How is this "throttling"? All T-Mobile is pointing out is that bandwidth is a limited resource. If you want more of it, you need to pay for it. How is that any different than the days when we moved from 56K dial up to broadband?
If you reward based on irrelevant factors, you will be overtaken by a competitor who rewards based on relevant ones. Is there anything more irrelevant to the performance of a worker than what color their skin happens to be?
Thanks for the link to Appel's blog, that is pretty interesting. The seals we use in Virginia are not adhesive, they are pull-tight plastic that go through two physical loops. We seal the compartment to the flash drive on the scanner, the case on the scanner, and the locking rails that connect the scanner to the top of the ballot box. But, as Appel points out, any time you are leaving equipment unattended, you run the risk of someone gaining access to the machine, defeating the seal, and making mischief. It's an interesting problem, because it is definitely easier to distribute the scanning equipment to the precincts ahead of time. But maybe that is too much of a risk. Hmm.
Millions of people vote at once, and the results have to be counted, certified, and then shared with the national media within hours. Machine-counting is the only way to do that. Would you trust human counters to count millions of pieces of paper reliably? I wouldn't. People are terrible at repetitive tasks. But ANY machine can be hacked. The scanners of course have source code, and operating systems with drivers and all the rest of the threat surfaces of any general-use computer. In Virginia, the scanners don't have hardware network interfaces at all, so that removes one category of threat (but only one.)
Truly securing vote counting is a non-trivial task, and takes a pretty deep defense-in-depth approach to do well.
I am a poll worker in Virginia. From the very scant details on this particular hack, the apparent claim is that you can vote more than once by "resetting" the machine while in the booth and not touching any equipment. Well, if it is even technically possible to pull this off, within an hour we'd know that the votes in that precinct were off, because we do an hourly audit of the of the number of people who check in to vote vs. the number of votes that are cast. When we are off by even a count of 1 it is a major event, and triggers an immediate investigation. Any kind of mass attempt to defraud the count would be caught immediately. And, nearly 2 million people are eligible to vote in Virginia, so you'd have to pull off an enormous hack across multiple precincts. You'd most certainly wind up canceling the election, not swaying it.
Virginia does not use direct-recording voting machines any more, we use machine-counted paper ballots. We decertified all our direct-recording machines two elections ago when it was discovered that in a couple of precincts the wireless local area network between machines were running with default administrative passwords. The scanning equipment we use is not networkable, and it is sealed with numbered seals. I do not believe it is possible to even do the hack suggested by the article any more.
Hello? You want to let the federal government control the process by which its own executives are chosen? Hasn't anyone ever done any game theory, AT ALL?
As soon as I saw that real consequences started happening because of the DNC hack, my first thought was, "Hmm, well, some consumer-grade Exchange box sitting on the end of a Comcast connection running without an SSL certificate for two months would be a piece of cake compared to the DNC's infrastructure. Somebody's for sure got those deleted emails." Heck, even Comey himself testified that the FBI was able to reconstitute thousands of work-related emails. Maybe we don't need the Russkies or the script kiddies to give us the emails, our own FBI could fork them over.
Regardless, yeah, I'd like to see those emails. I think 30,000 emails about yoga would be interesting.
I had exactly the same reaction. Character? None. Background? She married Bill, carpetbagged her way into a New York senate seat, and got paid a bazillion dollars for "making speeches" to one percenters. Results? A middle east in flames.
You're asking the wrong question. The question that must be asked is how do you expect the federal government to independently audit an election for federal office? That's not independent. Do you ever wonder why the federal government doesn't just run elections? What would the federal government gain by being able to control who gets elected? Everything. Which is why we don't let them do that. Not even the states run the elections. Elections are run by volunteers.
You can't let the government audit the vote, because it would be auditing itself. You can't have an audit without independence.
Fortunately, we already have the answer to this problem: votes are counted by voter-volunteers, not by government employees or politicians or appointees. Were you aware of that? Every single vote that is counted is done by one of your fellow citizens. It's hens guarding the hen house, not foxes.
In Virginia, voter fraud is a felony with a penalty of up to 10 years in state prison, or up to 5 years in a local jail plus a $2,500 fine. Do the math on that 10 times, and get back to me on how frequently you think your scenario happens here.
Look, the people who run elections are not stupid. We have an opt-in registration system where you have to prove identity and residency to even be allowed to cast a ballot. We check everyone showing up to vote against a list of registered voters.
No doubt some people are able to slip through the cracks, and especially in states with lax voter laws, those cracks can be pretty big. But voter fraud is not a high-value crime. Huge risk, for what reward? $20 bucks? Against 10 years in jail?
Please do not go to a Department of Motor Vehicles office to register to vote. Go to your local Board of Elections Registrar instead. The DMV just forwards whatever it gets to the Registrar, because it is not responsible for registering voters.
You need to volunteer as a poll worker before you opine any further on this topic. The system does not work the way you imagine, at all. Literally every scenario you describe is impossible, because the people who count your votes are not idiots.
For example, do you know that votes are counted by volunteers in this country? Did you know that voting procedures are written by volunteers, too, and that the authority to run elections isn't even vested in a locality or a state, but in volunteer-staffed local and state boards of elections? There are a few paid administrative people who run the back office, but your votes are counted by your fellow citizens, not by employees, and certainly not by political parties.
You think for a moment that we're going to try and make voting more difficult and less open? That's ridiculous. And insulting. You think there are smoke-filled back rooms where big-wig politicos "decide" everything? Maybe in a B movie. Not in real life.
I have been counting votes for about 10 years now. The procedures we follow in Virginia are intelligent and comprehensive. There are multiple, simultaneous contemporaneous records of everything we do, and everything is done in the open where the voting public can see it. I have read so many wild scenarios where someone opens up a voting machine during the vote and inserts some circuit board, etc. and that's all just complete BS. What, you don't think we have seals on our equipment? You don't think we keep them where everyone can see them, precisely so that kind of thing can't be done?
Google maps is pretty good, I'll admit. But their driving directions, don't get me started!
Why isn't there an "easy" routing option? Just yesterday maps sent me to an interstate exit going in the opposite direction with an immediate u-turn, instead of the normal, right-hand exit. Maybe the u-turn was a few seconds faster, but it's about 200% more dangerous, it's confusing, and just maddening beyond belief.
Another time, maps took me off a paved road onto a gravel road, over a one-lane bridge almost axle-deep in mud next to a cattle yard, onto a dirt road, and then: back on to the same paved road again, a quarter-mile down the road! The routing algorithm had basically just cut out a bend in the road. It was so outrageous that I imagined Google engineers were actually trying to punk us -- hey, Larry, look, I can't believe that guy actually took the cow path!
OK, don't be evil, I get that. But also, don't make your customers want to throttle your apps with their bare hands.
Facebook corporate does not think of your data as belonging to you, it thinks of it as belonging to them. Your posts. Your photos. Your conversations. Whatever you allow its application to hoover. It is constantly changing and expanding the list of things it knows about you, and constantly changes your controls over how that list is filtered, so you have to be hyper-aware of how it is working, and take proactive steps repeatedly to have what little control over the reuse of your data they allow.
Ultimately, to play in their playground is to give them blanket permission to reuse anything you say or do in that playground. As a corporate practice, they clearly feel no personal obligation to you for your data. They place restrictions on how you and others like you can use your data, but no restrictions on themselves.
That being the case, one should be very sure that the exchange is a good one. Facebook gives you a way to share your online life with others. In exchange, it can reuse the facts of your life in any way it sees fit, including monetizing it. Recording your conversations to feed you better advertisements? Of course. How is that any different from recording your posts? It isn't.
Personally, I don't mind a retailer like Amazon having information related to transactions, but I am careful to not use them to make private transactions. There is no need for them to know that. I do mind a Facebook having all my personal facts, because first, they are ALL private as far as I'm concerned, and second, I already have a wide variety of ways to communicate with my friends. I don't need to give up my life's details to a hugely leaky public corporation who has no care for me as a person.
Hey, "deep learning" is all about pattern-matching, and what is music except a bunch of patterns! Let's have machines repeat back the patterns we use! Look -- it's artificial intelligence!
*sigh*
Yes, music IS just a bunch of patterns: patterns that evoke very specific emotions. You can't just string 'em together like popcorn, they go together for a reason. Listening to this is just painful, like watching a person try to walk on a broken leg with the bone still sticking out.
I don't think right to lifers are shy about talking about religion, where do you get that? The idea of human life being "sacred" -- a religious term, meaning set apart/dedicated to God -- is common in the movement. As to whether or not it is possible to create "synthetic" life, I would point out that it that isn't at all what is being discussed here. What the scientists will be doing is more like "directed" life, using the framework of existing biological systems to manipulate and direct growth. Manipulating growth is something mankind has been doing since the dawn of history, although obviously not so directly at the cellular level. God created everything the scientists are using, including the scientists themselves, so there's not really a religious question that has to be answered.
Nothing in that article explains why rats -- even wild ones -- are ALSO getting more obese. Gotta be something in the food supply, or triggered by something in the food supply. Rats don't diet.
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So I was able to create my very long, secure, easy to remember password. Yay.
How is this "throttling"? All T-Mobile is pointing out is that bandwidth is a limited resource. If you want more of it, you need to pay for it. How is that any different than the days when we moved from 56K dial up to broadband?
If you reward based on irrelevant factors, you will be overtaken by a competitor who rewards based on relevant ones. Is there anything more irrelevant to the performance of a worker than what color their skin happens to be?
Thanks for the link to Appel's blog, that is pretty interesting. The seals we use in Virginia are not adhesive, they are pull-tight plastic that go through two physical loops. We seal the compartment to the flash drive on the scanner, the case on the scanner, and the locking rails that connect the scanner to the top of the ballot box. But, as Appel points out, any time you are leaving equipment unattended, you run the risk of someone gaining access to the machine, defeating the seal, and making mischief. It's an interesting problem, because it is definitely easier to distribute the scanning equipment to the precincts ahead of time. But maybe that is too much of a risk. Hmm.
Millions of people vote at once, and the results have to be counted, certified, and then shared with the national media within hours. Machine-counting is the only way to do that. Would you trust human counters to count millions of pieces of paper reliably? I wouldn't. People are terrible at repetitive tasks. But ANY machine can be hacked. The scanners of course have source code, and operating systems with drivers and all the rest of the threat surfaces of any general-use computer. In Virginia, the scanners don't have hardware network interfaces at all, so that removes one category of threat (but only one.)
Truly securing vote counting is a non-trivial task, and takes a pretty deep defense-in-depth approach to do well.
I am a poll worker in Virginia. From the very scant details on this particular hack, the apparent claim is that you can vote more than once by "resetting" the machine while in the booth and not touching any equipment. Well, if it is even technically possible to pull this off, within an hour we'd know that the votes in that precinct were off, because we do an hourly audit of the of the number of people who check in to vote vs. the number of votes that are cast. When we are off by even a count of 1 it is a major event, and triggers an immediate investigation. Any kind of mass attempt to defraud the count would be caught immediately. And, nearly 2 million people are eligible to vote in Virginia, so you'd have to pull off an enormous hack across multiple precincts. You'd most certainly wind up canceling the election, not swaying it.
Virginia does not use direct-recording voting machines any more, we use machine-counted paper ballots. We decertified all our direct-recording machines two elections ago when it was discovered that in a couple of precincts the wireless local area network between machines were running with default administrative passwords. The scanning equipment we use is not networkable, and it is sealed with numbered seals. I do not believe it is possible to even do the hack suggested by the article any more.
Hello? You want to let the federal government control the process by which its own executives are chosen? Hasn't anyone ever done any game theory, AT ALL?
Somebody famous, I think? His name was Bill something-or-other.
But for millennia it was very hard to get. No longer.
Fascinating, I had never heard of the utopian mouse universe before.
Porn ruins your ability to have normal romantic and sexual relationships, because it destroys attainable expectations. Porn is poison for the mind.
As soon as I saw that real consequences started happening because of the DNC hack, my first thought was, "Hmm, well, some consumer-grade Exchange box sitting on the end of a Comcast connection running without an SSL certificate for two months would be a piece of cake compared to the DNC's infrastructure. Somebody's for sure got those deleted emails." Heck, even Comey himself testified that the FBI was able to reconstitute thousands of work-related emails. Maybe we don't need the Russkies or the script kiddies to give us the emails, our own FBI could fork them over.
Regardless, yeah, I'd like to see those emails. I think 30,000 emails about yoga would be interesting.
I had exactly the same reaction. Character? None. Background? She married Bill, carpetbagged her way into a New York senate seat, and got paid a bazillion dollars for "making speeches" to one percenters. Results? A middle east in flames.
What? Boy, I sure wouldn't go with that list!
You're asking the wrong question. The question that must be asked is how do you expect the federal government to independently audit an election for federal office? That's not independent. Do you ever wonder why the federal government doesn't just run elections? What would the federal government gain by being able to control who gets elected? Everything. Which is why we don't let them do that. Not even the states run the elections. Elections are run by volunteers.
You can't let the government audit the vote, because it would be auditing itself. You can't have an audit without independence.
Fortunately, we already have the answer to this problem: votes are counted by voter-volunteers, not by government employees or politicians or appointees. Were you aware of that? Every single vote that is counted is done by one of your fellow citizens. It's hens guarding the hen house, not foxes.
In Virginia, voter fraud is a felony with a penalty of up to 10 years in state prison, or up to 5 years in a local jail plus a $2,500 fine. Do the math on that 10 times, and get back to me on how frequently you think your scenario happens here.
Look, the people who run elections are not stupid. We have an opt-in registration system where you have to prove identity and residency to even be allowed to cast a ballot. We check everyone showing up to vote against a list of registered voters.
No doubt some people are able to slip through the cracks, and especially in states with lax voter laws, those cracks can be pretty big. But voter fraud is not a high-value crime. Huge risk, for what reward? $20 bucks? Against 10 years in jail?
I hope no one is that stupid.
Please do not go to a Department of Motor Vehicles office to register to vote. Go to your local Board of Elections Registrar instead. The DMV just forwards whatever it gets to the Registrar, because it is not responsible for registering voters.
You need to volunteer as a poll worker before you opine any further on this topic. The system does not work the way you imagine, at all. Literally every scenario you describe is impossible, because the people who count your votes are not idiots.
For example, do you know that votes are counted by volunteers in this country? Did you know that voting procedures are written by volunteers, too, and that the authority to run elections isn't even vested in a locality or a state, but in volunteer-staffed local and state boards of elections? There are a few paid administrative people who run the back office, but your votes are counted by your fellow citizens, not by employees, and certainly not by political parties.
You think for a moment that we're going to try and make voting more difficult and less open? That's ridiculous. And insulting. You think there are smoke-filled back rooms where big-wig politicos "decide" everything? Maybe in a B movie. Not in real life.
I have been counting votes for about 10 years now. The procedures we follow in Virginia are intelligent and comprehensive. There are multiple, simultaneous contemporaneous records of everything we do, and everything is done in the open where the voting public can see it. I have read so many wild scenarios where someone opens up a voting machine during the vote and inserts some circuit board, etc. and that's all just complete BS. What, you don't think we have seals on our equipment? You don't think we keep them where everyone can see them, precisely so that kind of thing can't be done?
Go volunteer, and learn how we do it.
Google maps is pretty good, I'll admit. But their driving directions, don't get me started!
Why isn't there an "easy" routing option? Just yesterday maps sent me to an interstate exit going in the opposite direction with an immediate u-turn, instead of the normal, right-hand exit. Maybe the u-turn was a few seconds faster, but it's about 200% more dangerous, it's confusing, and just maddening beyond belief.
Another time, maps took me off a paved road onto a gravel road, over a one-lane bridge almost axle-deep in mud next to a cattle yard, onto a dirt road, and then: back on to the same paved road again, a quarter-mile down the road! The routing algorithm had basically just cut out a bend in the road. It was so outrageous that I imagined Google engineers were actually trying to punk us -- hey, Larry, look, I can't believe that guy actually took the cow path!
OK, don't be evil, I get that. But also, don't make your customers want to throttle your apps with their bare hands.
Facebook corporate does not think of your data as belonging to you, it thinks of it as belonging to them. Your posts. Your photos. Your conversations. Whatever you allow its application to hoover. It is constantly changing and expanding the list of things it knows about you, and constantly changes your controls over how that list is filtered, so you have to be hyper-aware of how it is working, and take proactive steps repeatedly to have what little control over the reuse of your data they allow.
Ultimately, to play in their playground is to give them blanket permission to reuse anything you say or do in that playground. As a corporate practice, they clearly feel no personal obligation to you for your data. They place restrictions on how you and others like you can use your data, but no restrictions on themselves.
That being the case, one should be very sure that the exchange is a good one. Facebook gives you a way to share your online life with others. In exchange, it can reuse the facts of your life in any way it sees fit, including monetizing it. Recording your conversations to feed you better advertisements? Of course. How is that any different from recording your posts? It isn't.
Personally, I don't mind a retailer like Amazon having information related to transactions, but I am careful to not use them to make private transactions. There is no need for them to know that. I do mind a Facebook having all my personal facts, because first, they are ALL private as far as I'm concerned, and second, I already have a wide variety of ways to communicate with my friends. I don't need to give up my life's details to a hugely leaky public corporation who has no care for me as a person.
Hey, "deep learning" is all about pattern-matching, and what is music except a bunch of patterns! Let's have machines repeat back the patterns we use! Look -- it's artificial intelligence!
*sigh*
Yes, music IS just a bunch of patterns: patterns that evoke very specific emotions. You can't just string 'em together like popcorn, they go together for a reason. Listening to this is just painful, like watching a person try to walk on a broken leg with the bone still sticking out.
I don't think right to lifers are shy about talking about religion, where do you get that? The idea of human life being "sacred" -- a religious term, meaning set apart/dedicated to God -- is common in the movement. As to whether or not it is possible to create "synthetic" life, I would point out that it that isn't at all what is being discussed here. What the scientists will be doing is more like "directed" life, using the framework of existing biological systems to manipulate and direct growth. Manipulating growth is something mankind has been doing since the dawn of history, although obviously not so directly at the cellular level. God created everything the scientists are using, including the scientists themselves, so there's not really a religious question that has to be answered.
Nothing in that article explains why rats -- even wild ones -- are ALSO getting more obese. Gotta be something in the food supply, or triggered by something in the food supply. Rats don't diet.
The idea of a hover platform to provide guidance to ground-based robots would seem to make sense. Would be pretty noisy, tho.
Sounds like it makes sense in Alaska where the water is presumably already cold during the winter. http://www.industrialheatpumps...