I agree with a lot of these ideas. This is what we did in San Diego county, CA, which I thought did a pretty good job (as opposed to the problems that we had with electronic voting machines in the march primary).
1) Optical scan ballots. Scantron style. Verifiable. The absentee ballots were identical to the normal ones, (is this normal?) and although very long, very very straightforward. We in california had about 60 things to vote on this year.
2) Although I cannot find reference for this, I was told that there is a 1% recount- 1% of all ballots are recounted manually to make sure that the machines agree with reality.
3) well, of course we still have the problems with provisional ballots, not a holiday,etc., but you can do early voting, and is quite easy to get an absentee ballot. In fact, some candidates mailed out a postpaid absentee ballot request form to you, that was already filled out with your name, address, etc. All you had to do was sign it, and drop it in the mail, then you got your absentee ballot. An excellent idea for a campaign.
3) Unfortunately, this situation is going to change- we're apparently going to go back to the pure electronic systems once they are "certified". However I like this system better. Hopefully other people will agree, now that they have used it.
4) Something interesting that happened in san diego specifically:
The mayoral race became very interesting. In march, we had a primary, choosing between which of the 3, mid fifties, white moderate republicans that we wanted for mayor. Up until about 6 weeks ago, we had to choose between 2 of them, and they were splitting the vote nrealy 50-50. Neither of them was that popular, and there are currently a lot of scandals going on at city hall (i.e. we underfunded the pension system by 1.2 $Billion (with a B). So, a very popular city council member who had the lone vote in city council meetings to fix the pension system decided to run as write in. And it looks like she will win. One advantage of the optical ballot- you already have a pen and paper in your hand, with which to wrote someone in... The final vote: 35%, 34%, 31%. Note that the 35% is the total "write in"- they're still counting the ballots and are about halfway through.
It appears that open source is making its way into the data side of things... See the The RCSB ProteinDataBank, the human genome sequencing, etc.
But the bottom line is the following:
It costs (currently) about US$800 million to $1 billion to develop a drug. That is all of the initial trials, screening, 3 phase clinical trials, etc. This is typically a 10 year process-(there are some exceptions, but this is generally true).
The _reason_ why any company would invest this sort of money is so that they could have a monopoly on making it for 20 years. If everything were open sourced, and anyone could make anyone else's drug, why would companies put this much money into developing it? They would have no incentive to do so.
As someone else mentioned- this is not the sort of thing that you can just do in your basement. The company I work for makes a fancy robotic incubator to help you crystallize proteins. People want to do this so they can put them in an xray machine to get their structure, which can lead to possibly designing drugs that might interact with that protein. This machine costs about US$250,000. People need it because protein crystallography is hard- there's no way to predict under which conditions it will crystallize. You typically need to try 10,000-100,000 different conditions to get a reasonably sized crystal, that you can diffract and get the structure from. Some proteins _never_ crystallize.
This is way before you are even trying _anything_ in a biological screen, let alone animal trials, let alone phase 1, 2, and 3 (human) clinical trials.
If you do successfully crystallize the protein (and determine the structure, which is very straightforward once you have a good crystal), you can (and everyone does) submit it to the protein databank, and you can publish these conditions in a paper. So in this sense, lower level biotech is/becoming open source. But the higher level stuff requires a lot more thought and resources.
I'm not saying that there's no waste or greed in big pharma- Of course there is, like any other industry. Perhaps its higher than average, due to the large potential amount of money to be made.
My point is that the places that open source is successful- coding, which requires a $300 computer with an internet connection; wikipedia, which requires the same; there is a very low cost of entry to contribute. Even if companies and universities start open sourcing the lower level stuff more than it is now, Animal and human trials costs very large sums of money. Why would a company invest $10's of millions on one part of a trial if someone else could end up making (and selling) the drug?
I agree that cheap drugs would be great. But if its open source, and people start dying because of a side effect of the drug, who is liable? Not to mention who will fill out the FDA paperwork (there has to be $10's of millions invested just in complying with the paperwork. I've heard estimates that it is basically a medium sized room full of paper. And that's for 1 (one) drug.)
-E
If SCO doesn't want people to find out which lines are "copied into linux", so they can be removed, then why would they allow their code to be run through this program?
The open source community would then know which lines SCO has any business talking about, those lines could be investigated as to their source/license, changed if neccesary, and everyone could move on.
But wait! SCO wouldn't have a case. (Not that they have one anyway, but that's beside the point. This point, at least). This is exactly the same situation as SCO just telling everyone which lines they are talking about. How would it be different?
I mean if you compare two sets of data, and you know which lines are identical....
Is the difference that maybe someone wouldn't be breaking their NDA with SCO if they ran the code through this and provided MD5 hashes (rather than the raw source code)? (i.e. so that this can actually be done, whereas SCO will not show their code themselves...)
Mac OS X was also updated. Up to 4L13 (10.0.1). This is the official apple sanctioned release version. Check out macnn for tips if you installed an earlier, developer only build (4l5?)
Get it by running apple software update, letting it update your software update application, run it again (to get 10.0.1), reboot, and run it again (to get updated epson printer drivers) if you want.
Have fun...
From Apple:
Update Now: Use the Software Update feature in your System Preferences to get the latest Mac OS X software. Improvements including better support for 3rd party USB devices, Classic compatibility and overall application stability as well as support for the popular open source Secure Shell service. For Japanese users, an update to the Epson printer drivers is also available.
Although I don't deny the coolness factor of these boxes, and the high level of flexibility that they allow, it would seem that the author could have solved his problem much more simply- with a 1 port router from someone like linksys or D-link at 1/3 of the price (I know those are dirty words for some)....
The latest firmware revision allows IPSEC packets to pass through, in addition to providing standard NAT functionality. Unless he wanted to do more, like link up two nets via IPSEC, which is beyond the capability of a $100 router. Netopia routers can, but those are about at the same price as his homemade router. That would be a much simpler setup though- plug it in, set up a few IP's, and go.
The laser is 780 nm laser, using the same kind as in a CD player. So it is in the near IR region.
There's an article with some more detail in EE Times this week. Important numbers are the $20,000 cost (installed) per node, and that it is physically 1 by 3 feet.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with a lot of these ideas. This is what we did in San Diego county, CA, which I thought did a pretty good job (as opposed to the problems that we had with electronic voting machines in the march primary).
s /20041018-9999-1m18mayor.html
s /20041110-9999-6m10work.html
1) Optical scan ballots. Scantron style. Verifiable. The absentee ballots were identical to the normal ones, (is this normal?) and although very long, very very straightforward. We in california had about 60 things to vote on this year.
2) Although I cannot find reference for this, I was told that there is a 1% recount- 1% of all ballots are recounted manually to make sure that the machines agree with reality.
3) well, of course we still have the problems with provisional ballots, not a holiday,etc., but you can do early voting, and is quite easy to get an absentee ballot. In fact, some candidates mailed out a postpaid absentee ballot request form to you, that was already filled out with your name, address, etc. All you had to do was sign it, and drop it in the mail, then you got your absentee ballot. An excellent idea for a campaign.
3) Unfortunately, this situation is going to change- we're apparently going to go back to the pure electronic systems once they are "certified". However I like this system better. Hopefully other people will agree, now that they have used it.
4) Something interesting that happened in san diego specifically: The mayoral race became very interesting. In march, we had a primary, choosing between which of the 3, mid fifties, white moderate republicans that we wanted for mayor. Up until about 6 weeks ago, we had to choose between 2 of them, and they were splitting the vote nrealy 50-50. Neither of them was that popular, and there are currently a lot of scandals going on at city hall (i.e. we underfunded the pension system by 1.2 $Billion (with a B). So, a very popular city council member who had the lone vote in city council meetings to fix the pension system decided to run as write in. And it looks like she will win. One advantage of the optical ballot- you already have a pen and paper in your hand, with which to wrote someone in... The final vote: 35%, 34%, 31%. Note that the 35% is the total "write in"- they're still counting the ballots and are about halfway through.
Here's a pre-election article about the race. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/citie
Current results: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/citie
Another interesting website: http://calvoter.org/
The California Voter Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization promoting and applying the responsible use of technology to improve the democratic process.
It appears that open source is making its way into the data side of things... See the The RCSB Protein Data Bank , the human genome sequencing, etc.
But the bottom line is the following:
It costs (currently) about US$800 million to $1 billion to develop a drug. That is all of the initial trials, screening, 3 phase clinical trials, etc. This is typically a 10 year process-(there are some exceptions, but this is generally true).
The _reason_ why any company would invest this sort of money is so that they could have a monopoly on making it for 20 years. If everything were open sourced, and anyone could make anyone else's drug, why would companies put this much money into developing it? They would have no incentive to do so.
As someone else mentioned- this is not the sort of thing that you can just do in your basement. The company I work for makes a fancy robotic incubator to help you crystallize proteins. People want to do this so they can put them in an xray machine to get their structure, which can lead to possibly designing drugs that might interact with that protein. This machine costs about US$250,000. People need it because protein crystallography is hard- there's no way to predict under which conditions it will crystallize. You typically need to try 10,000-100,000 different conditions to get a reasonably sized crystal, that you can diffract and get the structure from. Some proteins _never_ crystallize.
This is way before you are even trying _anything_ in a biological screen, let alone animal trials, let alone phase 1, 2, and 3 (human) clinical trials.
If you do successfully crystallize the protein (and determine the structure, which is very straightforward once you have a good crystal), you can (and everyone does) submit it to the protein databank, and you can publish these conditions in a paper. So in this sense, lower level biotech is/becoming open source. But the higher level stuff requires a lot more thought and resources.
I'm not saying that there's no waste or greed in big pharma- Of course there is, like any other industry. Perhaps its higher than average, due to the large potential amount of money to be made.
My point is that the places that open source is successful- coding, which requires a $300 computer with an internet connection; wikipedia, which requires the same; there is a very low cost of entry to contribute. Even if companies and universities start open sourcing the lower level stuff more than it is now, Animal and human trials costs very large sums of money. Why would a company invest $10's of millions on one part of a trial if someone else could end up making (and selling) the drug?
I agree that cheap drugs would be great. But if its open source, and people start dying because of a side effect of the drug, who is liable? Not to mention who will fill out the FDA paperwork (there has to be $10's of millions invested just in complying with the paperwork. I've heard estimates that it is basically a medium sized room full of paper. And that's for 1 (one) drug.) -E
If SCO doesn't want people to find out which lines are "copied into linux", so they can be removed, then why would they allow their code to be run through this program?
The open source community would then know which lines SCO has any business talking about, those lines could be investigated as to their source/license, changed if neccesary, and everyone could move on.
But wait! SCO wouldn't have a case. (Not that they have one anyway, but that's beside the point. This point, at least). This is exactly the same situation as SCO just telling everyone which lines they are talking about. How would it be different?
I mean if you compare two sets of data, and you know which lines are identical....
Is the difference that maybe someone wouldn't be breaking their NDA with SCO if they ran the code through this and provided MD5 hashes (rather than the raw source code)? (i.e. so that this can actually be done, whereas SCO will not show their code themselves...)
Mac OS X was also updated. Up to 4L13 (10.0.1). This is the official apple sanctioned release version. Check out macnn for tips if you installed an earlier, developer only build (4l5?)
Get it by running apple software update, letting it update your software update application, run it again (to get 10.0.1), reboot, and run it again (to get updated epson printer drivers) if you want.
Have fun...
From Apple:
Update Now: Use the Software Update feature in your System Preferences to get the latest Mac OS X software. Improvements including better support for 3rd party USB devices, Classic compatibility and overall application stability as well as support for the popular open source Secure Shell service. For Japanese users, an update to the Epson printer drivers is also available.
Although I don't deny the coolness factor of these boxes, and the high level of flexibility that they allow, it would seem that the author could have solved his problem much more simply- with a 1 port router from someone like linksys or D-link at 1/3 of the price (I know those are dirty words for some)....
The latest firmware revision allows IPSEC packets to pass through, in addition to providing standard NAT functionality. Unless he wanted to do more, like link up two nets via IPSEC, which is beyond the capability of a $100 router. Netopia routers can, but those are about at the same price as his homemade router. That would be a much simpler setup though- plug it in, set up a few IP's, and go.
If you think that ewatch is a CRA, why isn't a private detective agency a CRA? Or is it?
There's an article with some more detail in EE Times this week. Important numbers are the $20,000 cost (installed) per node, and that it is physically 1 by 3 feet.
http://www.eet.com/story/OEG20000424S0020