If it took this long to create the Source engine, maybe they can crank out a sequel without writing the next generation engine -- more levels, more content, more story, maybe a few tweaks. Like they did with HL: Opposing Force, but maybe a little longer.
Amazon is no longer listing them for MSRP, but the Amazon Marketplace prices are up to $350. *This* kind of behavior is what causes supplied to run out. It's not that people can't find them for Christmas presents, it's that people are snarfing them up to scalp on Amazon and eBay.
I had asked the same thing on another Slashdot DS story. Here in north Alabama, I can't find any stores that have any in stock. The Wal-Marts and Target stores got about 6 each and were sold out by midday Sunday. A local Rhino store had two left at closing time yesterday, but had sold both of them by 10:30 this morning.
There is a definite run on them here. The EB stores got enough to cover their pre-orders, but no extras at all. Best Buy got 16 and sold them all in an hour. No stores I talked to had any concrete dates when they would get more, but all expected at least one more shipment before Christmas.
You know how everyone argues about e-books? Whether they cause eye strain, or how much better an ink-on-paper book looks/feels/smells?
I don't think this makes as much difference to kids. My daughter (13), my son (10) and one of their friends (12) are all hooked on reading e-books on Palm devices. They are used to spending hours looking at a GB screen, so scrolling through a Harry Potter book on a Palm is a natural activity for them.
So, I think there ought to be an real e-book reader app for the Game Boys. I've bought the GB movie thing from Lik-Sang and it supports.txt file reading, but doesn't have book marks, so it's not terribly practical. Does anyone know of a program that supports.pdf, MobiPocket, PalmReader, or HTML e-books that can be burned on a GB cartridge?
OK, it seems that every store and mail order shop is already sold out, but a few are taking orders to ship when they get new units.
Does anyone know if this is an "artificial" shortage to build up "Tickle Me Elmo" type hysteria leading into Christmas, or is Nintendo really having trouble producing enough units for the Christmas season?
I missed my chance to pick on up at the local Target. I was trying to buy two (one for each of my kids), but when I got to Target at 1:30PM on Sunday, a woman in front of my bought the last one they had.
I'm not buying one from an eBay or z-Shop scalper, but I'm wondering if I should try to place a "send me one when you get them" online order, or just chill and wait for the local Wal-Marts to get a few hundred on the day after Thanksgiving (or the week before Christmas).
This is a good thing. I'm always in awe of the stupidity of most criminals. Maybe more of them will watch these type of shows and think twice about doing what they were planning on doing. If nothing else, a low-IQ hood who plans some elaborate way of evading CSI style techniques is probably *more* likely to screw up and get caught.
Haven't got HL2 yet, but the very best thing about the original HL over Doom, Quake, et al was the story progression and meaningfulness of the puzzles.
Early ID games were kill everything, find a few hidden area, look for keys that someone hid in stupid places to unlock the exits. Repeat for three levels, then fight a boss. Later games had great level designs and wonderful eye-candy appeal, but the gameplay and "story" were the same.
Half Life was like starring in a really exciting (cheesy, but exciting) action SF movie. Getting by the big tentacled monster that responded to sound, finally finding the first RPG to take down one of the helicopters in the desert, finding hidden and weird passages that actually got you somewhere useful instead of just uncovering a weapons cache, watching the pre-programmed sequences instead of getting shown animated cut-scenes that didn't look like the rest of the gameplay. All of these things made it very memorable.
And that's just the single player mode. Even before the great mods started coming out, those laser trip mines were really cool. We even found that you could put them on a wall in a stairstep and climb to otherwise inaccessible areas.
Some of it usually has to do with visual realism and how much you are into the game.
I've occasionally gotten motion sick playing HL:1, but never did playing Doom, Quake, or Unreal.
My all time stomach churner was Descent II -- even with the (now) chunky graphics, that game would get me motion sick all the time. I tried to load it out of nostalgia a few weeks ago and couldn't get it to work on XP. I found a few hints and hack sites, but it seemed like too much trouble. That's a game I would like to see with a new graphics engine. Is there anything similar?
While porn is usually brought up as what drives the acceptance of new technology, games have to be a close second.
Aside from the issues of selling even low power lasers to kids (i.e., cheap laser pointers warning that they are not toys and shouldn't be sold to kids), wouldn't it be easy to use a cheap red laser diode to make a "game console" that would let you play Asteroids, Battle Zone, or Missle Command type games on your wall (or on the side of your house 20' high)?
Or, as others have joked about, just a simple scrolling message display like those spin around your head segmented LED displays so you can "tag" messages in public places?
You might have a hard time getting them carried at your local Radio Shack or Best Buy, but what do you bet that you can order them from international online stores soon?
Did I just blow my chances at a multi-million dollar patent again?:-)
Another thing to realize is that there aren't just two choices: Extreme Urban or Hick Town.
I live in Huntsville, Alabama which has a thriving high tech industry and it is a medium sized southern town with lots of suburbs and few big city amenities: nice restaurants, sports (albeit minor league), colleges, a symphony, an opera company, a nice art gallery, a club scene (albeit not a great one), libraries, book stores, etc. We also have very little traffic, nice neighborhoods, good schools, cheap houses, and low property taxes. Broadband internet is available from 2 or 3 different sources anywhere in the city.
If you want to live "in the country", you can buy a 100 acre farm within about a 20 minute commute to any business in the city. Or you can buy a 3000 square foot house on a nice treed lot for around $200K (or less).
Much smaller database of crawled, high-profile sites yields more relevant search results for simple queries (MSN Search).
Huge database of crawled sites, including lot of semi-obscure ones yields a greater depth of information, but may require refinement of search terms (Google).
I rarely search Google with a single word search unless I am looking for the home page of a product or project. As a matter of fact, I usually free-associate on a topic and search for 5 or 6 words (or more) then broaden my search if I don't find what I wanted to start with.
As the message below this one states, the QCast SW was sold to Gameshark -- I don't know its long term future or if it is even still being supported. I picked mine up at Best Buy for $10! Haven't tried it yet.
I've been looking at this a replacement/upgrade from my Hauppage MediaMVP, but the consumer reviews (and the online support forum flames) have scared me away from it.
Any problems with yours? Media compatibility OK? Are you using it wirelessly? How is the web browsing?
Thinkgeek has this for $149 (after rebate) and there is a wireless keyboard for it for ~$30.
A true geek is never happy with their current setup and I know mine could use some improvement, but for the record:
I was too lazy to run Cat5 downstairs (explaination below), so my downstairs Panasonic HDTV (projection) has my cable modem and 802.11g router by it. I have a Hauppage MediaMVP connected to the TV and 5.1 surround sound system and wired into the wireless router. I had three choices -- run cable from my upstairs computer, use a wireless bridge (I was too cheap to buy one), or go this route. Actually, I'm happy with the wireless hub here since it gives me good coverage on the front porch, kitchen, library, and back deck when I'm using my laptop.
Upstairs in my computer room/study I have a modest desktop machine with an ATI TV tuner card running Beyond TV. The machine has 200+ GB of disk space. My kids use this as a computer as well as a TV. I use Beyond TV's PVR software to schedule recordings which I can then watch on the computer or stream to the MediaMVP downstairs on the real TV. I can also access my MP3 collection through MediaMVP and play on the stereo system, as well as listen to internet radio stations. Note that while the MediaMVP is cabled to the router, my media files are accessed wirelessly from my PC.
I'm reasonably happy with the MediaMVP and with Beyond TV. Beyond TV lets me remotely set recordings through Snapstream.com, which is nice for a no service contract site. There are some hacks which I have not explored that allow you some web access (weather and news tickers) and the ability to control and set recordings through the MediaMVP, but I haven't explored them yet.
I recently upgraded Beyond TV and found that while the features and interface are improved, it is less responsive than it used to be. I have an ATI TV-Wonder VE (Value Edition) which doesn't have a hardware mpeg encoder and I think that is the slowdown -- I'm going to upgrade tuners and see what happens.
I can also access my video, audio, and pictures (as well as watch live TV) through a web browser on my laptop anywhere in the house.
What I don't like:
My daughter is an iTunes fanatic and I can't play non-WMP DRM content through the MediaMVP, so I have to download, burn to CD, then rip to MP3 (which I usually do anyway so I can use my Rio MP3 player).
I want to schedule recordings through my TV. Hacks may exist for this, but they seem buggy. I can use my laptop downstairs, but that is the long way around.
200 GB of disk space gives me a pretty good record time, but I need to set up a "click and burn" solution for backing up shows I want to keep to DVD-R or SVCD (which is about the quality I record the shows at -- they are good enough to watch, but obviously not DVD, or even cable broadcast quality).
I really want digital cable or dish satellite for the HDTV broadcasts, but throwing in multiple set-top boxes with external tuners bugs me. I've already got three TVs and a computer hooked up to cable, and on my TV I've got a DVD player, the MediaMVP, a VHS VCR, and, occassionally, a PS2, so it's already a wiring and remote control nightmare. I have expanded basic analog cable (no pay channels) so I don't have any set top boxes in the mix.
Finally, I picked up a QCast disk for my PS2 and I'm going to experiment with it to turn my other upstairs TV/video game area into a media center. If the quality is good, I might consider permanently moving the PS2 and replacing the MediaMVP with it, but I'm not holding my breath.
Oh yeah, I also just ordered a GBA video player for the kids. We've got a portable DVD player, but my son keeps wanting a Video Now or Juicebox player and I refuse to spend the money for a device which only plays proprietary media. The video player (ordered from Lik Sang) lets you downconvert a number of different formats to a format that you can copy to a Compact Flash card and watch on the GBA -- also supports music, JPGs, TXT file "ebooks" and (with a flash upgrade) a quasi-legal NES emulator.
Well, coming from someone who has stood in line for movie tickets and seen midnight showings on opening day (SW: Episode I *blush*), I really should criticize anyone, but I did think it odd that the EB store in the mall had a line out the door yesterday to pre-order and that the mall entrances were opened specially at midnight for people to come by and pick up their games.
Now, if there were a shortage (real or created), I could see this, but I stopped by Target on the way to work to pick up a few things and there was a big stack of Halo 2 right there at the door. Assuming the stock clerks were on their toes, the fanboys at EB could just as easily went to the Wal-Mart Supercenter at midnight and avoided the hassle, right?
Well, as a measure, he didn't publicly *claim* victory even when it was obvious that he had won and instead gratiously waited for Kerry to concede before doing so.
I assume that it means that the Democrat's will not pursue legal arguments for recounts or pour over the individual details of the provisional ballots. If I understand the system correctly, then at some point the Ohio legislature will appoint the electors and then it will be all over.
I don't know if it would be in the short term good or not, but I think that all states should at least do a statistical sampling of all provisional votes since I understand that they are often never counted or processed if they have not statistical chance of influencing the election. Having historial data, however, would make it easier in the future to figure their proposed impact.
Interestingly in this election, several of the pre-election polls on both sides bullseyed the election results, but the exit polls were wildly off. Of course, if you look at contested states like Ohio, or even "non-contested" states like Massachusetts, you can see that an exit poll in Cincinatti or Boston would certainly not be reflective of the state as a whole.
That's not what the parent poster asked. I can stand out in my backyard with a shotgun to defend my property from dragons with a 100% success rate in repelling dragons, but that doesn't mean there are any.
So, again, has anyone witnessed any attempts at voter intimidation?
Not if it involves moving to California (I like CA, I just don't want to move).
Anyway, I see the validity of the question because I end up interviewing a lot of people with "real world" programming experience, often self-taught, or people with math or business degrees who "took some programming classes". Many of these people can be sharp coders, but they often have never taken any formal CS classes in algorithms, data structures, discrete math, etc. It's not uncommon for these people to be able to write thousands of lines of workmanlike code, but get a deer in headlights look when someone starts talking about n-Trees, graph traversals, doubly-linked lists, etc.
I haven't used pointers in so long, I would have to look up some of the syntax (embarassing as that may sound), but I know I could sketch out the algorithms for pointer-based linked lists quickly. I designed an electric tracing module for our product that creates an n-tree of conductor segments that is transformed into a binary tree (child-child-* -> child-sibling) with full parenting with three electical phases represented by different sets of linkages and all stored as a sorted array of structures (where the pointers are actually array indices). To trace up or down a circuit, you can do a binary search for the start segment, then quickly walk the tree up or down by phase. This design made me real appreciative of my algorithms and data structures classes (and the textbooks for them that I still had on my bookshelf).
Alabama, rightly so in many cases, gets a bad rap for being a backward state, but after reading all of the horrible stories about weird voting machines, [Democratic|Republican] "challenges", disorganized staff, etc. from around the country, I'd like to share my experience...
I drove by my polling place (a suburban neighborhood church) at 7:30 and the line was around the building, so I went on to work. I returned at around 12:30 and the line was more reasonable.
I waited in line for about twenty minutes before I got to the registration table. I showed them my driver's license and voter registration card. They looked up my registration on a form-fed printout of the registration lists and crossed my name out with a yellow highlighter and ruler and handed me a slip of paper. I walked to the next table, gave them the slip of paper and they wrote my ballot number on it, made me sign two side-by-side registers (one printed, one "signed") and gave me the corresponding numbered ballot and a Sharpie marker.
I took it to a privacy cubicle and completed it by connecting the very clear and well-aligned arrows beside the candidates and options of my choice with a big, fat, black line (no possibility of ambiguity unless you are a total idiot). I checked over the ballot, then walked over to the voting machine and fed it in. A beep and a green light told me immediately that all of my votes were registered unambiguously and the paper record of the vote went into a locked tray inside the machine. They gave me a "I voted" sticker and I was on my way.
My only gripe? There are two lines (clearly marked, BTW) for people whose last names start with A-L or M-Z. Everytime I've voted here, the A-L line has, at most, 5 people in in while the M-Z snakes out the door. Unless 'M' is the real clincher, it wouldn't be too hard to split the alphabet to more evenly distribute the lines. If 'M' *is* the culpret, they could even do A-Mi and Mo-Z, but that would probably confuse the moron element.
Why can backward Alabama (or at least our precinct in Huntsville -- can't speak for the rest of the state) get it right while the rest of country is awash in touch screens, mechanical dinosaurs, butterfly ballots, hanging chads, charcoal on tree bark, or whatever else they are forced to use? What is so damned disenfranchising about requiring proof of ID? How hard can it possibly be to cross-check voter registration lists?
Slashdot Mirror
If it took this long to create the Source engine, maybe they can crank out a sequel without writing the next generation engine -- more levels, more content, more story, maybe a few tweaks. Like they did with HL: Opposing Force, but maybe a little longer.
Amazon is no longer listing them for MSRP, but the Amazon Marketplace prices are up to $350. *This* kind of behavior is what causes supplied to run out. It's not that people can't find them for Christmas presents, it's that people are snarfing them up to scalp on Amazon and eBay.
I had asked the same thing on another Slashdot DS story. Here in north Alabama, I can't find any stores that have any in stock. The Wal-Marts and Target stores got about 6 each and were sold out by midday Sunday. A local Rhino store had two left at closing time yesterday, but had sold both of them by 10:30 this morning.
There is a definite run on them here. The EB stores got enough to cover their pre-orders, but no extras at all. Best Buy got 16 and sold them all in an hour. No stores I talked to had any concrete dates when they would get more, but all expected at least one more shipment before Christmas.
You know how everyone argues about e-books? Whether they cause eye strain, or how much better an ink-on-paper book looks/feels/smells?
.txt file reading, but doesn't have book marks, so it's not terribly practical. Does anyone know of a program that supports .pdf, MobiPocket, PalmReader, or HTML e-books that can be burned on a GB cartridge?
I don't think this makes as much difference to kids. My daughter (13), my son (10) and one of their friends (12) are all hooked on reading e-books on Palm devices. They are used to spending hours looking at a GB screen, so scrolling through a Harry Potter book on a Palm is a natural activity for them.
So, I think there ought to be an real e-book reader app for the Game Boys. I've bought the GB movie thing from Lik-Sang and it supports
OK, it seems that every store and mail order shop is already sold out, but a few are taking orders to ship when they get new units.
Does anyone know if this is an "artificial" shortage to build up "Tickle Me Elmo" type hysteria leading into Christmas, or is Nintendo really having trouble producing enough units for the Christmas season?
I missed my chance to pick on up at the local Target. I was trying to buy two (one for each of my kids), but when I got to Target at 1:30PM on Sunday, a woman in front of my bought the last one they had.
I'm not buying one from an eBay or z-Shop scalper, but I'm wondering if I should try to place a "send me one when you get them" online order, or just chill and wait for the local Wal-Marts to get a few hundred on the day after Thanksgiving (or the week before Christmas).
Army of Darkness was the first thing that came to my mind when I heard about the Sears/K-Mart merger.
I'm not sure if you were serious or just poking fun at copyright, but in case you were, you evidently haven't seen this:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/cdrom/
This is a good thing. I'm always in awe of the stupidity of most criminals. Maybe more of them will watch these type of shows and think twice about doing what they were planning on doing. If nothing else, a low-IQ hood who plans some elaborate way of evading CSI style techniques is probably *more* likely to screw up and get caught.
Haven't got HL2 yet, but the very best thing about the original HL over Doom, Quake, et al was the story progression and meaningfulness of the puzzles.
Early ID games were kill everything, find a few hidden area, look for keys that someone hid in stupid places to unlock the exits. Repeat for three levels, then fight a boss. Later games had great level designs and wonderful eye-candy appeal, but the gameplay and "story" were the same.
Half Life was like starring in a really exciting (cheesy, but exciting) action SF movie. Getting by the big tentacled monster that responded to sound, finally finding the first RPG to take down one of the helicopters in the desert, finding hidden and weird passages that actually got you somewhere useful instead of just uncovering a weapons cache, watching the pre-programmed sequences instead of getting shown animated cut-scenes that didn't look like the rest of the gameplay. All of these things made it very memorable.
And that's just the single player mode. Even before the great mods started coming out, those laser trip mines were really cool. We even found that you could put them on a wall in a stairstep and climb to otherwise inaccessible areas.
Some of it usually has to do with visual realism and how much you are into the game.
I've occasionally gotten motion sick playing HL:1, but never did playing Doom, Quake, or Unreal.
My all time stomach churner was Descent II -- even with the (now) chunky graphics, that game would get me motion sick all the time. I tried to load it out of nostalgia a few weeks ago and couldn't get it to work on XP. I found a few hints and hack sites, but it seemed like too much trouble. That's a game I would like to see with a new graphics engine. Is there anything similar?
While porn is usually brought up as what drives the acceptance of new technology, games have to be a close second.
:-)
Aside from the issues of selling even low power lasers to kids (i.e., cheap laser pointers warning that they are not toys and shouldn't be sold to kids), wouldn't it be easy to use a cheap red laser diode to make a "game console" that would let you play Asteroids, Battle Zone, or Missle Command type games on your wall (or on the side of your house 20' high)?
Or, as others have joked about, just a simple scrolling message display like those spin around your head segmented LED displays so you can "tag" messages in public places?
You might have a hard time getting them carried at your local Radio Shack or Best Buy, but what do you bet that you can order them from international online stores soon?
Did I just blow my chances at a multi-million dollar patent again?
Another thing to realize is that there aren't just two choices: Extreme Urban or Hick Town.
I live in Huntsville, Alabama which has a thriving high tech industry and it is a medium sized southern town with lots of suburbs and few big city amenities: nice restaurants, sports (albeit minor league), colleges, a symphony, an opera company, a nice art gallery, a club scene (albeit not a great one), libraries, book stores, etc. We also have very little traffic, nice neighborhoods, good schools, cheap houses, and low property taxes. Broadband internet is available from 2 or 3 different sources anywhere in the city.
If you want to live "in the country", you can buy a 100 acre farm within about a 20 minute commute to any business in the city. Or you can buy a 3000 square foot house on a nice treed lot for around $200K (or less).
While I understand the attempt at humor, it should be noted (to the humor and research impaired) that the data is this graph is completely made up...
s p
http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/stateiq.a
Much smaller database of crawled, high-profile sites yields more relevant search results for simple queries (MSN Search).
Huge database of crawled sites, including lot of semi-obscure ones yields a greater depth of information, but may require refinement of search terms (Google).
I rarely search Google with a single word search unless I am looking for the home page of a product or project. As a matter of fact, I usually free-associate on a topic and search for 5 or 6 words (or more) then broaden my search if I don't find what I wanted to start with.
Amen, now if I could convince my boss of that...
As the message below this one states, the QCast SW was sold to Gameshark -- I don't know its long term future or if it is even still being supported. I picked mine up at Best Buy for $10! Haven't tried it yet.
I've been looking at this a replacement/upgrade from my Hauppage MediaMVP, but the consumer reviews (and the online support forum flames) have scared me away from it.
Any problems with yours? Media compatibility OK? Are you using it wirelessly? How is the web browsing?
Thinkgeek has this for $149 (after rebate) and there is a wireless keyboard for it for ~$30.
A true geek is never happy with their current setup and I know mine could use some improvement, but for the record:
I was too lazy to run Cat5 downstairs (explaination below), so my downstairs Panasonic HDTV (projection) has my cable modem and 802.11g router by it. I have a Hauppage MediaMVP connected to the TV and 5.1 surround sound system and wired into the wireless router. I had three choices -- run cable from my upstairs computer, use a wireless bridge (I was too cheap to buy one), or go this route. Actually, I'm happy with the wireless hub here since it gives me good coverage on the front porch, kitchen, library, and back deck when I'm using my laptop.
Upstairs in my computer room/study I have a modest desktop machine with an ATI TV tuner card running Beyond TV. The machine has 200+ GB of disk space. My kids use this as a computer as well as a TV. I use Beyond TV's PVR software to schedule recordings which I can then watch on the computer or stream to the MediaMVP downstairs on the real TV. I can also access my MP3 collection through MediaMVP and play on the stereo system, as well as listen to internet radio stations. Note that while the MediaMVP is cabled to the router, my media files are accessed wirelessly from my PC.
I'm reasonably happy with the MediaMVP and with Beyond TV. Beyond TV lets me remotely set recordings through Snapstream.com, which is nice for a no service contract site. There are some hacks which I have not explored that allow you some web access (weather and news tickers) and the ability to control and set recordings through the MediaMVP, but I haven't explored them yet.
I recently upgraded Beyond TV and found that while the features and interface are improved, it is less responsive than it used to be. I have an ATI TV-Wonder VE (Value Edition) which doesn't have a hardware mpeg encoder and I think that is the slowdown -- I'm going to upgrade tuners and see what happens.
I can also access my video, audio, and pictures (as well as watch live TV) through a web browser on my laptop anywhere in the house.
What I don't like:
My daughter is an iTunes fanatic and I can't play non-WMP DRM content through the MediaMVP, so I have to download, burn to CD, then rip to MP3 (which I usually do anyway so I can use my Rio MP3 player).
I want to schedule recordings through my TV. Hacks may exist for this, but they seem buggy. I can use my laptop downstairs, but that is the long way around.
200 GB of disk space gives me a pretty good record time, but I need to set up a "click and burn" solution for backing up shows I want to keep to DVD-R or SVCD (which is about the quality I record the shows at -- they are good enough to watch, but obviously not DVD, or even cable broadcast quality).
I really want digital cable or dish satellite for the HDTV broadcasts, but throwing in multiple set-top boxes with external tuners bugs me. I've already got three TVs and a computer hooked up to cable, and on my TV I've got a DVD player, the MediaMVP, a VHS VCR, and, occassionally, a PS2, so it's already a wiring and remote control nightmare. I have expanded basic analog cable (no pay channels) so I don't have any set top boxes in the mix.
Finally, I picked up a QCast disk for my PS2 and I'm going to experiment with it to turn my other upstairs TV/video game area into a media center. If the quality is good, I might consider permanently moving the PS2 and replacing the MediaMVP with it, but I'm not holding my breath.
Oh yeah, I also just ordered a GBA video player for the kids. We've got a portable DVD player, but my son keeps wanting a Video Now or Juicebox player and I refuse to spend the money for a device which only plays proprietary media. The video player (ordered from Lik Sang) lets you downconvert a number of different formats to a format that you can copy to a Compact Flash card and watch on the GBA -- also supports music, JPGs, TXT file "ebooks" and (with a flash upgrade) a quasi-legal NES emulator.
Either he's got a good server, or no one cared enough to look.
That's the ultimate insult -- making the front page of Slashdot, then *not* getting Slashdotted as a result...
Well, coming from someone who has stood in line for movie tickets and seen midnight showings on opening day (SW: Episode I *blush*), I really should criticize anyone, but I did think it odd that the EB store in the mall had a line out the door yesterday to pre-order and that the mall entrances were opened specially at midnight for people to come by and pick up their games.
Now, if there were a shortage (real or created), I could see this, but I stopped by Target on the way to work to pick up a few things and there was a big stack of Halo 2 right there at the door. Assuming the stock clerks were on their toes, the fanboys at EB could just as easily went to the Wal-Mart Supercenter at midnight and avoided the hassle, right?
Well, as a measure, he didn't publicly *claim* victory even when it was obvious that he had won and instead gratiously waited for Kerry to concede before doing so.
I assume that it means that the Democrat's will not pursue legal arguments for recounts or pour over the individual details of the provisional ballots. If I understand the system correctly, then at some point the Ohio legislature will appoint the electors and then it will be all over.
I don't know if it would be in the short term good or not, but I think that all states should at least do a statistical sampling of all provisional votes since I understand that they are often never counted or processed if they have not statistical chance of influencing the election. Having historial data, however, would make it easier in the future to figure their proposed impact.
Interestingly in this election, several of the pre-election polls on both sides bullseyed the election results, but the exit polls were wildly off. Of course, if you look at contested states like Ohio, or even "non-contested" states like Massachusetts, you can see that an exit poll in Cincinatti or Boston would certainly not be reflective of the state as a whole.
That's not what the parent poster asked. I can stand out in my backyard with a shotgun to defend my property from dragons with a 100% success rate in repelling dragons, but that doesn't mean there are any.
So, again, has anyone witnessed any attempts at voter intimidation?
Not if it involves moving to California (I like CA, I just don't want to move).
Anyway, I see the validity of the question because I end up interviewing a lot of people with "real world" programming experience, often self-taught, or people with math or business degrees who "took some programming classes". Many of these people can be sharp coders, but they often have never taken any formal CS classes in algorithms, data structures, discrete math, etc. It's not uncommon for these people to be able to write thousands of lines of workmanlike code, but get a deer in headlights look when someone starts talking about n-Trees, graph traversals, doubly-linked lists, etc.
I haven't used pointers in so long, I would have to look up some of the syntax (embarassing as that may sound), but I know I could sketch out the algorithms for pointer-based linked lists quickly. I designed an electric tracing module for our product that creates an n-tree of conductor segments that is transformed into a binary tree (child-child-* -> child-sibling) with full parenting with three electical phases represented by different sets of linkages and all stored as a sorted array of structures (where the pointers are actually array indices). To trace up or down a circuit, you can do a binary search for the start segment, then quickly walk the tree up or down by phase. This design made me real appreciative of my algorithms and data structures classes (and the textbooks for them that I still had on my bookshelf).
Alabama, rightly so in many cases, gets a bad rap for being a backward state, but after reading all of the horrible stories about weird voting machines, [Democratic|Republican] "challenges", disorganized staff, etc. from around the country, I'd like to share my experience...
I drove by my polling place (a suburban neighborhood church) at 7:30 and the line was around the building, so I went on to work. I returned at around 12:30 and the line was more reasonable.
I waited in line for about twenty minutes before I got to the registration table. I showed them my driver's license and voter registration card. They looked up my registration on a form-fed printout of the registration lists and crossed my name out with a yellow highlighter and ruler and handed me a slip of paper. I walked to the next table, gave them the slip of paper and they wrote my ballot number on it, made me sign two side-by-side registers (one printed, one "signed") and gave me the corresponding numbered ballot and a Sharpie marker.
I took it to a privacy cubicle and completed it by connecting the very clear and well-aligned arrows beside the candidates and options of my choice with a big, fat, black line (no possibility of ambiguity unless you are a total idiot). I checked over the ballot, then walked over to the voting machine and fed it in. A beep and a green light told me immediately that all of my votes were registered unambiguously and the paper record of the vote went into a locked tray inside the machine. They gave me a "I voted" sticker and I was on my way.
My only gripe? There are two lines (clearly marked, BTW) for people whose last names start with A-L or M-Z. Everytime I've voted here, the A-L line has, at most, 5 people in in while the M-Z snakes out the door. Unless 'M' is the real clincher, it wouldn't be too hard to split the alphabet to more evenly distribute the lines. If 'M' *is* the culpret, they could even do A-Mi and Mo-Z, but that would probably confuse the moron element.
Why can backward Alabama (or at least our precinct in Huntsville -- can't speak for the rest of the state) get it right while the rest of country is awash in touch screens, mechanical dinosaurs, butterfly ballots, hanging chads, charcoal on tree bark, or whatever else they are forced to use? What is so damned disenfranchising about requiring proof of ID? How hard can it possibly be to cross-check voter registration lists?