Never mind facts and credibility, lets just attack Apple 'cause it grabs headlines. Listen greentards, if it comes down to choosing between Apple and Greenpeace, it's Apple all the way. Greenpeace has lost whatever tiny shed of credibility it had. The greentards are doing more harm to the environmental movement by making up alarmist stories. Haven't the greentards heard about crying wolf?
They mean the University of Miami in Florida?!? I work there and I don't know what the Computerworld people were thinking. The IT CIO at UM is a schmuck to put it nicely. UM generally pays its employees the least amount they can get away with. You get tuition remission so they figure they don't have to pay you very much and they don't. Of course you need permission from your supervisor to take any daytime classes (so unless it is related to work and they approve...). The classes offered at night are crap so good luck getting a degree while you work there (maybe a law degree or an MBA at best). At least your spouse and kids get the tuition remission as well. Still, you have not seen bureaucracy like the one at UM. Nothing like meetings and red tape to make your day. I have heard a manager say "you cant say dumb without UM". Second place my ass.
They are going to need something strong to make this one stick. They must be handing out LSD or making people smoke peyote before they enter. They must really be desperate.
I voted in the Tuesday primary and amazingly enough, I managed to do so with a minimum of fuss. It surprises me that we didn't actually have many more problems. After many years of using punch card voting, the state has inflicted a new computer voting system on us. The majority of the poll workers are elderly people who tend not to be very comfortable with new technology. The Miami Herald reported today that most of the poll workers received minimal training and it consisted of watching a video. If you were going to implement such a system, wouldn't you try it out or test it in a wide scale first?
Dade and Broward counties, where most of the problems occurred, are also two of the most populated counties in Florida with the highest numbers of elderly and poor people. Imagine implementing a whole new voting system without doing a wide scale dry run. The kind of massive problems that we witnessed here where to be expected. What also wasn't addressed where the kind of organizational details like having enough poll workers of both political parties at each polling place. That meant that some polling places could not open. We still had the usual record keeping problems, registered voters not appearing in the voter rolls and poorly trained poll workers. What is inexcusable is that with a new system being tried out for the very first time they did not have enough techs available to handle the inevitable problems. They didn't even have a good way to communicate to all polling places to stay open an extra 2 hours. Never mind that many of the voting machines were not ready on time and were sent out to the polling places without the right programming. Then strangely enough, the voting machines would not boot properly. Why weren't the machines tested before sending the out on the field? We are not counting girl scout cookies here! What kind of moron would take brand new untested technology and put it out to be managed by poorly trained technophobes and expect less that a complete disaster?
Before you start giving the poll workers a hard time consider the fact that they had to be at the polling place by 6:00 AM and that they would have to stay till poll closing time. There is only one set of people working the polling sites. There is no second watch. You go home after the polls close. After the last person votes you get to break down the machines and collect the votes and so forth. So conservatively, if the polling window is not extended like it was, the earliest you'd get out would be 8:00 PM. Thats 14 hours minimum. Then you add an extra 2 hours and you have to stay around till 10:00 PM. All this and you only had lunch around noon sometime. By 11:00 PM some of these old folks must have been hypoglycemic!
The problem is not only with the closed, non-auditable, poorly explained, even worse implemented voting system. Its with the people who picked it and the people picked to organize its implementation. To begin with the Florida government has to be the biggest group of imbeciles you could ever hope to put together in one room (that includes our esteemed governor, Jeb Bush). Their main purpose in life seems to be making other "more progressive" states like Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi look good in comparison. The only thing more screwed up than our voting systems is our child foster care system, which is also managed and organized by the same group of geniuses in Tallahassee.
My problem with a closed implementation of a voting system is that I have no way of knowing that the machine recorded my actual vote. I have no way of knowing that the machine simply didn't make up a vote or just make believe it never existed. I know no voting system can ever be completely tamper proof and fraud free. You may not need computers to tamper with an election but they make doing so much more efficient. Some of the polling places with the most problems where in poor black neighborhoods. At some of these only one vote out of thousands cast were recorded. All the other votes vanished into the ether.
All I want to know is how come Afghanistan, a 4th wold nation in complete ruins, managed to have an election and we cannot.
Continued: Star Wars is not original anymore
on
The Empire Stumbles
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· Score: 1
The prequels just don't have the same feel as the old movies. George Lucas has lost it. And all the new technology is hurting the actors performance. Acting in front of a blue screen most of the time is much harder than having a set with actual people to react to. I am not impressed by a bunch of Yoda shaped pixels moving really fast. These days, you see that kind of effect every 2 minutes in a movie.
Star Wars is no more than the sum of a bunch of snazzy special effects and that is no replacement for a good story. Star Wars is good fun for an afternoon, but it no longer the kind of legend that it once was. It has lost its soul.
I think Peter Jackson is the new George Lucas. Managing to get LOTR to the screen in such a compelling fashion was almost miraculous. He used speciall effects well without taking anything away from the story. Perhaps, George should ask Peter for help in episode 3.
Twenty Five years ago, when Star Wars first came out, there was nothing else like it. It was different and exciting. It could afford to have weak dialogue because it was so mind blowing.
Now, with movies like The Matrix, LOTR, Spider-Man and others like them, Star Wars is no longer that different. We are used to seeing alien worlds and spaceships. The audience is much more sophisticated and a weak story without heart cannot be supported by special effects alone. There is not one character as compelling as Han Solo in the first two movies. And Anakin is surely not a character I can relate to. Why would senator Amidala fall in love with a man who just masacred a bunch of inocent beings?
Collateral damage? What do you call putting two airliners into the World Trade Center? If the muslim fundamentalists don't worry bout killing innocent people, why should we lose any sleep about killing them? I say bomb them into the stone age. The same thing goes for any country that aids terrorists. This is war and they started it, all bets are off.
Slashdot Mirror
Never mind facts and credibility, lets just attack Apple 'cause it grabs headlines. Listen greentards, if it comes down to choosing between Apple and Greenpeace, it's Apple all the way. Greenpeace has lost whatever tiny shed of credibility it had. The greentards are doing more harm to the environmental movement by making up alarmist stories. Haven't the greentards heard about crying wolf?
They mean the University of Miami in Florida?!? I work there and I don't know what the Computerworld people were thinking. The IT CIO at UM is a schmuck to put it nicely. UM generally pays its employees the least amount they can get away with. You get tuition remission so they figure they don't have to pay you very much and they don't. Of course you need permission from your supervisor to take any daytime classes (so unless it is related to work and they approve...). The classes offered at night are crap so good luck getting a degree while you work there (maybe a law degree or an MBA at best). At least your spouse and kids get the tuition remission as well. Still, you have not seen bureaucracy like the one at UM. Nothing like meetings and red tape to make your day. I have heard a manager say "you cant say dumb without UM". Second place my ass.
They are going to need something strong to make this one stick. They must be handing out LSD or making people smoke peyote before they enter. They must really be desperate.
I thought the custom was that you waited till people were actually dead before naming things after them.
Never mind that I have had painful bowel movements that could have been better presidents than Reagan was.
She helped develop COBOL. Need I say more?
I voted in the Tuesday primary and amazingly enough, I managed to do so with a minimum of fuss. It surprises me that we didn't actually have many more problems. After many years of using punch card voting, the state has inflicted a new computer voting system on us. The majority of the poll workers are elderly people who tend not to be very comfortable with new technology. The Miami Herald reported today that most of the poll workers received minimal training and it consisted of watching a video. If you were going to implement such a system, wouldn't you try it out or test it in a wide scale first?
Dade and Broward counties, where most of the problems occurred, are also two of the most populated counties in Florida with the highest numbers of elderly and poor people. Imagine implementing a whole new voting system without doing a wide scale dry run. The kind of massive problems that we witnessed here where to be expected. What also wasn't addressed where the kind of organizational details like having enough poll workers of both political parties at each polling place. That meant that some polling places could not open. We still had the usual record keeping problems, registered voters not appearing in the voter rolls and poorly trained poll workers. What is inexcusable is that with a new system being tried out for the very first time they did not have enough techs available to handle the inevitable problems. They didn't even have a good way to communicate to all polling places to stay open an extra 2 hours. Never mind that many of the voting machines were not ready on time and were sent out to the polling places without the right programming. Then strangely enough, the voting machines would not boot properly. Why weren't the machines tested before sending the out on the field? We are not counting girl scout cookies here! What kind of moron would take brand new untested technology and put it out to be managed by poorly trained technophobes and expect less that a complete disaster?
Before you start giving the poll workers a hard time consider the fact that they had to be at the polling place by 6:00 AM and that they would have to stay till poll closing time. There is only one set of people working the polling sites. There is no second watch. You go home after the polls close. After the last person votes you get to break down the machines and collect the votes and so forth. So conservatively, if the polling window is not extended like it was, the earliest you'd get out would be 8:00 PM. Thats 14 hours minimum. Then you add an extra 2 hours and you have to stay around till 10:00 PM. All this and you only had lunch around noon sometime. By 11:00 PM some of these old folks must have been hypoglycemic!
The problem is not only with the closed, non-auditable, poorly explained, even worse implemented voting system. Its with the people who picked it and the people picked to organize its implementation. To begin with the Florida government has to be the biggest group of imbeciles you could ever hope to put together in one room (that includes our esteemed governor, Jeb Bush). Their main purpose in life seems to be making other "more progressive" states like Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi look good in comparison. The only thing more screwed up than our voting systems is our child foster care system, which is also managed and organized by the same group of geniuses in Tallahassee.
My problem with a closed implementation of a voting system is that I have no way of knowing that the machine recorded my actual vote. I have no way of knowing that the machine simply didn't make up a vote or just make believe it never existed. I know no voting system can ever be completely tamper proof and fraud free. You may not need computers to tamper with an election but they make doing so much more efficient. Some of the polling places with the most problems where in poor black neighborhoods. At some of these only one vote out of thousands cast were recorded. All the other votes vanished into the ether.
All I want to know is how come Afghanistan, a 4th wold nation in complete ruins, managed to have an election and we cannot.
The prequels just don't have the same feel as the old movies. George Lucas has lost it. And all the new technology is hurting the actors performance. Acting in front of a blue screen most of the time is much harder than having a set with actual people to react to. I am not impressed by a bunch of Yoda shaped pixels moving really fast. These days, you see that kind of effect every 2 minutes in a movie.
Star Wars is no more than the sum of a bunch of snazzy special effects and that is no replacement for a good story. Star Wars is good fun for an afternoon, but it no longer the kind of legend that it once was. It has lost its soul.
I think Peter Jackson is the new George Lucas. Managing to get LOTR to the screen in such a compelling fashion was almost miraculous. He used speciall effects well without taking anything away from the story. Perhaps, George should ask Peter for help in episode 3.
Twenty Five years ago, when Star Wars first came out, there was nothing else like it. It was different and exciting. It could afford to have weak dialogue because it was so mind blowing.
Now, with movies like The Matrix, LOTR, Spider-Man and others like them, Star Wars is no longer that different. We are used to seeing alien worlds and spaceships. The audience is much more sophisticated and a weak story without heart cannot be supported by special effects alone. There is not one character as compelling as Han Solo in the first two movies. And Anakin is surely not a character I can relate to. Why would senator Amidala fall in love with a man who just masacred a bunch of inocent beings?
Collateral damage? What do you call putting two airliners into the World Trade Center? If the muslim fundamentalists don't worry bout killing innocent people, why should we lose any sleep about killing them? I say bomb them into the stone age. The same thing goes for any country that aids terrorists. This is war and they started it, all bets are off.