If it does so on your car, then you need to have your brakes repaired/overhauled before you kill someone or at the least get ticketed for driving an unsafe vehicle.
Who knows what he might do if started into alertness by an impact.
Since the truck had already had a couple of impacts (sideswipes) by that point, there was a reasonable expectation that one more wouldn't wake him up. Not quickly, anyway.
OTOH, multiple impacts by running the intersection might have, for a few milliseconds.
cars don't have failsafes for an unconscious driver.
Hello, my name is cruise control. Nice to meet you!
No, a cruise control isn't a failsafe, it's a fail dangerous. Failsafes are supposed to make a system safe(r) if part of the system (the driver, in this case) fails. Cruise control will happily go on maintaining speed if the driver slumps over in a coma, as long as he doesn't press the brake pedal while doing so.
By the inherent nature of closed software, when systems are (optionally!) certified by registrars, there is no proof that they will behave the same on election day as in tests.
Actually there is, for that (optionally, yes) certified software. The distributed software is built from source by the independent testing labs (in what's called a trusted build) and hashes are taken of all the components. The testing lab keeps escrowed copies and the hashes are also available from eac.gov.
Of course, this does assume that the systems have been so certified (optional at the Federal level, but mandated by law in some states/counties) and that the supervisor at the district (county, whatever) level bothers to check.
Open source software is no cure-all either. While the voting systems may include commodity computers, a lot of components (ballot scanners and tabulators, interfaces for disabled voters, etc) will have custom hardware and firmware in them. (And yes, the independent labs review and test this stuff too.)
However, as someone who worked for a testing lab, I can say that the most likely reason that vendors don't want their source made visible to the public at large has nothing to do with competition or potential vote fraud, but with embarrassment at how god-awful some of their code is. But that's true of a lot of proprietary code.
they can get someone on Mars for $10 billion; why the fuck haven't they started yet?
They also said that was the price tag for a one way trip. While I have no doubt that you could find many volunteers for that, even if they had no hope of survival past the point of the canned air running out, politicians don't have the guts. Remember the second part of Kennedy's moon goal, "and return him safely to the Earth". It would take a real change in our culture before the majority would support politicians who supported a one-way mission.
Unlikely but still factual. What's combustible at 14.7 PSI pure O2 isn't necessarily so at 3 PSI (not 5) pure O2. 3 PSI O2 is roughly the partial-pressure of O2 in air at sea level.
Even so, a lot of people said it was stupid at the time, and the post-Apollo 1 redesign of the vehicle, while not eliminating the pure O2 atmosphere for flight, did eliminate it during ground tests and also eliminated many potential ignition sources and potentially flammable components. (They also redesigned the cabin hatch to open outwards, quickly, rather than inwards -- increasing the risk of a possible blow-out but enabling for quick escape in the case of another fire.)
Redesigning Apollo to use a sea-level-like air mix would have made it too heavy to get to the Moon on the existing Saturn V.
Mind, as a resident of the Denver area and knowing that there are plenty of people living at even greater altitudes, I'm a little surprised they opted for 14.7 PSI for Shuttle when ~12 PSI works just fine. Commercial airliners pressurize the cabin to = 8000 feet, typically ~7000 feet or about 11.5 PSI, but you start running into issues with avionics cooling, comfort, and extreme exertion if you beyond that.
Thank you. Clearest explanation of an inverse femtobarn yet.
Since I have an idea how small a femtobarn is*, enough collisions to see one with that cross section is one hell of a lot of data.
(*Take a half teaspoon (about 3ml) of stuff, stretch stuff out into a strand a megaparsec long. It'll have a cross section of about 1 barn. Now take a quadrillionth of that.)
If you've read Anathem by Neal Stephenson, you'll find many ideas of science and math that are informed by this tradition.
Never, ever take a science fiction story or novel (let alone technothriller or any other genre) as the sole source for something technical or historical. Fiction writers make stuff up, and while some of us try to lean toward more technically accurate than not (and Stephenson's usually pretty good at this, although he'll occasionally slip in a howler), we're not above tweaking something for the sake of a good story. Others just make it up wholesale.
That's why the WGAW (Writers Guild of America - West) registry exists. For a modest fee you can register your story, script, synopsis or even just concept with them (you don't have to be a member, but members get a discount). In the event somebody swipes (or appears to) your idea, it provides evidence of your prior claim. They don't guarantee that you were first. If someone else registered something similar before you and the studio licensed that version then you may be SOL, but the greater the specificity the stronger the claim.
Nah. According to the Schenectady Accords, science fiction writers won't sue technology companies (although their writings may serve as prior art in patent cases, see the waterbed and the communications satellite) for using their ideas and technology companies won't sue science fiction writers for using their ideas. It's something you sign on to when you become a SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) member.
(And yes, I'm making this shit up. I'm an SF writer, that's what I do.)
The only one that sounds strange to me is the shopping mall one. Space in shopping malls tends to be pretty expensive.
The retail space, yeah. One of my first jobs was in a data center (mainframes, this was in the late 70s) in a shopping mall, in the basement. Maybe they got a break on the rent for helping heat the place;-) (This was Ottawa, Canada -- they spend far more of the year heating living areas than cooling them.)
It's hardly the case that "none" of them get followed.
Yes, uncertified patches and extraneous memory cards happen -- at the point where the systems are under the control of the county election officials. Those same folks who could -- if they'd a mind to -- tamper with plain old paper balloting too. Nobody said the system was perfect. There's a mechanism (the independent VSTLs and certification) for making reasonably sure the machines aren't compromised by the vendor, but that still needs to be supplemented by local vigilance to make sure the counts are kept reasonably honest.
The upside is that uncertified patches and stray memory cards, like lost ballot boxes and mispunched cards, usually will only screw up a close local election and not something national (vs a systemic problem with all machines from a given vendor.) But yeah, exceptions like Florida in 2000 happen.
Programs aren't open source and are not available to scrutinize.
Yes and no. The EAC (Election Assistance Commission, formerly the Federal Elections Commission) has a very fat book full of regulations and specifications to which voting systems should be certified. (Technically certification is voluntary, in practice many states and counties will only approve certified systems for purchase.) The testing and certification is done by independent Voting System Testing Laboratories (VSTLs). Testing covers everything from hardware (security of locking mechanisms and seals, resistance to ESD and power glitches, etc) to software (line-by-line inspection of source code, independent builds of the source using independently acquired or verified compilers, etc) to running simulated elections and verifying counts, etc. A lot of the validation data for certified systems is available on the EAC web site.
Not that any of this is 100% foolproof, the standards don't cover everything conceivable.
(I worked for a VSTL mostly doing source code review, also security analysis of the system design,both as documented and checking that implementation matched documentation. I rejected a lot of code, although much of that was for commenting that wasn't up to standard rather than potential security holes -- although there was a lot of failing to check for null pointers. If the logic really looked squirrelly, but met coding standards, I had to okay the code but could write up a test case to check it out during system testing. The code itself of course was all under NDA and security in the labs was pretty tight -- although not quite as tight as for the game testing lab next door.)
What, exactly, is it about paper ballots that makes electronic voting systems seem like such a better idea?
At a guess, I'd say the anon poster above is familiar with voting in countries other than the US.
For various arcane reasons, the US has regularly scheduled election days where just about every government position, from President down to county coroner (or even dogcatcher) is voted on on the same day. That would require a paper ballot (or collection thereof) on the order of a phone book. It's even worse when you consider the strange and bizarre overlaps in various federal, state, county, municipal and other districts. Basically, electronic systems are (theoretically) cheaper for the jurisdictions responsible for actually running the elections.
Note, though, that electronic systems are not incompatible with paper ballots. Several voting system vendors make systems (originally in response to Federal regulations in the wake of the 2000 Florida fiasco, and Federal disability act regulations) that provide a variety of ways for a user to interact (touch screen, audio response, sip/puff switches, etc) and then generate a marked-up paper ballot. These ballots are also much more amenable to machine reading. No more hanging chads.
When user votes, for his vote a checksum is created using one-way algo (digest) which is formed from:
Session ID, Voter name, Vote result, a unique key given only to voter and known only by voter and govt, date.
Now crack that one;)
It doesn't need to be cracked, it's already broken; that unique key known to the govt breaks voter anonymity.
Parent post is exactly right, it's about enforcing discipline. Many writers, especially of fiction, are "differently attentive" (ie, ADD) and it is so easy to get sidetracked into looking up a word or fact on-line right now or tweaking the text by rearranging phrases in the middle of writing a paragraph. All of which kills productivity and also plays havoc with the creative process necessary to good writing. (Similar to when you're "in the zone" coding or debugging.)
Writing consists of both the creative part and the editor part -- but you have to keep them separate or your internal editor will screw up the creative flow by throwing up alternative phrasings, word choices, compelling you to back up delete something because it isn't good enough, etc. You need to turn that off to be productive in draft mode (and turn on in revision mode for the subsequent draft). That takes discipline. If using ed helps -- and since it requires a conscious switch between input mode and edit mode, I can see where it would -- then that's great.
The AlphaSmart -- a self-contained word processor in a keyboard with a 4-line text-only display (like the old Tandy Model 100, but lighter) -- is used in a number of schools as an assist to ADD kids because it lets them focus on their writing rather than playing with fonts or doodling in the margins or getting sucked into computer games. I've seen them advertised to writers for similar reasons. (It dumps your saved text into your WP program of choice by pretending to be a keyboard.)
Some of the bloat is due to word processors -- if you're writing on a typewriter, revisions mean retyping the whole bloody thing, which is a pain and is time consuming. With a word processor (or even ed) you only have to retype the changes.
But, a bigger cause of the bloat is publishers themselves. As book prices rose, pubs wanted to provide readers with more words and pages to justify the cost (the paper and ink only being a fraction of the total book cost). Back when I started reading SF as a kid, novels were typically in the 60,000 word range. I recently submitted a 70k novel -- the publisher likes it but wants it 20-30k words longer. I can do that (by adding plot threads, not bloat) but my writing tends to be tight to start with (and I like to trim 10-20% on the final draft). Most fiction these days could stand to be cut 15%, but the publishers don't want that -- presumably because most readers want more pages per dollar.
It's easy for an author to add bloat by inverting the usual rules of good writing (two words where one would do, unnecessary description, redundant words and phrases, etc). A beginner won't get away with that because the work has to stand on its own. A recognized author name has momentum, so its easier to get away with. Conversely, an experienced author should also have an easier time coming up with additional plot points (words are easy, plotting takes more thought) to expand the work and need not revert to bloat -- so it depends on the author.
I just assumed he was talking powder weight, not slug weight. For slug weight that's in the.22 ballpark -- and if you're close enough for that to be truly effective you might as well just whack them over the head with the butt and save the ammo.
In general "fewer" goes with a pluralized word, "less" doesn't. Thus "fewer pounds", "less weight", but "one less pound" or "two fewer pounds". "15 or less items" is just wrong.
Nope. I happily speak both metric and imperial (both US and British -- which aren't identical).
Billion (10^12 most places, 10^9 in US and Canada -- and "officially" in Britain as of 1974) vs milliard (10^9 most places, almost unknown in US and Canada) is neither.
Slashdot Mirror
A pressed accelerator overpowers breaks [sic]
If it does so on your car, then you need to have your brakes repaired/overhauled before you kill someone or at the least get ticketed for driving an unsafe vehicle.
Who knows what he might do if started into alertness by an impact.
Since the truck had already had a couple of impacts (sideswipes) by that point, there was a reasonable expectation that one more wouldn't wake him up. Not quickly, anyway.
OTOH, multiple impacts by running the intersection might have, for a few milliseconds.
cars don't have failsafes for an unconscious driver.
Hello, my name is cruise control. Nice to meet you!
No, a cruise control isn't a failsafe, it's a fail dangerous. Failsafes are supposed to make a system safe(r) if part of the system (the driver, in this case) fails. Cruise control will happily go on maintaining speed if the driver slumps over in a coma, as long as he doesn't press the brake pedal while doing so.
By the inherent nature of closed software, when systems are (optionally!) certified by registrars, there is no proof that they will behave the same on election day as in tests.
Actually there is, for that (optionally, yes) certified software. The distributed software is built from source by the independent testing labs (in what's called a trusted build) and hashes are taken of all the components. The testing lab keeps escrowed copies and the hashes are also available from eac.gov.
Of course, this does assume that the systems have been so certified (optional at the Federal level, but mandated by law in some states/counties) and that the supervisor at the district (county, whatever) level bothers to check.
Open source software is no cure-all either. While the voting systems may include commodity computers, a lot of components (ballot scanners and tabulators, interfaces for disabled voters, etc) will have custom hardware and firmware in them. (And yes, the independent labs review and test this stuff too.)
However, as someone who worked for a testing lab, I can say that the most likely reason that vendors don't want their source made visible to the public at large has nothing to do with competition or potential vote fraud, but with embarrassment at how god-awful some of their code is. But that's true of a lot of proprietary code.
Maybe she should paint the outside with lead based paint,
Hey, that'd take care of the radiation problem.
they can get someone on Mars for $10 billion; why the fuck haven't they started yet?
They also said that was the price tag for a one way trip. While I have no doubt that you could find many volunteers for that, even if they had no hope of survival past the point of the canned air running out, politicians don't have the guts. Remember the second part of Kennedy's moon goal, "and return him safely to the Earth". It would take a real change in our culture before the majority would support politicians who supported a one-way mission.
Unlikely but still factual. What's combustible at 14.7 PSI pure O2 isn't necessarily so at 3 PSI (not 5) pure O2. 3 PSI O2 is roughly the partial-pressure of O2 in air at sea level.
Even so, a lot of people said it was stupid at the time, and the post-Apollo 1 redesign of the vehicle, while not eliminating the pure O2 atmosphere for flight, did eliminate it during ground tests and also eliminated many potential ignition sources and potentially flammable components. (They also redesigned the cabin hatch to open outwards, quickly, rather than inwards -- increasing the risk of a possible blow-out but enabling for quick escape in the case of another fire.)
Redesigning Apollo to use a sea-level-like air mix would have made it too heavy to get to the Moon on the existing Saturn V.
Mind, as a resident of the Denver area and knowing that there are plenty of people living at even greater altitudes, I'm a little surprised they opted for 14.7 PSI for Shuttle when ~12 PSI works just fine. Commercial airliners pressurize the cabin to = 8000 feet, typically ~7000 feet or about 11.5 PSI, but you start running into issues with avionics cooling, comfort, and extreme exertion if you beyond that.
It just means that it won't work during leap years -- and the next one is less than 15 months away.
Thank you. Clearest explanation of an inverse femtobarn yet.
Since I have an idea how small a femtobarn is*, enough collisions to see one with that cross section is one hell of a lot of data.
(*Take a half teaspoon (about 3ml) of stuff, stretch stuff out into a strand a megaparsec long. It'll have a cross section of about 1 barn. Now take a quadrillionth of that.)
If you've read Anathem by Neal Stephenson, you'll find many ideas of science and math that are informed by this tradition.
Never, ever take a science fiction story or novel (let alone technothriller or any other genre) as the sole source for something technical or historical. Fiction writers make stuff up, and while some of us try to lean toward more technically accurate than not (and Stephenson's usually pretty good at this, although he'll occasionally slip in a howler), we're not above tweaking something for the sake of a good story. Others just make it up wholesale.
That's why the WGAW (Writers Guild of America - West) registry exists. For a modest fee you can register your story, script, synopsis or even just concept with them (you don't have to be a member, but members get a discount). In the event somebody swipes (or appears to) your idea, it provides evidence of your prior claim. They don't guarantee that you were first. If someone else registered something similar before you and the studio licensed that version then you may be SOL, but the greater the specificity the stronger the claim.
Nah. According to the Schenectady Accords, science fiction writers won't sue technology companies (although their writings may serve as prior art in patent cases, see the waterbed and the communications satellite) for using their ideas and technology companies won't sue science fiction writers for using their ideas. It's something you sign on to when you become a SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) member.
(And yes, I'm making this shit up. I'm an SF writer, that's what I do.)
Because then it would be too heavy to fly.
I know, "whoosh".
The only one that sounds strange to me is the shopping mall one. Space in shopping malls tends to be pretty expensive.
The retail space, yeah. One of my first jobs was in a data center (mainframes, this was in the late 70s) in a shopping mall, in the basement. Maybe they got a break on the rent for helping heat the place ;-) (This was Ottawa, Canada -- they spend far more of the year heating living areas than cooling them.)
Plenty of stretches of highway here in Colorado -- and nearby states -- where the speed limit is 75 mph.
It's hardly the case that "none" of them get followed.
Yes, uncertified patches and extraneous memory cards happen -- at the point where the systems are under the control of the county election officials. Those same folks who could -- if they'd a mind to -- tamper with plain old paper balloting too. Nobody said the system was perfect. There's a mechanism (the independent VSTLs and certification) for making reasonably sure the machines aren't compromised by the vendor, but that still needs to be supplemented by local vigilance to make sure the counts are kept reasonably honest.
The upside is that uncertified patches and stray memory cards, like lost ballot boxes and mispunched cards, usually will only screw up a close local election and not something national (vs a systemic problem with all machines from a given vendor.) But yeah, exceptions like Florida in 2000 happen.
Programs aren't open source and are not available to scrutinize.
Yes and no. The EAC (Election Assistance Commission, formerly the Federal Elections Commission) has a very fat book full of regulations and specifications to which voting systems should be certified. (Technically certification is voluntary, in practice many states and counties will only approve certified systems for purchase.) The testing and certification is done by independent Voting System Testing Laboratories (VSTLs). Testing covers everything from hardware (security of locking mechanisms and seals, resistance to ESD and power glitches, etc) to software (line-by-line inspection of source code, independent builds of the source using independently acquired or verified compilers, etc) to running simulated elections and verifying counts, etc. A lot of the validation data for certified systems is available on the EAC web site.
Not that any of this is 100% foolproof, the standards don't cover everything conceivable.
(I worked for a VSTL mostly doing source code review, also security analysis of the system design,both as documented and checking that implementation matched documentation. I rejected a lot of code, although much of that was for commenting that wasn't up to standard rather than potential security holes -- although there was a lot of failing to check for null pointers. If the logic really looked squirrelly, but met coding standards, I had to okay the code but could write up a test case to check it out during system testing. The code itself of course was all under NDA and security in the labs was pretty tight -- although not quite as tight as for the game testing lab next door.)
What, exactly, is it about paper ballots that makes electronic voting systems seem like such a better idea?
At a guess, I'd say the anon poster above is familiar with voting in countries other than the US.
For various arcane reasons, the US has regularly scheduled election days where just about every government position, from President down to county coroner (or even dogcatcher) is voted on on the same day. That would require a paper ballot (or collection thereof) on the order of a phone book. It's even worse when you consider the strange and bizarre overlaps in various federal, state, county, municipal and other districts. Basically, electronic systems are (theoretically) cheaper for the jurisdictions responsible for actually running the elections.
Note, though, that electronic systems are not incompatible with paper ballots. Several voting system vendors make systems (originally in response to Federal regulations in the wake of the 2000 Florida fiasco, and Federal disability act regulations) that provide a variety of ways for a user to interact (touch screen, audio response, sip/puff switches, etc) and then generate a marked-up paper ballot. These ballots are also much more amenable to machine reading. No more hanging chads.
When user votes, for his vote a checksum is created using one-way algo (digest) which is formed from:
Session ID, Voter name, Vote result, a unique key given only to voter and known only by voter and govt, date.
Now crack that one ;)
It doesn't need to be cracked, it's already broken; that unique key known to the govt breaks voter anonymity.
I already commented or I'd mod this up.
Parent post is exactly right, it's about enforcing discipline. Many writers, especially of fiction, are "differently attentive" (ie, ADD) and it is so easy to get sidetracked into looking up a word or fact on-line right now or tweaking the text by rearranging phrases in the middle of writing a paragraph. All of which kills productivity and also plays havoc with the creative process necessary to good writing. (Similar to when you're "in the zone" coding or debugging.)
Writing consists of both the creative part and the editor part -- but you have to keep them separate or your internal editor will screw up the creative flow by throwing up alternative phrasings, word choices, compelling you to back up delete something because it isn't good enough, etc. You need to turn that off to be productive in draft mode (and turn on in revision mode for the subsequent draft). That takes discipline. If using ed helps -- and since it requires a conscious switch between input mode and edit mode, I can see where it would -- then that's great.
The AlphaSmart -- a self-contained word processor in a keyboard with a 4-line text-only display (like the old Tandy Model 100, but lighter) -- is used in a number of schools as an assist to ADD kids because it lets them focus on their writing rather than playing with fonts or doodling in the margins or getting sucked into computer games. I've seen them advertised to writers for similar reasons. (It dumps your saved text into your WP program of choice by pretending to be a keyboard.)
Some of the bloat is due to word processors -- if you're writing on a typewriter, revisions mean retyping the whole bloody thing, which is a pain and is time consuming. With a word processor (or even ed) you only have to retype the changes.
But, a bigger cause of the bloat is publishers themselves. As book prices rose, pubs wanted to provide readers with more words and pages to justify the cost (the paper and ink only being a fraction of the total book cost). Back when I started reading SF as a kid, novels were typically in the 60,000 word range. I recently submitted a 70k novel -- the publisher likes it but wants it 20-30k words longer. I can do that (by adding plot threads, not bloat) but my writing tends to be tight to start with (and I like to trim 10-20% on the final draft). Most fiction these days could stand to be cut 15%, but the publishers don't want that -- presumably because most readers want more pages per dollar.
It's easy for an author to add bloat by inverting the usual rules of good writing (two words where one would do, unnecessary description, redundant words and phrases, etc). A beginner won't get away with that because the work has to stand on its own. A recognized author name has momentum, so its easier to get away with. Conversely, an experienced author should also have an easier time coming up with additional plot points (words are easy, plotting takes more thought) to expand the work and need not revert to bloat -- so it depends on the author.
I decided to be uncool and stay out of Facebook.
That's okay, your friends* created an account for you.
* If you don't have any friends, read "enemies".
I just assumed he was talking powder weight, not slug weight. For slug weight that's in the .22 ballpark -- and if you're close enough for that to be truly effective you might as well just whack them over the head with the butt and save the ammo.
In general "fewer" goes with a pluralized word, "less" doesn't. Thus "fewer pounds", "less weight", but "one less pound" or "two fewer pounds". "15 or less items" is just wrong.
Nope. I happily speak both metric and imperial (both US and British -- which aren't identical).
Billion (10^12 most places, 10^9 in US and Canada -- and "officially" in Britain as of 1974) vs milliard (10^9 most places, almost unknown in US and Canada) is neither.
I'm a writer. I never struggle to find words.