If the manufacturer is also the only dealer, you will see the same price at every dealer; full MSRP.
... and then the manufacturers would have to compete against each other on price, and the MSRPs would drop. I don't see a problem there. It's not like there is currently a lot of benefit to the consumer in having every car labelled with an irrelevant MSRP price that only suckers actually pay. Wouldn't it be nicer if the MSRP was actually a reasonable price, and you could just go in and buy a car at that price without haggling for hours? That's how most consumer purchases work, and it makes buying a lot less stressful.
No. Waterboarding is torture and has never been legal in the US, self-serving double-talk from the Bush administration notwithstanding. Waterboarding is outlawed by Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which have the force of law in the US. If the US were a country where the military is held responsible for its actions, both the people who did the waterboarding and the people who ordered them to do it would have been tried, found guilty, and imprisoned.
the US does it to its own pilots and special forces
The difference being that in the training scenario, the pilot is undergoing waterboarding voluntarily, and is free to refuse or cut short the process. That is very different from the situation we saw in the Bush administration, where the victim had no control over his own repeated near-drowning.
Arguing that waterboarding is legal because it's sometimes undergone voluntarily for training purposes makes as much sense as saying that tying people down and slicing them with a scalpel is legal because surgeons do it during surgery. Context matters.
It doesn't represent the will of 49% of the voters.
A truly representative system would slice off 49% of Candidate A and 51% of Candidate B, sew the pieces together, and nominate the result as President.
Whichever technology you use, the key is keeping the process open and properly audited.
I totally agree -- however, computers by their very nature are difficult to keep open and audited, because you can't see what's really going on inside a microchip. Instead, you inevitably end up having to rely on the word of some expert that it is working correctly.
The behavior of ink-on-paper, on the other hand, can be readily seen and understood by even the most muddle-headed retiree polling volunteer.
This is important, because even if some clever designer comes up with a computer system that is foolproof, people still won't trust it unless they can understand (and see for themselves) the mechanism(s) that prevent abuse. And the chances of the majority of Americans ever becoming comfortable with nuances of programming languages, compiler design, checksums, microprocessor verification, and so on are very, very slim.
It's not enough for the system to just be reliable. People need to have faith in the system as well.
No they did not. Water boarding was listed as activities supporting torture but none of them were convicted for water boarding anyone. You will not find one charge of water boarding against any of the japs or germans convicted of post facto laws
I'm not sure if you are arguing some technicality (such as the technique being referred to as "water torture" rather than "water boarding" at the time, despite being the same practice)... but in any case, Politifact disagrees with you.
The electoral college is necessary to balance power between large and small states. Civics education in this country is going down the pooper.
Whether or not balancing power between large and small states is a good thing is open to debate, though.
The fact is that the vote of a person living in Wisconsin counts for 3.8 times as many Electoral Votes as my vote as a Californian.
The historical background of the USA as a collection of sovereign states notwithstanding, that seems like a pretty undemocratic state of affairs. In a proper democratic system, all votes should be given equal weight.
Please, let's stop pretending that Bush started anything.
1) He started the invasion of Iraq. 2) He started torture as official US policy.
His predecessors were hardly any better.
After World War 2, the USA convicted several Japanese soldiers of water boarding American and Allied prisoners of war. The US government hanged them for that crime.
George W. Bush will forever be known as the President who first sanctioned torture in the USA.
I agree, closed source voting machines are bad. Do voting machines have to be closed source? They do not.
You know what's even sneakier than a closed-source voting machine running hacked firmware? An open-source voting machine that's running hacked firmware. Just because you have a.tar.gz of source code to look at doesn't mean that code is what the machine is running, or that the machine is running the code the way you would expect it to.
(And having it display a checksum or something to "prove" it's really running the non-tampered-with version isn't much help either, since the secretly-evil version will happily display the expected checksum as well)
If only printed receipts are counted, then would it not be even easier for a fraudster to mass print lots of "receipts" that would be indistinguishable from actual receipts? [...] I suppose there's a system in place to block that. If so, how does it work?
Several things make that difficult (although probably not completely impossible):
- When the polls open, the poll worker who is in charge of the polling location shows everyone in the room that the ballot box is empty, and then locks the ballot box.
- The ballot box is at all times kept in a clearly visible location, so anyone tampering with it would be seen by voters and by poll workers.
- Ballots are printed on special paper, and the ballot paper is tracked closely -- the polling inspector has to know exactly how many ballots he was given, he has to retain any that were voided, and he has to account for all of them at the end of the day.
- Ballots paper for each precinct has the precinct ID on it, so ballots for precinct #1111 can't be used at precinct #1112, etc.
- Everyone who votes signs the voter roll book, and at the end of the day the ballots in the box are counted (by all the poll workers) and the number of ballots is compared to the number of signatures in the book. If the numbers differ, clearly there is something wrong. If they differ by a lot, that's a big red flag.
- Poll workers generally don't know each other, so the chances of an entire precinct worth of poll workers being dishonest at once is small.
- After the poll closes, the ballots are sealed with special tape into a box that two poll workers take to the collection point. Also, a third poll worker separately mails a form containing the ballot counts, signature counts, etc. This minimizes the opportunity for any particular poll worker to engage in shenanigans without being noticed.
- And finally, if someone is sufficiently evil/clever to find ways around all of the above without getting caught, they still will have only modified a few hundred votes at best, so the payoff is small. In order to significantly effect most races, you'd have to have dozens or hundreds of polling precincts compromised, and the likelihood is that someone would mess up and get caught, at which point there would be a big hue and cry and everything would be gone over with a fine-toothed comb, hopefully exposing the other conspirators.
How about the high cost of counting ballots by hand?
I've been a poll worker here (in California) several times, and the only hand-counting of ballots we did was literally just that -- counting the number of paper ballots in the box at the end of the day, to make sure it matched the number of signatures we had gathered in the log book. With a team of 5 poll workers doing it in parallel (and checking each other's work), it takes about 30 minutes to complete. Given that poll workers are paid a flat fee ($100 or so for the day), the cost isn't high.
The actual counting of who bubbled in which bubble is done by machine elsewhere, but it could be re-done by hand if any questions arose about the machines' accuracy.
The fact that it's extremely hard to do a proper audit trail on dead tree media?
What's so hard about it? Tedious, perhaps. Doing an audit trail on a computer's flash RAM, on the other hand, is nearly impossible for anyone who isn't a computer expert (read: pretty much everyone)
Paper ballots aren't even that reliable. Elections have turned on judgement calls over how sloppy a ballot can be before it's ignored.
Outside of Florida they work pretty well.
And one more time: they are not a safeguard against fraud. Where do you suppose the term "stuffing the ballot box" comes from?
I don't think anyone ever claimed paper ballots were fraud-proof. But they are fraud-resistant. As an evil poll-worker, I might possibly get away with stuffing the ballot box at my one polling location, but outside of an exceptionally close race it wouldn't make any difference, as each polling location is such a small part of the total. More likely, I'd just get caught. As an evil vote-machine programmer, my secret back door that switches 3% of all votes statewide to $(MY_CANDIDATE) would likely go undetected for a long time, and worse it would effect all polling locations that used the voting machines. So the chances of my evil scheme actually changing the results of the election would be much larger.
So, you can show a picture of yourself with an "I voted" sticker, and you can type up a list of every single thing you voted on, and how you voted, but somehow a picture (that says it all faster) is illegal. Sure, that makes a lot of sense...
Actually, it does make sense if there's a possibility that you might be coerced or bribed.
The difference is that you can put anything you want on your typed-up list, whereas a picture of your ballot (to the extent that such a thing is hard to fake) would be actual evidence that you voted one way or another. So your abusive husband (or controlling boss) could demand the latter (and threaten punishment if you don't provide it) as a way to control your vote, but with the former you could easily keep control of your own vote by making up whatever choices he wants to see.
Maybe the law should prohibit the use of electronic voting machines with resistive touch screens then, or any device that needs recalibrating too frequently based on the rate of people who are expected to use it.
Even if/when they fix the touch screen issue, there will inevitably be other issues, some of which may not be obvious to voters.
The only reliable solution is to either not use electronic voting machines, or use them only as ballot printing devices (i.e. the voter enters his choices into the machine, the machine prints out a human-readable paper ballot with those choices, the voter reviews the paper ballot to make sure it is correct, and then either places it in to the ballot box or (if he sees an error) voids it and returns it to a poll worker in exchange for a new one).
Anything more complicated than that opens the door to errors and/or shennanigans.
In particular, electronic voting machines should NOT be relied on to hold the official voting record, as there is no layman-verifiable way to show that an electronic vote tally is correct.
What people generally do is get out of the car the moment that happens.
Of course, if the fire is caused by sea water entering the battery and creating an electrical short, getting out of the car (and thereby touching the electrified sea water) might not be such a good idea either.
Last estimates I heard for net gain from fusion were 2018-2020. That's not very far away now.
Of course, seeing a net gain in a prototype reactor and commercializing the technology are two very different things. For example, had net gain from photovoltaics in the 70's, but it hasn't been until recently that PV has become economical for everyday use.
However if you can make a beam like transmission path the then the area never diverges your power density will never drop. I have no idea how you would even start to do this
I believe the device you're thinking of is a laser.
Adding a fuel backup means adding all the infrastructure necessary to convert fuel into motion in addition to electrical systems used for solar energy
Agreed. Probably the closest thing we're going to see is a ground-based mechanism for using solar energy to make jet fuel (or something other high-energy-density fuel) that could then be used to refuel aircraft. (i.e. something like this)
Once that is done, it's possible that lightweight solar cells might be useful for extending the plane's range or improving its efficiency, but I don't think the FAA (or common sense) would ever allow passenger planes to depend on direct sunlight alone.
"Legacy Free" is a nice sounding term for "won't run $hit". So much for your 1,000 app and app-lets you rely on, Business.
I think that's less of a problem in the cell-phone market than in the desktop market.
In the cell-phone market, increasingly there is an App Store type service that automatically upgrades people's installed applications as necessary, so the onus is no longer on the user to do the work.
Why not just install Micro Explosive Devices (MED's) in each phone. Some bastard steals your phone, you use your keybob to blow his head, hand or other weapon off.
Wow, if you think getting your cell phone through airport security is a hassle now, just wait until you try it with one of those.
Not to mention the inevitability of someone eventually figuring out the remote-trigger mechanism, and then broadcasting the detonate sequence and blowing the gonads off of 90% of the population...
And this will do nothing to solve carbon emissions, you are taking it out of the air, to put it back again while loosing 75% of energy in the process.
Fuel synthesized using air and carbon-neutral (renewable) electricity would be carbon-neutral. To the extent that the synthetic fuel displaced the mining of carbon from underground, it would decrease carbon emissions.
I'm sure there will be a "redneck mode", where any time the sensors detect an animal on the road, they direct the car to swerve toward it. (the robotic arms to automatically retrieve, skin, and dress the carcass will be a costly extra)
Read your damn Constitution; the President has no authority to create legislation, only the opportunity to sign or veto it.
You're technically correct, but the reality is that the President works with Congress to get his agenda passed, sets the tone for what his party is going to try to do while they are in power, and finally can veto any bills he doesn't like.
So unless you're claiming that the ACA would still have been proposed and passed if McCain had been elected in 2008, you're missing the forest for the trees.
there is jail / prison care where under the us constitution they must give you health care.
Is that the Republican health plan? "If you need health care, just go rob a liquor store and get caught?". I can't say I'm impressed. Btw each person in prison costs the US taxpayer an average of $35,000 a year. $35,000 a year would buy a lot of health insurance.
And the ER must take care of you.
Yes, in an emergency you can go to the ER, get stabilized, get handed a $50,000 bill for services rendered, and go bankrupt because you can't pay it.
Which is why so many poor people put off going to the ER until their health issue is completely intolerable, and ends up costing them (or, more usually us) much more to treat than it would have if they had been able to afford to see a doctor when the problem started. It's really the worst-case scenario -- the patient loses big, and so do the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like New York and Massachusetts are trying to apply the law outside its scope.
Note that it's not New York and Massachusetts who are suing Tesla, it's the car dealership associations.
If the manufacturer is also the only dealer, you will see the same price at every dealer; full MSRP.
... and then the manufacturers would have to compete against each other on price, and the MSRPs would drop. I don't see a problem there. It's not like there is currently a lot of benefit to the consumer in having every car labelled with an irrelevant MSRP price that only suckers actually pay. Wouldn't it be nicer if the MSRP was actually a reasonable price, and you could just go in and buy a car at that price without haggling for hours? That's how most consumer purchases work, and it makes buying a lot less stressful.
[waterboarding] was legal at the time
No. Waterboarding is torture and has never been legal in the US, self-serving double-talk from the Bush administration notwithstanding. Waterboarding is outlawed by Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which have the force of law in the US. If the US were a country where the military is held responsible for its actions, both the people who did the waterboarding and the people who ordered them to do it would have been tried, found guilty, and imprisoned.
the US does it to its own pilots and special forces
The difference being that in the training scenario, the pilot is undergoing waterboarding voluntarily, and is free to refuse or cut short the process. That is very different from the situation we saw in the Bush administration, where the victim had no control over his own repeated near-drowning.
Arguing that waterboarding is legal because it's sometimes undergone voluntarily for training purposes makes as much sense as saying that tying people down and slicing them with a scalpel is legal because surgeons do it during surgery. Context matters.
How is this NOT representative?
It doesn't represent the will of 49% of the voters.
A truly representative system would slice off 49% of Candidate A and 51% of Candidate B, sew the pieces together, and nominate the result as President.
Whichever technology you use, the key is keeping the process open and properly audited.
I totally agree -- however, computers by their very nature are difficult to keep open and audited, because you can't see what's really going on inside a microchip. Instead, you inevitably end up having to rely on the word of some expert that it is working correctly.
The behavior of ink-on-paper, on the other hand, can be readily seen and understood by even the most muddle-headed retiree polling volunteer.
This is important, because even if some clever designer comes up with a computer system that is foolproof, people still won't trust it unless they can understand (and see for themselves) the mechanism(s) that prevent abuse. And the chances of the majority of Americans ever becoming comfortable with nuances of programming languages, compiler design, checksums, microprocessor verification, and so on are very, very slim.
It's not enough for the system to just be reliable. People need to have faith in the system as well.
No they did not. Water boarding was listed as activities supporting torture but none of them were convicted for water boarding anyone. You will not find one charge of water boarding against any of the japs or germans convicted of post facto laws
I'm not sure if you are arguing some technicality (such as the technique being referred to as "water torture" rather than "water boarding" at the time, despite being the same practice)... but in any case, Politifact disagrees with you.
The electoral college is necessary to balance power between large and small states. Civics education in this country is going down the pooper.
Whether or not balancing power between large and small states is a good thing is open to debate, though.
The fact is that the vote of a person living in Wisconsin counts for 3.8 times as many Electoral Votes as my vote as a Californian.
The historical background of the USA as a collection of sovereign states notwithstanding, that seems like a pretty undemocratic state of affairs. In a proper democratic system, all votes should be given equal weight.
Please, let's stop pretending that Bush started anything.
1) He started the invasion of Iraq.
2) He started torture as official US policy.
His predecessors were hardly any better.
After World War 2, the USA convicted several Japanese soldiers of water boarding American and Allied prisoners of war. The US government hanged them for that crime.
George W. Bush will forever be known as the President who first sanctioned torture in the USA.
I agree, closed source voting machines are bad. Do voting machines have to be closed source? They do not.
You know what's even sneakier than a closed-source voting machine running hacked firmware? An open-source voting machine that's running hacked firmware. Just because you have a .tar.gz of source code to look at doesn't mean that code is what the machine is running, or that the machine is running the code the way you would expect it to.
(And having it display a checksum or something to "prove" it's really running the non-tampered-with version isn't much help either, since the secretly-evil version will happily display the expected checksum as well)
If only printed receipts are counted, then would it not be even easier for a fraudster to mass print lots of "receipts" that would be indistinguishable from actual receipts? [...] I suppose there's a system in place to block that. If so, how does it work?
Several things make that difficult (although probably not completely impossible):
- When the polls open, the poll worker who is in charge of the polling location shows everyone in the room that the ballot box is empty, and then locks the ballot box.
- The ballot box is at all times kept in a clearly visible location, so anyone tampering with it would be seen by voters and by poll workers.
- Ballots are printed on special paper, and the ballot paper is tracked closely -- the polling inspector has to know exactly how many ballots he was given, he has to retain any that were voided, and he has to account for all of them at the end of the day.
- Ballots paper for each precinct has the precinct ID on it, so ballots for precinct #1111 can't be used at precinct #1112, etc.
- Everyone who votes signs the voter roll book, and at the end of the day the ballots in the box are counted (by all the poll workers) and the number of ballots is compared to the number of signatures in the book. If the numbers differ, clearly there is something wrong. If they differ by a lot, that's a big red flag.
- Poll workers generally don't know each other, so the chances of an entire precinct worth of poll workers being dishonest at once is small.
- After the poll closes, the ballots are sealed with special tape into a box that two poll workers take to the collection point. Also, a third poll worker separately mails a form containing the ballot counts, signature counts, etc. This minimizes the opportunity for any particular poll worker to engage in shenanigans without being noticed.
- And finally, if someone is sufficiently evil/clever to find ways around all of the above without getting caught, they still will have only modified a few hundred votes at best, so the payoff is small. In order to significantly effect most races, you'd have to have dozens or hundreds of polling precincts compromised, and the likelihood is that someone would mess up and get caught, at which point there would be a big hue and cry and everything would be gone over with a fine-toothed comb, hopefully exposing the other conspirators.
How about the high cost of counting ballots by hand?
I've been a poll worker here (in California) several times, and the only hand-counting of ballots we did was literally just that -- counting the number of paper ballots in the box at the end of the day, to make sure it matched the number of signatures we had gathered in the log book. With a team of 5 poll workers doing it in parallel (and checking each other's work), it takes about 30 minutes to complete. Given that poll workers are paid a flat fee ($100 or so for the day), the cost isn't high.
The actual counting of who bubbled in which bubble is done by machine elsewhere, but it could be re-done by hand if any questions arose about the machines' accuracy.
The fact that it's extremely hard to do a proper audit trail on dead tree media?
What's so hard about it? Tedious, perhaps. Doing an audit trail on a computer's flash RAM, on the other hand, is nearly impossible for anyone who isn't a computer expert (read: pretty much everyone)
Paper ballots aren't even that reliable. Elections have turned on judgement calls over how sloppy a ballot can be before it's ignored.
Outside of Florida they work pretty well.
And one more time: they are not a safeguard against fraud. Where do you suppose the term "stuffing the ballot box" comes from?
I don't think anyone ever claimed paper ballots were fraud-proof. But they are fraud-resistant. As an evil poll-worker, I might possibly get away with stuffing the ballot box at my one polling location, but outside of an exceptionally close race it wouldn't make any difference, as each polling location is such a small part of the total. More likely, I'd just get caught. As an evil vote-machine programmer, my secret back door that switches 3% of all votes statewide to $(MY_CANDIDATE) would likely go undetected for a long time, and worse it would effect all polling locations that used the voting machines. So the chances of my evil scheme actually changing the results of the election would be much larger.
So, you can show a picture of yourself with an "I voted" sticker, and you can type up a list of every single thing you voted on, and how you voted, but somehow a picture (that says it all faster) is illegal. Sure, that makes a lot of sense...
Actually, it does make sense if there's a possibility that you might be coerced or bribed.
The difference is that you can put anything you want on your typed-up list, whereas a picture of your ballot (to the extent that such a thing is hard to fake) would be actual evidence that you voted one way or another. So your abusive husband (or controlling boss) could demand the latter (and threaten punishment if you don't provide it) as a way to control your vote, but with the former you could easily keep control of your own vote by making up whatever choices he wants to see.
the 7 devs
... and Snow White as well. (Sleeping Beauty could not be reached for comment, but it's rumored that she has transitioned to an Apple platform)
Maybe the law should prohibit the use of electronic voting machines with resistive touch screens then, or any device that needs recalibrating too frequently based on the rate of people who are expected to use it.
Even if/when they fix the touch screen issue, there will inevitably be other issues, some of which may not be obvious to voters.
The only reliable solution is to either not use electronic voting machines, or use them only as ballot printing devices (i.e. the voter enters his choices into the machine, the machine prints out a human-readable paper ballot with those choices, the voter reviews the paper ballot to make sure it is correct, and then either places it in to the ballot box or (if he sees an error) voids it and returns it to a poll worker in exchange for a new one).
Anything more complicated than that opens the door to errors and/or shennanigans.
In particular, electronic voting machines should NOT be relied on to hold the official voting record, as there is no layman-verifiable way to show that an electronic vote tally is correct.
What people generally do is get out of the car the moment that happens.
Of course, if the fire is caused by sea water entering the battery and creating an electrical short, getting out of the car (and thereby touching the electrified sea water) might not be such a good idea either.
Last estimates I heard for net gain from fusion were 2018-2020. That's not very far away now.
Of course, seeing a net gain in a prototype reactor and commercializing the technology are two very different things. For example, had net gain from photovoltaics in the 70's, but it hasn't been until recently that PV has become economical for everyday use.
However if you can make a beam like transmission path the then the area never diverges your power density will never drop. I have no idea how you would even start to do this
I believe the device you're thinking of is a laser.
Adding a fuel backup means adding all the infrastructure necessary to convert fuel into motion in addition to electrical systems used for solar energy
Agreed. Probably the closest thing we're going to see is a ground-based mechanism for using solar energy to make jet fuel (or something other high-energy-density fuel) that could then be used to refuel aircraft. (i.e. something like this)
Once that is done, it's possible that lightweight solar cells might be useful for extending the plane's range or improving its efficiency, but I don't think the FAA (or common sense) would ever allow passenger planes to depend on direct sunlight alone.
"Legacy Free" is a nice sounding term for "won't run $hit". So much for your 1,000 app and app-lets you rely on, Business.
I think that's less of a problem in the cell-phone market than in the desktop market.
In the cell-phone market, increasingly there is an App Store type service that automatically upgrades people's installed applications as necessary, so the onus is no longer on the user to do the work.
Or buy a new $40 router every 2 years. How much is your time worth?
Here on Slashdot, our time is cheap, and fix-it projects like this count as free entertainment.
Why not just install Micro Explosive Devices (MED's) in each phone. Some bastard steals your phone, you use your keybob to blow his head, hand or other weapon off.
Wow, if you think getting your cell phone through airport security is a hassle now, just wait until you try it with one of those.
Not to mention the inevitability of someone eventually figuring out the remote-trigger mechanism, and then broadcasting the detonate sequence and blowing the gonads off of 90% of the population...
And this will do nothing to solve carbon emissions, you are taking it out of the air, to put it back again while loosing 75% of energy in the process.
Fuel synthesized using air and carbon-neutral (renewable) electricity would be carbon-neutral. To the extent that the synthetic fuel displaced the mining of carbon from underground, it would decrease carbon emissions.
Needless to say, if its an animal, it's game.
I'm sure there will be a "redneck mode", where any time the sensors detect an animal on the road, they direct the car to swerve toward it. (the robotic arms to automatically retrieve, skin, and dress the carcass will be a costly extra)
Read your damn Constitution; the President has no authority to create legislation, only the opportunity to sign or veto it.
You're technically correct, but the reality is that the President works with Congress to get his agenda passed, sets the tone for what his party is going to try to do while they are in power, and finally can veto any bills he doesn't like.
So unless you're claiming that the ACA would still have been proposed and passed if McCain had been elected in 2008, you're missing the forest for the trees.
there is jail / prison care where under the us constitution they must give you health care.
Is that the Republican health plan? "If you need health care, just go rob a liquor store and get caught?". I can't say I'm impressed. Btw each person in prison costs the US taxpayer an average of $35,000 a year. $35,000 a year would buy a lot of health insurance.
And the ER must take care of you.
Yes, in an emergency you can go to the ER, get stabilized, get handed a $50,000 bill for services rendered, and go bankrupt because you can't pay it.
Which is why so many poor people put off going to the ER until their health issue is completely intolerable, and ends up costing them (or, more usually us) much more to treat than it would have if they had been able to afford to see a doctor when the problem started. It's really the worst-case scenario -- the patient loses big, and so do the rest of us.