Even scarier than the facial identification scernario, the article contained the following tidbit:
[The SOP] also states that a field interview report must be filed if a picture is taken, and that cameras can be used to record evidence not usually collected by forensic investigators.
I can't wait until digital camera "photos" of "evidence" that forensic investigators don't find interesting begin to show up in court. I will be very curious to see how the chain of evidence is preserved for a digital image, and to hear why the trained forensic investigators didn't see fit to take normal photos themselves.
OK, now I'm gonna go put on my tin foil hat and shudder in the corner for a while.
More important for this stage: How will your investors make money? Any time you take other people's money to fund a business, you should be thinking about how you'll pay them back with adequate returns. If you can't answer that, you shouldn't be asking for their money in the first place.
The League of Women Voters rescinded its support of paperless voting machines on Monday after hundreds of angry members voiced concern that paper ballots were the only way to safeguard elections from fraud, hackers or computer malfunctions.
About 800 delegates who attended the nonpartisan league's biennial convention in Washington voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution that supports "voting systems and procedures that are secure, accurate, recountable and accessible."
...
E-voting critics who attended the five-day convention, which ends Tuesday, said the league's revision was welcome -- if not overdue.
"My initial reaction is incredible joy and relief," said computer scientist Barbara Simons, 63, past president of the Association for Computing Machinery and a league member from a chapter in Palo Alto, Calif. "This issue was threatening to split the league apart.... The league now has a position that I feel very comfortable supporting."
The VCs are out there, but you're not in their market anymore. Before the bubble, VCs didn't invest "seed capital", which is what you're looking for. After the bubble, VCs again don't do seed money, they're looking for companies that need "mezzanine financing" - companies with paying customers, good cash flow, and preferably a profitable quarter or two behind them. Companies that need money to grow instead of money to get started.
Before the VCs squeezed them out of the market, there were "angel investors" - individuals who knew their specific industries very well, had made their own money previously and were willing to take a flyer on a new company in their industry. Angels typically require much less documentation etc. to invest.
... if it was, we'd have run those punch cards down in Florida through an IBM 2501 and been done with it in a couple of hours definitively. Some ballots will be rejected by the automatic process, all OCR technologies have a less than 100% scan rate. As do all other technologies - I own and have used a card saw.
Technology isn't the answer because it isn't a technical question. We wouldn't even be having this debate if Gore lost Florida by a metric crapload of popular votes. The problem is political - whenever the swing count is small, every vote matters, and some ballots will be open to interpretation.
Nope, I didn't say it would make it more secure, only that the scenario in question has occurred time and again in the past. I'm not saying we have to solve all the problems in this go-round, but this particular problem was solved by the concept of a genuinely secret vote a long time ago. Those gigantic mechanical voting machines that New York used to use did the job well, permitted write-in candidates (unlike some electronic machines), left an inside-the-machine physical audit trail and prevented anyone outside the curtain from knowing how you voted.
I'm a software developer with close to 20 years of experience.
Which, if it makes your comments worth hearing, makes mine moreso as I've got over 25 years behind me.:-)
These printed ballots would: [...] have an encoded version of the votes via a bar-code to make scanning in the votes for semi-automated recounts easy
and later
The voter verified paper system is intended to enable any human, without technical skill to dump the ballot box and count -- with their own eyes -- the votes for a given district. Without this manual check you have to implicitly assume that all software is bug free. And you have to trust that the developers of such software have not altered the voting process in a nefarious manner. Voter verified paper trails meet this requirement.
You do realize that these two statements are at odds, right? The whole idea behind voter verification is that the voter can verify that his or her vote was cast as intended. If the recounts aren't done with the exact text the voter approved, the whole scheme falls apart.
Imagine the scenario of "show your voting receipt to your union foreman if you ever want another raise in your career." It would never be that obvious, but word would get around.
It would be that obvious, and it was that obvious. Chicago ward captains were famous for it during the Daley pere regime. So were company stores in Southern textile towns during union-accreditation voting. Any time one's vote can be observed or reverse-engineered, it can and will be coerced.
Who says we can't have a simple solution? Printing out a piece of paper most certainly WILL address all of the security concerns. At a stroke it allows voter verification, recounts, and auditing to find both corruption and machine errors.
Just how will a piece of paper printed by a computer enable recounts and auditing? (cue "Wayne's World" dream music)
"Good evening, and welcome to the eleven o'clock news. Our top story today: President George W. Bush has lost Florida's key electoral votes by a scant 2,749 popular votes, and has demanded a recount. All residents of the state of Florida are required present themselves to at their polling places within the next 72 hours, and show the elections officers their voting receipts. Any citizen who does not report in will have their vote voided."
(cue dream-sequence-end music)
Don't get me wrong - I like the idea of voter receipts, even though they could be faked just as easily as any other software effect. But they aren't going to magically fix any problem other than increasing the belief in vote security among the lay public.
For a change, the tin-foil-hat crowd may actually be right!
The article says animal tests have shown "formation of new beta cells". If that can be replicated in humans, we may finally have a cure, after 70 years of insulin therapy and it's deleterious effects.
My personal interest is in type-1, not type-2, as my son suffers from it. Over the years, all the research on cures for type-1 has focused on islet-cell transplants. But if there's something that can grow new beta cells, that's a quantum leap forward and to one side.
Xerox ran some of the last remaining pure-research corporate labs, and the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was one of them. IBM Research was another such outfit, and like Xerox it is a major generator of patents. Pure research isn't about producing commercial products (that's applied research), it's about investigating interesting stuff and increasing the world's knowlege base. They payoff to a sponsoring company for that (in the USA, anyway) is the exclusive ownership of some of those results for a limited period of time.
You could say the same thing about Hewlett-Packard, at least in the old days. While it didn't have a pure-research operation, it did frequently grant rights over on-the-job creations to the staff who made them, when the business turned out not to be interested in commercializing the result.
Its simple. The guidelines the patent office works with say that they are to assume a patent is valid unless clear evidence to the contrary is presented.
Like sifting for gold, patent examining can be a scrupulous activity. I mutter my mantra . . . find a way . . . find a way . . . there must be a way. My eyes scan documents and reference books with a determined fluidity. My brain wheels churn in frustration. Pausing for a moment, I gently massage my right wrist with my left thumb. In the background, I can hear the steady beat of my clock. Tick. Tick. Tick. Finally, as 12 strikes, I see it. A sly smile grows on my face, and my eyes gleam. Smelling success, I reach for the stamp. REJECTED.
From: Patrick Sobalvarro <pgs@pa.dec.com> Subject: RSI epidemic Date: Sunday, August 13, 1995 1:26PM
Friday I was talking to my friend Johnson from the CDC, who told me that the CDC had been doing an epidemiological study of clustered RSI cases among computer scientists. He said that they've been waiting to act until their internal review process is completed, but it seems that there is indeed an infectious agent causing RSI. But it's not a biological agent. It's software.
"In particular," Johnson told me, "the significant vector among academics is Emacs."
"Emacs?" I gasped.
"Oh yes," he continued; "Didn't you ever notice that two of the first people in the computer science community around MIT who suffered from RSI were Richard Stallman and Bernie Greenberg? What were those people implementing fifteen or twenty years ago? That's what tipped us off."
We were having lunch at the cafeteria at Moffett Field. Johnson watched my hands throughout the meal. "Hey buddy. You're still doing okay anyway, aren't you? It's good to see that. Really good." He smiled, then looked at his watch and asked, "Walk me to the terminal, will you?"
I accompanied him to the little facility where crew-cut young men in uniform and their dependents, trailer-park girls with squawling babies, sat around waiting for MAC flights to other military facilities. A black helicopter, curiously silent, was waiting on the tarmac outside, its rotors turning lazily in the sunlight. "Ah, that'd be my flight," said Johnson. "Old Uncle Sam always sends you first-class, ha ha."
We shook hands. A little anxiously, I asked, "But what will you do about it? About the epidemic?"
Johnson paused before answering. He looked outside at the black helicopter. The pilot had seen him now; in his helmet and visor he appeared strangely insectile as he regarded Johnson patiently. I noticed the booms extending from the sides of the helicopter, where standardized weapons pods could be attached. "Patrick, old buddy," said Johnson playfully, "Back in high school people said you were smart, but I never thought you had an ounce of sense in your head. Listen: our charter is to protect the people of the United States of America by containing epidemics and eliminating disease. We have many... tools... at our disposal. Why don't you take a break for a while? Go someplace where people don't use Emacs. Where they never heard of Emacs. Don't take it with you. Go to Hawaii -- better yet - -- go to Redmond. Okay?" He punched my shoulder, smiling. I winced.
Then he strode out onto the tarmac, giving a thumbs-up to the pilot, who spun up the turbines. There was almost no noise. I didn't wait to watch them take off.
It sounds like you're doing something Mr. Wizard-ish, where you'll be showing younger kids "how stuff works". So maybe you don't need to build a speaker as we know it.
Back in the day, when dinosaurs ruled the planet, we had these things called "LP"s and "45"s. And when we were young, we always used to fool around with them, doing things that would make our college audiophile friends scream. Including...
... playing the records by rolling a sheet of paper into a cone, sticking a pin through the small end, holding the cone lightly and letting the pin ride the grooves. It wasn't good sound, but it was intelligible, and we thought it was cool.
So you needed a license model that does NOT allow sharing between REAL open licenses but looks open enough.
The Open Source Initiative thinks the CPL is "open". It allows derivitive works, grants no-royalty patent licenses to recipients (although only specifically for the program they receive), and allows source redistribution. It doesn't require source redistribution, but then neither do several other "open" licenses.
Allen is not sure how a terrorist ended up with his Social Security number. He believes it has to do with the fact that his birthday falls on Sept. 11. After talking to the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Treasury, the FBI, lawyers, and local police, Allen said that he is still not sure how to clear his name.
Uh oh... me too! I guess now I've got yet another thing to thank John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney and Cheney's puppet for!
How does one go about asking the government "Hey, I was just wondering, am I a terrorist?"
It hasn't worked yet for John Gilmore, but he hasn't given up and he's got the financial resources to press the case until Hell freezes over. Unfortunately, it probably will require an opinion by the Supremes before anything changes, and unless the ACLU and/or the EFF pay your costs, it's a much more expensive task than just buying a car without a loan.
Sure, Waterloo Script is a 370-ish system, but it's just one of an entire class of early text formatters that all share characteristics and derivations. One called "nroff" you might find vaquely familiar:-)
Good idea, AC. What is being asked for is something really simple like the Old Skool text formatters - runoff, Script, et al.. You want paragraphs? Just indent the first line or leave a blank line before them. You want headings? Just time ".h1 Heading Text Here". Tables are harder, but Script did them without as much markup as HTML.
Back to the Future!
Opera's "kiosk mode" is intended for just such uses. You get all the benefits of a web browser (links you can select, etc.) and it's neatly and easily secured against general use.
And they have a donation program for worthy causes, so the price might wind up being US$0.00
Slashdot Mirror
Even scarier than the facial identification scernario, the article contained the following tidbit:
I can't wait until digital camera "photos" of "evidence" that forensic investigators don't find interesting begin to show up in court. I will be very curious to see how the chain of evidence is preserved for a digital image, and to hear why the trained forensic investigators didn't see fit to take normal photos themselves.OK, now I'm gonna go put on my tin foil hat and shudder in the corner for a while.
More important for this stage: How will your investors make money? Any time you take other people's money to fund a business, you should be thinking about how you'll pay them back with adequate returns. If you can't answer that, you shouldn't be asking for their money in the first place.
(or maybe it was all their peeved members)
What part of the following don't you understand?
Whaddaya know, this "democracy" stuff works!
The VCs are out there, but you're not in their market anymore. Before the bubble, VCs didn't invest "seed capital", which is what you're looking for. After the bubble, VCs again don't do seed money, they're looking for companies that need "mezzanine financing" - companies with paying customers, good cash flow, and preferably a profitable quarter or two behind them. Companies that need money to grow instead of money to get started.
Before the VCs squeezed them out of the market, there were "angel investors" - individuals who knew their specific industries very well, had made their own money previously and were willing to take a flyer on a new company in their industry. Angels typically require much less documentation etc. to invest.
... if it was, we'd have run those punch cards down in Florida through an IBM 2501 and been done with it in a couple of hours definitively. Some ballots will be rejected by the automatic process, all OCR technologies have a less than 100% scan rate. As do all other technologies - I own and have used a card saw.
Technology isn't the answer because it isn't a technical question. We wouldn't even be having this debate if Gore lost Florida by a metric crapload of popular votes. The problem is political - whenever the swing count is small, every vote matters, and some ballots will be open to interpretation.
Nope, I didn't say it would make it more secure, only that the scenario in question has occurred time and again in the past. I'm not saying we have to solve all the problems in this go-round, but this particular problem was solved by the concept of a genuinely secret vote a long time ago. Those gigantic mechanical voting machines that New York used to use did the job well, permitted write-in candidates (unlike some electronic machines), left an inside-the-machine physical audit trail and prevented anyone outside the curtain from knowing how you voted.
Can't we at least keep up with the 1960s?
Which, if it makes your comments worth hearing, makes mine moreso as I've got over 25 years behind me. :-)
and laterYou do realize that these two statements are at odds, right? The whole idea behind voter verification is that the voter can verify that his or her vote was cast as intended. If the recounts aren't done with the exact text the voter approved, the whole scheme falls apart.
Imagine the scenario of "show your voting receipt to your union foreman if you ever want another raise in your career." It would never be that obvious, but word would get around.
It would be that obvious, and it was that obvious. Chicago ward captains were famous for it during the Daley pere regime. So were company stores in Southern textile towns during union-accreditation voting. Any time one's vote can be observed or reverse-engineered, it can and will be coerced.
Who says we can't have a simple solution? Printing out a piece of paper most certainly WILL address all of the security concerns. At a stroke it allows voter verification, recounts, and auditing to find both corruption and machine errors.
Just how will a piece of paper printed by a computer enable recounts and auditing?
(cue dream-sequence-end music)(cue "Wayne's World" dream music)
Don't get me wrong - I like the idea of voter receipts, even though they could be faked just as easily as any other software effect. But they aren't going to magically fix any problem other than increasing the belief in vote security among the lay public.
For a change, the tin-foil-hat crowd may actually be right!
The article says animal tests have shown "formation of new beta cells". If that can be replicated in humans, we may finally have a cure, after 70 years of insulin therapy and it's deleterious effects.
My personal interest is in type-1, not type-2, as my son suffers from it. Over the years, all the research on cures for type-1 has focused on islet-cell transplants. But if there's something that can grow new beta cells, that's a quantum leap forward and to one side.
Here's hoping!
Xerox ran some of the last remaining pure-research corporate labs, and the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was one of them. IBM Research was another such outfit, and like Xerox it is a major generator of patents. Pure research isn't about producing commercial products (that's applied research), it's about investigating interesting stuff and increasing the world's knowlege base. They payoff to a sponsoring company for that (in the USA, anyway) is the exclusive ownership of some of those results for a limited period of time.
You could say the same thing about Hewlett-Packard, at least in the old days. While it didn't have a pure-research operation, it did frequently grant rights over on-the-job creations to the staff who made them, when the business turned out not to be interested in commercializing the result.
Its simple. The guidelines the patent office works with say that they are to assume a patent is valid unless clear evidence to the contrary is presented.
Then again, maybe not. From last Sunday'sWashington Post Style section:
... it's Equifax Collections, a bill collector. Admittedly, it's not via reverse-lookup but instead from somebody's web page.
From The Maineiac Site of Jokes and Games:
It sounds like you're doing something Mr. Wizard-ish, where you'll be showing younger kids "how stuff works". So maybe you don't need to build a speaker as we know it.
Back in the day, when dinosaurs ruled the planet, we had these things called "LP"s and "45"s. And when we were young, we always used to fool around with them, doing things that would make our college audiophile friends scream. Including ...
... playing the records by rolling a sheet of paper into a cone, sticking a pin through the small end, holding the cone lightly and letting the pin ride the grooves. It wasn't good sound, but it was intelligible, and we thought it was cool.
So you needed a license model that does NOT allow sharing between REAL open licenses but looks open enough.
The Open Source Initiative thinks the CPL is "open". It allows derivitive works, grants no-royalty patent licenses to recipients (although only specifically for the program they receive), and allows source redistribution. It doesn't require source redistribution, but then neither do several other "open" licenses.
So what's the problem?
Maybe not time travel, but "Mr. Nuclear" isn't as far out as it looked in 1985. Bubble fusion experiments are being reproduced.
Allen is not sure how a terrorist ended up with his Social Security number. He believes it has to do with the fact that his birthday falls on Sept. 11. After talking to the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Treasury, the FBI, lawyers, and local police, Allen said that he is still not sure how to clear his name.
Uh oh ... me too! I guess now I've got yet another thing to thank John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney and Cheney's puppet for!
How does one go about asking the government "Hey, I was just wondering, am I a terrorist?"
It hasn't worked yet for John Gilmore, but he hasn't given up and he's got the financial resources to press the case until Hell freezes over. Unfortunately, it probably will require an opinion by the Supremes before anything changes, and unless the ACLU and/or the EFF pay your costs, it's a much more expensive task than just buying a car without a loan.
Sure, Waterloo Script is a 370-ish system, but it's just one of an entire class of early text formatters that all share characteristics and derivations. One called "nroff" you might find vaquely familiar :-)
Good idea, AC. What is being asked for is something really simple like the Old Skool text formatters - runoff, Script, et al.. You want paragraphs? Just indent the first line or leave a blank line before them. You want headings? Just time ".h1 Heading Text Here". Tables are harder, but Script did them without as much markup as HTML. Back to the Future!
I told them that with two weeks and a good book, I could be as fluent in COBOL as any of their engineers, but that wasn't good enough.
You may think wthat's what you told them. What you really told them was:
Opera's "kiosk mode" is intended for just such uses. You get all the benefits of a web browser (links you can select, etc.) and it's neatly and easily secured against general use.
And they have a donation program for worthy causes, so the price might wind up being US$0.00
There is an open source Rexx, and it's very good. Check out regina-rexx.sourceforge.net for details.