I think you might have an inflated opinion of just how interesting you are to law enforcement agencies.
Ask Maher Arar just how interesting he thought he was to the US government. He's the Canadian citizen who was renditioned to Syria for over a year for interrogation about his coworker's brother, who was a terrorist. Take a look around you. How many people do you know that the government knows you know? How many people do they know? When the government is playing "six degrees of al qaeda" to find new bogeymen, are you so sure you're not "interesting"?
You have nothing to hide right? So you wouldn't mind if people came around and asked your boss questions about you, right? You wouldn't mind people listening in on your calls with your wife about when she's going to be home and whether the kids will let themselves in, right? You wouldn't mind people listening in on your conversations and negotiations about the future of your company, right? You wouldn't mind people reading your email and playing "six degrees of galaxyboy" to see what they can pin on you (don't think you're that interesting? Neither did Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who got "renditioned" to Syria for over a year because his coworker's brother was a terrorist). We haven't even gotten to people getting your credit card and bank account numbers yet.
Liberty isn't about doing illegal things and getting away with it. Liberty is about having basic rights that are rights for a reason, not just because they sound cool or are golly gee fun to have. Liberty is about people who obey the law not being harassed or investigated for a stupid reason or no reason at all. Finally liberty is about protecting us from people who would subvert the power of government, whether you believe that person is Bush or someone taking office in 3 years who would use the power Bush staked out for their own ends.
So censorship is worse than killing people in your mind?
A man threatens to kill the woman he's holding hostage and is using her as a shield. You've got a gun, the training to use it, and a clear shot at his face. Is it wrong to take the shot?
maybe you should get your Laywer (yuck) to look into ways of seperating what a pt. is charged, and how much money is actualy transfered from the pt. to your business
Trust me, the insurance companies have more and yuckier lawyers. I could suggest they run some contract language by their lawyers and see what they think of charging more up front then automatically providing a 50% discount on services or something like that, perhaps even promoting it as a "sale" to attract patients. (One is actually looking at advertising such a thing to pick up some cash patients, and he'll probably be happy to try any suggestion that gets him a loophole through the contracts he relies on for his business now)
Otherwise, interesting ideas, I'll put them to my clients, though most of them seem to have their patient flow mostly under control (except for a couple of newbie doctors who think they can take on the world).
As for non-paying patients, the client I have with the most trouble with this is an OBGYN who finds that her patients are not just "lagging" in payments, they're going back to whatever country they came from and stiffing her on the several thousand dollar bill for the delivery. Or just moving across town and changing their name. They all go into collections, but these days the collection agency just doesn't give a good rate for difficult cases, thus cash up front.
Thats a different question. If the information is there and you cannot find it, then you look harder or find someone else who can find it. If it is far out of reach, you go to school, you study that field, you become an expert, and learn how to find it, or at least meet someone at a seminar that knows that piece of information, or at least where it can be found.
This has nothing to do with access to information; that is a red herring
What I was referring to is what makes something "right" and something else "wrong". Are there things that are universally "right" and "wrong"? I proposed that censorship in the form of a mandatory block to information is universally wrong. At no time did I tell you to "shut up and not talk about it".
You tell me I should think about "many perspectives" however censorship can deny access to information regarding those other perspectives. Why then should I think about these "many perspectives"? Do you hold me to a higher standard than those facing censorship? Why?
I'd be too busy enjoying my end-of-the-world orgy to go door to door informing people that their time has come, however should anyone ask, I'd have no problem with telling them about it. They can then use the information to make an informed decision on what to do with their remaining time.
There is a difference between "not censoring" and "telling the world". To illustrate it (with what some might feel is an extreme), take child porn. Specifically, the project a few years back where people erased the children from the pictures and distributed the backgrounds in hopes that people would recognize the locations. To do this, someone had to have been able to obtain the child porn and look at it to erase the child. Permitting these people to access the child porn is not the same as handing out the child porn to everyone, nor is it the same as condoning the child porn.
No, because you would still have Word installed on your machine.
And unless you personally settled with the patent holder, you'd be infringing the patent if you continued to use it. Maybe you could get away with it, but then that still leaves "what's special about OSS"?
I build a similar widget for my own use (but never sell it) then I am not infringing your patent.
Patents protect the holder from people "practicing" that patent, not just selling it. There is generally understood to be an exemption for research, but using the patent to make money even if you're not selling the actual implementation of that patent is most definitely infringing it.
I don't understand why this is "special" for either OSS or SaaS.
If Microsoft Word infringed on patents and the patent holder refused to settle with Microsoft, and you relied on Microsoft Word, you're just as fucked as anyone using OSS or SaaS that got killed by patents.
Interesting question. Why don't you do some research on various philosophical outlooks, and get back to us on that. While you're looking for information to make your decision, ask yourself what you'd do if you were unable to find the information you need in order to make your decision. How would you feel if you knew that information existed but you're not permitted to see it. Not because the owner of the information set a price for it that you couldn't afford, not because you didn't know where it was, but simply because someone else said so.
Killing people may or may not be evil. Putting them in small cells for the rest of their life may or may not be evil. Telling them that they are permitted to only have one child may or may not be evil. But denying people access to information so that they can make reasoned and informed decisions, what is that, if not evil?
The other route to sanity is genuine socialized medicine.
My "vision" for what it's worth is a matter of degrees. The problem today is that health insurance isn't. Everyone gets sick, and if you aren't, you probably still are seeing the doctor for checkups anyway. Unlike other forms of insurance, it's a guaranteed payout, and unlike life insurance, that payout begins immediately, not after decades of payments and interest. Health insurance literally is socalized medicine already, except enforced by corporations rather than governments. They essentially take from the (health)rich and give to the (health)poor.
Finishing the job and socializing the basic health of the population has a good chance at improving the situation. Corporations needn't feel left out, they can continue selling major medical insurance, and likely turn a pretty serious profit without charging insane prices for everyone to make sure that they can get their broken legs set or cancer treated. Major medical becomes like automotive insurance: everyone's a risk, but it's no longer a 100% risk. You look at their history and their lifestyle and decide on how much you want to charge them, if you want to take on that risk at all. You tell them "hey, lose 100 pounds and get off your fat lard ass and we'll charge you 10% less for not being a heart attack victim in waiting" or "You're in pretty good shape, but with this motorcycle racing thing, you getting into a wreck is simply a matter of time so if you go with us it's going to be a 50% copay on all of your broken bones."
With the ability to create it from any plant matter, tens of millions of lawns in hundreds of thousands of subdivisions across the country stand ready for the signal. After all, if we didn't cut the lawn, we'd be evicted by the housing association, so the stuff might as well do something other than fill landfills.
I'll even do my part by using my father's old reel mower to maximize fuel efficiency.
If nothing else, Bethseda will have no problem recreating that one ST:TNG episode where parts of the ship were phasing in and out, and people were falling into the floors.
If the provider will be paid no matter what they charge, they will charge whatever they please. With costs so high, the only way to get service is through an insurance company, which guarantees payment.
HAHAHAHA
OK, I actually work with doctors here in the US, let me tell you how it really works:
Step 1: Every year, the AMA and the US Government create a list of all of the procedures you can possibly perform and bill for, these are called CPT codes (aka HCPCS Level I) and HCPCS Level II/III codes, respectively. The US government (Center for Medicare/Medicaid Services) assigns them a "relative value unit" measurement that basically says "this heart surgery is worth twice as much as this knee surgery, so the heart surgery will have two times the RVU as the knee surgery". Then they do a bunch of math to arrive at a dollar amount for each procedure or drug in each region of the country, based on the cost of living, scarcity of doctors, ruralness, and whatever else the government wants to meddle with. This generally becomes called the "Medicare Fee Schedule". It sets what a doctor will be paid for performing that procedure on a Medicare patient. The doctor is free to bill however much they want, but that number is what they'll be paid. Furthermore, Medicare specifically tells the doctor how much they're allowed to charge the patient (copay/coinsurance/deductible). Every year it changes, and in almost every case the numbers are lower than the last. As an aside, Medicare also determines which procedures match which diagnosises... you can't do heart surgery for athelete's foot, for instance.
Step 2: Insurance companies take these numbers and run with it. They establish their own fee schedules, and start shopping them around to doctors. For the biggest companies (Aetna, Cigna, United Healthcare, BCBS, and so on), doctors must contract with each insurance company in order to accept that insurance company's patients (smaller ones have the in-network vs. out-of-network distinction, and the doctors are paid less for being out-of-network, encouraging them to contract with those insurers as well). For 98% of these contracts, the Insurance Fee Schedule is derived as a percentage of Medicare's Fee Schedule. Usually it's around 115%, some higher. I have one client who actually dropped an insurance company because they wanted to revise their existing contract to 95% of Medicare's schedule. (have you ever had a doctor tell you they don't take your insurance?) For another 1.9%, the contract is for a Capitated contract (this almost always applies only to primary care, and is a small subset of their contracts), meaning that the insurance company sends them X patients, and pays them $Y per capita per time period, whether they see a patient 0, 1, or 50 times. The last 0.1% are the generous ones who will pay whatever they're billed, within reason, and possibly pending an audit to ensure that the charges are legit. Again, the doctor can bill whatever they want, and the insurance company will pay whatever they want. And again, the insurance company contract specifically tells the doctor what they can and cannot charge the patient.
But here's the kicker: A good number of these contracts also require that the doctor set their prices for uninsured patients within a certain range of what they pay. Almost all of these require that the doctor never charge an uninsured patient less than what the insurance company can pay them. After all, if uninsured patients can get cheap care, why would they pay the $700/month (the rate my coworker pays to insure his wife, should she become pregnant, or worse, become pregnant and develop gestational diabetes which pretty much makes you permanently uninsurable for the rest of your life, even if the diabetes goes away with the delivery as the majority of the cases do) to be insured against having to spend lots of money for medical care? The doctors can reject those contracts of course (meaning that they'll be cutting themselves out of a ve
1) Because older windows is limited to how much ram you can have? 2) Because 32 bit windows is limited to 4GB of process data space, a good chunk of that reserved for windows itself and adding more after that doesn't help in most cases? 3) Because the motherboard is already full of RAM and replacing it with a faster one with more slots would require buying a new processor, new motherboard, and completely new RAM anyway, especially if you switch to an athlon 64 and 64 bit XP to avoid #2?
Nobody's even mentioned "suspend to disk" with this thing. Resuming would probably be about as fast as waking the machine up from sleep. The SATA interface may be "slow" compared directly to RAM, but while you're waiting for everything else in the system to spin up, you've already got the system running.
I don't want to trade in my responsibility for my family's health for a little dubious security
So you'd rather have a company cut corners on your health to keep their stockholders happy? By the way, the HMO reviewed your case and decided that you're just too expensive to keep alive. Please shuffle over to the approved waiting area/pile of bodies and wait for the end.
At least the government's stated goal isn't to make money above all else. In the real world, they'd probably suck too, so I don't really have any answer other than a pipe dream of people ditching the whole materialistic thing, giving up million dollar mansions and driving up the prices of property in order to turn a profit and worrying more about their bling than solving problems.
Eh, his description is funky. I think he meant 4 sets of 2 mirrored drives, that are then striped. You could do it the other way, I guess, but that IS a lot of wasted space.
As for "extra redundancy" The difference between RAID 10 and RAID 01 is in the failure mode, not strictly in the redundancy.
In RAID 01, the data is stored like this: [ABCD] - four drives striped [ABCD] - four drives striped... and then mirrored. If a drive C fails, that entire mirror becomes useless since you can't mirror ABCD to ABD, making the state: [ABCD] - four drives striped [XXXX] - four drives offline... and the next drive failure kills it, assuming that offline drives don't count. Some hardware raid systems will continue to mirror ABD, essentially converting it to RAID 10 on the fly.
In RAID 10, the data is stored like this: [AA] - two drives mirrored [BB] - two drives mirrored [CC] - two drives mirrored [DD] - two drives mirrored... and then striped. If a drive fails only that drive is offline... [AA] [BB] [CX] - one drive offline [DD]... if the remaining drive C fails, then the array is lost. However, any other drive could fail without destroying the array (in fact, up to three more, if you're lucky).
You overestimate the stupidity of the lower end of the American voter. On the old systems, there were regularly cases where there would be two holes punched out or two marks made or other ridiculous errors.
Then you have the people running the election. If a guy doesn't mark the X straight and it looks more like a + or maybe a V, is that still counted as a vote? You might scoff, but that was basically the "hanging chad" argument in Florida: people thumping the rulebook and nitpicking the obvious for their benefit.
ATM mistakes may happen all the time, but they're the result of random bugs, and as another poster mentioned, mindless worms with dumb luck. If you have any cases where someone sat down and hacked an ATM into giving them all of its money (either by attacking it directly or simply working out which sequence of bugs lead to an unrecorded transaction and repeating this until it ran dry), let me know so that I'd change my position, but in these cases, BBV and other challengers sat down and hacked an election into giving them all of its votes, not just one or two incorrect transactions. The other poster mentioned that ATMs are hard to attack because they're not on the internet. If Diebold could make ATMs work securely despite whatever flaws by simply putting them on a completely separate network, why are voting machines vulnerable?
Hm, while I'm at it, can we have the reply count links back, you know, the ____ of ____ replies? when there's something like 1 of 6, I usually hit the 6 so I don't have to view the article and override my usual threshhold. I'm sure the servers will thank you too;)
Slashdot Mirror
I think you might have an inflated opinion of just how interesting you are to law enforcement agencies.
Ask Maher Arar just how interesting he thought he was to the US government. He's the Canadian citizen who was renditioned to Syria for over a year for interrogation about his coworker's brother, who was a terrorist. Take a look around you. How many people do you know that the government knows you know? How many people do they know? When the government is playing "six degrees of al qaeda" to find new bogeymen, are you so sure you're not "interesting"?
You have nothing to hide right? So you wouldn't mind if people came around and asked your boss questions about you, right? You wouldn't mind people listening in on your calls with your wife about when she's going to be home and whether the kids will let themselves in, right? You wouldn't mind people listening in on your conversations and negotiations about the future of your company, right? You wouldn't mind people reading your email and playing "six degrees of galaxyboy" to see what they can pin on you (don't think you're that interesting? Neither did Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who got "renditioned" to Syria for over a year because his coworker's brother was a terrorist). We haven't even gotten to people getting your credit card and bank account numbers yet.
Liberty isn't about doing illegal things and getting away with it. Liberty is about having basic rights that are rights for a reason, not just because they sound cool or are golly gee fun to have. Liberty is about people who obey the law not being harassed or investigated for a stupid reason or no reason at all. Finally liberty is about protecting us from people who would subvert the power of government, whether you believe that person is Bush or someone taking office in 3 years who would use the power Bush staked out for their own ends.
If you block everyone from learning how to make a bomb, someone will reinvent it.
Where then will be the hero who will disarm it and save the day, something which almost certainly requires knowlege of bomb construction?
So censorship is worse than killing people in your mind?
A man threatens to kill the woman he's holding hostage and is using her as a shield. You've got a gun, the training to use it, and a clear shot at his face. Is it wrong to take the shot?
maybe you should get your Laywer (yuck) to look into ways of seperating what a pt. is charged, and how much money is actualy transfered from the pt. to your business
Trust me, the insurance companies have more and yuckier lawyers. I could suggest they run some contract language by their lawyers and see what they think of charging more up front then automatically providing a 50% discount on services or something like that, perhaps even promoting it as a "sale" to attract patients. (One is actually looking at advertising such a thing to pick up some cash patients, and he'll probably be happy to try any suggestion that gets him a loophole through the contracts he relies on for his business now)
Otherwise, interesting ideas, I'll put them to my clients, though most of them seem to have their patient flow mostly under control (except for a couple of newbie doctors who think they can take on the world).
As for non-paying patients, the client I have with the most trouble with this is an OBGYN who finds that her patients are not just "lagging" in payments, they're going back to whatever country they came from and stiffing her on the several thousand dollar bill for the delivery. Or just moving across town and changing their name. They all go into collections, but these days the collection agency just doesn't give a good rate for difficult cases, thus cash up front.
Thats a different question. If the information is there and you cannot find it, then you look harder or find someone else who can find it. If it is far out of reach, you go to school, you study that field, you become an expert, and learn how to find it, or at least meet someone at a seminar that knows that piece of information, or at least where it can be found.
Censorship is not the opposite of Google.
This has nothing to do with access to information; that is a red herring
What I was referring to is what makes something "right" and something else "wrong". Are there things that are universally "right" and "wrong"? I proposed that censorship in the form of a mandatory block to information is universally wrong. At no time did I tell you to "shut up and not talk about it".
You tell me I should think about "many perspectives" however censorship can deny access to information regarding those other perspectives. Why then should I think about these "many perspectives"? Do you hold me to a higher standard than those facing censorship? Why?
I'd be too busy enjoying my end-of-the-world orgy to go door to door informing people that their time has come, however should anyone ask, I'd have no problem with telling them about it. They can then use the information to make an informed decision on what to do with their remaining time.
There is a difference between "not censoring" and "telling the world". To illustrate it (with what some might feel is an extreme), take child porn. Specifically, the project a few years back where people erased the children from the pictures and distributed the backgrounds in hopes that people would recognize the locations. To do this, someone had to have been able to obtain the child porn and look at it to erase the child. Permitting these people to access the child porn is not the same as handing out the child porn to everyone, nor is it the same as condoning the child porn.
No, because you would still have Word installed on your machine.
And unless you personally settled with the patent holder, you'd be infringing the patent if you continued to use it. Maybe you could get away with it, but then that still leaves "what's special about OSS"?
I build a similar widget for my own use (but never sell it) then I am not infringing your patent.
Patents protect the holder from people "practicing" that patent, not just selling it. There is generally understood to be an exemption for research, but using the patent to make money even if you're not selling the actual implementation of that patent is most definitely infringing it.
I don't understand why this is "special" for either OSS or SaaS.
If Microsoft Word infringed on patents and the patent holder refused to settle with Microsoft, and you relied on Microsoft Word, you're just as fucked as anyone using OSS or SaaS that got killed by patents.
Are they "wrong"? What makes ours "right"?
Interesting question. Why don't you do some research on various philosophical outlooks, and get back to us on that. While you're looking for information to make your decision, ask yourself what you'd do if you were unable to find the information you need in order to make your decision. How would you feel if you knew that information existed but you're not permitted to see it. Not because the owner of the information set a price for it that you couldn't afford, not because you didn't know where it was, but simply because someone else said so.
Killing people may or may not be evil. Putting them in small cells for the rest of their life may or may not be evil. Telling them that they are permitted to only have one child may or may not be evil. But denying people access to information so that they can make reasoned and informed decisions, what is that, if not evil?
It's evil to obey laws
What if the laws themselves are evil?
That makes it different from netflix how? Other than that the library charges less for its membership and has fewer titles?
The other route to sanity is genuine socialized medicine.
My "vision" for what it's worth is a matter of degrees. The problem today is that health insurance isn't. Everyone gets sick, and if you aren't, you probably still are seeing the doctor for checkups anyway. Unlike other forms of insurance, it's a guaranteed payout, and unlike life insurance, that payout begins immediately, not after decades of payments and interest. Health insurance literally is socalized medicine already, except enforced by corporations rather than governments. They essentially take from the (health)rich and give to the (health)poor.
Finishing the job and socializing the basic health of the population has a good chance at improving the situation. Corporations needn't feel left out, they can continue selling major medical insurance, and likely turn a pretty serious profit without charging insane prices for everyone to make sure that they can get their broken legs set or cancer treated. Major medical becomes like automotive insurance: everyone's a risk, but it's no longer a 100% risk. You look at their history and their lifestyle and decide on how much you want to charge them, if you want to take on that risk at all. You tell them "hey, lose 100 pounds and get off your fat lard ass and we'll charge you 10% less for not being a heart attack victim in waiting" or "You're in pretty good shape, but with this motorcycle racing thing, you getting into a wreck is simply a matter of time so if you go with us it's going to be a 50% copay on all of your broken bones."
require hudreds of thousands of acres of crops.
With the ability to create it from any plant matter, tens of millions of lawns in hundreds of thousands of subdivisions across the country stand ready for the signal. After all, if we didn't cut the lawn, we'd be evicted by the housing association, so the stuff might as well do something other than fill landfills.
I'll even do my part by using my father's old reel mower to maximize fuel efficiency.
If nothing else, Bethseda will have no problem recreating that one ST:TNG episode where parts of the ship were phasing in and out, and people were falling into the floors.
If the provider will be paid no matter what they charge, they will charge whatever they please. With costs so high, the only way to get service is through an insurance company, which guarantees payment.
HAHAHAHA
OK, I actually work with doctors here in the US, let me tell you how it really works:
Step 1: Every year, the AMA and the US Government create a list of all of the procedures you can possibly perform and bill for, these are called CPT codes (aka HCPCS Level I) and HCPCS Level II/III codes, respectively. The US government (Center for Medicare/Medicaid Services) assigns them a "relative value unit" measurement that basically says "this heart surgery is worth twice as much as this knee surgery, so the heart surgery will have two times the RVU as the knee surgery". Then they do a bunch of math to arrive at a dollar amount for each procedure or drug in each region of the country, based on the cost of living, scarcity of doctors, ruralness, and whatever else the government wants to meddle with. This generally becomes called the "Medicare Fee Schedule". It sets what a doctor will be paid for performing that procedure on a Medicare patient. The doctor is free to bill however much they want, but that number is what they'll be paid. Furthermore, Medicare specifically tells the doctor how much they're allowed to charge the patient (copay/coinsurance/deductible). Every year it changes, and in almost every case the numbers are lower than the last. As an aside, Medicare also determines which procedures match which diagnosises... you can't do heart surgery for athelete's foot, for instance.
Step 2: Insurance companies take these numbers and run with it. They establish their own fee schedules, and start shopping them around to doctors. For the biggest companies (Aetna, Cigna, United Healthcare, BCBS, and so on), doctors must contract with each insurance company in order to accept that insurance company's patients (smaller ones have the in-network vs. out-of-network distinction, and the doctors are paid less for being out-of-network, encouraging them to contract with those insurers as well). For 98% of these contracts, the Insurance Fee Schedule is derived as a percentage of Medicare's Fee Schedule. Usually it's around 115%, some higher. I have one client who actually dropped an insurance company because they wanted to revise their existing contract to 95% of Medicare's schedule. (have you ever had a doctor tell you they don't take your insurance?) For another 1.9%, the contract is for a Capitated contract (this almost always applies only to primary care, and is a small subset of their contracts), meaning that the insurance company sends them X patients, and pays them $Y per capita per time period, whether they see a patient 0, 1, or 50 times. The last 0.1% are the generous ones who will pay whatever they're billed, within reason, and possibly pending an audit to ensure that the charges are legit. Again, the doctor can bill whatever they want, and the insurance company will pay whatever they want. And again, the insurance company contract specifically tells the doctor what they can and cannot charge the patient.
But here's the kicker: A good number of these contracts also require that the doctor set their prices for uninsured patients within a certain range of what they pay. Almost all of these require that the doctor never charge an uninsured patient less than what the insurance company can pay them. After all, if uninsured patients can get cheap care, why would they pay the $700/month (the rate my coworker pays to insure his wife, should she become pregnant, or worse, become pregnant and develop gestational diabetes which pretty much makes you permanently uninsurable for the rest of your life, even if the diabetes goes away with the delivery as the majority of the cases do) to be insured against having to spend lots of money for medical care? The doctors can reject those contracts of course (meaning that they'll be cutting themselves out of a ve
Why?
1) Because older windows is limited to how much ram you can have?
2) Because 32 bit windows is limited to 4GB of process data space, a good chunk of that reserved for windows itself and adding more after that doesn't help in most cases?
3) Because the motherboard is already full of RAM and replacing it with a faster one with more slots would require buying a new processor, new motherboard, and completely new RAM anyway, especially if you switch to an athlon 64 and 64 bit XP to avoid #2?
Nobody's even mentioned "suspend to disk" with this thing. Resuming would probably be about as fast as waking the machine up from sleep. The SATA interface may be "slow" compared directly to RAM, but while you're waiting for everything else in the system to spin up, you've already got the system running.
The Guardian Gamesblog writes about a new Persuasive Games game called 'Disaffected'.
HTH, HAND.
I don't want to trade in my responsibility for my family's health for a little dubious security
So you'd rather have a company cut corners on your health to keep their stockholders happy? By the way, the HMO reviewed your case and decided that you're just too expensive to keep alive. Please shuffle over to the approved waiting area/pile of bodies and wait for the end.
At least the government's stated goal isn't to make money above all else. In the real world, they'd probably suck too, so I don't really have any answer other than a pipe dream of people ditching the whole materialistic thing, giving up million dollar mansions and driving up the prices of property in order to turn a profit and worrying more about their bling than solving problems.
Eh, his description is funky. I think he meant 4 sets of 2 mirrored drives, that are then striped. You could do it the other way, I guess, but that IS a lot of wasted space.
... and then mirrored. If a drive C fails, that entire mirror becomes useless since you can't mirror ABCD to ABD, making the state: ... and the next drive failure kills it, assuming that offline drives don't count. Some hardware raid systems will continue to mirror ABD, essentially converting it to RAID 10 on the fly.
... and then striped. If a drive fails only that drive is offline... ... if the remaining drive C fails, then the array is lost. However, any other drive could fail without destroying the array (in fact, up to three more, if you're lucky).
As for "extra redundancy" The difference between RAID 10 and RAID 01 is in the failure mode, not strictly in the redundancy.
In RAID 01, the data is stored like this:
[ABCD] - four drives striped
[ABCD] - four drives striped
[ABCD] - four drives striped
[XXXX] - four drives offline
In RAID 10, the data is stored like this:
[AA] - two drives mirrored
[BB] - two drives mirrored
[CC] - two drives mirrored
[DD] - two drives mirrored
[AA]
[BB]
[CX] - one drive offline
[DD]
Kind of hard to mess that up I've always thought.
You overestimate the stupidity of the lower end of the American voter. On the old systems, there were regularly cases where there would be two holes punched out or two marks made or other ridiculous errors.
Then you have the people running the election. If a guy doesn't mark the X straight and it looks more like a + or maybe a V, is that still counted as a vote? You might scoff, but that was basically the "hanging chad" argument in Florida: people thumping the rulebook and nitpicking the obvious for their benefit.
ATM mistakes may happen all the time, but they're the result of random bugs, and as another poster mentioned, mindless worms with dumb luck. If you have any cases where someone sat down and hacked an ATM into giving them all of its money (either by attacking it directly or simply working out which sequence of bugs lead to an unrecorded transaction and repeating this until it ran dry), let me know so that I'd change my position, but in these cases, BBV and other challengers sat down and hacked an election into giving them all of its votes, not just one or two incorrect transactions. The other poster mentioned that ATMs are hard to attack because they're not on the internet. If Diebold could make ATMs work securely despite whatever flaws by simply putting them on a completely separate network, why are voting machines vulnerable?
Hm, while I'm at it, can we have the reply count links back, you know, the ____ of ____ replies? when there's something like 1 of 6, I usually hit the 6 so I don't have to view the article and override my usual threshhold. I'm sure the servers will thank you too ;)