Yes if you were a climate scientist you wouldn't believe in global warming based on consensus. You would believe in it because that is what the complicate data and models show.
Now if you aren't going to go out and do the science yourself you need to trust in experts. Rather than pick one guy and get lucky the best guide to the truth is the consensus in the discipline. Hence the reason that the consensus in the climate community matters to us.
I agree that the mainstream media discussion of global warming looks like it is faith based. However the actual scientists carefully considered alternative explanations and only reached conclusions after many years of testing competing hypotheses. Don't use the politicization of the topic in the mainstream media to shmear the scientific discussion.
No, real scientists base their conclusions in their area on evidence and results. They trust the consensus on related areas that they can trust other scientists to have been right about.
In short you couldn't publish a paper in nature that sought to prove global warming by interviewing scientists you would need to give evidence.
This doesn't mean every scientist needs to check everything but consensus is the result of evidence not a replacement for it. (see my response to your parent)
Give me a break on number 6. Chaos is not some magic property that lets you explain why a system is going to harm you when you can't figure out any other harm. Besides it appears that local climate is a chaotic system but that global climate is reasonably predictable using large models and we are getting better at it all the time.
Also you are just wrong about 9. If the effect isn't anthropogenic it is quite possible our remediation attempts just won't have any effect because the system is really being driven by something else. It is anthropogenic so this doesn't matter but it is an important question.
I've criticized this article in other places for putting up strawman but I think you overreached yourself here. Your points on the scientific errors he makes are good though unexplained but it gets shaky when you get to 6 and below. I tend to think this sort of reply does more harm than good because the people who already realize or are inclined to believe this guy is BS are going to cheer and agree but it doesn't provide enough information and gets enough wrong to make it useless at convincing a non-believer. In other words if I didn't already know enough to have justified belief in global warming your post would just give me more reason to think that people believed in global warming on faith.
In other words it is harmful to offer soundbyte answers, especially if some of them are clearly hokey and wrong, that will only appeal to those already convinced.
I mean you don't believe one can have a basis for conditional statements. So scientists who don't know if a serious earthquake is going to happen in California during the next 10 years shouldn't tell us where it is likely to be if it happens or what is a good evacuation plan if an earthquake happens.
The only reason your child molester example works out is because the accusation makes so many people emotional they stop being able to think. Moreover, if you both said "If Joe is a child molester" and then you said "But if Joe isn't a child molester" you would avert much of the bias.
Sure if this guy had given only one scenario and perfected it with if it might be misleading but that isn't what he did. Don't take the idiotic position that it is misleading to inform people of conditional certainty and explain what will happen in various situations.
I mean he did exactly the same thing as the impartial analysis in all our voting guides do, lay out what happens in different scenarios.
Admittedly I have some problems with the stern report. It seems happy to assume that global warming is responsible for increased hurricanes, a result that is supported by a few suggestive papers but far from established. Also there were a few other reports about it that made me think it might be erring on the side of overestimation. Still I haven't read it myself so these could be misleading reports.
However, this article is clearly written as a hack job to take one from one report that might exaggerate a bit to the conclusion that global warming isn't a big deal and is being perpetrated as some sort of international conspiracy. Let's be reasonable here and use the same standard for global warming as we use for anything else. At worst this means there was a report released by someone who (in good faith) might have relied on effects that are supported by research but not well verified. It is totally ridiculous to attack global warming in general.
But what I really wrote this article to point out is how ridiculous the claim is about the UN cutting the predicted value from their model by three to get the right value for the 20th century. This piece cleverly avoids telling you that carbon dioxide is not the only forcing that needs to be considered here and there are significant negative forcings. Thus the temperature increase from CO2 will be far larger than the real temperature increase as it will be offset by temperature decreases from things like increased particulate matter in the atmosphere. However, since the other forcings tend to be bounded or increasing at relatively slow rates while the CO2 forcing is increasing quite significantly in the future we get to see more of the CO2 forcing, i.e., now we are looking at something like 6-4 in the future we get 10-5.
Also does anyone really think that the statisticians hired by the US senate were crazy greens who were dead set on defending some false science? More likely the UN graph really was meritorious. Perhaps the medieval warm period was only a local European phenomena not a global effect (and was thus offset by colder temperatures elsewhere)?
These sorts of articles really piss me off. They ultimately leverage the fact that global warming is a very complicated issue and that the scientific consensus is really only that it is happening at a significant rate. There is still much disagreement about what that rate should be. Additionally the very fact that there is such a consensus on global warming means that it isn't too hard to find one or two bad apples on the global warming side. Since the public doesn't really understand the scientific process these types of articles manage to trick them into seeing it the same way they see political parties, i.e., as consisting of organized sides who are blamable for all claims made by their side.
Well to be fair I didn't get around to addressing the issue of more organized attacks against the voting infrastructure.
There are two possible ways we can imagine e-vote fraud occuring. The first is a very small number of people rig the election withou involving any massive conspiracy or corruption. This is the scenario I was addressing.
In this scenario you are right that people will mistrust the polls *to a point*. If the discrepancy starts getting unexplanably large it will raise a significant amount of sucpiscion. If only a small few are in on the scam pretty quickly some honest public official investigating the discrepancy will notice something amiss. Sure someone might get away with a significant vote shift once or twice but in the long run it won't make a huge difference. They may get away with a small vote shift more frequently but that has less effect.
So yes polling provides little to no protection against throwing a close race one way or another (close meaning within 10% maybe a bit more). However, my point is that even if we set a national rule that says 'democrats need to get 55% of the votes to win' or vice versa the harm wouldn't be that bad. The country might lean a little bit more one way or another but it would tack just a little off mainstream and the politicians would still respond to the same public moods.
The second scenario is that we have machine style fraud facilitated by e-voting. That is we have large numbers of corrupt officials in on a scheme to do vote rigging. Yet in this case I don't think e-voting fraud makes it any harder to detect. The weak link in stuffing ballot boxes is the same as in a institutionalized e-voting scam, the people who are in on the scam.
Thus I just don't think e-voting is a particular threat. Sure it's bad but I think it would be unwise to shift our focus from things like gerrymandering to this.
My point is exactly that the harm from e-voting hacks pales in comparison to the harm from perfectly legal gerrymandering.
No matter which way we can imagine a hypothetical florida or Ohio being thrown to via voting fraud both Bush and Kerry would have had to run and pay attention to the demands of the people in these states. This isn't what happens in gerrymandered situations.
In short even if you have e-fraud it almost certainly wouldn't rise to the level or harm that other things like gerrymandering do. Perverting the will of the people so you only need 45% of them to be elected is a lot less bad than getting to pretty much ignore them entirely.
You are using a different notion of significant than I am.
The point is that no one denies that the Florida and Ohio races were close. What I'm saying is that in the long run it doesn't really matter if some close races are thrown one way or another. Sure in the short term it seems to make a big difference but in the long run this gets lost in the noise of bad voter decisions and the fact that it won't always be one side cheating.
The point is florida and ohio are exactly what any undetected electronic vote theft would likely look like, a close vote thrown to one side or the other. But this didn't mean that either Bush or Gore/Kerry could ignore what the voters in either of these states thought. They still had to do just as much campaigning and be just as careful in the past four years to court these voters. In contrast when you draw a safe seat that often eliminates any competition and means that the candiate only answers to members of his own party in the primary.
So while the theft of an election may seem like the worst thing that can happen the prospect of electronic election theft doesn't undermine the incentives of elected officials to shift towards the center of their voter's opinions. On the other hand things like safe districts do undermine this structural force.
Also I said unexplainable discrepancies. I saw several after the fact examinations of how the polling data was off and they seemed to have a good understanding of why this happened and what they had screwed up.
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Now compare what happened in Florida to what happened in Ohio. In Ohio there is no doubt that lack of sufficient machines and other screw ups in the cities discouraged many people from voting. Now there is no good reason to believe this was some conspiracy and it isn't even clear if it was enough to shift the election but my point is this sort of behavior is more problematic. It is far easier to get away with stealing an election by accidentally mucking up polling places where your opponent is strong than to do a complex technological hack.
I'm far more concerned about vote machines crashing or happening to be misconfigured than I am about some complex vote stealing hack.
The issue is we need a robust modern drawing API that *replaces* the X protocol.
It's kinda silly to keep the X architecture if we are going to give up network transparency, I mean at that point the fundamental design decisions motivating X become invalid. Yet if we are going to do this we need something better than GLX (commands are too big).
In particular what I would like to see is an integration of the windowing system with our drawing API, e.g., integrate X and Cairo. The interface to the window system would be entirely through the one drawing API (encouraging though not requiring a common look). This API could offer sufficiently high level objects to allow network transparency at reasonable speeds. Furthermore when designing this API one needs to take it for granted at the start that the image operations are likely to be accelerated as well as recognizing that reading from video mem can be slower than writing.
We should go to a model where backwards compatibility is maintained by a software layer on top of this new accelerated drawing API rather than trying to layer our new drawing APIs on top of an old system.
One thing that considerably complicates designing a good X architecture/replacement is the insistence on keeping the window manager separate from the windowing system. This forces several extra levels of abstraction and may (I don't know) make it difficult to take advantage of acceleration opportunities. For instance I still don't understand why we need damage extensions. If we are drawing on boxes that we render using the card's hidden surface acceleration why shouldn't all the window hiding happen transparently.
In any case sure one could keep X in name but what I am arguing for is an integration of the windowing system with the drawing API. I think this is absolutely necessary to get a robust, good looking system with good performance as well as a productive culture in that system. Unfortunately it seems X is not heading in this direction, likely because they could never get everyone to agree on the right drawing API.
Then again I'm finding it difficult to find architecture docs on some of this stuff so I might be missing something major.
I saddened and dismayed by the poor engineering and ignorance of basic security practices that our electronic voting machines show. However, is this really something we should panic about or even the biggest problem in our election system.
All voting systems are vulnerable to fraud. What makes these electronic systems different is that one or a very small number of individuals can engineer a fraud. However, their ability to execute a fraud is limited by the media polls (we will suspect something if the results are inexplicably different than polled) and knowledge of precinct history. Thus the danger from individuals changing the vote seems to really be that they will shift a close race (say 10% apart) one way or another.
However, this sort of shifting close races doesn't greatly degrade the structural force of voting. All candidates will still try to enact policies to garner support whether they need 50% of the votes or only 45%. Much of voting is random, affected by things like personal charisma rather than policy questions so clearly the system doesn't work because we always have the person who 50% want but rather it works because of the structural pressure not to stray to far from what the people want. Or to put it in political science terms what does all the work is the tendency of all candidates to shift to the middle in the long run who actually wins each race isn't so important.
But now comparing the potential for electronic vote fraud to things like machine politics (with conventional ballot stuffing), safe districts, voter disenfranchisement efforts, felon lists etc.. etc.. it doesn't seem like it is such a big deal. Making sure the poling places in the inner city don't have enough machines has a much bigger structural effect, by making sure one group's votes don't count at all, than just giving one candidate a random 10% of the vote. Creating a safe district removes virtually all of the structural pressure of voters on government and it seems far more effective and less dangerous to accidentally strike the wrong people from the rolls or put too few voting machines in some precincts.
In short are we letting our concern over the technology of voting blind us to the bigger issues? Shouldn't we be paying more attention to who gets to vote, how districts are drawn and other conventional aspects of voting than to the potential for individuals to electronically cheat?
I don't mean to criticize the linux/X people here. They are likely doing their best with a tough situation.
Ironically Linux and Vista are both at a disadvantage to OS X in many respects because they are burdended down with backwards compatibility issues.
Likely the best hope for replacing X is to get everyone on board using multiple output rendering libraries like cairo which can then be retargeted to a new underlying windowing system.
I'm a big linux fan. I think it makes for a great server system and a great development/geek system. However, I would be reluctant to run it as my primary laptop OS. I wouldn't run Vista either.
If Linux wants to be more widely adopted what it needs is not more hardware support but to be more like OS X. Namely it's complex UNIX guts should be accessible but hidden. The user should be presented with a consistent, pretty user interface with all the bells and whistles without being lured into dealing with any complex configurations.
KDE and Gnome projects have done some great work here but the underlying problem is X. The old difficult to accelerate architecture of X really needs to be replaced with a whole new drawing/rendering model. Quartz is a good example but I'm sure the smart people who do this sort of thing could come up with something even better if their was the will to totally jettison X and start over.
Until something like that happens I'm using linux for my server boxes but my main machine will remain a laptop running OS X and if I need a PC for general web browsing and things that would be OS X as well.
'Don't Be Evil' doesn't mean 'Don't use Judgement'
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Google and the CIA?
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I don't understand what makes people think all these issues like turning over info to the government, offering censored content in china or giving IP addresses to the government have simple ideological answers.
Handing over search information to the government to help them go fishing for people looking at porn so they can gain votes by brandishing puritanical moral principles is a whole lot different than engaging in a narrowly tailored program to catch terrorists.
Anyone who believes it is always wrong for IT companies to hand info over to the government or to openly engage in partial censorship is an idiot. Like anything else in life these are questions that involve complex trade offs. Does the harm to privacy/free expression exceeded the benefit that will be created by complying with the program?
This is a tough question that requires real analysis of that particular situation. You just can't decide this sort of thing in the abstract.
Whether or not it is good for google to censor in china depends on what you think would happen if they didn't. It benefits no one for google to stick their nose up in the air and refuse to censor if this just means they will be blocked and an even more censor happy, privacy violating Chinese competitor will take their place, perhaps even exporting their censor laden product to other places.
Similarly whether it is good or bad for google to turn over information to the government depends on the relative harm to privacy versus the prevention of harm. In the COPA case their was no benefit to turning the records over, in fact doing so posed a potential danger to free speech if it aided the government case. Additionally there were a great many records demanded meaning many people's privacy might be compromised (see the recent AOL search result release). In contrast if this is a narrowly tailored program few people's records might be revealed and much potential harm prevented.
Obviously we need to know more about the alleged program before one can give a verdict but it's just dumb to call google hypocritical or evil at this stage.
As much as I'm in favor of letting local communities provide broadband it isn't part of a real free market.
I mean imagine if I argued, people who don't want the government to provide health care don't really believe in a free market since they don't want the government to compete in health care. This would be absurd. If the government offered everyone free health care the fact that other people could sell health insurance wouldn't really be relevent.
Similarly towns have powers of compulsion that corporations (should) lack. They can fund broadband infrastructure with tax dollars and guarantee they are the only game in town.
The reason I'm in favor of municipal broadband is that true free market competition isn't possible. Cable and phone companies get monopolies on providing service anyway. Forbidding municipalities from offering broadband just guarantees we get the worst of both worlds, the lack of accountability and profit focus of corporations combined with monopolistic power.
However, the argument that free market people should support municipal broadband as part of a free market philosophy is just absurd.
We won't be ANY safer after Christopher's work. Not because he was wrong about his claims but because he is right. We only have security theatre.
No rational allocation of resources would have beefed up passenger screening after 9/11. I don't care if you do get a AK-47 on a plane nowadays you won't be able to hijack it and crash it into a building for the simple reason that the people on the plane KNOW they will die if they let you fly the plane.
9/11 was a one time deal. It worked because no one expected terrorists to fly planes into buildings. After 9/11 any hijacking would end like flight 82. While this would be a horrible tragedy it would be far easier to create such a tragedy with surface to air missiles, gas attacks in subways or a hundred other ways we aren't guarding against.
The real risk now is new attacks not a repeat of 9/11. We should be spending our money securing chemical plants or defending our water supply not inconveniencing people in airports. Any security in airports beyond pre 9/11 levels is nothing but a show designed to make people think they are safer while wasting resources.
Christopher is showing that the post 9/11 security measures are total theater. He isn't being arrested because he put people at risk, he is being arrested because he made uncomfortable.
Note that they also say part of the benefit is using way smaller platters. They seem to be talking about replacing 3-4 with 14-15 platters, or at least that is how I read them. With simpler head assemblies this may not be cost prohibitive.
Now with smaller disk platters twisting isn't as much of a problem.
Additionally as long as they are spinning centrifugal force and air dynamics are likely to keep them quite flat. When they are powered down they can flap far more without danger since they won't have heads to hit.
Consider the amount of power needed for a teraflop in 1980 versus now. The chip makers got that for free with increased performance too then on TOP of that they spent money to reduce power.
As someone else already pointed out it might make a difference depending on what sort of motor you use. I'm not sure though as drive manufacturer's might have already been clever enough to figure out how to just add a bit more angular momentum to a moving system.
However the big savings is in the spin up/down energy and more importantly time.
The faster your disk drive spins up and down the more frequently you can spin it down to save power. If it is lighter then spinning it up costs less energy as well.
I don't know if Cringely's numbers were right or just an example but if it is indeed true that this drive spins up in.4 seconds versus 5 seconds for a regular HD that's a LOT of extra time you can leave it spun down.
Go read the background of this patent. The patent itself admits that there was plenty of graphics prior art that used floating point values to do the calculations. All they are claiming a patent on is implementing this system in hardware! And they include a line in their patent about how it has now become possible/desierable to implement the floating point stuff in hardware.
To be fair it seems their 'advancement' is that they kept the data in floating point format in the framebuffer rather than converting it to fixed point. Now their implementation of this approach probably contained some genuine advancement but just the notion of doing everything in floating point is pretty fucking obvious.
What I don't understand about this is that surely SGI has some much more substantial patents in their pockets. Is the problem that they gave them away with OpenGL/don't want to scare people away from opengl?
My personal guess is that SGI isn't serious about pursuing this particular patent infringement. Rather they are using a very broad and simple patent to go on a fishing expedition about ATI's hardware. During discovery on this patent SGI will be able to get details about how ATI's hardware/software works that they would otherwise not be able to get. I suspect SGI thinks ATI is infringing on a more substantial patent somewhere and is going to use the discovery during this case to find out.
In a recent court case the judge in fact ruled that the border search exemption does not apply to laptop searches. I think it was on deciscion of the day or something.
Yes, there have been several high profile laptop losses but compare this to the millions of laptops out there. So long as it is troublesome to deal with these encryption issues, costs significant IT resources or requires difficult procedures for the end user it just isn't worth it.
It is tempting to think of companies as simple top down structures where the management sets policies and the workers follow them but I think we all know this isn't entierly true. It is important to keep your workers happy and if laptop passwords are annoying to use their will be strong pressure not to use them or otherwise get around them.
Additionally one needs to take into account the fact that it is often harder to recover from HD mishaps when the data is encrypted.
Before we start seeing widespread adoptiong of FDE encryption I think we need hardware level two key systems. That is the diskdrive itself should encrypt all data entering the HD and decrypt all data leaving it after being furnished with the correct key. This key would be required to be represented *only* after the laptop had been shut or powered off (alternatively it could only be required to represent after the laptop has been powered off and the OS could lock when the laptop is closed which would require a power off to avoid). Management or IT would have a master key which could not be changed by the user allowing them to read the HD should the user forget the password or otherwise screw things up.
Furthermore this encyrption system should have the property that anyone knowing the key, the location of a block on the HD and the contents of this block should be able to decrypt this block, i.e., the encryption of a block on the HD doesn't depend on the values of other blocks. This would make data recovery no more problematic than it is today since management would have the appropriate key.
So elsewhere I have argued that parents shouldn't have the right to deny their children access to conflicting views. Just as we prevent parents from abusing their children, keeping them out of school stoping them from learning to read or similar harms we shouldn't allow parents to brainwash their children with their prejudices and stop them from hearing conflicting viewpoints. The radical islamic parents in the article are a good example of why we shouldn't let parents totally control what their children are allowed to see.
Of course many people immediatly reply to this by bringing up examples of hateful, prejudiced positions (KKK, NAMBLA whatever) and argue that surely it is bad to let their children see this material without supervision. I'm far from convinced it is, it takes far more than happening across a site to brainwash a child. However, the best way to make sure most kids are more likely to view this material and be susceptible to it's influence is to tell them that they can't see it and make it a challenge to get around the blocking software.
You can't make it okay to only block the 'bad' sites. If schools in your nice sophisticated public school can block KKK websites and other racist junk then schools in the evangelical parts of the country can block pro-atheist, pro-evolution or even pro-racial equality sites.
This was the point about the islamic parents. I don't know about you but I find it very bothersome that kids can be denied access to real information about jews and only few racist propaganda. It seems to me a far lesser evil that some kids might read about the KKK on their own, and probably go ask their parents about it anyway, than that some kids might be totally denied access to independent information and brain washed into believing racist radical ideologies.
Besides all the parents who try and block sites miss out on the key aspect of adolescent psychology. Making something forbidden just makes it all the more appealing. Their is a particular thrill in getting around your parent's/schools filtering software. I have no doubt their are tons of kids out there now reading KKK sites or looking at porn they probably wouldn't have bothered with if they didn't know it was forbidden.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes if you were a climate scientist you wouldn't believe in global warming based on consensus. You would believe in it because that is what the complicate data and models show.
Now if you aren't going to go out and do the science yourself you need to trust in experts. Rather than pick one guy and get lucky the best guide to the truth is the consensus in the discipline. Hence the reason that the consensus in the climate community matters to us.
I agree that the mainstream media discussion of global warming looks like it is faith based. However the actual scientists carefully considered alternative explanations and only reached conclusions after many years of testing competing hypotheses. Don't use the politicization of the topic in the mainstream media to shmear the scientific discussion.
No, real scientists base their conclusions in their area on evidence and results. They trust the consensus on related areas that they can trust other scientists to have been right about.
In short you couldn't publish a paper in nature that sought to prove global warming by interviewing scientists you would need to give evidence.
This doesn't mean every scientist needs to check everything but consensus is the result of evidence not a replacement for it. (see my response to your parent)
Give me a break on number 6. Chaos is not some magic property that lets you explain why a system is going to harm you when you can't figure out any other harm. Besides it appears that local climate is a chaotic system but that global climate is reasonably predictable using large models and we are getting better at it all the time.
Also you are just wrong about 9. If the effect isn't anthropogenic it is quite possible our remediation attempts just won't have any effect because the system is really being driven by something else. It is anthropogenic so this doesn't matter but it is an important question.
I've criticized this article in other places for putting up strawman but I think you overreached yourself here. Your points on the scientific errors he makes are good though unexplained but it gets shaky when you get to 6 and below. I tend to think this sort of reply does more harm than good because the people who already realize or are inclined to believe this guy is BS are going to cheer and agree but it doesn't provide enough information and gets enough wrong to make it useless at convincing a non-believer. In other words if I didn't already know enough to have justified belief in global warming your post would just give me more reason to think that people believed in global warming on faith.
In other words it is harmful to offer soundbyte answers, especially if some of them are clearly hokey and wrong, that will only appeal to those already convinced.
You clearly have a political agenda.
I mean you don't believe one can have a basis for conditional statements. So scientists who don't know if a serious earthquake is going to happen in California during the next 10 years shouldn't tell us where it is likely to be if it happens or what is a good evacuation plan if an earthquake happens.
The only reason your child molester example works out is because the accusation makes so many people emotional they stop being able to think. Moreover, if you both said "If Joe is a child molester" and then you said "But if Joe isn't a child molester" you would avert much of the bias.
Sure if this guy had given only one scenario and perfected it with if it might be misleading but that isn't what he did. Don't take the idiotic position that it is misleading to inform people of conditional certainty and explain what will happen in various situations.
I mean he did exactly the same thing as the impartial analysis in all our voting guides do, lay out what happens in different scenarios.
Admittedly I have some problems with the stern report. It seems happy to assume that global warming is responsible for increased hurricanes, a result that is supported by a few suggestive papers but far from established. Also there were a few other reports about it that made me think it might be erring on the side of overestimation. Still I haven't read it myself so these could be misleading reports.
However, this article is clearly written as a hack job to take one from one report that might exaggerate a bit to the conclusion that global warming isn't a big deal and is being perpetrated as some sort of international conspiracy. Let's be reasonable here and use the same standard for global warming as we use for anything else. At worst this means there was a report released by someone who (in good faith) might have relied on effects that are supported by research but not well verified. It is totally ridiculous to attack global warming in general.
But what I really wrote this article to point out is how ridiculous the claim is about the UN cutting the predicted value from their model by three to get the right value for the 20th century. This piece cleverly avoids telling you that carbon dioxide is not the only forcing that needs to be considered here and there are significant negative forcings. Thus the temperature increase from CO2 will be far larger than the real temperature increase as it will be offset by temperature decreases from things like increased particulate matter in the atmosphere. However, since the other forcings tend to be bounded or increasing at relatively slow rates while the CO2 forcing is increasing quite significantly in the future we get to see more of the CO2 forcing, i.e., now we are looking at something like 6-4 in the future we get 10-5.
Also does anyone really think that the statisticians hired by the US senate were crazy greens who were dead set on defending some false science? More likely the UN graph really was meritorious. Perhaps the medieval warm period was only a local European phenomena not a global effect (and was thus offset by colder temperatures elsewhere)?
These sorts of articles really piss me off. They ultimately leverage the fact that global warming is a very complicated issue and that the scientific consensus is really only that it is happening at a significant rate. There is still much disagreement about what that rate should be. Additionally the very fact that there is such a consensus on global warming means that it isn't too hard to find one or two bad apples on the global warming side. Since the public doesn't really understand the scientific process these types of articles manage to trick them into seeing it the same way they see political parties, i.e., as consisting of organized sides who are blamable for all claims made by their side.
Grr.
Well to be fair I didn't get around to addressing the issue of more organized attacks against the voting infrastructure.
There are two possible ways we can imagine e-vote fraud occuring. The first is a very small number of people rig the election withou involving any massive conspiracy or corruption. This is the scenario I was addressing.
In this scenario you are right that people will mistrust the polls *to a point*. If the discrepancy starts getting unexplanably large it will raise a significant amount of sucpiscion. If only a small few are in on the scam pretty quickly some honest public official investigating the discrepancy will notice something amiss. Sure someone might get away with a significant vote shift once or twice but in the long run it won't make a huge difference. They may get away with a small vote shift more frequently but that has less effect.
So yes polling provides little to no protection against throwing a close race one way or another (close meaning within 10% maybe a bit more). However, my point is that even if we set a national rule that says 'democrats need to get 55% of the votes to win' or vice versa the harm wouldn't be that bad. The country might lean a little bit more one way or another but it would tack just a little off mainstream and the politicians would still respond to the same public moods.
The second scenario is that we have machine style fraud facilitated by e-voting. That is we have large numbers of corrupt officials in on a scheme to do vote rigging. Yet in this case I don't think e-voting fraud makes it any harder to detect. The weak link in stuffing ballot boxes is the same as in a institutionalized e-voting scam, the people who are in on the scam.
Thus I just don't think e-voting is a particular threat. Sure it's bad but I think it would be unwise to shift our focus from things like gerrymandering to this.
Your making my point for me.
My point is exactly that the harm from e-voting hacks pales in comparison to the harm from perfectly legal gerrymandering.
No matter which way we can imagine a hypothetical florida or Ohio being thrown to via voting fraud both Bush and Kerry would have had to run and pay attention to the demands of the people in these states. This isn't what happens in gerrymandered situations.
In short even if you have e-fraud it almost certainly wouldn't rise to the level or harm that other things like gerrymandering do. Perverting the will of the people so you only need 45% of them to be elected is a lot less bad than getting to pretty much ignore them entirely.
No, they didn't.
You are using a different notion of significant than I am.
The point is that no one denies that the Florida and Ohio races were close. What I'm saying is that in the long run it doesn't really matter if some close races are thrown one way or another. Sure in the short term it seems to make a big difference but in the long run this gets lost in the noise of bad voter decisions and the fact that it won't always be one side cheating.
The point is florida and ohio are exactly what any undetected electronic vote theft would likely look like, a close vote thrown to one side or the other. But this didn't mean that either Bush or Gore/Kerry could ignore what the voters in either of these states thought. They still had to do just as much campaigning and be just as careful in the past four years to court these voters. In contrast when you draw a safe seat that often eliminates any competition and means that the candiate only answers to members of his own party in the primary.
So while the theft of an election may seem like the worst thing that can happen the prospect of electronic election theft doesn't undermine the incentives of elected officials to shift towards the center of their voter's opinions. On the other hand things like safe districts do undermine this structural force.
Also I said unexplainable discrepancies. I saw several after the fact examinations of how the polling data was off and they seemed to have a good understanding of why this happened and what they had screwed up.
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Now compare what happened in Florida to what happened in Ohio. In Ohio there is no doubt that lack of sufficient machines and other screw ups in the cities discouraged many people from voting. Now there is no good reason to believe this was some conspiracy and it isn't even clear if it was enough to shift the election but my point is this sort of behavior is more problematic. It is far easier to get away with stealing an election by accidentally mucking up polling places where your opponent is strong than to do a complex technological hack.
I'm far more concerned about vote machines crashing or happening to be misconfigured than I am about some complex vote stealing hack.
The issue is we need a robust modern drawing API that *replaces* the X protocol.
It's kinda silly to keep the X architecture if we are going to give up network transparency, I mean at that point the fundamental design decisions motivating X become invalid. Yet if we are going to do this we need something better than GLX (commands are too big).
In particular what I would like to see is an integration of the windowing system with our drawing API, e.g., integrate X and Cairo. The interface to the window system would be entirely through the one drawing API (encouraging though not requiring a common look). This API could offer sufficiently high level objects to allow network transparency at reasonable speeds. Furthermore when designing this API one needs to take it for granted at the start that the image operations are likely to be accelerated as well as recognizing that reading from video mem can be slower than writing.
We should go to a model where backwards compatibility is maintained by a software layer on top of this new accelerated drawing API rather than trying to layer our new drawing APIs on top of an old system.
One thing that considerably complicates designing a good X architecture/replacement is the insistence on keeping the window manager separate from the windowing system. This forces several extra levels of abstraction and may (I don't know) make it difficult to take advantage of acceleration opportunities. For instance I still don't understand why we need damage extensions. If we are drawing on boxes that we render using the card's hidden surface acceleration why shouldn't all the window hiding happen transparently.
In any case sure one could keep X in name but what I am arguing for is an integration of the windowing system with the drawing API. I think this is absolutely necessary to get a robust, good looking system with good performance as well as a productive culture in that system. Unfortunately it seems X is not heading in this direction, likely because they could never get everyone to agree on the right drawing API.
Then again I'm finding it difficult to find architecture docs on some of this stuff so I might be missing something major.
I saddened and dismayed by the poor engineering and ignorance of basic security practices that our electronic voting machines show. However, is this really something we should panic about or even the biggest problem in our election system.
All voting systems are vulnerable to fraud. What makes these electronic systems different is that one or a very small number of individuals can engineer a fraud. However, their ability to execute a fraud is limited by the media polls (we will suspect something if the results are inexplicably different than polled) and knowledge of precinct history. Thus the danger from individuals changing the vote seems to really be that they will shift a close race (say 10% apart) one way or another.
However, this sort of shifting close races doesn't greatly degrade the structural force of voting. All candidates will still try to enact policies to garner support whether they need 50% of the votes or only 45%. Much of voting is random, affected by things like personal charisma rather than policy questions so clearly the system doesn't work because we always have the person who 50% want but rather it works because of the structural pressure not to stray to far from what the people want. Or to put it in political science terms what does all the work is the tendency of all candidates to shift to the middle in the long run who actually wins each race isn't so important.
But now comparing the potential for electronic vote fraud to things like machine politics (with conventional ballot stuffing), safe districts, voter disenfranchisement efforts, felon lists etc.. etc.. it doesn't seem like it is such a big deal. Making sure the poling places in the inner city don't have enough machines has a much bigger structural effect, by making sure one group's votes don't count at all, than just giving one candidate a random 10% of the vote. Creating a safe district removes virtually all of the structural pressure of voters on government and it seems far more effective and less dangerous to accidentally strike the wrong people from the rolls or put too few voting machines in some precincts.
In short are we letting our concern over the technology of voting blind us to the bigger issues? Shouldn't we be paying more attention to who gets to vote, how districts are drawn and other conventional aspects of voting than to the potential for individuals to electronically cheat?
I don't mean to criticize the linux/X people here. They are likely doing their best with a tough situation.
Ironically Linux and Vista are both at a disadvantage to OS X in many respects because they are burdended down with backwards compatibility issues.
Likely the best hope for replacing X is to get everyone on board using multiple output rendering libraries like cairo which can then be retargeted to a new underlying windowing system.
I'm a big linux fan. I think it makes for a great server system and a great development/geek system. However, I would be reluctant to run it as my primary laptop OS. I wouldn't run Vista either.
If Linux wants to be more widely adopted what it needs is not more hardware support but to be more like OS X. Namely it's complex UNIX guts should be accessible but hidden. The user should be presented with a consistent, pretty user interface with all the bells and whistles without being lured into dealing with any complex configurations.
KDE and Gnome projects have done some great work here but the underlying problem is X. The old difficult to accelerate architecture of X really needs to be replaced with a whole new drawing/rendering model. Quartz is a good example but I'm sure the smart people who do this sort of thing could come up with something even better if their was the will to totally jettison X and start over.
Until something like that happens I'm using linux for my server boxes but my main machine will remain a laptop running OS X and if I need a PC for general web browsing and things that would be OS X as well.
I don't understand what makes people think all these issues like turning over info to the government, offering censored content in china or giving IP addresses to the government have simple ideological answers.
Handing over search information to the government to help them go fishing for people looking at porn so they can gain votes by brandishing puritanical moral principles is a whole lot different than engaging in a narrowly tailored program to catch terrorists.
Anyone who believes it is always wrong for IT companies to hand info over to the government or to openly engage in partial censorship is an idiot. Like anything else in life these are questions that involve complex trade offs. Does the harm to privacy/free expression exceeded the benefit that will be created by complying with the program?
This is a tough question that requires real analysis of that particular situation. You just can't decide this sort of thing in the abstract.
Whether or not it is good for google to censor in china depends on what you think would happen if they didn't. It benefits no one for google to stick their nose up in the air and refuse to censor if this just means they will be blocked and an even more censor happy, privacy violating Chinese competitor will take their place, perhaps even exporting their censor laden product to other places.
Similarly whether it is good or bad for google to turn over information to the government depends on the relative harm to privacy versus the prevention of harm. In the COPA case their was no benefit to turning the records over, in fact doing so posed a potential danger to free speech if it aided the government case. Additionally there were a great many records demanded meaning many people's privacy might be compromised (see the recent AOL search result release). In contrast if this is a narrowly tailored program few people's records might be revealed and much potential harm prevented.
Obviously we need to know more about the alleged program before one can give a verdict but it's just dumb to call google hypocritical or evil at this stage.
As much as I'm in favor of letting local communities provide broadband it isn't part of a real free market.
I mean imagine if I argued, people who don't want the government to provide health care don't really believe in a free market since they don't want the government to compete in health care. This would be absurd. If the government offered everyone free health care the fact that other people could sell health insurance wouldn't really be relevent.
Similarly towns have powers of compulsion that corporations (should) lack. They can fund broadband infrastructure with tax dollars and guarantee they are the only game in town.
The reason I'm in favor of municipal broadband is that true free market competition isn't possible. Cable and phone companies get monopolies on providing service anyway. Forbidding municipalities from offering broadband just guarantees we get the worst of both worlds, the lack of accountability and profit focus of corporations combined with monopolistic power.
However, the argument that free market people should support municipal broadband as part of a free market philosophy is just absurd.
I think so but not sure.
If it is and you are reading this congrats on your book.
We won't be ANY safer after Christopher's work. Not because he was wrong about his claims but because he is right. We only have security theatre.
No rational allocation of resources would have beefed up passenger screening after 9/11. I don't care if you do get a AK-47 on a plane nowadays you won't be able to hijack it and crash it into a building for the simple reason that the people on the plane KNOW they will die if they let you fly the plane.
9/11 was a one time deal. It worked because no one expected terrorists to fly planes into buildings. After 9/11 any hijacking would end like flight 82. While this would be a horrible tragedy it would be far easier to create such a tragedy with surface to air missiles, gas attacks in subways or a hundred other ways we aren't guarding against.
The real risk now is new attacks not a repeat of 9/11. We should be spending our money securing chemical plants or defending our water supply not inconveniencing people in airports. Any security in airports beyond pre 9/11 levels is nothing but a show designed to make people think they are safer while wasting resources.
Christopher is showing that the post 9/11 security measures are total theater. He isn't being arrested because he put people at risk, he is being arrested because he made uncomfortable.
That's not clear to me. When spinning at 15,000 rpm it is entierly possible dynamic forces far outweigh stiffness considerations.
Note that they also say part of the benefit is using way smaller platters. They seem to be talking about replacing 3-4 with 14-15 platters, or at least that is how I read them. With simpler head assemblies this may not be cost prohibitive.
Now with smaller disk platters twisting isn't as much of a problem.
Additionally as long as they are spinning centrifugal force and air dynamics are likely to keep them quite flat. When they are powered down they can flap far more without danger since they won't have heads to hit.
Besides how much twisting does a HDD go through?
That is just riding the increase in capacity.
Consider the amount of power needed for a teraflop in 1980 versus now. The chip makers got that for free with increased performance too then on TOP of that they spent money to reduce power.
As someone else already pointed out it might make a difference depending on what sort of motor you use. I'm not sure though as drive manufacturer's might have already been clever enough to figure out how to just add a bit more angular momentum to a moving system.
.4 seconds versus 5 seconds for a regular HD that's a LOT of extra time you can leave it spun down.
However the big savings is in the spin up/down energy and more importantly time.
The faster your disk drive spins up and down the more frequently you can spin it down to save power. If it is lighter then spinning it up costs less energy as well.
I don't know if Cringely's numbers were right or just an example but if it is indeed true that this drive spins up in
Go read the background of this patent. The patent itself admits that there was plenty of graphics prior art that used floating point values to do the calculations. All they are claiming a patent on is implementing this system in hardware! And they include a line in their patent about how it has now become possible/desierable to implement the floating point stuff in hardware.
To be fair it seems their 'advancement' is that they kept the data in floating point format in the framebuffer rather than converting it to fixed point. Now their implementation of this approach probably contained some genuine advancement but just the notion of doing everything in floating point is pretty fucking obvious.
What I don't understand about this is that surely SGI has some much more substantial patents in their pockets. Is the problem that they gave them away with OpenGL/don't want to scare people away from opengl?
My personal guess is that SGI isn't serious about pursuing this particular patent infringement. Rather they are using a very broad and simple patent to go on a fishing expedition about ATI's hardware. During discovery on this patent SGI will be able to get details about how ATI's hardware/software works that they would otherwise not be able to get. I suspect SGI thinks ATI is infringing on a more substantial patent somewhere and is going to use the discovery during this case to find out.
In a recent court case the judge in fact ruled that the border search exemption does not apply to laptop searches. I think it was on deciscion of the day or something.
Yes, there have been several high profile laptop losses but compare this to the millions of laptops out there. So long as it is troublesome to deal with these encryption issues, costs significant IT resources or requires difficult procedures for the end user it just isn't worth it.
It is tempting to think of companies as simple top down structures where the management sets policies and the workers follow them but I think we all know this isn't entierly true. It is important to keep your workers happy and if laptop passwords are annoying to use their will be strong pressure not to use them or otherwise get around them.
Additionally one needs to take into account the fact that it is often harder to recover from HD mishaps when the data is encrypted.
Before we start seeing widespread adoptiong of FDE encryption I think we need hardware level two key systems. That is the diskdrive itself should encrypt all data entering the HD and decrypt all data leaving it after being furnished with the correct key. This key would be required to be represented *only* after the laptop had been shut or powered off (alternatively it could only be required to represent after the laptop has been powered off and the OS could lock when the laptop is closed which would require a power off to avoid). Management or IT would have a master key which could not be changed by the user allowing them to read the HD should the user forget the password or otherwise screw things up.
Furthermore this encyrption system should have the property that anyone knowing the key, the location of a block on the HD and the contents of this block should be able to decrypt this block, i.e., the encryption of a block on the HD doesn't depend on the values of other blocks. This would make data recovery no more problematic than it is today since management would have the appropriate key.
So elsewhere I have argued that parents shouldn't have the right to deny their children access to conflicting views. Just as we prevent parents from abusing their children, keeping them out of school stoping them from learning to read or similar harms we shouldn't allow parents to brainwash their children with their prejudices and stop them from hearing conflicting viewpoints. The radical islamic parents in the article are a good example of why we shouldn't let parents totally control what their children are allowed to see.
Of course many people immediatly reply to this by bringing up examples of hateful, prejudiced positions (KKK, NAMBLA whatever) and argue that surely it is bad to let their children see this material without supervision. I'm far from convinced it is, it takes far more than happening across a site to brainwash a child. However, the best way to make sure most kids are more likely to view this material and be susceptible to it's influence is to tell them that they can't see it and make it a challenge to get around the blocking software.
Grr..You just don't get it do you.
You can't make it okay to only block the 'bad' sites. If schools in your nice sophisticated public school can block KKK websites and other racist junk then schools in the evangelical parts of the country can block pro-atheist, pro-evolution or even pro-racial equality sites.
This was the point about the islamic parents. I don't know about you but I find it very bothersome that kids can be denied access to real information about jews and only few racist propaganda. It seems to me a far lesser evil that some kids might read about the KKK on their own, and probably go ask their parents about it anyway, than that some kids might be totally denied access to independent information and brain washed into believing racist radical ideologies.
Besides all the parents who try and block sites miss out on the key aspect of adolescent psychology. Making something forbidden just makes it all the more appealing. Their is a particular thrill in getting around your parent's/schools filtering software. I have no doubt their are tons of kids out there now reading KKK sites or looking at porn they probably wouldn't have bothered with if they didn't know it was forbidden.