruled by economic incentives?
(A conspiracy theory that I like -- which is not to say that I believe it -- is that the Three Mile Island accident was caused by an anti-nuclear activist that infiltrated the plant. That's why it just happened to coincide with the release of the movie "The China Syndrome".)
Yes, it's absolutely critical to reproduce the sound of over-cranked Marshall amps so that you hear the precise degree of distortion that god intended.
Before getting all dogmatic about the application of the Nyquist theorem, you need to be sure you really know what the range of human hearing is, and the way they measure that range is by putting head phones on people and having them sit in quiet little rooms.
Notice a problem with that? The presumption is that you only hear sound with your ears.
Having watched people humping speaker stacks at raves, I have my doubts that this is strictly true.
Here's my Skullflower anecdote about MP3s:
Back in the days when I was working for an incarnation of eMusic (several buy-outs ago), I noticed that they had a release from Skullflower in the collection, and I listened to it at work. Skullflower has a pretty seriously noisy sound, but sometimes I like serious noise, and the Skullflower mp3s sounded pretty good to me. That seemed a little funny, because I was pretty sure I'd listened to the CD before down in KZSU's library (I was a DJ at KZSU in those days), and the CD hadn't grabbed me.
But the next time I was on the air, I pulled the Sullflower CD out of the library on impulse, and tried playing a track. It struck me as horribly annoying. Hm, must've picked a bad track. I played around with fading the CD down, fading something else up, and skipping to another Skullflower track. I did that several times, and found them all horribly annoying.
My conclusion: this particular "music" is full of screeching high-frequencies that drive me up the wall, and the mp3 format's compression does a good job of screening them out.
In general I prefer CDs to mp3s, but then, myself I preferred the sound of vinyl to CDs... There's been a trend in the CD era toward a very clean and bright sound that I don't think very much of. Myself, I prefer a sense of "warmth" and "depth", but for that you need some fairly serious speakers, and along with CDs came a fad for minaturization, and people don't listen to music on those major sound systems much any more.
My conclusion: it's impossible to talk about the merits of different sound formats in isolation, because music production practices change as the characteristics of the formats and audio equipment change. If you expect people to be listening on wimpy speakers via a lossy compression format, then you're going to things like lean on the highs to punch through those barriers. And then if someone takes barriers away, you're going to be blasted by the highs.
Just to hammer the point home: in evaluating someone's opinion about economics, it's far less important whether they have a credentialed degree in the subject than knowing who pays their salary.
Lack of expertise is not the problem (and certainly vandalism is not a serious problem): the real problem is propaganda and subversion.
I sincerely hope that Stephen Hawking isn't wasting his time editing at citizendium, he has better things to do.
For all wikipedia's problems, it is a provable fact that the level of expertise of it's volunteers is adequate for writing introductory level articles. The technical articles at wikipedia may not be perfect, but they are as good or better as the ones from more professional sources...
So, once again, why the obsession with credentials?
Can't imagine why. You can split water easily using a source of electricity (e.g. nuclear), ship the hydrogen to where ever, and burn it using local oxygen from the air (fuel cell, internal combustion engine, whatever), and the emissions are limited to water vapor. Essentially, it's a neat way of storing energy -- the hard part is shipping the hydrogen (Do you do it at high pressure? At cryogenic temperature?)
At the rate we're going, marijuana will be legalized before they get around to hemp, but the bio-fuel dream is always going to be a non-starter: there just isn't enough energy available to the biosphere to think that we can hijack enough of it to run a significant chunk of our industry. Seriously, the estimates I've seen are something like 6 terrawatts in the biosphere, and more than twice that is used by industry: Drew Endby and Jim Thomas, Long Now talk (mp3)
You're losing me here. Even before you talk about CO2 emissions, coal power in the US kills thousands of people a year. It's an incredibly dirty, 18th Century energy technology.
s{ procedural }{object-oriented}x;
A brief HTML lesson: If you type "é" you will see: é
Only if you drop the improper religious references.
Unless they're promoted to management.
No: there is little hope for "multi-language programming", because the barriers are social, not technical. Every time you add a language to a project, you're raising the bar on the number of languages you need to be familiar with to work on that project.
The academic attitude is that you should learn all languages, and all programming methodologies for the sake of the mental exercise involved, but out in the real world people go hog-wild for things like object-relational mappers -- whose main benefit is to save procedural programmers from the horrors of having to shift gears and think relationally.
There is one possible bright spot I know of in the multi-language world: the development of things like the Parrot virtual machine, which is intended to be an efficient backend for all dynamic languages, including (but not limited to) Perl 6. It seems unlikely to me that this technical achievement is going to bridge the social barriers between the camps of language advocates, but you never know, maybe I'm underestimating Larry Wall's social engineering skills.
By the way: the unix "do one thing and do it well" philosophy has almost never been adhered to by anyone. It's more like "do one thing sort of okay, then trick it out with command-line options, configuration files, and customization languages until you can't tell if it's going to fry eggs or go to the bathroom". In reality, piping together small programs is of extremely limited utility: a pipe is too narrow a communication channel -- that's why perl was such a success, it integrated all of the old shell favorites into one process so the pieces could talk to each other much more easily.
(1) There isn't any particular reason to think that credentialed experts are going to want to volunteer their work for free on wikipedia. Close it off to amateurs, and wikipedia will likely shrivel.
(2) There isn't any evidence that wikipedia is any more unreliable than any other encylopedia -- what studies there have been show them to be roughly comparable.
(3) The problem with volunteerism isn't the average quality of the volunteers -- the actual problem is subversion. As wikipedia, and things like it, grow in importance, than the ability to game the system will grow in importance, and well-funded flacks will overwhelm the volunteers (First, imagine that a Karl Rove has hired dozens of people to open hundreds of accounts, all of which build up their reputations until they're needed to control politically sensitive material. Second, imagine that the Chinese government has decided to take control of the page about China, rather than block the site.)
My prediction: there will come a time when internet anonymity has become more trouble than it's worth, and we'll insist that we know who our volunteers are.
If you're trying to tell me we're living in a bold new era of internet campaigns, I'm going to tell you to look again. The net let's people who are already motivated talk to each other -- it is by no means a way of reaching The Undecideds, which is what you need to sway an election.
Well, yes, that would've protected us from Bush Jr.
Because New Hampshire and Iowa are such pip-squeak little places, it is possible for the politicians to get out and press a significant amount of flesh, and so that's what they have to do to compete with each other -- they need to get out there and answer questions at little town meetings and so on. Candidate A may choose to just buy TV ads, but on average they'll lose out to Candidate B if brand B has bought TV ads and also runs around kissing babies.
On the national stage, these kinds of little town meetings would be lost in the noise. You can't possibly appear in enough of them to effect a national vote, so what's the point in trying?
Of course, none of this is a justification for Iowa and New Hampshire being the gate-keepers... I'd probably rather see a lottery system choosing the order of primaries.
No one is going to complain about the small states controlling their local government. This "mob rule" bit is a bit hyperbolic.