This is actually one of my complaints about the iPod. It is difficult to do certain operations without looking at the screen. The scroll wheel does different things depending on what "state" the menus are in, and there is an elaborate system of "timeouts" where the mode of the machine moves from one state to another without your asking it to. Furthermore the wheel goves no tactile feedback (aural feedback, while nice, just doesn't connect to your brain in the same way) and it's easy to move it a click accidentally between selecting an option and moving your finger to the select button.
I'm not blind, but I do have a desire to operate the thing without looking--for example when driving, or turning the volume down before I cross a street.
HOWEVER, when I upgraded I took a long, hard look at other MP3 players, and was forced to conclude that iPod interface was the best despite its flaws. So this is a "six of one, half dozen of the other" sort of situation.
Do you have a relavant link to case law, or is it appropriate to just make this stuff up nowadays? Read the Act:
''electronic communication'' means any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic or photooptical system that affects interstate or foreign commerce.
The federal law makes wiretapping an interstate transmission illegal. What you type on your keyboard and gets sent to your computer is not going to be an interstate transmission.
You know, when I make a phone call, it goes from my phone line to the local switch. Then it goes from the local switch to a regional switch. Maybe it makes its way to an interstate line. Who knows? It depends what number I call. But the signal that goes between my house and the local switch, well, that doesn't cross state lines, right?
So if you tap the phone line from my house to the local switch, the signal you are tapping never crosses state lines. Therefore a federal agency can tap my phone line with impunity.
See, the network connection is irrelevant to the transmissions, which could have been made on a stand-alone phone with no link at all the a long-distance network. Therefore no local phone taps violate the Wiretap Act.
Right?
After all, as defined in the Act, ''electronic communication'' means any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic or photooptical system that affects interstate or foreign commerce. It's crystal clear.
Hm. I typically have three or four binders open on my desk with various printed documentation in them. Screen real estate is too valuable to dedicate to documentation--having to continually flip between development and reference really slows me down.
While it may be wasteful of paper, I'm sticking with the binders until there is a display that (a) is as big as my desk (b) has 600 dpi effective resolution for easy reading (c) I can convince my employer to buy.
Anyway, paper books have a perfectly servicable search function, accessed by opening to the back pages of the book and locating the desired search terms, then reading the referenced page number.
And what if your sample finds problems. What do you do then ?
Then you check everything. That's why you have a paper trail in the first place.
Anything that can go wrong with paper ballots can go wrong with paper records kept by a voting machine. In addition, we have failure modes caused by the electronic system, some of which will not be caught by the paper records. Thus an electronic voting booth that relies unequivocally and finally on paper ballots is, in the best case, at least as unreliable as the paper by itself.
It's really no mean feat to come up with a system that is guaranteed to be worse than the system currently in place--this is an enviable accomplishment of the blogging/techno-pundit community.
You can duct tape a Timex onto an atomic clock but that doesn't make it a redundant system.
It's simply false that redundancy is an indicator of reliability. Did you know that the rate of deaths in twin-engine aircraft is an order of magnitude greater than the rate of deaths in single engine craft?
In the cases of aircraft, powerplants, and weapons, the designers of the system have carefully considered the failure modes of their system, and ensured that if there are redundant systems, that they are effective.
I work in the medical devices industry--before we can bring a device to market, we must convince FDA that the design followed an accountable process and that the potential risks to patients from failure of the device are suitably small. The procedures for documenting the process and performing the risk analysis are fairly well established and work well. Similar sorts of standards are enforced by the FAA, DOE, and the military for the systems they deal with.
The lack of such a standard for elections, and the complicit lack of a risk-management mentality, is glaring. But each of the aforementioned agencies seeems to have arrived at its procedures seperately and independently, after a spotty history of accidents, so it's not a big surprise that we'd have to re-invent the wheel yet again for elections. Multiply that by the fact that each municipality determines the standards for its own elections and there's a lot of re-learning to be done.
Presumably the intent of a paper trail is to reduce the probability that votes are lost or falsified.
So do the risk analysis: How likely is it that the electronic system will have its results lost or falsified? Now, what measures are in place for detecting a failure?
How likely is it that IF the electronic system fails, then the failure will be detected? How likely will it be that a failure is indicated when no failure has actually taken place?
Now how likely is it that if the failure is correctly detected, that the paper trail will provide useful results?
Get in the habit of asking these questions and you soon realize, the mode in which the vote is implemented doesn't matter, it's the process. Two systems can be wed to provide a more reliable whole, but more often when you tie two systems together you just have a larger system that exhibits all the failure modes of its components, PLUS all the failure modes of their composition.
At work I'm constantly shooting down hare-brained redundant systems. Typically we are considering some safety issue and a check that has been put into place to try to address it. Only problem is the mitigator is only effective in a very idealized case (oh teh noes!!! haxx0rs in teh yu0r voting boxxen!!!!1!!one), while a more typical falure takes out the mitigator as well. Considering the inherent unreliability of additional complexity, these schemes are less than worthless, and should be replaced with a proper design for the original system.
I find it absolutely hilarious that the huge push towards electronic voting was motivated by the perceived unreliability of paper-based voting systems in the 2000 elections, yet the techno pundits are insistent on wedding them to paper records like some kind of magic talisman.
In the Bleep store you get to listen to 30-second samples but you can click along the timeline to pick the part of the song the sample comes from. Then they give you decent-quality, non-DRM-encumbered files. To top it off, their downloads include limited-release and out-of-print records. To date they're the only store I've bought intangible downloaded goods from.
That's what they have the clicker for. The new ipods will even play a click through the speakers you connect them to. I agree it could use more tactile feedback, but I tried most of the mp3 players on the market and concluded that the ipod is the least terrible.
I recommend adapting your listening to driving. For example, I set my ipod into Album Shuffle mode, choose "Shuffle Songs" and hit play. If I don't like the album it picks I press menu and select again in it picks a new album. Repeat as necessary without taking eyes off the road.
I don't understand. You complain that "if those things really meant I was no longer insurable by them, I should have been cancelled right away." But they continued to do business with you for four years.
Now which is more expensive--finding new insurance right after an accident, or finding new insurance four years after an accident? It sounds like State Farm saved you a lot of money by continuing you insure you.
And this is why saden1's idea of returning unused premiums is so dumb.
Every once in a while something like a flood happens, and the insurance company is going to have to pay out a lot more than it's taking in. If it's not sitting on enough reserves, the company goes broke and leaves everyone with unfilled claims.
Anyway, being screwed is a matter of degree. I'd rather my insurance company drop hot potato policies after settling their claims than fail to settle claims equitably in the first place.
You just described State Farm (and every other mutual insurance company). Policyholders are part owners of the company. Everyone gets an annual financial statement to see where their money is going, and can vote in the annual meeting.
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that if you timed users on regular tasks such as opening tabs, that there would be no substantial difference between command-click and a second trackpad button.
Personally I find command-clicking more convenient. My hand naturally rests with the index finger on the pad and thumb on the left half of the button. Moving the thumb to the right half of the button is an uncomfortable position, and that movement takes just as much time as pressing the cmd key with my other hand would.
On a laptop the keyboard is right next to the pad anyway. Think of your powerbook as having an 89-button trackpad if it helps. Also, I believe you can use a utility like uControl to map keys directly to mouseclicks if you must have single-button action.
Re:RGBCMY is more marketing factoid than it isreal
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
·
· Score: 1
a linear combination of RGB can express any color in the universe.
Yes and no. In a strict mathematical sense, since we have three color photoreceptors, so percievable color space is three dimensional.
But in translating from the percievable color to RGB you find that some colors would have to use negative RGB components to be reproduced. Since there does not exist a display that can show "minus green," we compensate by using additional primaries.
That's not even touching the fact that under certain lighting conditions, rods act as a fourth receptor giving a four dimensional percievable colorspace. Did you ever wonder why some colors seem to stand out from sunset to dusk? Now you know the rest of the story...
Does Kazaa also upload sections of a file that hasn't totally downloaded yet? If not, then you can account for approximately half of the traffic right there. Also, Torrents are announced, creating a traffic rush, whereas there isn't really a notification mechanism (last time I checked) for Kazaa that would cause a similar rush.
I don't see how either of these points would affect a measurement based on the total amount of traffic passing through an ISP. In either system, every byte transferred is accounted for by a person who is downloading a file. More bytes transferred == more bytes downloaded onto people's hard drives.
Slashdot Mirror
1984 called, they want their false accusation of plagiarism back.
This is actually one of my complaints about the iPod. It is difficult to do certain operations without looking at the screen. The scroll wheel does different things depending on what "state" the menus are in, and there is an elaborate system of "timeouts" where the mode of the machine moves from one state to another without your asking it to. Furthermore the wheel goves no tactile feedback (aural feedback, while nice, just doesn't connect to your brain in the same way) and it's easy to move it a click accidentally between selecting an option and moving your finger to the select button.
I'm not blind, but I do have a desire to operate the thing without looking--for example when driving, or turning the volume down before I cross a street.
HOWEVER, when I upgraded I took a long, hard look at other MP3 players, and was forced to conclude that iPod interface was the best despite its flaws. So this is a "six of one, half dozen of the other" sort of situation.
Do you have a relavant link to case law, or is it appropriate to just make this stuff up nowadays? Read the Act:
''electronic communication'' means any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic or photooptical system that affects interstate or foreign commerce.
The federal law makes wiretapping an interstate transmission illegal. What you type on your keyboard and gets sent to your computer is not going to be an interstate transmission.
You know, when I make a phone call, it goes from my phone line to the local switch. Then it goes from the local switch to a regional switch. Maybe it makes its way to an interstate line. Who knows? It depends what number I call. But the signal that goes between my house and the local switch, well, that doesn't cross state lines, right?
So if you tap the phone line from my house to the local switch, the signal you are tapping never crosses state lines. Therefore a federal agency can tap my phone line with impunity.
See, the network connection is irrelevant to the transmissions, which could have been made on a stand-alone phone with no link at all the a long-distance network. Therefore no local phone taps violate the Wiretap Act.
Right?
After all, as defined in the Act, ''electronic communication'' means any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic or photooptical system that affects interstate or foreign commerce. It's crystal clear.
Hm. I typically have three or four binders open on my desk with various printed documentation in them. Screen real estate is too valuable to dedicate to documentation--having to continually flip between development and reference really slows me down.
While it may be wasteful of paper, I'm sticking with the binders until there is a display that (a) is as big as my desk (b) has 600 dpi effective resolution for easy reading (c) I can convince my employer to buy.
Anyway, paper books have a perfectly servicable search function, accessed by opening to the back pages of the book and locating the desired search terms, then reading the referenced page number.
And what if your sample finds problems. What do you do then ?
Then you check everything. That's why you have a paper trail in the first place.
Anything that can go wrong with paper ballots can go wrong with paper records kept by a voting machine. In addition, we have failure modes caused by the electronic system, some of which will not be caught by the paper records. Thus an electronic voting booth that relies unequivocally and finally on paper ballots is, in the best case, at least as unreliable as the paper by itself.
It's really no mean feat to come up with a system that is guaranteed to be worse than the system currently in place--this is an enviable accomplishment of the blogging/techno-pundit community.
You can duct tape a Timex onto an atomic clock but that doesn't make it a redundant system.
It's simply false that redundancy is an indicator of reliability. Did you know that the rate of deaths in twin-engine aircraft is an order of magnitude greater than the rate of deaths in single engine craft?
In the cases of aircraft, powerplants, and weapons, the designers of the system have carefully considered the failure modes of their system, and ensured that if there are redundant systems, that they are effective.
I work in the medical devices industry--before we can bring a device to market, we must convince FDA that the design followed an accountable process and that the potential risks to patients from failure of the device are suitably small. The procedures for documenting the process and performing the risk analysis are fairly well established and work well. Similar sorts of standards are enforced by the FAA, DOE, and the military for the systems they deal with.
The lack of such a standard for elections, and the complicit lack of a risk-management mentality, is glaring. But each of the aforementioned agencies seeems to have arrived at its procedures seperately and independently, after a spotty history of accidents, so it's not a big surprise that we'd have to re-invent the wheel yet again for elections. Multiply that by the fact that each municipality determines the standards for its own elections and there's a lot of re-learning to be done.
Presumably the intent of a paper trail is to reduce the probability that votes are lost or falsified.
So do the risk analysis: How likely is it that the electronic system will have its results lost or falsified? Now, what measures are in place for detecting a failure?
How likely is it that IF the electronic system fails, then the failure will be detected? How likely will it be that a failure is indicated when no failure has actually taken place?
Now how likely is it that if the failure is correctly detected, that the paper trail will provide useful results?
Get in the habit of asking these questions and you soon realize, the mode in which the vote is implemented doesn't matter, it's the process. Two systems can be wed to provide a more reliable whole, but more often when you tie two systems together you just have a larger system that exhibits all the failure modes of its components, PLUS all the failure modes of their composition.
At work I'm constantly shooting down hare-brained redundant systems. Typically we are considering some safety issue and a check that has been put into place to try to address it. Only problem is the mitigator is only effective in a very idealized case (oh teh noes!!! haxx0rs in teh yu0r voting boxxen!!!!1!!one), while a more typical falure takes out the mitigator as well. Considering the inherent unreliability of additional complexity, these schemes are less than worthless, and should be replaced with a proper design for the original system.
I find it absolutely hilarious that the huge push towards electronic voting was motivated by the perceived unreliability of paper-based voting systems in the 2000 elections, yet the techno pundits are insistent on wedding them to paper records like some kind of magic talisman.
I say, like this?
Heh, like
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/aer721/
Some other ethanol crops such as sugar cane work better, however sugar cane is limited to growing in semi-tropical conditions.
Correction: Ethanol made from corn was not energy-positive in the 1970's. Today, it is.
In the Bleep store you get to listen to 30-second samples but you can click along the timeline to pick the part of the song the sample comes from. Then they give you decent-quality, non-DRM-encumbered files. To top it off, their downloads include limited-release and out-of-print records. To date they're the only store I've bought intangible downloaded goods from.
GPS + Mapping. You can never get too much detail on a map.
That's what they have the clicker for. The new ipods will even play a click through the speakers you connect them to. I agree it could use more tactile feedback, but I tried most of the mp3 players on the market and concluded that the ipod is the least terrible.
I recommend adapting your listening to driving. For example, I set my ipod into Album Shuffle mode, choose "Shuffle Songs" and hit play. If I don't like the album it picks I press menu and select again in it picks a new album. Repeat as necessary without taking eyes off the road.
Solaris 10 will almost certainly not use the GPL for its license.
Funny enough, I think it was the BMW Z4 that had a system of pipes and diaphragms specifically designed to route engine noise into the cockpit.
I don't understand. You complain that "if those things really meant I was no longer insurable by them, I should have been cancelled right away." But they continued to do business with you for four years.
Now which is more expensive--finding new insurance right after an accident, or finding new insurance four years after an accident? It sounds like State Farm saved you a lot of money by continuing you insure you.
And this is why saden1's idea of returning unused premiums is so dumb.
Every once in a while something like a flood happens, and the insurance company is going to have to pay out a lot more than it's taking in. If it's not sitting on enough reserves, the company goes broke and leaves everyone with unfilled claims.
Anyway, being screwed is a matter of degree. I'd rather my insurance company drop hot potato policies after settling their claims than fail to settle claims equitably in the first place.
You just described State Farm (and every other mutual insurance company). Policyholders are part owners of the company. Everyone gets an annual financial statement to see where their money is going, and can vote in the annual meeting.
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that if you timed users on regular tasks such as opening tabs, that there would be no substantial difference between command-click and a second trackpad button.
Personally I find command-clicking more convenient. My hand naturally rests with the index finger on the pad and thumb on the left half of the button. Moving the thumb to the right half of the button is an uncomfortable position, and that movement takes just as much time as pressing the cmd key with my other hand would.
On a laptop the keyboard is right next to the pad anyway. Think of your powerbook as having an 89-button trackpad if it helps. Also, I believe you can use a utility like uControl to map keys directly to mouseclicks if you must have single-button action.
a linear combination of RGB can express any color in the universe.
Yes and no. In a strict mathematical sense, since we have three color photoreceptors, so percievable color space is three dimensional.
But in translating from the percievable color to RGB you find that some colors would have to use negative RGB components to be reproduced. Since there does not exist a display that can show "minus green," we compensate by using additional primaries.
That's not even touching the fact that under certain lighting conditions, rods act as a fourth receptor giving a four dimensional percievable colorspace. Did you ever wonder why some colors seem to stand out from sunset to dusk? Now you know the rest of the story...
On your lap. I think it's meant as a gaming/media machine as opposed to a workstation.
What makes you think it's meant to go on a desk?
Does Kazaa also upload sections of a file that hasn't totally downloaded yet? If not, then you can account for approximately half of the traffic right there. Also, Torrents are announced, creating a traffic rush, whereas there isn't really a notification mechanism (last time I checked) for Kazaa that would cause a similar rush.
I don't see how either of these points would affect a measurement based on the total amount of traffic passing through an ISP. In either system, every byte transferred is accounted for by a person who is downloading a file. More bytes transferred == more bytes downloaded onto people's hard drives.