Echoing a previous response, I'm also surprised this lawsuit over a termination in 2001 is somehow considered recent news.
However, of note about VoteHere is that the E-voting activist Bev Harris (http://blackboxvoting.com) has few nice things to say about the company. San Francisco Indymedia is carrying her account of a recent encounter with the Secret Service over an alleged VoteHere hack.
And here's Bev Harris's opinion of VoteHere:
Okay, a word about VoteHere: This is the company that has no visible means of support. It doesn't seem to sell anything. Its board is heavily infested with defense industry types -- a former CIA director (Robert Gates, now heads George Bush School of Government); it had Admiral Bill Owens, also Vice-Chairman of SAIC and a member of the Defense Policy Board with Perle and Wolfowitz, a very close friend of Cheney; currently headed by former Washington Secretary of State Ralph Munro.
VoteHere announced that it would be releasing its software for review, back in July 2003. It was planning to release it in September, and was supposed to do so to Dr. David Dill's web site. It never released the code, just a bunch of literature about its product. (It did release some, but not all, of its code this month, making a big splash about it). About a week into October, I got solicited with an email "click this link" for VoteHere software.
Now who would fall for that? Why would anyone in their right mind grab the stuff in some clandestine manner when it was being released into the open momentarily? And this is a company that never sells anything. Who gives a sh*t anyway, what its software does? It now is trying to peddle yet another alternative to a voter verified paper ballot, an idiotic solution where we turn over auditing of the vote to a handful of cryptographers who work for a private company with defense industry ties. No one I know thinks that is even a viable concept, so why would we care to examine the software these cryptographers make up?
A big factor in the debate over the cost of Bush's proposed Lunar/Martian expeditionary force is its relationship with reality. There are several critical gaps in the engineering details of the Moon/Mars plan, that would be akin to that Far Side comic with the "and then a miracle happens" bit as the final step in a large chalkboard calculation.
Russian Space Web, for example, has an article that details several
technical weaknesses with Bush's plan. For example the rocket thrust required to orbit the planned space capsules far exceeds that currently available with Saturn-V boosters. Also, Bush's plan to mine resources from the Lunar surface to fuel the trip to Mars would require A) substanially more fuel just to lift off the lunar surface than would be necessary for spacecraft assembled in Earth orbit, and B) some sort of industrial/mining infrastructure on the moon, which itself would require massive fuel just to get off earth.
Rental car agencies are already exploiting GPS tracking devices for uncapped profit (eg. bouncing a $250 rental fee to $3.4k). I wonder how long it will take them to exploit this one so they can charge penalties for... oh... not using your blinker, leaving the dome light on when the car is off, and perhaps even for not flipping down the sun visors. Y'know, 5 minutes of harsh sunlight can really wreak havoc on unprotected automotive uphostlery, and possibly increase the maintenance cost for a vehicle by a full $0.000000005!!
So right. Lest I let myself become too concerned over how that additional 1000th of a second by the end of the century will surely cast all our solar-influenced, biological clocks into complete disarray. Instead, I'd much rather concern myself with more pressing astronomical concerns, especially ones that I can influence personally. Like the heat death of the universe.
Can (or could) they hear the reentry in Hawaii?
on
Mir Deathwatch
·
· Score: 3
When Skylab went down in Australia, some of its larger bits emitted several sonic booms as they decelerated to subsonic speeds.
This is now past tense, since Mir is apparently warming the minnows at this point, but could these sonic booms have been heard in the any of the nearby Pacific Islands? Easter Island, Hawaii, etc?
Of course, I'm not really expecting something on a Krakatoa scale, and I doubt the sound wave would still be audible by the time it reaches me several hours late
So Gracenote appears to be exercising judgement in what it believes to be authorized/unauthorized MP3 players (didn't recognize Sonique, did recognize Realjukebox), presumably to make the burning of copy-protected CD's less convenient. I especially like the we-dont-really-care-if-your-player-really-is-licen sed-but-not-on-our-list wording: "That application does/does not appear to be a licensed CDDB-Enabled Application."
But what about people coding their own MP3 players or CD players, for release as a new product? I see Gracenote offers a "Non-Commerical developer's license" for such a situation, but it's limited to 100 end-users until Gracenote validates the license.
Yet what really stinks is how Gracenote is currently featuring an MP3 encoder (N2MP3) that apparently incorporates the LAME open-source MP3 codec, even tho LAME itself is not on the CDDB list. I.e. you can't use LAME itself with CDDB, but you're more than welcome to buy this commercially distributed rehash which does.
Just as Pluto is largely irrelevant now in the Grand Scheme of Things. Unless, of course, you'd like to stop and pick up a bag of dusty ice for your martini on your trip to Beta Lyrae. But then again, you'd probably have scores of other bodies to choose from in the Kupier Belt.
Re:Artificial Black Holes
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 2
Hmmm. Artificial black holes, eh? Would make nice portable garbage disposals, wouldn't they? So, assuming black holes exist in all sizes, you just create a "quantum" black hole, then put it in a mason jar large enough to be just beyond the hole's event horizon. And with the intense radiation from the hole's perimeter, you could also attach a steam turbine and power your car or PC off it.
I smell a new startup. Venture capital! I need venture capital!
I hope that it keeps half-assed attempts to get on-air away, as they would only add to the noise. However, I hope that it does not inhibit those who wished to start a small market station to fill in the voids left by corp. radio. Perhaps this will be a "start", with the opportunity for more lisences to increase assuming responsibility is shown?
Such "half-assed attempts" to go on the the air would not make it through the LPFM screening processs, as applicants would have to demonstrate the same technical competence as those for already existing lower class licenses (i.e. educational class d). Really the only distinction between LPFM applicants, and those for existing lower-power licenses is that LPFM applicants must demstrate some "community purpose," to be in tune with the spirit of LPFM.
As for whether this may inhibit the creation of a smaller, non-commercial radio market, let me relate my experience with the campus radio station, KWUR, that I've worked at for the past two years.
KWUR has been broadcasting in some form since 1964. Until 1976 it was a carrier current AM station only available on the dorms' electrical wiring net, after which it received an educational Class D license, allowing it to broadcast FM at a whopping 10 watts (~2 mile broadcast range). This makes it older than many of the 1.21 Jigawatt commercial stations that operate in St. Louis (ok, maybe not quite a Jigawatt), made even more unique by the fact that the station has been continuously student-run since its inception (quite a feat, considering how the staff turns over wholesale every 3-4 years).
For the past 10 years, possibly longer, we have submitted multiple pettitions to the FCC for a 100Watt wattage upgrade, and on each occasion, our pettition was struck down, largely because a local, 10KWatt NPR station on the 2nd-adjactent channel has consistently fought it tooth and nail. (They claim THEIR signal would interfere with ours, were we to upgrade, so they're really just looking out for our own interests. Funny, isn't it?). Anyway, in its decades of existence, the KWUR has garnered strong support and recognition from local musicians, art communities, and especially from nationwide associations of college radio stations...all to little avail. We broadcast to more people online, outside of St. Louis, than we could ever hope to reach right here in St. Louis.
The LPFM initiative would have been a great hope for us, as we would have used it justify new programming more directed at the local comminity, rather than the current indie college radio fare. Unfortunately, this hope is no more, since the "3rd-adjacent channel" restriction that has been shoe-horned into the LPFM bill by corporate lobbyists nixes ALL LPFM channels that would have been available in St. Louis.
So, does this hinder the engendering of grass roots radio markets that would actually have some origin from the audience they're broadcast too? Absolutely. Do such listeners actually prefer top-40 commercial radio continuously playing Eminem/Britney/Backstreet Boys on an automated 8-hour cycle? I doubt it.
Advertising is what makes this medium affordable. How else would a webmaster with a popular non-commerce website be able to pay for server space, bandwidth, application software and site maintenance? It's the same reason why magazines aren't $25 each, why newspapers are only a buck and why cable TV doesn't cost thousands a month. Let's put it this way: would you rather put up with a few easily ignored banner ads, or pay $3.00 each time you wanted to read your favourite website or do your email? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth - let's just keep quiet and let the advertisers pay the bills.
The issue here is not to deprive advertisers of their ability to advertise, but to discourage them from doing so in an obnoxious and potentially disruptive way. So banner ads have been deemed "ineffective," i.e. the proprietor of www.toejambiscuits.com is incensed that he doesn't have 1M hits/day after circulating his banner ads, so what? Roadside billboards are in essentially the same situation, but you don't see advertisers placing banners on sawhorses that block in the roadway in an attempt to catch drivers' attention.
The truth is that forcing people to view ads that fill their field of view will only guarantee a sharply decreased customer base, causing service providers or site administrators that use such advertising techniques to be skipped over by the mainstream of net users. And then where will the advertising revenue come from?
I would much rather give up a vertebra, or two, since I meet all requirements (including the German one) except that height one, by a lousy 0.67" (1.85m=72.8346in; I'm 73.5in tall).
Could the 6feet have some margin of error, especially given that it was certainly converted from cm? Maybe if I did the conversion myself (hehe)?
Or maybe if I wear all black and keep up the chain smoking, they'll take me for a German national, and overlook those 0.67inches (ahem, 1.7cm).
Hmm, so if puffer fish share certain generic genomes in common with humans, could they be used at some distant future date to "fill in the gaps" for reconstructing ancient human genes entombed in amber-cased gnats? Sorta like they did with frog genes in Jurassic Park?
My, that would be a rather lame adventure park, "Cenozoic Park," even sans Richard Attenborough. I would demand my money back.
Too bad gate count doesn't necessarily = correctness or robustness of design. In fact, it's pretty much inevitable that higher complexity (in this case, by one or more magnitudes) will translate into buggier designs, unless Intel can find the time to check all circa (infinity)! operational permutations.
Good point. So perhaps IBM can etch silicon wafers down to such lilliputian dimensions, but what about thermal instability? With 3-atom-wide transistors, I'm guessing the number of electrons needed to hold a charge in a flop ain't all that much, and the alpha radiation from nearby lead (e.g. solder) could become a big(ger) concern.
Or did they forget to mention such a device is really only reliable around absolute zero?
TCP/IP certainly doesn't handle the sort of error-rates associated with wireless-links very well. That is, with error rates that are magnitudes above even he noisiest POTS lines, and with burst errors mich more frequent and longer, TCP's dynamic windowing mechanism (i.e. cutting the xmit window in 1/2 when missing packet sequence # detected) doesn't really translate to high throughput in wireless situations.
Of course, some wireless nets that I've seen actually encapsulate their TCP/IP packets in the AX.25 wireless link protocol, which is meant to compensate for these shortcomings of TCP/IP. Take a look at this cool city-wide wireless LAN in Latvia.
Many institutions, such as my University, support (or standardize on) Netscape officially. I don't want to see Netscape go away, and I don't think it will. My web server logs still show Netscape at 30-40%...
I concur. For small LAN's where shelling out a lot of time or $$ for standardized webserver+email client setups (e.g. MS Outlook + MS IE) is pointless, Netscape still provides a rather simple option. Indeed, most department-level LAN's at my school use Netscape on their (NT) workstations, primarily because Netscape profiles can be stored at a central location, greatly reducing the size of NT roaming profiles to be copied to and fro (while IE+Outlook will store dozens of MB's of webcache and mail in the actual profile).
It's also too bad that the average German national (at least those paticipating in O-fest) likely has an alcohol tolerance that would make Ted Kennedy envious, meaning it'd probably be the visiting American to collapse under the table first.
Better start those practice rounds of Quarters now if you want any chance of staying conscious for Oktoberfest 2001.
You are being a bit loose with terms. The Pentium 4 is fabricated with a.18 micron process. This means that an individual gate measures 0.18 micron wide (or is it long? Damn...where's my VLSI text). Now, the smaller you make each individual gate, the more gates you can pack into the same square area of silicon.
Process generally refers to smallest feature size, e.g. "lambda." Given this, the smallest a gate can be is 2*lamba on a side (i.e. wide and long), i.e. 0.36um.
For more info, check out this link.
The translation appears to be based on translating individual words and anglicizing specific German grammatical constructs (verb structures, etc.). Considering the typically obufscated word order in German, I'm amazed it turned out even halfway comprehensible.
At any rate, the name "Babblefish" appears fully approriate, both for the translator's input and output;)
Slashdot Mirror
However, of note about VoteHere is that the E-voting activist Bev Harris (http://blackboxvoting.com) has few nice things to say about the company. San Francisco Indymedia is carrying her account of a recent encounter with the Secret Service over an alleged VoteHere hack.
And here's Bev Harris's opinion of VoteHere:
Russian Space Web, for example, has an article that details several technical weaknesses with Bush's plan. For example the rocket thrust required to orbit the planned space capsules far exceeds that currently available with Saturn-V boosters. Also, Bush's plan to mine resources from the Lunar surface to fuel the trip to Mars would require A) substanially more fuel just to lift off the lunar surface than would be necessary for spacecraft assembled in Earth orbit, and B) some sort of industrial/mining infrastructure on the moon, which itself would require massive fuel just to get off earth.
Rental car agencies are already exploiting GPS tracking devices for uncapped profit (eg. bouncing a $250 rental fee to $3.4k). I wonder how long it will take them to exploit this one so they can charge penalties for ... oh ... not using your blinker, leaving the dome light on when the car is off, and perhaps even for not flipping down the sun visors. Y'know, 5 minutes of harsh sunlight can really wreak havoc on unprotected automotive uphostlery, and possibly increase the maintenance cost for a vehicle by a full $0.000000005!!
So right. Lest I let myself become too concerned over how that additional 1000th of a second by the end of the century will surely cast all our solar-influenced, biological clocks into complete disarray. Instead, I'd much rather concern myself with more pressing astronomical concerns, especially ones that I can influence personally. Like the heat death of the universe.
When Skylab went down in Australia, some of its larger bits emitted several sonic booms as they decelerated to subsonic speeds.
This is now past tense, since Mir is apparently warming the minnows at this point, but could these sonic booms have been heard in the any of the nearby Pacific Islands? Easter Island, Hawaii, etc?
Of course, I'm not really expecting something on a Krakatoa scale, and I doubt the sound wave would still be audible by the time it reaches me several hours late
I guess there would be little chance now of me getting my rebate check from Northpoint.
Anyone interested in a lightly used 3com SDSL modem fer real cheap? Throw in an RJ45 cable at no charge.
So Gracenote appears to be exercising judgement in what it believes to be authorized/unauthorized MP3 players (didn't recognize Sonique, did recognize Realjukebox), presumably to make the burning of copy-protected CD's less convenient. I especially like the we-dont-really-care-if-your-player-really-is-licen sed-but-not-on-our-list wording: "That application does/does not appear to be a licensed CDDB-Enabled Application."
But what about people coding their own MP3 players or CD players, for release as a new product? I see Gracenote offers a "Non-Commerical developer's license" for such a situation, but it's limited to 100 end-users until Gracenote validates the license.
Yet what really stinks is how Gracenote is currently featuring an MP3 encoder (N2MP3) that apparently incorporates the LAME open-source MP3 codec, even tho LAME itself is not on the CDDB list. I.e. you can't use LAME itself with CDDB, but you're more than welcome to buy this commercially distributed rehash which does.
Just as Pluto is largely irrelevant now in the Grand Scheme of Things. Unless, of course, you'd like to stop and pick up a bag of dusty ice for your martini on your trip to Beta Lyrae. But then again, you'd probably have scores of other bodies to choose from in the Kupier Belt.
Hmmm. Artificial black holes, eh? Would make nice portable garbage disposals, wouldn't they? So, assuming black holes exist in all sizes, you just create a "quantum" black hole, then put it in a mason jar large enough to be just beyond the hole's event horizon. And with the intense radiation from the hole's perimeter, you could also attach a steam turbine and power your car or PC off it.
I smell a new startup. Venture capital! I need venture capital!
I hope that it keeps half-assed attempts to get on-air away, as they would only add to the noise. However, I hope that it does not inhibit those who wished to start a small market station to fill in the voids left by corp. radio. Perhaps this will be a "start", with the opportunity for more lisences to increase assuming responsibility is shown?
Such "half-assed attempts" to go on the the air would not make it through the LPFM screening processs, as applicants would have to demonstrate the same technical competence as those for already existing lower class licenses (i.e. educational class d). Really the only distinction between LPFM applicants, and those for existing lower-power licenses is that LPFM applicants must demstrate some "community purpose," to be in tune with the spirit of LPFM.
As for whether this may inhibit the creation of a smaller, non-commercial radio market, let me relate my experience with the campus radio station, KWUR, that I've worked at for the past two years.
KWUR has been broadcasting in some form since 1964. Until 1976 it was a carrier current AM station only available on the dorms' electrical wiring net, after which it received an educational Class D license, allowing it to broadcast FM at a whopping 10 watts (~2 mile broadcast range). This makes it older than many of the 1.21 Jigawatt commercial stations that operate in St. Louis (ok, maybe not quite a Jigawatt), made even more unique by the fact that the station has been continuously student-run since its inception (quite a feat, considering how the staff turns over wholesale every 3-4 years).
For the past 10 years, possibly longer, we have submitted multiple pettitions to the FCC for a 100Watt wattage upgrade, and on each occasion, our pettition was struck down, largely because a local, 10KWatt NPR station on the 2nd-adjactent channel has consistently fought it tooth and nail. (They claim THEIR signal would interfere with ours, were we to upgrade, so they're really just looking out for our own interests. Funny, isn't it?). Anyway, in its decades of existence, the KWUR has garnered strong support and recognition from local musicians, art communities, and especially from nationwide associations of college radio stations...all to little avail. We broadcast to more people online, outside of St. Louis, than we could ever hope to reach right here in St. Louis.
The LPFM initiative would have been a great hope for us, as we would have used it justify new programming more directed at the local comminity, rather than the current indie college radio fare. Unfortunately, this hope is no more, since the "3rd-adjacent channel" restriction that has been shoe-horned into the LPFM bill by corporate lobbyists nixes ALL LPFM channels that would have been available in St. Louis.
So, does this hinder the engendering of grass roots radio markets that would actually have some origin from the audience they're broadcast too? Absolutely. Do such listeners actually prefer top-40 commercial radio continuously playing Eminem/Britney/Backstreet Boys on an automated 8-hour cycle? I doubt it.
Advertising is what makes this medium affordable. How else would a webmaster with a popular non-commerce website be able to pay for server space, bandwidth, application software and site maintenance? It's the same reason why magazines aren't $25 each, why newspapers are only a buck and why cable TV doesn't cost thousands a month. Let's put it this way: would you rather put up with a few easily ignored banner ads, or pay $3.00 each time you wanted to read your favourite website or do your email? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth - let's just keep quiet and let the advertisers pay the bills.
The issue here is not to deprive advertisers of their ability to advertise, but to discourage them from doing so in an obnoxious and potentially disruptive way. So banner ads have been deemed "ineffective," i.e. the proprietor of www.toejambiscuits.com is incensed that he doesn't have 1M hits/day after circulating his banner ads, so what? Roadside billboards are in essentially the same situation, but you don't see advertisers placing banners on sawhorses that block in the roadway in an attempt to catch drivers' attention.
The truth is that forcing people to view ads that fill their field of view will only guarantee a sharply decreased customer base, causing service providers or site administrators that use such advertising techniques to be skipped over by the mainstream of net users. And then where will the advertising revenue come from?
I would much rather give up a vertebra, or two, since I meet all requirements (including the German one) except that height one, by a lousy 0.67" (1.85m=72.8346in; I'm 73.5in tall).
Could the 6feet have some margin of error, especially given that it was certainly converted from cm? Maybe if I did the conversion myself (hehe)?
Or maybe if I wear all black and keep up the chain smoking, they'll take me for a German national, and overlook those 0.67inches (ahem, 1.7cm).
Hmm, so if puffer fish share certain generic genomes in common with humans, could they be used at some distant future date to "fill in the gaps" for reconstructing ancient human genes entombed in amber-cased gnats? Sorta like they did with frog genes in Jurassic Park?
My, that would be a rather lame adventure park, "Cenozoic Park," even sans Richard Attenborough. I would demand my money back.
Too bad gate count doesn't necessarily = correctness or robustness of design. In fact, it's pretty much inevitable that higher complexity (in this case, by one or more magnitudes) will translate into buggier designs, unless Intel can find the time to check all circa (infinity)! operational permutations.
Good point. So perhaps IBM can etch silicon wafers down to such lilliputian dimensions, but what about thermal instability? With 3-atom-wide transistors, I'm guessing the number of electrons needed to hold a charge in a flop ain't all that much, and the alpha radiation from nearby lead (e.g. solder) could become a big(ger) concern.
Or did they forget to mention such a device is really only reliable around absolute zero?
TCP/IP certainly doesn't handle the sort of error-rates associated with wireless-links very well. That is, with error rates that are magnitudes above even he noisiest POTS lines, and with burst errors mich more frequent and longer, TCP's dynamic windowing mechanism (i.e. cutting the xmit window in 1/2 when missing packet sequence # detected) doesn't really translate to high throughput in wireless situations.
Of course, some wireless nets that I've seen actually encapsulate their TCP/IP packets in the AX.25 wireless link protocol, which is meant to compensate for these shortcomings of TCP/IP. Take a look at this cool city-wide wireless LAN in Latvia.
Many institutions, such as my University, support (or standardize on) Netscape officially. I don't want to see Netscape go away, and I don't think it will. My web server logs still show Netscape at 30-40%...
I concur. For small LAN's where shelling out a lot of time or $$ for standardized webserver+email client setups (e.g. MS Outlook + MS IE) is pointless, Netscape still provides a rather simple option. Indeed, most department-level LAN's at my school use Netscape on their (NT) workstations, primarily because Netscape profiles can be stored at a central location, greatly reducing the size of NT roaming profiles to be copied to and fro (while IE+Outlook will store dozens of MB's of webcache and mail in the actual profile).
It's also too bad that the average German national (at least those paticipating in O-fest) likely has an alcohol tolerance that would make Ted Kennedy envious, meaning it'd probably be the visiting American to collapse under the table first. Better start those practice rounds of Quarters now if you want any chance of staying conscious for Oktoberfest 2001.
Process generally refers to smallest feature size, e.g. "lambda." Given this, the smallest a gate can be is 2*lamba on a side (i.e. wide and long), i.e. 0.36um.
For more info, check out this link.
The translation appears to be based on translating individual words and anglicizing specific German grammatical constructs (verb structures, etc.). Considering the typically obufscated word order in German, I'm amazed it turned out even halfway comprehensible.
;)
At any rate, the name "Babblefish" appears fully approriate, both for the translator's input and output