The actual unstated major assumption here is that the RC helicopter actually was fired at. We have nothing more than the claim of a spokesman for these "activists." Where's video of damage consistent with birdshot on the RC helicopter?
I note that their supporters seem to have a major knowledge deficit regarding firearms; notice the inability to distinguish between rifles and shotguns, and between birdshot and bullets.
Pretty much the same result here...the map gives both Verizon and AT&T (neither of which has service here), and two other wireless providers who do not serve the area, and misses the one provider who actually does.
I've worked this sort of schedule, and the quality of output falls.
I've also had a job or two where it was more watch-standing instead of requiring constant high level thought. You can get away with it longer there.
Were I asked to do it now I would immediately start job-hunting. It might take a while to get something better, but any manager that would ask that now, with no significant additional compensation offer will be a problem forever.
I absolutely don't feel sorry for the local taxpayers who have elected a board of such staggering incompetence as to bless this administrative voyeurism project. There should be personal liability for the administrators who have been peeping away, both civil and criminal.
If we turn idiots loose to govern in our name, we're ultimately responsible for their actions...in this case by the taxpayers of that district taking a (hopefully) heavy hit in the pocketbook.
And I don't excuse the tech folks that implemented this scheme. They had to either be totally blind to the implications of this, or knowingly complicit. They should share in the liability as well.
At least in California that 'focus on forcing the telcos to expand broadband coverage" has been futile. After the SBC (now AT&T) takeover of Pacific Bell the promised expansion flat died.
The current California PUC has been persuaded that reselling Hughes Satellite service is equivalent to real broadband. If you've ever been stuck on satellite you well know that it is clearly not true broadband, between the horrible latency that is inherent in the technology, and the narrow caps of usage that are go with satellite.
Officially, AT&T broadband is coming. Unofficially, AT&T techs say they've been told that 'never' is the correct term. So yes, I'd like to see them prodded. And I'm not too particular whether its the state PUC or the FCC.
Actually, a very large number of us. Since the entity now called AT&T acquired Pacific Bell, extension of broadband to rural areas has ground to a halt, their public relations comments notwithstanding.
There's no cell service at my location, no terrestrial IP provider, leaving me with satellite. Given the high latency and bandwidth caps it's not a real substitute. I'd cheerfully abandon POTS, but we're screwed if we do. VOIP over satellite doesn't work. Comcast came through the neighborhood a couple of years ago, putting brackets on the line poles, but abandoned the project as soon as AT&T quit talking about expanding DSL.
I'm hardly in the back of beyond...just a few miles from Grass Valley in California, and my situation is not unusual.
So yes, the answer is that real, usable IP is out of reach for many of us.
multisync above hit on one of the major problems, but it is more than simple compression of commercials.
First, there are significant psycho-acoustic effects...material delivered in an urgent tone of voice is perceived as louder than material delivered in a relaxed pace. Second, almost all material you hear has had significant processing...more than simple compression. Third, we've been trying to develop a means of metering audio levels that allow the metered level to actually correspond to perceived loudness for as long as I've been in broadcast engineering, with no success. We can meter peak levels easily, average power levels with some difficulty, and perceived loudness not at all.
If you wanted to ban all audio processing you could get closer, but still not have a way to account for the psychological part of the equation. The advertiser may have an incentive to make his or her stuff louder, but you don't really sell product by irritating the potential customer. And the broadcaster has no reason to jack up commercials. Some of the apparent increase in this has come in recent years as the master control operations for both cable, satellite, and terrestrial broadcast has become more automated. If the automation is well done you decrease some classes of errors, but there is seldom a trained ear paying attention any more.
But a lot of the academics are affiliated with one political persuasion.
And paper ballots are also unreliable. Stuffing the ballot box and failing to count votes from areas with the 'wrong' kind of voters has been developed to a fine art.
Look at the chronic fraud in Chicago and St. Louis. Look at the ballot boxes found floating in San Francisco Bay after the 2004 election...the ballots never found. We don't have a perfect system, but those who profit from the well known ways to game paper ballots are pushing for the status quo.
My county has used the AVC Edge system, with recording printers for several years. They have run a full audit, comparing the machine totals with the votes recorded by the printers and verified by the voters, with 100% match.
And the paper systems depend on scanner/computer systems to totalize the vote. Get to that and you control the election.
Bottom line: No perfect election, as we're dependent on people. But a lot less real-world opportunity for fraud with a correctly implemented e-vote system.
This is anecdotal and certainly represents a small sample, but I've worked the polls the last three elections. These are the three in which we used electronic voting machines, but the voters had the choice to use paper ballots if they did not want to use the electronic machines. We get about 300 voters at the location (average) in each of the three elections.
Not one voter requested the paper ballot option.
As a second observation, in all three elections the county ran a 100% audit, comparing the output of the voting machines with the paper audit trail that they generate and present to the voter to verify that the paper printout matches their selection. No errors were found. I don't think you can do much better than that.
I do think that we should be moving to open-source software, and that improvements can be made in security, but note that what we really have here is a demand for a return to the old methods, where the tried and true ballot-stuffing techniques work. Note that most of the pressure comes from the same sectors who demanded the fraud-prone 'motor-voter' registrations and are opposed to requirement that voters identify themselves. There's a common thread here....
Seems to me that being physically prevented from leaving (by the Circuit City types) does constitute a crime that justifies calling 911. In many areas there are different non-emergency numbers for each local jurisdiction, and if I'm being detained by a non-LEO it _does_ constitute an urgent need for an officer.
In this case, of course, the lack of training on the part of the officer made the call relatively useless, but it is the right thing to do.
My understanding is that the only circumstances under which a store can demand to see the receipt and inspect the purchases is in the case of membership stores such as Sam's Club or Costco, where you have agreed to that as a condition of your membership. I guess I'll tolerate a little hassle, but when the door nazis at Fry's get at all backed up I just walk past them. They grumble, but have yet to lay a hand on me.
By the way, I'm sending a little to support this guy.
Satellite is to broadband as government is to common sense. I'm stuck on Hughes satellite (officially AT&T will 'soon' have DSL here, but the local AT&T techs say they have been told that this area is _not_ on the list to ever get DSL).
Hughes has recently instituted a draconian download limit that is far more restrictive than that which was in place when I signed their contract. Their DNS service sucks. Some days nearly half of the DNS requests fail. Their web acceleration servers often hang in the middle of serving a page. And then there are the days when connectivity just dies, although signal strength is still right there.
And then we get to the inherent latency in a satellite connection. That's basic physics, and it is enough to make the web almost unusable, even when Hughes isn't tripping over its own feet.
And the local wireless broadband provider that said they had service here when we bought the place decided that they didn't really when they attempted an install. So, yes, there is a huge gap in providing broadband outside of the areas where cable and the telco want to cherry-pick. It is real, and it isn't getting any better, especially since AT&T has managed to rebuild itself from the dead.
I think the cost figures vs. gasoline are still off....remember, while the rest of the country is still in the 8 to 10 cents/kwh, the incremental cost in the People's Republic is (from my last bill) over 34 cents/kwh.
Add the long charge time, replacement cost of batteries...the technology just isn't there.
By the way, the battery swap scheme won't work. Aside from issues about high-current connectors, who is going to pay for the stock of batteries to swap in? And how do you feel if you start with a battery pack in good condition and get a dog that won't hold a charge?
To make this work the batteries would have to be universal, and the capital cost would have to be on the charging/swap stations. Now where is your cost per mile?
Open Source isn't a cure all...the problem has many parents.
I grew up in St. Louis (where the election officials were the model for the Daly machine in Chicago). Corruption was a given.
I've watched the recurring problem of missing ballot boxes floating in the bay in San Francisco.
I live in a state where you (by law!) don't have to present any ID at the polls. I've used paper ballots, mechanical voting machines, punch card ballots, and now the electronic machines. Any of them can be manipulated. We're at the mercy of the people (both state and county employees, and poll workers) who actually run the elections. And I've seen where both the professionals and the locals have been less than honest.
With some obvious exceptions (Washington's last gubernatorial and senate elections), by and large the results do manage to manage to reflect the actual vote. How about the greater danger posed by our failure to limit the vote to citizens?
Unfortunately, this is the marketing guy's version of some hard engineering facts. The article sounds very much like a j-school graduate's version of what an economist said...and that neither one ever took anything beyond bonehead physics for liberal arts majors (you know, the one without the math).
Yes, there are things that can be done to maximize the efficiency with which we use the available specturm. And yes, there are inefficient users of the spectrum (government agencies being among the most egregious). But this article clearly overstates the case by about the same amount that SCO overstates the value of their IP.
Unfortunately, the sources cited by Behrooz fail to back his assertions....
The first site is purporting to be repeating a newspaper story (long after the election) complaining that Florida's attempts to minimize illegal voting by convicted felons was overbroad.
The second cite (to the Guardian, only slightly more reliable a source than the National Inquirer)is a bad URL.
Note that the original assertions in this thread were not relfected in news at the time, and not supported by any of the multiple media studies of the Florida election outcome.
Three things stand out: First, this really winds up with a pretty large central obstruction, which translates into low image contrast. Second, he trades the third optical surface found in conventional folded Newtonians for what probably is an increase in abberation. Third, while a truss design in place of a tube is a valid choice, and has some significant advantages in terms of weight and elimination of tube currents, this looks awfully light for that large a 'scope.
And I'm not sure how much easier the large secondary is to make. Flat surfaces are just plain difficult. The conventional secondary is not an elliptical surface; it is a flat that is cut to an elliptical outline.
Interesting, but I don't see this as revolutionary.
Missed two things, I think. Several have commented on the lack of anonymity, but the other major issue is how do we know how many phantom voters were generated by corrupt officials? And, were the totals arrived at correctly?
Without some verifiable physical record of the vote that can be audited the whole process is toast.
I may be cynical about this, but I grew up in St. Louis, whose election corruption made Chicago elections look pure as snow. NegativeK's suggestion doesn't keep politicians from voting the dead.
We do have that kind of pragmatic assignment scheme now...and the proposal on the table is to allow LPFM to be dropped in regardless.
And note that LPFM should have to provide the same Emergency Information that others do...again, a non-trivial problem from both an operational and financial view.
10 Watters weren't grandfathered..but it was not that costly to get up to 100 W. The real economic factor is that once licensed it is hard to avoid having to pay royalties...this is the killer unless one wants to broadcast 100 percent original music. The record-keeping required to avoid having to purchase blanket licenses from ASCAP, BMI and SESAC are difficult to manage.
We do need a special rule for intentional transmitters, FM or otherwise. The power emitted is far more than that of typical unlicensed devices, and it is intentionally emitted close to existing station's frequencies.
Keeping the occupied bandwidth reasonable is a non-trivial problem in the absence of very $$$ equipment. A certain state university at the south end of San Francisco has an FM station that from time to time splatters over a good bit of the low end of the FM band. This is a reasonably well funded operation that tries to keep a clean operation. What do you think the chances are that any significant number of LPFMs will manage to even make a serious pass at any compliance with technical standards?
Interference is only a straw man if you don't happen to live where the LPFM blows you out. Read the report. Interference _is_ seen in a radius of hundred of meters around LPFM transmitters.
The report is being widely interpreted to open the door, but many who read it that way are missing the strong conditions...including not licensing LPFM stations to locate where there are concentrations of receivers, and specifying that a very strong emission mask must be used.
These are likely show-stoppers for most of the LPFM set.
By the way, anyone missing all those low-power campus and community stations...this has not been standing in the way. If they were there once they worked under the existing rules. Economics has probably led to the demise of most.
If you don't find any interest at your high school, another option would be to give your local Boy Scout Council a call. The Scouts have a program called Exploring for people 14 and up. It is open to both sexes, and is groups of people interested in specific areas. They may have a Computer interest group running now, or can help find someone (usually a company) to help sponsor one.
I'm an early adopter with PacBell, and the original installation was slow and sloppy. But after some early problems (bad card in the DSLAM and the line not properly prepped--a couple of bridge taps not removed), the actual DSL service has been excellent. I run about 800K downstream, and I'm about 14,000 feet from the CO. So, PacBell (the Telco) is good.
Pac Bell Internet (the ISP) is pretty lame. News servers frequently down, and speed capped on their news servers, along with a lot of missing posts. This may be slightly improving, but you may do better with a different ISP. The actual DSL service is good, and seems more consistent that some of my co-workers report from @home.
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The actual unstated major assumption here is that the RC helicopter actually was fired at. We have nothing more than the claim of a spokesman for these "activists."
Where's video of damage consistent with birdshot on the RC helicopter?
I note that their supporters seem to have a major knowledge deficit regarding firearms; notice the inability to distinguish between rifles and shotguns, and between birdshot and bullets.
Pretty much the same result here...the map gives both Verizon and AT&T (neither of which has service here), and two other wireless providers who do not serve the area, and misses the one provider who actually does.
And we spent how many tax dollars on this?
I've worked this sort of schedule, and the quality of output falls.
I've also had a job or two where it was more watch-standing instead of requiring constant high level thought. You can get away with it longer there.
Were I asked to do it now I would immediately start job-hunting. It might take a while to get something better, but any manager that would ask that now, with no significant additional compensation offer will be a problem forever.
Are we sure that this isn't Darl McBride's new scam after his SCO gig didn't work out so well for him?
I absolutely don't feel sorry for the local taxpayers who have elected a board of such staggering incompetence as to bless this administrative voyeurism project. There should be personal liability for the administrators who have been peeping away, both civil and criminal.
If we turn idiots loose to govern in our name, we're ultimately responsible for their actions...in this case by the taxpayers of that district taking a (hopefully) heavy hit in the pocketbook.
And I don't excuse the tech folks that implemented this scheme. They had to either be totally blind to the implications of this, or knowingly complicit. They should share in the liability as well.
At least in California that 'focus on forcing the telcos to expand broadband coverage" has been futile. After the SBC (now AT&T) takeover of Pacific Bell the promised expansion flat died.
The current California PUC has been persuaded that reselling Hughes Satellite service is equivalent to real broadband. If you've ever been stuck on satellite you well know that it is clearly not true broadband, between the horrible latency that is inherent in the technology, and the narrow caps of usage that are go with satellite.
Officially, AT&T broadband is coming. Unofficially, AT&T techs say they've been told that 'never' is the correct term. So yes, I'd like to see them prodded. And I'm not too particular whether its the state PUC or the FCC.
Actually, a very large number of us. Since the entity now called AT&T acquired Pacific Bell, extension of broadband to rural areas has ground to a halt, their public relations comments notwithstanding.
There's no cell service at my location, no terrestrial IP provider, leaving me with satellite. Given the high latency and bandwidth caps it's not a real substitute. I'd cheerfully abandon POTS, but we're screwed if we do. VOIP over satellite doesn't work. Comcast came through the neighborhood a couple of years ago, putting brackets on the line poles, but abandoned the project as soon as AT&T quit talking about expanding DSL.
I'm hardly in the back of beyond...just a few miles from Grass Valley in California, and my situation is not unusual.
So yes, the answer is that real, usable IP is out of reach for many of us.
multisync above hit on one of the major problems, but it is more than simple compression of commercials.
First, there are significant psycho-acoustic effects...material delivered in an urgent tone of voice is perceived as louder than material delivered in a relaxed pace.
Second, almost all material you hear has had significant processing...more than simple compression.
Third, we've been trying to develop a means of metering audio levels that allow the metered level to actually correspond to perceived loudness for as long as I've been in broadcast engineering, with no success. We can meter peak levels easily, average power levels with some difficulty, and perceived loudness not at all.
If you wanted to ban all audio processing you could get closer, but still not have a way to account for the psychological part of the equation. The advertiser may have an incentive to make his or her stuff louder, but you don't really sell product by irritating the potential customer. And the broadcaster has no reason to jack up commercials. Some of the apparent increase in this has come in recent years as the master control operations for both cable, satellite, and terrestrial broadcast has become more automated. If the automation is well done you decrease some classes of errors, but there is seldom a trained ear paying attention any more.
But a lot of the academics are affiliated with one political persuasion.
And paper ballots are also unreliable. Stuffing the ballot box and failing to count votes from areas with the 'wrong' kind of voters has been developed to a fine art.
Look at the chronic fraud in Chicago and St. Louis. Look at the ballot boxes found floating in San Francisco Bay after the 2004 election...the ballots never found. We don't have a perfect system, but those who profit from the well known ways to game paper ballots are pushing for the status quo.
My county has used the AVC Edge system, with recording printers for several years. They have run a full audit, comparing the machine totals with the votes recorded by the printers and verified by the voters, with 100% match.
And the paper systems depend on scanner/computer systems to totalize the vote. Get to that and you control the election.
Bottom line: No perfect election, as we're dependent on people. But a lot less real-world opportunity for fraud with a correctly implemented e-vote system.
This is anecdotal and certainly represents a small sample, but I've worked the polls the last three elections. These are the three in which we used electronic voting machines, but the voters had the choice to use paper ballots if they did not want to use the electronic machines. We get about 300 voters at the location (average) in each of the three elections.
Not one voter requested the paper ballot option.
As a second observation, in all three elections the county ran a 100% audit, comparing the output of the voting machines with the paper audit trail that they generate and present to the voter to verify that the paper printout matches their selection. No errors were found. I don't think you can do much better than that.
I do think that we should be moving to open-source software, and that improvements can be made in security, but note that what we really have here is a demand for a return to the old methods, where the tried and true ballot-stuffing techniques work. Note that most of the pressure comes from the same sectors who demanded the fraud-prone 'motor-voter' registrations and are opposed to requirement that voters identify themselves. There's a common thread here....
Seems to me that being physically prevented from leaving (by the Circuit City types) does constitute a crime that justifies calling 911. In many areas there are different non-emergency numbers for each local jurisdiction, and if I'm being detained by a non-LEO it _does_ constitute an urgent need for an officer.
In this case, of course, the lack of training on the part of the officer made the call relatively useless, but it is the right thing to do.
My understanding is that the only circumstances under which a store can demand to see the receipt and inspect the purchases is in the case of membership stores such as Sam's Club or Costco, where you have agreed to that as a condition of your membership. I guess I'll tolerate a little hassle, but when the door nazis at Fry's get at all backed up I just walk past them. They grumble, but have yet to lay a hand on me.
By the way, I'm sending a little to support this guy.
Satellite is to broadband as government is to common sense. I'm stuck on Hughes satellite (officially AT&T will 'soon' have DSL here, but the local AT&T techs say they have been told that this area is _not_ on the list to ever get DSL).
Hughes has recently instituted a draconian download limit that is far more restrictive than that which was in place when I signed their contract. Their DNS service sucks. Some days nearly half of the DNS requests fail. Their web acceleration servers often hang in the middle of serving a page. And then there are the days when connectivity just dies, although signal strength is still right there.
And then we get to the inherent latency in a satellite connection. That's basic physics, and it is enough to make the web almost unusable, even when Hughes isn't tripping over its own feet.
And the local wireless broadband provider that said they had service here when we bought the place decided that they didn't really when they attempted an install. So, yes, there is a huge gap in providing broadband outside of the areas where cable and the telco want to cherry-pick. It is real, and it isn't getting any better, especially since AT&T has managed to rebuild itself from the dead.
I think the cost figures vs. gasoline are still off....remember, while the rest of the country is still in the 8 to 10 cents/kwh, the incremental cost in the People's Republic is (from my last bill) over 34 cents/kwh.
Add the long charge time, replacement cost of batteries...the technology just isn't there.
By the way, the battery swap scheme won't work. Aside from issues about high-current connectors, who is going to pay for the stock of batteries to swap in? And how do you feel if you start with a battery pack in good condition and get a dog that won't hold a charge?
To make this work the batteries would have to be universal, and the capital cost would have to be on the charging/swap stations. Now where is your cost per mile?
Open Source isn't a cure all...the problem has many parents.
I grew up in St. Louis (where the election officials were the model for the Daly machine in Chicago). Corruption was a given.
I've watched the recurring problem of missing ballot boxes floating in the bay in San Francisco.
I live in a state where you (by law!) don't have to present any ID at the polls. I've used paper ballots, mechanical voting machines, punch card ballots, and now the electronic machines. Any of them can be manipulated. We're at the mercy of the people (both state and county employees, and poll workers) who actually run the elections. And I've seen where both the professionals and the locals have been less than honest.
With some obvious exceptions (Washington's last gubernatorial and senate elections), by and large the results do manage to manage to reflect the actual vote. How about the greater danger posed by our failure to limit the vote to citizens?
There are no easy fixes here.
Unfortunately, this is the marketing guy's version of some hard engineering facts. The article sounds very much like a j-school graduate's version of what an economist said...and that neither one ever took anything beyond bonehead physics for liberal arts majors (you know, the one without the math).
Yes, there are things that can be done to maximize the efficiency with which we use the available specturm. And yes, there are inefficient users of the spectrum (government agencies being among the most egregious). But this article clearly overstates the case by about the same amount that SCO overstates the value of their IP.
Unfortunately, the sources cited by Behrooz fail to back his assertions....
The first site is purporting to be repeating a newspaper story (long after the election) complaining that Florida's attempts to minimize illegal voting by convicted felons was overbroad.
The second cite (to the Guardian, only slightly more reliable a source than the National Inquirer)is a bad URL.
Note that the original assertions in this thread were not relfected in news at the time, and not supported by any of the multiple media studies of the Florida election outcome.
Perhaps it's tinfoil hat time.....
Three things stand out: First, this really winds up with a pretty large central obstruction, which translates into low image contrast. Second, he trades the third optical surface found in conventional folded Newtonians for what probably is an increase in abberation. Third, while a truss design in place of a tube is a valid choice, and has some significant advantages in terms of weight and elimination of tube currents, this looks awfully light for that large a 'scope.
And I'm not sure how much easier the large secondary is to make. Flat surfaces are just plain difficult. The conventional secondary is not an elliptical surface; it is a flat that is cut to an elliptical outline.
Interesting, but I don't see this as revolutionary.
Missed two things, I think. Several have commented on the lack of anonymity, but the other major issue is how do we know how many phantom voters were generated by corrupt officials? And, were the totals arrived at correctly?
Without some verifiable physical record of the vote that can be audited the whole process is toast.
I may be cynical about this, but I grew up in St. Louis, whose election corruption made Chicago elections look pure as snow. NegativeK's suggestion doesn't keep politicians from voting the dead.
We do have that kind of pragmatic assignment scheme now...and the proposal on the table is to allow LPFM to be dropped in regardless.
And note that LPFM should have to provide the same Emergency Information that others do...again, a non-trivial problem from both an operational and financial view.
10 Watters weren't grandfathered..but it was not that costly to get up to 100 W. The real economic factor is that once licensed it is hard to avoid having to pay royalties...this is the killer unless one wants to broadcast 100 percent original music. The record-keeping required to avoid having to purchase blanket licenses from ASCAP, BMI and SESAC are difficult to manage.
We do need a special rule for intentional transmitters, FM or otherwise. The power emitted is far more than that of typical unlicensed devices, and it is intentionally emitted close to existing station's frequencies.
Keeping the occupied bandwidth reasonable is a non-trivial problem in the absence of very $$$ equipment. A certain state university at the south end of San Francisco has an FM station that from time to time splatters over a good bit of the low end of the FM band. This is a reasonably well funded operation that tries to keep a clean operation. What do you think the chances are that any significant number of LPFMs will manage to even make a serious pass at any compliance with technical standards?
Interference is only a straw man if you don't happen to live where the LPFM blows you out. Read the report. Interference _is_ seen in a radius of hundred of meters around LPFM transmitters.
The report is being widely interpreted to open the door, but many who read it that way are missing the strong conditions...including not licensing LPFM stations to locate where there are concentrations of receivers, and specifying that a very strong emission mask must be used.
These are likely show-stoppers for most of the LPFM set.
By the way, anyone missing all those low-power campus and community stations...this has not been standing in the way. If they were there once they worked under the existing rules. Economics has probably led to the demise of most.
If you don't find any interest at your high school, another option would be to give your local Boy Scout Council a call. The Scouts have a program called Exploring for people 14 and up. It is open to both sexes, and is groups of people interested in specific areas. They may have a Computer interest group running now, or can help find someone (usually a company) to help sponsor one.
I'm an early adopter with PacBell, and the original installation was slow and sloppy. But after some early problems (bad card in the DSLAM and the line not properly prepped--a couple of bridge taps not removed), the actual DSL service has been excellent. I run about 800K downstream, and I'm about 14,000 feet from the CO. So, PacBell (the Telco) is good.
Pac Bell Internet (the ISP) is pretty lame. News servers frequently down, and speed capped on their news servers, along with a lot of missing posts. This may be slightly improving, but you may do better with a different ISP. The actual DSL service is good, and seems more consistent that some of my co-workers report from @home.