Fortunately, technology is better in 2002
on
Jet Turbine Locomotives
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I think if we were to design a gas-turbine locomotive in 2002, the worries about fuel consumption, noise levels and exhaust emissions are no longer major issues, thanks to the efforts of GE, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce in the last 25 years in dramatically reducing fuel consumption, noise levels and harmful exhaust emissions on airliner jet engines. A Turbo Train using a modified version of today's modern jet engines would be quite powerful, generate much less noise, have very low emissions and would be far more efficient than the old GE Big Blows that UP used during the 1950's and 1960's.
However, we still must eliminate a big problem with gas turbines: the hot exhaust from the engine. Both GE Transportation Systems and GM's EMD will have to figure out how to cool that exhaust in a very small space before we can build a modern gas-turbine locomotive. Remember, we're not taking about a ship, where there is plenty of space to either divert the hot exhaust or install various technologies in the exhaust stream to cool the hot exhaust.
Okay, modern gas turbines can be silenced and have lower fuel consumption than the gas turbines used on the famous GE Big Blow locomotives.
But we still have one big problem: what we do with that hot exhaust from the gas turbine? One of the biggest banes of the Big Blow locomotives was that the hot exhaust posed a huge fire and high-temperature hazard to anything nearby, especially the undersides of bridges.
GE and GM's EMD better figure out how to cool that gas turbine exhaust in a very small space before we can consider using gas turbine engines on a locomotive again.
The GE-built Big Blow locomotives were powerful but between the high fuel consumption, the loud whooshing sound and the very hot exhaust, no wonder why as soon as diesel-electric locomotives got more powerful by the early 1960's the Big Blows were quickly retired.
Now, if GE, Pratt & Whitney or Rolls-Royce has finally licked the high fuel consumption and noise problem, then gas turbine locomotives might make a comeback of sorts. But we still have to deal with the problem of dealing with that hot exhaust from the gas turbine engine.
There's only one problem: steam requires water out of the wazoo to work.
Why do you think the railroads in the western USA--where finding water for steam engines proved to be a major challenge--bought diesel-electric locomotives en masse from 1940 on? After World War II, the railroads switched to diesel-electric locomotives because it allowed the railroads to eliminate costly watering and oiling/coaling stations along mainlines.
Unfortunately, given the way Saddam Hussein operates (he's a Stalinist paranoid, more or less), now that the US Congress has approved the resolution Bush wanted, Hussein is not above bringing the world down with him if Bush does decide to attack Iraq. What better way to do a Goetterdaemmerung-style finish than to destroy access to the largest oil supply on this planet for a few years and cause untold economic chaos.
You can mod me down all you want but given Hussein's history against his neighbors and his own people (even his own family!), this very possibility is no longer a far-fetched fantasy.
NOx contributes to acid rain and the formation of ground ozone. Not good.
I would have understood your concerns in the past but today's emission control systems found on diesel cars sold in Europe have pretty much eliminated the NOx pollution issue. The only reason we don't see it in the USA is the fact Diesel #2 fuel sold in the USA has too high a level of sulfur compounds, which will destroy diesel exhaust emission controls since the compounds act like sulfuric acid (anyone who's taken high school chemistry knows how strong sulfuric acid can be). However, with the EPA mandating soon that sulfur compounds cannot exceed 80 parts per million (this is the current California Air Resources Board standard), we can apply truly modern emission controls on diesel engines and it'll likely meet the tough Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle standard.
I'll give you the main reason: Iraq has missiles that can reach Dharhan, Saudi Arabia's main oil terminal on the Persian Gulf coast.
I don't want Saddam Hussein to launch a missile armed with a nuclear warhead and that missile destroys the Dharhan oil terminal--it will cut off a huge portion of the world's oil supply until a replacement oil terminal is built, which could take up to three years to build. Meanwhile, the price of a barrel of oil zooms to US$90/barrel, something nobody wants.
I think using sugar cane to make alcohol fuel is the wrong fuel to make.
The Brazilians should make biodiesel fuel from sugar cane instead; that means the entire sugar cane plant can be use to make the fuel. Unlike regular diesel fuel, biodiesel fuel has no particulate emissions, no sulfur-compound problems, and with the right engine design burns very cleanly. Biodiesel fuel mixed with JP4 jet fuel actually burns much cleaner than straight JP4 on jet engines, with almost no soot in the exhaust.
Actually, even without the Echostar/DirecTV merger, small DBS dishes have done serious harm to local cable systems anyway.
Because both DirecTV and Dish Network can offer hundreds of channels of programming, they already can do things that very few cable systems can do. I mean, things like multichannel HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and TMC first started on DBS systems. And DBS systems are a sports junkie's delight: you can get ESPN's multichannel packages for college football and college basketball, and on DirecTV you can get multichannel packages for MLB, NBA, NHL and NFL, which allows you to see almost every game in its entirety. How many cable systems are capable of such enormous programming choices?
Because of the design of DBS systems, they may by 2010 be the primary means to deliver 1080i HDTV programming to most of the country, since it'll be vastly cheaper to transmit HDTV programming by satellite than by upgrading cable systems to support 1080i HDTV.
...What will it take to bring things back into balance?
Will it take a Malthusian vision where war, pestilence and famine wipes out a huge fraction of the human population to start all over again? Given the large number of nuclear weapons, rapidly spread human diseases and potential blights that could destroy much of the human food supply, it's not impossible the human race could contract severely like what happened during the explosive spread of the bubonic plague in Europe from 1348 to 1352--nearly 50% of the European population died.
I think at least humans in 2002 will likely survive after such a horrible event--we at least won't lose our scientific knowledge completely like what happened during the Dark Ages of Europe, thanks to the massively huge number of books of general knowledge printed.
Congrats to Mr. Giacconi for winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his research into X-ray emissions in outer space.
It was his research with sounding rockets, the UHURU satellite and the Einstein satellite that made it possible to study unusual astronomical objects such as black holes and pulsars and allow us to peer much more closely at nebulas and other astronomical objects that have befuddled astronomers before Giacconi's pioneering work. It was his work that made it possible for the development of the NASA Chandra and ESA XMM-Newton X-ray observatory satellites.
I've played with sodium metal and potassium metal in my high school Chemistry class.
I dropped a very small amount of sodium metal in a 250 ml beaker of water and there was a very loud fizzing sound as the sodium dissolved quickly in water. But dropping the same amount of potassium metal into water has MUCH more violent effects--I heard a loud "pop" and you saw a flame above the potassium metal sliver as it dissolved in water.
Also, it seems like the imminent switch to IPV6 has been predicted for the last 10 years; as it turns out, with IPMasq and NAT, it's not really necessary.
But that is still essentially a band-aid solution of not enough IP addresses for everyone out there, and it adds serious complications for network admins juggling available IP addresses. Given the number of IP addresses available under IPv6, you can do things like assign every Net-enabled device its own IP address, which makes for much easier setup of routers, switches, hubs, and so on.
While we may be in an economic slump right now, we are forgetting that there are upcoming technologies that will likely drive a second tech boom in the second half of this decade.
I cite the following:
1. Cellular phone companies have started on the road to 3G cellular phone technology, technology that could completely transform the way people use cellphones. Imagine bi-directional 384 kilobits/second data transfer, about the same as low-end SDSL, but operating in a wireless fashion and well beyond the reach of 802.11b Wi-Fi; this could allow people to upload and download data fast enough that even high-resolution digital photographs or circa VHS quality video can be transferred quickly. To keep up with the competition from Europe and Japan, expect major rollouts of 3G cellular technology by middle of this decade. Because of the bandwidth requirements of 3G, this will need massive investments in infrastructure to support these new phones.
2. The mandatory imposition of digital television in the USA in accordance to the Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC) standards by late this decade. This will mean a lot of new investments in television broadcasting hardware, especially when you have to implement these standards for both over-air and cable broadcasting on a scale far beyond what we've seen so far.
3. The beginning of the switch from IPv4 to IPv6 addressing. Much of our current Internet hardware infrastructure is not yet suited to support IPv6, and many of today's computer operating systems don't yet support IPv6, either. As the switch to IPv6 accelerates there will be considerable investments needed in both software upgrades and network infrastructure upgrades to be IPv6 compatible. Yes, I know network hardware built within the last two years are IPv6 compatible but there is still a huge fraction of installed hardware that is not IPv6 compatible yet.
I would not be surprised there will be a surge in demand for IT hardware and services as these three technologies rapidly rise in usage by the end of 2010.
However, we're going to be seeing changes in data transport technology that will require major improvements in IT infrastructure by 2010.
First, we have begun the process to the switch to 3G cellular telephones. This next-generation cellphone will require a lot of infrastructure changes to implement, and we'll need to a lot of new hardware to implement 3G cellular service.
Second, we may see very soon the beginning of the switch from IPv4 to IPv6. This will also require a lot of new hardware since a large fraction of today's telecommunications network aren't designed to handle IPv6; that means a lot of software upgrades and a lot of upgrades of actual network hardware itself to support IPv6.
Third, the imposition of digital television in the USA to comply with the ATSC standards will also require a lot of upgrades to our whole broadcast infrastructure.
We may be in an economic slump right now, but by mid-decade the technological developments I mentioned will need hardware upgrades on a scale that will make the 1990's tech boom seem like a minor even in comparison, since these technological changes will affect everyone.
I think the news sites should have the ability to run multiple mirrors of their own web site all over the world. That way, instead of everyone trying to log onto one centralized site they just log onto the closest mirror site. After all, Microsoft now uses Akamai as their primary means to distribute patches and updates online, and Akamai is one of the companies specializing in this type of business.
The new motherboards that use the nVidia nForce2 chipset will be extremely fast, especially since it supports the latest AMD Athlon XP CPUs (2200+ to 2800+) and also has native support for DDR333 DDR-SDRAM memory.
At these high speeds, the onboard GeForce4 MX equivalent graphics will be quite fast, capable of playing games like Unreal Tournament 2003 at 38 to 50 frames per second speeds. This is above the point that the human eye can see stuttering of motion. Also, because the video is GeForce4 MX equivalent, DVD playback will be excellent, since nForce2 supports Hardware Motion Compensation, Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform, Alpha Blending and Adaptive de-Interlacing acceleration of MPEG-2 video decoding. (This is actually as good, if not better than ATI's much-lauded hardware DVD decoding solution.) Best of all, nForce2 allows you to install an external graphics card if you want to upgrade to even faster video with the latest graphics cards.
Secondly, nForce2 supports Dolby Digital 5.1 audio with a low-cost expansion card. This allows you to have true surround sound for the latest games and DVD movie playback.
Finally, nForce2 supports up to six USB 2.0 ports and three IEEE-1394 Firewire ports, saving you the need to get a dedicated interface card.
In short, the nForce2 chipset motherboard could save you from having to buy as many as three additional expansion cards right out of the box; this is something a LOT of system OEM's really love.
I'd wish that were true, but there are many people from the northeastern USA that have second houses in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties in Florida. These so-called Snowbirds live in the state long enough that many of them could in theory get both Florida resident ID's and the ID's from their home state in the Northeast.
It's these counties of Florida that are notorious for voting problems--you do remember the 2000 Presidential election mess and what happened during the Democratic gubernatorial primary recently?
The issue of voting scams can be minimized with the following steps:
1. Before anyone votes in a voting booth, they have have proof of identity, preferably a picture ID.
2. Require that during election time the voter can ONLY vote in one voting jurisdiction, no exceptions allowed. That way, people who live part of the time in one part of the country and part of the time in another part of the country cannot vote in both jurisdictions, which is a great way to cause voter fraud.
3. Use a ballot that all the choices are marked off by a small ink stamp. With an ink stamped ballot, the ballot can be read by both hand and machine counts easily.
I'm sure there are more steps available to lower vote fraud, but these three steps ends the vast majority of voter fraud problems.
The problems with WorldCom's Internet backbone today explains why on a number of sites I visit frequently things are slowing down quite a bit. No wonder banner ads are not showing correctly.
The reason why I said the graphical UI of Red Hat Linux 8.0 reminds me a lot of Windows XP's Luna interface is the fact that a lot of icons on the RH Linux 8 UI has the very colorful look you get in XP.
To everyone who has helped run Slashdot: congratulations for five years of often thought-provoking reading.
Though of course your site has a pro-Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD stance (which of course means it's antagonistic towards Microsoft), you have to admit other articles on other aspects of technology posted on this website have made for interesting reading, especially the innumerable commentaries posted by various readers of this web page. It is all the more amazing considering that your site is probably one of the longest-lasting web sites on the Internet not related to a business enterprise.
I salute Slashdot for five years of great work, and have best wishes for many more years of success.
Again, the UCSB sysadmins are passing the buck on an issue that is easily fixed.
Given the cost of blank CD-R discs, they could have passed out to Windows 2000 users on campus a copy of Service Pack 3 plus a decent antivirus/firewall program on that CD-R disc. Install that before connecting the Win2K machine on the network, set the account permissions correctly, and enforce a ban on personal web servers running on client machines; that will usually be the end of the security problem.
Psst--the computers connected at UCSB are likely connected to a broadband Internet connection usually faster than what you get at home on DSL and cable modem. At those speeds you can download Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 reasonably quick. And of course UCSB could buy a large-scale license for McAfee VirusScan 7.0 and sell it to students for really cheap (like under US$20 per copy).
Slashdot Mirror
I think if we were to design a gas-turbine locomotive in 2002, the worries about fuel consumption, noise levels and exhaust emissions are no longer major issues, thanks to the efforts of GE, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce in the last 25 years in dramatically reducing fuel consumption, noise levels and harmful exhaust emissions on airliner jet engines. A Turbo Train using a modified version of today's modern jet engines would be quite powerful, generate much less noise, have very low emissions and would be far more efficient than the old GE Big Blows that UP used during the 1950's and 1960's.
However, we still must eliminate a big problem with gas turbines: the hot exhaust from the engine. Both GE Transportation Systems and GM's EMD will have to figure out how to cool that exhaust in a very small space before we can build a modern gas-turbine locomotive. Remember, we're not taking about a ship, where there is plenty of space to either divert the hot exhaust or install various technologies in the exhaust stream to cool the hot exhaust.
Okay, modern gas turbines can be silenced and have lower fuel consumption than the gas turbines used on the famous GE Big Blow locomotives.
But we still have one big problem: what we do with that hot exhaust from the gas turbine? One of the biggest banes of the Big Blow locomotives was that the hot exhaust posed a huge fire and high-temperature hazard to anything nearby, especially the undersides of bridges.
GE and GM's EMD better figure out how to cool that gas turbine exhaust in a very small space before we can consider using gas turbine engines on a locomotive again.
The GE-built Big Blow locomotives were powerful but between the high fuel consumption, the loud whooshing sound and the very hot exhaust, no wonder why as soon as diesel-electric locomotives got more powerful by the early 1960's the Big Blows were quickly retired.
Now, if GE, Pratt & Whitney or Rolls-Royce has finally licked the high fuel consumption and noise problem, then gas turbine locomotives might make a comeback of sorts. But we still have to deal with the problem of dealing with that hot exhaust from the gas turbine engine.
There's only one problem: steam requires water out of the wazoo to work.
Why do you think the railroads in the western USA--where finding water for steam engines proved to be a major challenge--bought diesel-electric locomotives en masse from 1940 on? After World War II, the railroads switched to diesel-electric locomotives because it allowed the railroads to eliminate costly watering and oiling/coaling stations along mainlines.
Unfortunately, given the way Saddam Hussein operates (he's a Stalinist paranoid, more or less), now that the US Congress has approved the resolution Bush wanted, Hussein is not above bringing the world down with him if Bush does decide to attack Iraq. What better way to do a Goetterdaemmerung-style finish than to destroy access to the largest oil supply on this planet for a few years and cause untold economic chaos.
You can mod me down all you want but given Hussein's history against his neighbors and his own people (even his own family!), this very possibility is no longer a far-fetched fantasy.
NOx contributes to acid rain and the formation
of ground ozone. Not good.
I would have understood your concerns in the past but today's emission control systems found on diesel cars sold in Europe have pretty much eliminated the NOx pollution issue. The only reason we don't see it in the USA is the fact Diesel #2 fuel sold in the USA has too high a level of sulfur compounds, which will destroy diesel exhaust emission controls since the compounds act like sulfuric acid (anyone who's taken high school chemistry knows how strong sulfuric acid can be). However, with the EPA mandating soon that sulfur compounds cannot exceed 80 parts per million (this is the current California Air Resources Board standard), we can apply truly modern emission controls on diesel engines and it'll likely meet the tough Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle standard.
I'll give you the main reason: Iraq has missiles that can reach Dharhan, Saudi Arabia's main oil terminal on the Persian Gulf coast.
I don't want Saddam Hussein to launch a missile armed with a nuclear warhead and that missile destroys the Dharhan oil terminal--it will cut off a huge portion of the world's oil supply until a replacement oil terminal is built, which could take up to three years to build. Meanwhile, the price of a barrel of oil zooms to US$90/barrel, something nobody wants.
I think using sugar cane to make alcohol fuel is the wrong fuel to make.
The Brazilians should make biodiesel fuel from sugar cane instead; that means the entire sugar cane plant can be use to make the fuel. Unlike regular diesel fuel, biodiesel fuel has no particulate emissions, no sulfur-compound problems, and with the right engine design burns very cleanly. Biodiesel fuel mixed with JP4 jet fuel actually burns much cleaner than straight JP4 on jet engines, with almost no soot in the exhaust.
Actually, even without the Echostar/DirecTV merger, small DBS dishes have done serious harm to local cable systems anyway.
Because both DirecTV and Dish Network can offer hundreds of channels of programming, they already can do things that very few cable systems can do. I mean, things like multichannel HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and TMC first started on DBS systems. And DBS systems are a sports junkie's delight: you can get ESPN's multichannel packages for college football and college basketball, and on DirecTV you can get multichannel packages for MLB, NBA, NHL and NFL, which allows you to see almost every game in its entirety. How many cable systems are capable of such enormous programming choices?
Because of the design of DBS systems, they may by 2010 be the primary means to deliver 1080i HDTV programming to most of the country, since it'll be vastly cheaper to transmit HDTV programming by satellite than by upgrading cable systems to support 1080i HDTV.
...What will it take to bring things back into balance?
Will it take a Malthusian vision where war, pestilence and famine wipes out a huge fraction of the human population to start all over again? Given the large number of nuclear weapons, rapidly spread human diseases and potential blights that could destroy much of the human food supply, it's not impossible the human race could contract severely like what happened during the explosive spread of the bubonic plague in Europe from 1348 to 1352--nearly 50% of the European population died.
I think at least humans in 2002 will likely survive after such a horrible event--we at least won't lose our scientific knowledge completely like what happened during the Dark Ages of Europe, thanks to the massively huge number of books of general knowledge printed.
Congrats to Mr. Giacconi for winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his research into X-ray emissions in outer space.
It was his research with sounding rockets, the UHURU satellite and the Einstein satellite that made it possible to study unusual astronomical objects such as black holes and pulsars and allow us to peer much more closely at nebulas and other astronomical objects that have befuddled astronomers before Giacconi's pioneering work. It was his work that made it possible for the development of the NASA Chandra and ESA XMM-Newton X-ray observatory satellites.
I've played with sodium metal and potassium metal in my high school Chemistry class.
I dropped a very small amount of sodium metal in a 250 ml beaker of water and there was a very loud fizzing sound as the sodium dissolved quickly in water. But dropping the same amount of potassium metal into water has MUCH more violent effects--I heard a loud "pop" and you saw a flame above the potassium metal sliver as it dissolved in water.
Also, it seems like the imminent switch to IPV6 has been predicted for the last 10 years; as it turns out, with IPMasq and NAT, it's not really necessary.
But that is still essentially a band-aid solution of not enough IP addresses for everyone out there, and it adds serious complications for network admins juggling available IP addresses. Given the number of IP addresses available under IPv6, you can do things like assign every Net-enabled device its own IP address, which makes for much easier setup of routers, switches, hubs, and so on.
Folks,
While we may be in an economic slump right now, we are forgetting that there are upcoming technologies that will likely drive a second tech boom in the second half of this decade.
I cite the following:
1. Cellular phone companies have started on the road to 3G cellular phone technology, technology that could completely transform the way people use cellphones. Imagine bi-directional 384 kilobits/second data transfer, about the same as low-end SDSL, but operating in a wireless fashion and well beyond the reach of 802.11b Wi-Fi; this could allow people to upload and download data fast enough that even high-resolution digital photographs or circa VHS quality video can be transferred quickly. To keep up with the competition from Europe and Japan, expect major rollouts of 3G cellular technology by middle of this decade. Because of the bandwidth requirements of 3G, this will need massive investments in infrastructure to support these new phones.
2. The mandatory imposition of digital television in the USA in accordance to the Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC) standards by late this decade. This will mean a lot of new investments in television broadcasting hardware, especially when you have to implement these standards for both over-air and cable broadcasting on a scale far beyond what we've seen so far.
3. The beginning of the switch from IPv4 to IPv6 addressing. Much of our current Internet hardware infrastructure is not yet suited to support IPv6, and many of today's computer operating systems don't yet support IPv6, either. As the switch to IPv6 accelerates there will be considerable investments needed in both software upgrades and network infrastructure upgrades to be IPv6 compatible. Yes, I know network hardware built within the last two years are IPv6 compatible but there is still a huge fraction of installed hardware that is not IPv6 compatible yet.
I would not be surprised there will be a surge in demand for IT hardware and services as these three technologies rapidly rise in usage by the end of 2010.
However, we're going to be seeing changes in data transport technology that will require major improvements in IT infrastructure by 2010.
First, we have begun the process to the switch to 3G cellular telephones. This next-generation cellphone will require a lot of infrastructure changes to implement, and we'll need to a lot of new hardware to implement 3G cellular service.
Second, we may see very soon the beginning of the switch from IPv4 to IPv6. This will also require a lot of new hardware since a large fraction of today's telecommunications network aren't designed to handle IPv6; that means a lot of software upgrades and a lot of upgrades of actual network hardware itself to support IPv6.
Third, the imposition of digital television in the USA to comply with the ATSC standards will also require a lot of upgrades to our whole broadcast infrastructure.
We may be in an economic slump right now, but by mid-decade the technological developments I mentioned will need hardware upgrades on a scale that will make the 1990's tech boom seem like a minor even in comparison, since these technological changes will affect everyone.
I think the news sites should have the ability to run multiple mirrors of their own web site all over the world. That way, instead of everyone trying to log onto one centralized site they just log onto the closest mirror site. After all, Microsoft now uses Akamai as their primary means to distribute patches and updates online, and Akamai is one of the companies specializing in this type of business.
Let's consider this.
The new motherboards that use the nVidia nForce2 chipset will be extremely fast, especially since it supports the latest AMD Athlon XP CPUs (2200+ to 2800+) and also has native support for DDR333 DDR-SDRAM memory.
At these high speeds, the onboard GeForce4 MX equivalent graphics will be quite fast, capable of playing games like Unreal Tournament 2003 at 38 to 50 frames per second speeds. This is above the point that the human eye can see stuttering of motion. Also, because the video is GeForce4 MX equivalent, DVD playback will be excellent, since nForce2 supports Hardware Motion Compensation, Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform, Alpha Blending and Adaptive de-Interlacing acceleration of MPEG-2 video decoding. (This is actually as good, if not better than ATI's much-lauded hardware DVD decoding solution.) Best of all, nForce2 allows you to install an external graphics card if you want to upgrade to even faster video with the latest graphics cards.
Secondly, nForce2 supports Dolby Digital 5.1 audio with a low-cost expansion card. This allows you to have true surround sound for the latest games and DVD movie playback.
Finally, nForce2 supports up to six USB 2.0 ports and three IEEE-1394 Firewire ports, saving you the need to get a dedicated interface card.
In short, the nForce2 chipset motherboard could save you from having to buy as many as three additional expansion cards right out of the box; this is something a LOT of system OEM's really love.
I'd wish that were true, but there are many people from the northeastern USA that have second houses in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties in Florida. These so-called Snowbirds live in the state long enough that many of them could in theory get both Florida resident ID's and the ID's from their home state in the Northeast.
It's these counties of Florida that are notorious for voting problems--you do remember the 2000 Presidential election mess and what happened during the Democratic gubernatorial primary recently?
The issue of voting scams can be minimized with the following steps:
1. Before anyone votes in a voting booth, they have have proof of identity, preferably a picture ID.
2. Require that during election time the voter can ONLY vote in one voting jurisdiction, no exceptions allowed. That way, people who live part of the time in one part of the country and part of the time in another part of the country cannot vote in both jurisdictions, which is a great way to cause voter fraud.
3. Use a ballot that all the choices are marked off by a small ink stamp. With an ink stamped ballot, the ballot can be read by both hand and machine counts easily.
I'm sure there are more steps available to lower vote fraud, but these three steps ends the vast majority of voter fraud problems.
The problems with WorldCom's Internet backbone today explains why on a number of sites I visit frequently things are slowing down quite a bit. No wonder banner ads are not showing correctly.
The reason why I said the graphical UI of Red Hat Linux 8.0 reminds me a lot of Windows XP's Luna interface is the fact that a lot of icons on the RH Linux 8 UI has the very colorful look you get in XP.
....Windows XP's Luna interface. :-/
If you didn't look carefully you'd be wondering if you were running Windows XP and not Red Hat Linux 8.0.
To everyone who has helped run Slashdot: congratulations for five years of often thought-provoking reading.
Though of course your site has a pro-Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD stance (which of course means it's antagonistic towards Microsoft), you have to admit other articles on other aspects of technology posted on this website have made for interesting reading, especially the innumerable commentaries posted by various readers of this web page. It is all the more amazing considering that your site is probably one of the longest-lasting web sites on the Internet not related to a business enterprise.
I salute Slashdot for five years of great work, and have best wishes for many more years of success.
Again, the UCSB sysadmins are passing the buck on an issue that is easily fixed.
Given the cost of blank CD-R discs, they could have passed out to Windows 2000 users on campus a copy of Service Pack 3 plus a decent antivirus/firewall program on that CD-R disc. Install that before connecting the Win2K machine on the network, set the account permissions correctly, and enforce a ban on personal web servers running on client machines; that will usually be the end of the security problem.
Psst--the computers connected at UCSB are likely connected to a broadband Internet connection usually faster than what you get at home on DSL and cable modem. At those speeds you can download Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 reasonably quick. And of course UCSB could buy a large-scale license for McAfee VirusScan 7.0 and sell it to students for really cheap (like under US$20 per copy).