So the first news about this are from South Korea, the US of A did not lead in this research and who is to blame for that if not the current US government?
Why is it a blame assigning moment if someone other than the US government discovers something?
The ultimate form of ethno-bias is assumging that only the US can make progress.
This is not a "stick it to the Bushies" moment. This is a validation of the conservative position. The opposing side has claimed that with embryonic stem cells people who are paralyzed can walk again. This event proves that the paralyzed can walk again without embroynic stem cells AND without federal funding. A two-for-one special.
You should really know what you are talking about before going raving mad telling others they are dumb and mocking them for considering ethical issues as well as scientific issues.
1. There is no ban on stem cell research in the US.
2. There has never been proposed or discussed a ban on stem cell research in the US.
3. Cord blood is just that: cord blood. Not embroynic stem cells. Unless someone can point me to something that suggests otherwise, this is not covered by the Federal ban on stem-cell research funding.
4. This treatment could have been derived in the US at various research universities. The fact that South Koreans made the breakthrough at this time does not detract from the US but rather should be an item of pride for the ingenuity and dedication of the South Koreans involved.
Snippy, snide, child-like comments aside, this development bolsters the claim that we do not need embroynic steam cells for the type of treatments and remedies that would help so many people. This was achieved withour US federal funding, without embroynic stem cells. The otherwise of the issue would have you believe that banning Federal funding of embroynic stem research on new lines is akin to calling the earth flat.
If the "monkeys" decide they like what they wrote, that's good
But the problem is that more often than not the monkey's opinion of the truth or fact isn't in fact necessarily congruent with the truth or fact.
Popular isn't necessarily correct or incorrect. It's just popular. You can have a dozen wikipedians arguing back and forth on a topic but at the end of the day the socratic or arugmentative process doesn't guarantee a solid article.
There is a difference between "root" access" and "limited access". It is trivial to setup this database in a manner which is secure and transprent and doesnt let out information that any individual pharamacy shouldn't have. Eventually, these tags will get into everything. But again, picking up a unique ID on a tag is not a threat to your privacy in any real way. The ID is useless without its accompyning reference.
The ONLY reason they are doing this is to avoid lawsuits. This won't do anything to stop counterfeit drugs.
That's untrue. This will do something to stop counterfeit drugs. Most cases of counterfeiting are undetected. Someone gets a placebo in place of a heart medication - that may never be discovered. This will clearly bring to light many cases that normally would go unsolved.
As far as the the "ends justifying the means". That's an exaggeration.
Not only that, but alot of people don't find anything offensive about what you mentioned. More than most - probably a massive percentage - of people are likely thinking: "So?" when you tell a story like that.
I certainly don't want to be heading towards the door with Oxy and have some hi-tech thief scan me and follow me home to rob me of the drugs I just purchased... Perhaps even someone could scan important/famous people and either blackmail them for their drug purchases (HIV/STDs) or just blatantly report it to the Fish Wrappers for cash.
This presumes that the thief would have access to the database of reference. The tag only contains a Unique ID, therefore, without the reference, the ID is useless. You or the famous person are at the type of risk you describe already if an untrustworthy person has access to your medical records or pharmacy records.
Once it does become viable for individual consumer bottles there will be yet another excuse why the prices need to continue to go up. Everything needs to cost more especially in the pharmaceutical industry. I swear everyone is in on it. I am told I need three low dose drugs when I have a feeling that a higher dose of another would handle it just fine. I am told that I am being prescribed these particular drugs because my coverage is good enough to afford it... It all leads to more money for everyone.
True. It is a corrupt system. But, on the other hand, millions of surgeries are avoided and lives preserved by the drugs every year.
Then WTF are we doing this? 20 cases of counterfeit drugs yet we have to spend thousands and thousands and pass that on to the consumer. Ugh. Yeah, they are going to say that we need to protect against a possible outbreak of this. Personally, I don't see how a label can help when the medicine inside is what is important. Anyone can swap out the real meds inside for their counterfeit ones.
The drugs that are reiceved are not usually in ready-to-distribute packages. The pharmacist takes from the big bottle and puts into your bottle. This is more dealing with the bottles that the pharmacist recieves. These are generally heavily tamper-resistant, especially for more dangerous drugs.
I was in a job interview before, and the interviewer-would-be-boss said to me:
"I'd like to ask you some questions.."
So I responded: "Go ahead, ask me anything.. life, the universe, everything" (or something similiar)..
He laughed.. I laughed, we shared some stories.. and then he warned me that the job would probably be eliminated in 2-3 months, and I'd probably be on my ass if I took it. It was great.
Another time I was interviewing for a contract and the person wanted to "test my personality".. he was obviously unimpressed with the corporate template questions. He asked me what my favorite color was. A super-intelligent shade of blue, of course. He laughed. He knew.
No, I fret. Everyone and their lame-ass over the hill friends are going to be walking around spouting how 42 is the answer. Fark.
If you think the UN is going to provide you safety you are very close to totally wrong.
and the majority of the planet?
The majority of the planet is weaker than the US, dependent on the US, or desperately in need of the US for protection or stability.
Not to mention an entire major religion?
Yeah, well, that entire religion has hated us for the better part of 150 years. And in earnet since the end of World War II.
If someone really wants to blow up a building, they're going to blow up a building.
No, that's false. There are a lot more people in the world who'd like to blow up a building than there actually buildings that have been blown up. The actual sentence should read "a sufficently motivated and capable person who wishes to damage a sufficently unprotected entity will try until stopped or success is achieved".
Its a completely false sense of security.
The US is significantly safer in many, many ways. However, it is clearly not secure.
and that even Adobe Acrobat is more easily scriptable on OS X than Windows, if you've got to use that tool for some sort of features or comfort level issue.
The Adobe SDK for Mac OS X is crippled beyond use for my purposes. It is almost equal, but not enough. I need to work with the Postscript streams directly but in a structured manner, and there is no interface for that with Mac.
What the heck kind of 'processing' are you doing to documents that takes so long? Do they start as PDF, or are you taking scans or other bitmaps and converting them to PDF ?
It's like this: need to extract the data in structured way from each page of the PDF's. Analyze the data against a set of business requirements, and re-order the pages in a specific way while merging in a small amount of additional data.
A decent example. We print bank statements. The bank sends us a PDF of statements for all their customers, say 10,000 pages. We need to add OCR codes for mail machines, so we have to locate the end of one statement and the start of another. We have to pre-sort the statements by zip code and delivery point. Within that, we need to sort by number of pages. We have to match raw check images, and create pages of check images to go with a statement. If the total number of pages exceeds what can be automatically handled by the mail equipment, it has to be taken out and put in a seperate file for hand treatment (seriously, who writes a 100-150 checks anymore?). Often times we have to make minor modifications to the statement to correct problems with the banks software. We also have to renumber the pages so that it is consistent with the number of pages in the statement. Many times the client will want inserts that go to some customers, not others. So we have to read the data from the statement and determine if we add a code to the page so that the inserter knows to insert a piece into this envelope. Sometimes they get fancy, like, "If the customer lives within 3 miles of a branch, and spends more than $10 a month on ATM fees at other banks, send them a list of branches. If they spend more than $20 a month on fees, insert a brouchure about reducing ATM fees". After all that, we have to add stock tags and directives so that the printers knows that page 1 comes from one tray, page N's come from this tray and are duplex, and check pages from a seperate tray that are duplexed.
I am the senior developer, and I really know what I am doing. The problem is that the requests from the clients are computationally intense. And mutli-layered, relying on layers and layers of conditional logic. I havent found an alternative to using the Adobe SDK which does much of the "heavy lifting". I deeply research ghostscript, and keep going back, but as far as I can tell doesn't do a fraction of what I need to do, even on the most basic level. I investigated modifying it, but quite frankly, why should I risk the effort when I have an offering from Adobe that works today? I have no indication that it will perform any better. It will be risky and time consuming to make ghostscript do what I want.
As far as the WinXP issue, the core here is not the OS. Most of the work is being done by an SDK that is essentially Windows-only for what I need. If a job runs for 18 hrs, my process is getting 17.75 hrs of CPU time, at least. It is a tight loop. I spent a month profiling and tweaking one job to get it to process fast enough to meet turn time requirements. It is a solid application. No unnecessary forking, no unneeded memory usuage, no unnecessary object invocations. None. I re-wrote a few standard library functions in assembly to eliminate unnecessary checks that are inapplicable to the question. Anything that looked out of whack in the profiling got examined and fixed. The task is basically 100% CPU bound.
The only good thing is that, for the most part, if I get a 10,000 page document, I can split it into 4 ~2500 page documents and process at the same time on multiple machines.
No, not when you use Adobe's SDK, which is as far as I can tell the only comprehensive SDK out there for working with PDFs in a complete manner.
The 'P' really refers to portable for viewing and printing. Not much else. Adobe seems hell bent on avoiding Unix for much of their programming interfaces.
Dial-up is not unprofitable! Running AOL on the other hand..
Charinging $20/mo for dial-up is a perfectly reasonable service. You just have to know that your customer base will not be what it used to be, that most customers will leave at some point. There will always be a market for dial-up though!
You have no idea! That's about right. I work with PDF documents for a printing company. We've been doing mostly small documents processing - up to say 5000 pages. Process the pages, re-order them, send to big printers.
The processing takes something like 4-48 hrs on a nice fast P4 3.2ghz box.
Well, all of the sudden, a client wants us to process a 100,000 page document. Ohh. Hmm. Interesting. Well, well, what to do now! We have 72 hrs to get it to press..
Clusters here we come. What else can we do! Spent a few weeks tweaking and profiling and fixing the code and that helped a lot. But now its just plain CPU bound!
The processing parallesizes fairly well, so a nice cluster of boxes would be the best solution I can think of. And since everything is already Windows based....
Seperation is not always waranted, and not always good. There was a lot of *intra-departmental* seperation. Having people work on the same goal, in the same building, on the same floor without being legally able to talk to each other is foolish.
I agree that we do not want a large monolithic government - although we have just that for 50 years - but what also do not want is a government that encourages inter-departmental squabbles at the expense of real security. That's pretty much exactly what has been going on.
It's not trendy to dissent on the Patriot Act around here, but probably a solid 90% of the bill accomplished SORELY needed reforms.
There were literally hundreds of pathetic attempts to seperate government agencies for a no good reason.
The rest of the bill that you hear so much about is what really burns most civil libertarians.
Everyone should be asked to read the whole act at least once in their lives. Most people would be surprised how much stuff the government *couldn't* do that just made sense before hand.
Sorry, I made a typo. 0.2% is a very acceptable rate of spoilage (0.02% would be, well, too much to ask for!).
There are three options about who can run elections: government, business, or a mix of both. All government is bad. All business is bad. A mix is the best choice.
All I really care about is that people responsible for counting and certifying the vote _should_ be non-partisan.
There is no such thing as a non-partisan person!
The people who count and certify votes are elected officals. That's the closest you can get to fair. There is no law that you could pass that would require a citizen to not donate, to not be poltically active. Participating in the process is supposed to be open to everyone.
There are thousands and thousands and thousands of people responsible for counting votes in this country. Suggesting that you can find non-partisans to fill in this role is just beyond belief. Suggesting that we amend the Constitution so that they are unable to participate in democracy and their birthright is beyond the pale. Finally, thinking that by limiting people from expressing their opinion negates the existenance of said opinion is foolhardy and contrary to everything history and science says about our humanity.
Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has motives.
Now why don't you all stop arguing about how things _are_ and start working toward making things as they _should_ be. Or maybe you can give me a damn good reason _why_ political activists foxs have any role whatsoever in guarding the hen houses that are our ballot boxes
Because it's the only way. There is no one else that can do it. Everyone - EVERYONE has bias. Try to find 100,000 people who meet the non-partisan moniker and wish to count the 100,000,000 million votes cast isn't a possibility.
The best to prevent and limit fraud is what we've been doing for centuries: limit the responsibility of individuals. Make the process transparent and the person in charge accountable for fraud. Make the elections board accountable to the people. Give the judicial system oversight over the process.
Proposing some of type of impossible surrealistic vision of phantom non-partisans to count votes is not an answer.
Diebold says "it's too hard" to add a printer for a paper trail
I havent seen that. Can you provide a link? I have read several pieces indicating that Diebold is totally prepared to add voter verified trails.
You can hack a punch card reader, but could you do it invisibly?
Very, very, very easily. And it'll look like an innocent mistake.
You can hack a punch card reader, but could you do it invisibly?
Most systems work by having votes stored on "cartridges" that are stored in each machine. After voting, those cartridges are driven/walked to a central tabulation point. The votes are read, and added to essentially a spreadsheet.
The only real difference here is that the votes are "counted" instantly by the software and are in electronic rather than paper form.
For widespread fraud to happen, several cartridges each representing one voting machine would have to be tampered with or the tabulation software. The problem with messing with any of the individuals cartridges is that if you break the match-up of voters signed vs. votes cast you have a major exposure.
It's been less than a week since the election and we've already spotted literally hundreds of thousands of votes that either disappeared into the void or were brought here from it.
That's a far exaggeration. There are not "hundreds of thousand" that have been changed or found or lost. Not, that, by the way, 200,000 would be a bad turnout. It isn't a bad outcome out of 100,000,000 million votes. Even 500,000 is statistically respectable.
If "democracy dies behind closed doors", then why are so many of the companies and policitians involved in the voting process such big fans of secrecy?
There not! That's just, really, a big myth. Does Diebold like negative attention? Hell no. But fundamentally speaking our elections are quite open. Politicans don't like closed processes. It tends to favor the fanatical supports, and fanatics are uncertain, and politicans hate that!
And we can't know because too many of the machines used to come to that conclusion can't be trusted
That's simply untrue. I have news for you. The machines that are in question - the electronic voting machines - are far more *resisliant* to attack than traditional vote machines. Really! Look at this way: even though I know enough about the machines that given a few minutes I could probably hack one, I know for a *fact* that I could hack a punch-card or optical vote reader.
These machines are a lot more reliable *and* tamper resistant than other machines. If there was or were machines that were hacked there is enough variation in all machines that outliers are lost in the noise.
I am sorry to put it like this, but: a modicum of fraud is alwas going to be part of American voting. It has been *since the very first election*. It is just fact! This is a big country, with lots of little elections. Each state runs their own election. Each princint has it's own ballot.
The point being the level of fraud involved in this election seems right now to be significantly lower than any I've researched (I've researched every presidential election since Hoover on this topic).
Finally, the way votes are counted and tabulated are not secret in any way. Every polling-place/princint counts the votes, the vote counting is open to the public. Every place sends votes back their central location, be it a city or county or state office. These intermediate locations count the vote and report. Detail is available down to the last polling place.
I think the next step will be the final kicker. Open source voting machines, and verifiable proof of voting.
I tried to find evidence of your claim, and couldn't. I would guess, however, the Kerry voters tended to be angry enough to get voting done first thing and on off hours, to make sure they didnt have any trouble. I'd also wager that the Kerry voters were more vocal about their support to exit pollers, and more likely to not avoid the question.
I wonder if anyone has any information on this?
Wink wink, nudge nudge, you know what I mean.
Again with innuendo. You either are or are not suggesting a massive conspiracy. Come out and say. What exactly are you saying.
and has a long and notorious history of being insecure and knowing about it
Exactly. I wrote my election board supervisor and urged them not buy from Diebold. Luckily they Diebold to get lost. I don't trust them, not because of malice, but because of imcompetance.
I'm certainly in no position to read their internal memos and to compare the deployed machines to their certified machines.
I think we should investigate every election, but this one deserves special attention.
I just doubt that anything is amiss here.
A few points that you refuse to addres:
1. No matter who makes voting equipment, there will be conflict of interest. If the government does it, that's the ultimate conflict of interest. If private business does it, there will be conflict of interest between the individuals involved.
2. You are using innuendo to suggest something, without saying it exactly. Say it. Say what you are hinting at you. You suspect that a massive statewide conspiracy involving any number of people was formed for the purpose of defrauding the electorate of Ohio. There must have been pre-meditation. At least 150,000 votes must have been changed or invalided, meaning that hundreds of polling places are affected, all in co-ordinated way in a small period of time. In addition to forming this conspiracy the CEO of Diebold informed some 2 million people of his intentions in order to better solicit donations to the Bush/RNC.
3. Proof of prior wrong doing is not proof of current wrongdoing. This is legal fact. It is however, a strong indication. There have been no claims that I can see which advance the theory that the electronic voting machines in this election were anything less than certified by Ohio's standards. If you have such claims or proof, I'd love to see it.
4. All the evidence points to the fact that the majority of voters on Nov 2 wanted to elect, and did elect, George W. Bush.
Slashdot Mirror
So the first news about this are from South Korea, the US of A did not lead in this research and who is to blame for that if not the current US government?
Why is it a blame assigning moment if someone other than the US government discovers something?
The ultimate form of ethno-bias is assumging that only the US can make progress.
Ahh, you are a fool.
This is not a "stick it to the Bushies" moment. This is a validation of the conservative position. The opposing side has claimed that with embryonic stem cells people who are paralyzed can walk again. This event proves that the paralyzed can walk again without embroynic stem cells AND without federal funding. A two-for-one special.
You should really know what you are talking about before going raving mad telling others they are dumb and mocking them for considering ethical issues as well as scientific issues.
That's not interesting:
1. There is no ban on stem cell research in the US.
2. There has never been proposed or discussed a ban on stem cell research in the US.
3. Cord blood is just that: cord blood. Not embroynic stem cells. Unless someone can point me to something that suggests otherwise, this is not covered by the Federal ban on stem-cell research funding.
4. This treatment could have been derived in the US at various research universities. The fact that South Koreans made the breakthrough at this time does not detract from the US but rather should be an item of pride for the ingenuity and dedication of the South Koreans involved.
Snippy, snide, child-like comments aside, this development bolsters the claim that we do not need embroynic steam cells for the type of treatments and remedies that would help so many people. This was achieved withour US federal funding, without embroynic stem cells. The otherwise of the issue would have you believe that banning Federal funding of embroynic stem research on new lines is akin to calling the earth flat.
If the "monkeys" decide they like what they wrote, that's good
But the problem is that more often than not the monkey's opinion of the truth or fact isn't in fact necessarily congruent with the truth or fact.
Popular isn't necessarily correct or incorrect. It's just popular. You can have a dozen wikipedians arguing back and forth on a topic but at the end of the day the socratic or arugmentative process doesn't guarantee a solid article.
There is a difference between "root" access" and "limited access". It is trivial to setup this database in a manner which is secure and transprent and doesnt let out information that any individual pharamacy shouldn't have. Eventually, these tags will get into everything. But again, picking up a unique ID on a tag is not a threat to your privacy in any real way. The ID is useless without its accompyning reference.
The ONLY reason they are doing this is to avoid lawsuits. This won't do anything to stop counterfeit drugs.
That's untrue. This will do something to stop counterfeit drugs. Most cases of counterfeiting are undetected. Someone gets a placebo in place of a heart medication - that may never be discovered. This will clearly bring to light many cases that normally would go unsolved.
As far as the the "ends justifying the means". That's an exaggeration.
Not only that, but alot of people don't find anything offensive about what you mentioned. More than most - probably a massive percentage - of people are likely thinking: "So?" when you tell a story like that.
I certainly don't want to be heading towards the door with Oxy and have some hi-tech thief scan me and follow me home to rob me of the drugs I just purchased... Perhaps even someone could scan important/famous people and either blackmail them for their drug purchases (HIV/STDs) or just blatantly report it to the Fish Wrappers for cash.
This presumes that the thief would have access to the database of reference. The tag only contains a Unique ID, therefore, without the reference, the ID is useless. You or the famous person are at the type of risk you describe already if an untrustworthy person has access to your medical records or pharmacy records.
Once it does become viable for individual consumer bottles there will be yet another excuse why the prices need to continue to go up. Everything needs to cost more especially in the pharmaceutical industry. I swear everyone is in on it. I am told I need three low dose drugs when I have a feeling that a higher dose of another would handle it just fine. I am told that I am being prescribed these particular drugs because my coverage is good enough to afford it... It all leads to more money for everyone.
True. It is a corrupt system. But, on the other hand, millions of surgeries are avoided and lives preserved by the drugs every year.
Then WTF are we doing this? 20 cases of counterfeit drugs yet we have to spend thousands and thousands and pass that on to the consumer. Ugh. Yeah, they are going to say that we need to protect against a possible outbreak of this. Personally, I don't see how a label can help when the medicine inside is what is important. Anyone can swap out the real meds inside for their counterfeit ones.
The drugs that are reiceved are not usually in ready-to-distribute packages. The pharmacist takes from the big bottle and puts into your bottle. This is more dealing with the bottles that the pharmacist recieves. These are generally heavily tamper-resistant, especially for more dangerous drugs.
That is truly sad!
I was in a job interview before, and the interviewer-would-be-boss said to me:
"I'd like to ask you some questions.."
So I responded: "Go ahead, ask me anything.. life, the universe, everything" (or something similiar)..
He laughed.. I laughed, we shared some stories.. and then he warned me that the job would probably be eliminated in 2-3 months, and I'd probably be on my ass if I took it. It was great.
Another time I was interviewing for a contract and the person wanted to "test my personality".. he was obviously unimpressed with the corporate template questions. He asked me what my favorite color was. A super-intelligent shade of blue, of course. He laughed. He knew.
No, I fret. Everyone and their lame-ass over the hill friends are going to be walking around spouting how 42 is the answer. Fark.
think you're any safer, having pissed off the UN
If you think the UN is going to provide you safety you are very close to totally wrong.
and the majority of the planet?
The majority of the planet is weaker than the US, dependent on the US, or desperately in need of the US for protection or stability.
Not to mention an entire major religion?
Yeah, well, that entire religion has hated us for the better part of 150 years. And in earnet since the end of World War II.
If someone really wants to blow up a building, they're going to blow up a building.
No, that's false. There are a lot more people in the world who'd like to blow up a building than there actually buildings that have been blown up. The actual sentence should read "a sufficently motivated and capable person who wishes to damage a sufficently unprotected entity will try until stopped or success is achieved".
Its a completely false sense of security.
The US is significantly safer in many, many ways. However, it is clearly not secure.
and that even Adobe Acrobat is more easily scriptable on OS X than Windows, if you've got to use that tool for some sort of features or comfort level issue.
The Adobe SDK for Mac OS X is crippled beyond use for my purposes. It is almost equal, but not enough. I need to work with the Postscript streams directly but in a structured manner, and there is no interface for that with Mac.
What the heck kind of 'processing' are you doing to documents that takes so long? Do they start as PDF, or are you taking scans or other bitmaps and converting them to PDF ?
It's like this: need to extract the data in structured way from each page of the PDF's. Analyze the data against a set of business requirements, and re-order the pages in a specific way while merging in a small amount of additional data.
A decent example. We print bank statements. The bank sends us a PDF of statements for all their customers, say 10,000 pages. We need to add OCR codes for mail machines, so we have to locate the end of one statement and the start of another. We have to pre-sort the statements by zip code and delivery point. Within that, we need to sort by number of pages. We have to match raw check images, and create pages of check images to go with a statement. If the total number of pages exceeds what can be automatically handled by the mail equipment, it has to be taken out and put in a seperate file for hand treatment (seriously, who writes a 100-150 checks anymore?). Often times we have to make minor modifications to the statement to correct problems with the banks software. We also have to renumber the pages so that it is consistent with the number of pages in the statement. Many times the client will want inserts that go to some customers, not others. So we have to read the data from the statement and determine if we add a code to the page so that the inserter knows to insert a piece into this envelope. Sometimes they get fancy, like, "If the customer lives within 3 miles of a branch, and spends more than $10 a month on ATM fees at other banks, send them a list of branches. If they spend more than $20 a month on fees, insert a brouchure about reducing ATM fees". After all that, we have to add stock tags and directives so that the printers knows that page 1 comes from one tray, page N's come from this tray and are duplex, and check pages from a seperate tray that are duplexed.
I am the senior developer, and I really know what I am doing. The problem is that the requests from the clients are computationally intense. And mutli-layered, relying on layers and layers of conditional logic. I havent found an alternative to using the Adobe SDK which does much of the "heavy lifting". I deeply research ghostscript, and keep going back, but as far as I can tell doesn't do a fraction of what I need to do, even on the most basic level. I investigated modifying it, but quite frankly, why should I risk the effort when I have an offering from Adobe that works today? I have no indication that it will perform any better. It will be risky and time consuming to make ghostscript do what I want.
As far as the WinXP issue, the core here is not the OS. Most of the work is being done by an SDK that is essentially Windows-only for what I need. If a job runs for 18 hrs, my process is getting 17.75 hrs of CPU time, at least. It is a tight loop. I spent a month profiling and tweaking one job to get it to process fast enough to meet turn time requirements. It is a solid application. No unnecessary forking, no unneeded memory usuage, no unnecessary object invocations. None. I re-wrote a few standard library functions in assembly to eliminate unnecessary checks that are inapplicable to the question. Anything that looked out of whack in the profiling got examined and fixed. The task is basically 100% CPU bound.
The only good thing is that, for the most part, if I get a 10,000 page document, I can split it into 4 ~2500 page documents and process at the same time on multiple machines.
No, not when you use Adobe's SDK, which is as far as I can tell the only comprehensive SDK out there for working with PDFs in a complete manner.
The 'P' really refers to portable for viewing and printing. Not much else. Adobe seems hell bent on avoiding Unix for much of their programming interfaces.
Dial-up is not unprofitable! Running AOL on the other hand..
Charinging $20/mo for dial-up is a perfectly reasonable service. You just have to know that your customer base will not be what it used to be, that most customers will leave at some point. There will always be a market for dial-up though!
You have no idea! That's about right. I work with PDF documents for a printing company. We've been doing mostly small documents processing - up to say 5000 pages. Process the pages, re-order them, send to big printers.
...what other options do we have!
The processing takes something like 4-48 hrs on a nice fast P4 3.2ghz box.
Well, all of the sudden, a client wants us to process a 100,000 page document. Ohh. Hmm. Interesting. Well, well, what to do now! We have 72 hrs to get it to press..
Clusters here we come. What else can we do! Spent a few weeks tweaking and profiling and fixing the code and that helped a lot. But now its just plain CPU bound!
The processing parallesizes fairly well, so a nice cluster of boxes would be the best solution I can think of. And since everything is already Windows based....
Ahh.. no. GOVERNMENT has the biggest incentive to rig elections, a lot bigger than any private individual or company.
The federal government SHOULD NEVER run state or local elections. Ever. Period.
Seperation is not always waranted, and not always good. There was a lot of *intra-departmental* seperation. Having people work on the same goal, in the same building, on the same floor without being legally able to talk to each other is foolish.
I agree that we do not want a large monolithic government - although we have just that for 50 years - but what also do not want is a government that encourages inter-departmental squabbles at the expense of real security. That's pretty much exactly what has been going on.
It's not trendy to dissent on the Patriot Act around here, but probably a solid 90% of the bill accomplished SORELY needed reforms.
There were literally hundreds of pathetic attempts to seperate government agencies for a no good reason.
The rest of the bill that you hear so much about is what really burns most civil libertarians.
Everyone should be asked to read the whole act at least once in their lives. Most people would be surprised how much stuff the government *couldn't* do that just made sense before hand.
Sorry, I made a typo. 0.2% is a very acceptable rate of spoilage (0.02% would be, well, too much to ask for!).
There are three options about who can run elections: government, business, or a mix of both. All government is bad. All business is bad. A mix is the best choice.
This isn't a new problem. 20 years ago the same exact question could be asked.
All I really care about is that people responsible for counting and certifying the vote _should_ be non-partisan.
There is no such thing as a non-partisan person!
The people who count and certify votes are elected officals. That's the closest you can get to fair. There is no law that you could pass that would require a citizen to not donate, to not be poltically active. Participating in the process is supposed to be open to everyone.
There are thousands and thousands and thousands of people responsible for counting votes in this country. Suggesting that you can find non-partisans to fill in this role is just beyond belief. Suggesting that we amend the Constitution so that they are unable to participate in democracy and their birthright is beyond the pale. Finally, thinking that by limiting people from expressing their opinion negates the existenance of said opinion is foolhardy and contrary to everything history and science says about our humanity.
Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has motives.
Now why don't you all stop arguing about how things _are_ and start working toward making things as they _should_ be. Or maybe you can give me a damn good reason _why_ political activists foxs have any role whatsoever in guarding the hen houses that are our ballot boxes
Because it's the only way. There is no one else that can do it. Everyone - EVERYONE has bias. Try to find 100,000 people who meet the non-partisan moniker and wish to count the 100,000,000 million votes cast isn't a possibility.
The best to prevent and limit fraud is what we've been doing for centuries: limit the responsibility of individuals. Make the process transparent and the person in charge accountable for fraud. Make the elections board accountable to the people. Give the judicial system oversight over the process.
Proposing some of type of impossible surrealistic vision of phantom non-partisans to count votes is not an answer.
Diebold says "it's too hard" to add a printer for a paper trail
I havent seen that. Can you provide a link? I have read several pieces indicating that Diebold is totally prepared to add voter verified trails.
You can hack a punch card reader, but could you do it invisibly?
Very, very, very easily. And it'll look like an innocent mistake.
You can hack a punch card reader, but could you do it invisibly?
Most systems work by having votes stored on "cartridges" that are stored in each machine. After voting, those cartridges are driven/walked to a central tabulation point. The votes are read, and added to essentially a spreadsheet.
The only real difference here is that the votes are "counted" instantly by the software and are in electronic rather than paper form.
For widespread fraud to happen, several cartridges each representing one voting machine would have to be tampered with or the tabulation software. The problem with messing with any of the individuals cartridges is that if you break the match-up of voters signed vs. votes cast you have a major exposure.
It's been less than a week since the election and we've already spotted literally hundreds of thousands of votes that either disappeared into the void or were brought here from it.
That's a far exaggeration. There are not "hundreds of thousand" that have been changed or found or lost. Not, that, by the way, 200,000 would be a bad turnout. It isn't a bad outcome out of 100,000,000 million votes. Even 500,000 is statistically respectable.
If "democracy dies behind closed doors", then why are so many of the companies and policitians involved in the voting process such big fans of secrecy?
There not! That's just, really, a big myth. Does Diebold like negative attention? Hell no. But fundamentally speaking our elections are quite open. Politicans don't like closed processes. It tends to favor the fanatical supports, and fanatics are uncertain, and politicans hate that!
That doesnt mean though that people will be thinking "Who is this guy? Everyone i know is working!"
And we can't know because too many of the machines used to come to that conclusion can't be trusted
That's simply untrue. I have news for you. The machines that are in question - the electronic voting machines - are far more *resisliant* to attack than traditional vote machines. Really! Look at this way: even though I know enough about the machines that given a few minutes I could probably hack one, I know for a *fact* that I could hack a punch-card or optical vote reader.
These machines are a lot more reliable *and* tamper resistant than other machines. If there was or were machines that were hacked there is enough variation in all machines that outliers are lost in the noise.
I am sorry to put it like this, but: a modicum of fraud is alwas going to be part of American voting. It has been *since the very first election*. It is just fact! This is a big country, with lots of little elections. Each state runs their own election. Each princint has it's own ballot.
The point being the level of fraud involved in this election seems right now to be significantly lower than any I've researched (I've researched every presidential election since Hoover on this topic).
Finally, the way votes are counted and tabulated are not secret in any way. Every polling-place/princint counts the votes, the vote counting is open to the public. Every place sends votes back their central location, be it a city or county or state office. These intermediate locations count the vote and report. Detail is available down to the last polling place.
I think the next step will be the final kicker. Open source voting machines, and verifiable proof of voting.
I tried to find evidence of your claim, and couldn't. I would guess, however, the Kerry voters tended to be angry enough to get voting done first thing and on off hours, to make sure they didnt have any trouble. I'd also wager that the Kerry voters were more vocal about their support to exit pollers, and more likely to not avoid the question. I wonder if anyone has any information on this?
Wink wink, nudge nudge, you know what I mean.
Again with innuendo. You either are or are not suggesting a massive conspiracy. Come out and say. What exactly are you saying.
and has a long and notorious history of being insecure and knowing about it
Exactly. I wrote my election board supervisor and urged them not buy from Diebold. Luckily they Diebold to get lost. I don't trust them, not because of malice, but because of imcompetance.
I'm certainly in no position to read their internal memos and to compare the deployed machines to their certified machines.
I think we should investigate every election, but this one deserves special attention.
I just doubt that anything is amiss here.
A few points that you refuse to addres:
1. No matter who makes voting equipment, there will be conflict of interest. If the government does it, that's the ultimate conflict of interest. If private business does it, there will be conflict of interest between the individuals involved.
2. You are using innuendo to suggest something, without saying it exactly. Say it. Say what you are hinting at you. You suspect that a massive statewide conspiracy involving any number of people was formed for the purpose of defrauding the electorate of Ohio. There must have been pre-meditation. At least 150,000 votes must have been changed or invalided, meaning that hundreds of polling places are affected, all in co-ordinated way in a small period of time. In addition to forming this conspiracy the CEO of Diebold informed some 2 million people of his intentions in order to better solicit donations to the Bush/RNC.
3. Proof of prior wrong doing is not proof of current wrongdoing. This is legal fact. It is however, a strong indication. There have been no claims that I can see which advance the theory that the electronic voting machines in this election were anything less than certified by Ohio's standards. If you have such claims or proof, I'd love to see it.
4. All the evidence points to the fact that the majority of voters on Nov 2 wanted to elect, and did elect, George W. Bush.