Actually, the property taxes are quite related to the schools. The current property tax law (Prop 13) was sold on the presumption that it would enable equal funding of all school districts...which required that the state provide the funding, so the state got to control the schools rather than the cities and counties which had done so previously. Somehow the schools didn't get equitable funding out of it, but the state did get control of the (previously) local school system. AFAIKT the funding for the poor school districts hasn't gotten any better, but it does seem as if the funding in the rich districts has gotten harder to come by, and there has been a rise in the number of private schools.
Also ignored was the effect caused because people eventually die, but corporations don't necessarily do the same. This has lead to an increasing proportion of corporately owned land being assessed at a minimal rate.
I can't really claim that all of the effects of this measure were intended by it's sponsors, but it's hard to think of any that they wouldn't have approved of. Look up "Donald Rumsford".
IIRC there is a Python compiler, it's just that it compiles to "p-code" (i.e., code for the Python virtual machine).
OTOH, lots of Python has both a Python reference implementation, and a C version that's used to speed up execution.
Your basic point is still correct, that Python is not really optimized for speed, except in places. The design is intended to be "fast enough". (Whether it is or not depends on what you're doing. The libraries tend to be optimized for speed.) S.a. Pypy.
That can be interpreted as killing the canary. I'll agree that it shouldn't be illegal, but then most of what NSL letters authorize *should* be illegal.
IIRC there has been a court decision, though I can't remember which court, in what context, or whether it was a binding precedent, that to kill a canary is to violate the terms of the NSL.
Possibly it was in the context of a secure communication company closing down because it could no longer protect it's customers.
When I read it as a quote he said he was going to give the election to the Republicans. That, of course, is not a quote, because my memory isn't that precise. And, of course, it's possible that the new media I was reading misquoted him. (I think it was a newspaper, but it certainly wasn't an Ohio newspaper.)
OTOH, what I've read about the design of the machine that he sold is quite consistent with my memory of his quote. (I can't remember whether it was reprogramable with a floppy disk or a usb stick, but it was a trivial thing to do.)
No. I'm saying the barrier is higher for some groups of voters than for others. E.g., if you live in a city and don't drive, access to the DMV can be quite troublesome (at least where I live). This is so true that I generally arrange for someone to drive me to a suburban DMV office. I assume that other groups of minorities with differing needs are handled with as much care as are mine, though I realize that this may well be overly optimistic. For me it's a significant barrier, but I'm not poor and I'm retired, so it's only an extreme annoyance. Were I working at a minimum wage job for an unsympathetic employer it would be effectively impossible.
I believe that you are insufficiently paranoid. There are people associated with the manufacture of voting machines who have boasted that their machine would give the election to party X.
I seem to remember this happening more than once, but the only one I remember the name of is Diebold. Don't, however, assume either that he was the only one, or that all the manufacturers who were that corrupt were arrogant enough to say so publicly, or that they were all on any particular side of the aisle. Many seem to be (well, have been) designed so that whoever has access to the machines can corrupt the vote.
FWIW, I haven't followed this since I was collecting evidence as to why the local government shouldn't use electronic voting machines. I was totally ignored. Malfeasance or misfeasance? My guess is malfeasance, but there's no way I could hope to prove it.
Anyone remember the old multiple choice exam papers that used to be sent to an optical scanner for grading? A modern development of that seems to be what you're asking for. The system in use locally (I'm in California, i think it's statewide) seems to meet your criteria except for the touch-screen interface (which I'm not real pleased with the idea of anyway).
OTOH: 1) I'm not sure how the counts are transmitted. I know the ballots are run through an optical scanner. 2) I really think they should be designed to use bingo markers rather than to require filling in of an arrow. Much easier interface. And there could be a frame to hold the marker and manipulate the ballot (pure mechanical, could even be all plastic). Some people might need help in putting the ballot in the frame, but a lever to depress the bingo marker should be easy. 2a) Yes, some people would still need assistance. I'm afraid I can't think of a design where some people don't need assistance. A touch screen certainly isn't one.
But are they taking steps to fix it, or just to make it less obvious?
I'm afraid my suspicion is that the entire reason that electronic voting machines were adopted was to make it easier to fake electoral returns without leaving obvious traces. (Check out some of the pronouncements by the president of Diebold.)
OK. Make it hard for those with incomes of over a million dollars a month to vote, and I won't object. They can hire people to take care of the details. But if you think the extremely poor are around 0.001% of the population then you need to think again, and perhaps open your eyes.
And for the extremely poor even the requirement to VISIT the DMV can be impossible. Many of the offices are designed to be driven to. And at least around here you're supposed to phone for an appointment which may be a month later, and then when you get there you need to expect a few hours wait. (I generally avoid this problem by being driven to an office in the suburbs... I don't drive, but then neither am I extremely poor.)
Were the conditions imposed equitably, then I wouldn't object. The examples I've seen, however, have not been equitable. They've discriminated against certain classes of valid voters. It may not (or may) rise to the level of a prohibition, but it's definitely a bias.
That said, if there *is* no requirement for validation, then you also get an unfair system. I'd care more if more than two parties had a chance...or if one of them put up a decent candidate.
In cases where the police use deadly force and it is determined to be unwarranted, how often are they charged with murder? Or even homicide?
Based on the new that I have encountered I expect the answer to be somewhere between never and extremely rarely, but I'll admit I don't have a decent basis for this opinion, as the news tends to be slanted to agitate the viewers.
I've been trying to think of governments that aren't "hostile to the core values of Western democracies.". The only possible candidate I've come up with is Switzerland. This causes me to wonder whether it's a design problem, or whether those values just don't scale.
Unfortunately, I think that the values don't scale. This is one reason I support using a lottery rather than elections...and it's necessary correlate the decentralization of power, so that one bad apple can't do excessive harm. This would statistically give actual representation to the people, unlike the current setup, where you not only must depend on the honesty of the candidates, but they are all corruptly bribed before they are ever elected. (True, it wouldn't weed out some real losers, but when I look at the folks who have been elected it just looks like we might get a different selection of crazies, and fewer of them.)
Traditionally the main advantage of mainframes was expensive high-capacity peripheral devices. (Well, they used to also be a lot faster...but they were enough more expensive that this was a dubious advantage over a network of micro-computers. And, of course, depending on which decade you are looking at.)
So. Perhaps the advantage is that this is a mainframe built totally around high end commodity CPUs. IBM sold they chip fab awhile ago, so there's not too much reason that they should stick with the power architecture.
(OTOH, if I really cared I'd go read the original article and see if it provided more info. As it is...well, it's been several decades since I actually used a mainframe...)
And that's, essentially, what he should have said to justify his "WON'T FIX". It still should have not been just "WON'T FIX", but should have been "push the feature to the next major version" or some such. Maybe they wouldn't be able to do it then, and maybe they would. If they couldn't, then they could move it into "requested features"...again, with an explanation.
I disagree with copy and paste. Document it once, well, and link the others to the place where you documented.
OTOH, this *is* a bit better than some *WON'T FIX* tags I've read. There is the explanation that he doesn't think he could make it work, which even though it's missing all useful information is "sort of" an explanation. What's not clear is whether he's saying he incompetent, that he's too busy, or that there is some particular specific problem (and if so, what).
The problem is, NOBODY can be trusted with that much power. So you also don't want the leader of the majority in the Senate to have that much power. And NOBODY includes those not in government, but who are exerting their power via bribery.
The secondary problem is that designing a system that would be dynamicly stable without excessive centralized power is trivial next to getting it enacted.
P.S.: Evidence seems to show that you can't even trust people with the amount of power given to a police chief or a high school principal, but it doesn't show that nobody can be trusted with that much power. Many principals seem to do a decent job without notable corruption.
Yes, but he's a teenager, so that shouldn't be surprising. The school district, however... that's another matter. And there should be personal legal consequences to the people who pushed it this far.
Not, however, any reward to Sagehorn. But the punishment to the school should require public apology to him by the principle. And possibly paying for him to be easily transported to another school. I'm really not convinced that it would be fair to ANYONE for him to be readmitted to this original school. Too many people in position to make decisions should have their toes stomped on HARD.
One could claim that he was alleging moral turpitude, and that the allegation was injurious to the teacher's trade.... I'd need a lot more context before I'd know whether such claims were reasonable, but they aren't blatantly unreasonable.
WiFi has many good points. But there are definitely bandwidth issues. And you generally want to use much/most of the available bandwidth for something else.
OTOH, there's a lot to be said for a cellular net. If you do it right you can get really fast connections with high bandwidth. This requires lots of fairly small cells, though. But it may well be cheaper that lines, whether copper or fiber, to each house. But you're probably going to want a fairly thick fiber bundle to each node. You could, I suppose, set it (the cell towers) up as a mesh network, but that could get pretty complex, and might well tend to slow things down. Still, if most connections are pretty local it might have some advantages over a hierarchical design.
Well, the hassle is that I use it so rarely that I never remember where to check. So I found this useful.
FWIW, I'm using IceWeasel so this may well not have applied to me anyway, but setting speculative links to 0 is probably a good idea anyway. I hope. (I don't really follow browser capabilities, so I'm not sure. And besides, IceWeasel often adopts features from Firefox.)
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He's not a moron. He just knows that most people would object to his real motives, and most will buy this one.
You trust too much in the honesty of politicians.
Actually, the property taxes are quite related to the schools. The current property tax law (Prop 13) was sold on the presumption that it would enable equal funding of all school districts...which required that the state provide the funding, so the state got to control the schools rather than the cities and counties which had done so previously. Somehow the schools didn't get equitable funding out of it, but the state did get control of the (previously) local school system. AFAIKT the funding for the poor school districts hasn't gotten any better, but it does seem as if the funding in the rich districts has gotten harder to come by, and there has been a rise in the number of private schools.
Also ignored was the effect caused because people eventually die, but corporations don't necessarily do the same. This has lead to an increasing proportion of corporately owned land being assessed at a minimal rate.
I can't really claim that all of the effects of this measure were intended by it's sponsors, but it's hard to think of any that they wouldn't have approved of. Look up "Donald Rumsford".
IIRC there is a Python compiler, it's just that it compiles to "p-code" (i.e., code for the Python virtual machine).
OTOH, lots of Python has both a Python reference implementation, and a C version that's used to speed up execution.
Your basic point is still correct, that Python is not really optimized for speed, except in places. The design is intended to be "fast enough". (Whether it is or not depends on what you're doing. The libraries tend to be optimized for speed.) S.a. Pypy.
That can be interpreted as killing the canary. I'll agree that it shouldn't be illegal, but then most of what NSL letters authorize *should* be illegal.
IIRC there has been a court decision, though I can't remember which court, in what context, or whether it was a binding precedent, that to kill a canary is to violate the terms of the NSL.
Possibly it was in the context of a secure communication company closing down because it could no longer protect it's customers.
When I read it as a quote he said he was going to give the election to the Republicans. That, of course, is not a quote, because my memory isn't that precise. And, of course, it's possible that the new media I was reading misquoted him. (I think it was a newspaper, but it certainly wasn't an Ohio newspaper.)
OTOH, what I've read about the design of the machine that he sold is quite consistent with my memory of his quote. (I can't remember whether it was reprogramable with a floppy disk or a usb stick, but it was a trivial thing to do.)
No. I'm saying the barrier is higher for some groups of voters than for others. E.g., if you live in a city and don't drive, access to the DMV can be quite troublesome (at least where I live). This is so true that I generally arrange for someone to drive me to a suburban DMV office. I assume that other groups of minorities with differing needs are handled with as much care as are mine, though I realize that this may well be overly optimistic. For me it's a significant barrier, but I'm not poor and I'm retired, so it's only an extreme annoyance. Were I working at a minimum wage job for an unsympathetic employer it would be effectively impossible.
You can't be certain that's true. It could look the same way whether it was NSA action or not. That's what an NSL is intended to ensure.
So it's quite reasonable to assume that this is NSA action, but don't be close minded about it. There could be other reasons.
I believe that you are insufficiently paranoid. There are people associated with the manufacture of voting machines who have boasted that their machine would give the election to party X.
I seem to remember this happening more than once, but the only one I remember the name of is Diebold. Don't, however, assume either that he was the only one, or that all the manufacturers who were that corrupt were arrogant enough to say so publicly, or that they were all on any particular side of the aisle. Many seem to be (well, have been) designed so that whoever has access to the machines can corrupt the vote.
FWIW, I haven't followed this since I was collecting evidence as to why the local government shouldn't use electronic voting machines. I was totally ignored. Malfeasance or misfeasance? My guess is malfeasance, but there's no way I could hope to prove it.
Anyone remember the old multiple choice exam papers that used to be sent to an optical scanner for grading? A modern development of that seems to be what you're asking for. The system in use locally (I'm in California, i think it's statewide) seems to meet your criteria except for the touch-screen interface (which I'm not real pleased with the idea of anyway).
OTOH:
1) I'm not sure how the counts are transmitted. I know the ballots are run through an optical scanner.
2) I really think they should be designed to use bingo markers rather than to require filling in of an arrow. Much easier interface. And there could be a frame to hold the marker and manipulate the ballot (pure mechanical, could even be all plastic). Some people might need help in putting the ballot in the frame, but a lever to depress the bingo marker should be easy.
2a) Yes, some people would still need assistance. I'm afraid I can't think of a design where some people don't need assistance. A touch screen certainly isn't one.
But are they taking steps to fix it, or just to make it less obvious?
I'm afraid my suspicion is that the entire reason that electronic voting machines were adopted was to make it easier to fake electoral returns without leaving obvious traces. (Check out some of the pronouncements by the president of Diebold.)
OK. Make it hard for those with incomes of over a million dollars a month to vote, and I won't object. They can hire people to take care of the details. But if you think the extremely poor are around 0.001% of the population then you need to think again, and perhaps open your eyes.
And for the extremely poor even the requirement to VISIT the DMV can be impossible. Many of the offices are designed to be driven to. And at least around here you're supposed to phone for an appointment which may be a month later, and then when you get there you need to expect a few hours wait. (I generally avoid this problem by being driven to an office in the suburbs ... I don't drive, but then neither am I extremely poor.)
Were the conditions imposed equitably, then I wouldn't object. The examples I've seen, however, have not been equitable. They've discriminated against certain classes of valid voters. It may not (or may) rise to the level of a prohibition, but it's definitely a bias.
That said, if there *is* no requirement for validation, then you also get an unfair system. I'd care more if more than two parties had a chance...or if one of them put up a decent candidate.
In cases where the police use deadly force and it is determined to be unwarranted, how often are they charged with murder? Or even homicide?
Based on the new that I have encountered I expect the answer to be somewhere between never and extremely rarely, but I'll admit I don't have a decent basis for this opinion, as the news tends to be slanted to agitate the viewers.
I've been trying to think of governments that aren't "hostile to the core values of Western democracies.". The only possible candidate I've come up with is Switzerland. This causes me to wonder whether it's a design problem, or whether those values just don't scale.
Unfortunately, I think that the values don't scale. This is one reason I support using a lottery rather than elections...and it's necessary correlate the decentralization of power, so that one bad apple can't do excessive harm. This would statistically give actual representation to the people, unlike the current setup, where you not only must depend on the honesty of the candidates, but they are all corruptly bribed before they are ever elected. (True, it wouldn't weed out some real losers, but when I look at the folks who have been elected it just looks like we might get a different selection of crazies, and fewer of them.)
Traditionally the main advantage of mainframes was expensive high-capacity peripheral devices. (Well, they used to also be a lot faster...but they were enough more expensive that this was a dubious advantage over a network of micro-computers. And, of course, depending on which decade you are looking at.)
So. Perhaps the advantage is that this is a mainframe built totally around high end commodity CPUs. IBM sold they chip fab awhile ago, so there's not too much reason that they should stick with the power architecture.
(OTOH, if I really cared I'd go read the original article and see if it provided more info. As it is...well, it's been several decades since I actually used a mainframe...)
And that's, essentially, what he should have said to justify his "WON'T FIX". It still should have not been just "WON'T FIX", but should have been "push the feature to the next major version" or some such. Maybe they wouldn't be able to do it then, and maybe they would. If they couldn't, then they could move it into "requested features"...again, with an explanation.
I disagree with copy and paste. Document it once, well, and link the others to the place where you documented.
OTOH, this *is* a bit better than some *WON'T FIX* tags I've read. There is the explanation that he doesn't think he could make it work, which even though it's missing all useful information is "sort of" an explanation. What's not clear is whether he's saying he incompetent, that he's too busy, or that there is some particular specific problem (and if so, what).
The problem is, NOBODY can be trusted with that much power. So you also don't want the leader of the majority in the Senate to have that much power. And NOBODY includes those not in government, but who are exerting their power via bribery.
The secondary problem is that designing a system that would be dynamicly stable without excessive centralized power is trivial next to getting it enacted.
P.S.: Evidence seems to show that you can't even trust people with the amount of power given to a police chief or a high school principal, but it doesn't show that nobody can be trusted with that much power. Many principals seem to do a decent job without notable corruption.
Yes, but he's a teenager, so that shouldn't be surprising. The school district, however... that's another matter. And there should be personal legal consequences to the people who pushed it this far.
Not, however, any reward to Sagehorn. But the punishment to the school should require public apology to him by the principle. And possibly paying for him to be easily transported to another school. I'm really not convinced that it would be fair to ANYONE for him to be readmitted to this original school. Too many people in position to make decisions should have their toes stomped on HARD.
Not if they get sued it isn't.
One could claim that he was alleging moral turpitude, and that the allegation was injurious to the teacher's trade. ...
I'd need a lot more context before I'd know whether such claims were reasonable, but they aren't blatantly unreasonable.
WiFi has many good points. But there are definitely bandwidth issues. And you generally want to use much/most of the available bandwidth for something else.
OTOH, there's a lot to be said for a cellular net. If you do it right you can get really fast connections with high bandwidth. This requires lots of fairly small cells, though. But it may well be cheaper that lines, whether copper or fiber, to each house. But you're probably going to want a fairly thick fiber bundle to each node. You could, I suppose, set it (the cell towers) up as a mesh network, but that could get pretty complex, and might well tend to slow things down. Still, if most connections are pretty local it might have some advantages over a hierarchical design.
Really, my mouse pointer tends to be whereever I moved it to get it out of the way. (I don't like it disappearing, so I never set it to do that.)
Well, the hassle is that I use it so rarely that I never remember where to check. So I found this useful.
FWIW, I'm using IceWeasel so this may well not have applied to me anyway, but setting speculative links to 0 is probably a good idea anyway. I hope. (I don't really follow browser capabilities, so I'm not sure. And besides, IceWeasel often adopts features from Firefox.)