Each country's patent office feels compelled to give every notion offered by one of their nationals the extreme benefit of the doubt for fear that some other country's PO will claim it for one of their own and somehow, however unlikely, it will prove to be of some value. Remember these are bureaucrats and their first rule is C.Y.A.
Tides come in and tides go out. If energy is extracted indifferently from either direction then I do not, upon reconsideration, think this would slow the rotation of the earth. It would instead, as suggested in other posts, take energy from the orbiting of the moon, which would gradually slip closer to the earth and take less time to complete an orbit. The sun also helps to raise tides so the earth would also edge closer to the sun.
The fly wheel idea is different and it would slow the rotation of the earth. So that kind of generator would lenghten the day while the Wells Turbine generators would shorten both the month, (as measured by pahse of the moon), and the year.
The fly wheel generator can be run in reverse as a motor. This would allow energy to be taken from the rotation of the earth at one location and put back in at another. Used this way, it is a mechanism for transmitting energy rather than generating it.
won't this afford MS a fine way to duck respondsability for any problem, (especially viruses), that could arise if the "option" is switched off? If MS can say "Sorry, we can't help you since you are not using our recommended option and your problem could be due to an unregistered executable" then how many users will decide they have no real option after all?
Actually, I DO believe that "a person of skill in the art" could implement the idea without undue experimentation, (presumably after wiping the drool away from my words). Is there an experienced mechanical engineer in the house who can give us an opinion?
I fail to see where my post contained any "patent bashing". Methinks the patent attorney protesteth too much.
This reminds me of an idea I came up with years ago: tapping energy from the rotation of the earth -- think massive fly-wheel that would resist change of orientation with respect to the fixed stars as the earth rotates under it, its mounting connected by reduction gears to a generator. Presumably taking energy this way would slow the rotation of the earth. I think tapping tidal wave energy would do the same.
In case nobody has patented the fly-wheel idea, keep a copy of this post as evidence of prior art,
along with my opinion that the idea is too obvious to merit patent protection.
Point one: It is easier to make a case for flextime when you have "customers" in the organization. In my current position, my group supports a few hundred developers and coders. We do the official builds and manage the configuration database among other duties official and unofficial. Releases are suppose to occur on a schedule so overtime, (unpaid I think), is frequent among those we support. Also some of our work is best done at relatively quiet times. To provide Support for most of the day our group works staggered hours. When I came on board I replaced the guy that came in on the late side, around 10AM, and left late, around 7PM. I took over his hours since they suited me, but I could have worked out any other arrangement with my group provided we still had good coverage - from about 7AM to 7PM. I would suggest that you identify who your "customers" are and try to make a case that they would benefit from extended "coverage". (Using these two buzz word is very important).
Point two: (Largely negates point one). I worked for a Japanese company for almost 8 years and I think you can safely bet the mortgage money that the decision has been made in Japan and nothing you say will make the least difference.
Interesting. I would have thought there would be more participation because employed people would have all day to get to the polls. So a holiday could cause apthetic voters to simply stay home where if they had to go to work they might think "Oh well, I may as well vote while I'm out anyway". Some others would find time to get to the polls which would otherwise not exist in their normally hectic schedules. Is there any data anywhere to indicate what the actual net effect would be? Regardless of which effect is greater, having the holiday would would tend to favor the energetic over the listless. Would that be bad?
The Bill of rights is considered to protect two different categories of rights: those enjoyed by the States and those enjoyed by the people. Since the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, no one of the fundamental rights of life, liberty or property, recognized and guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, can be denied or abridged by a State in respect to
any person within its jurisdiction. This is known as the "incorporation doctrine." Since freedom of speech is a right held by the people States are not free to violate it.
MAKE IT ILLEGAL TO PUBLISH EXIT POLL RESULTS UNTIL AFTER ALL POLLS ARE CLOSED IN THE COUTNRY!!! Every other country does this, but we don't.
In this country such a law would be contrary to free speech protections. What MIGHT be doable, and this is s stretch, is to make a law against publication of
fraudulent
exit poll results AND to define inappropriate and false claims of certainty as a form of fraud.
That residents of small States imagine the EC in their interests is laughable.
For one thing, they do not constitute a coherent (electoral) voting bloc as such. Vermont's 3 votes cancel Arkansas 3 votes, Maine's 4 votes cancels Indiana's 4 votes and so on. The influence of the small states is limited to whatever the net difference of small state votes happens to come to.
For another thing, the winner take all aspect favors the big states. If Delaware casts all 3 of its votes one way instead of 2 and 1 that is only a differnce of 1 electoral vote while if California casts all 54 votes for one side instead of 28 and 26 it makes a 28 vote difference. If you were competitive in both states where would you do your campaigning?
Finally, even in small states the interests of voters varies. At best, given winner take all, it is only the majority interest in the state that is represented, (and over represented). That is a distortion of the authentic, fragmented, state interest - if the state can even be said to have an interest apart from the interests of the voters.
All in all, the size of the small state advantage is probably too small to really matter and to the extent it even exists it is by no means clear exactly who the real beneficiaires are or whether their benefit is deserved.
Some think tank or group of academic researchers or government agency such as the FEC could conduct tests of various balloting methods and determine before-hand, (before the outcome of a real election was at stake), what systemic error rates apply to various systems. This should be done.
I know that many peolple, especially the Naderites, have argued that the candidates are hardly distinguishable. This is also a very popular view among those who want an excuse for not voting. However I believe the nearly 50/50 vote actually results from nearly equal sized populations with strongly opposed views. I was listening to a report on the radio last night about some exit polling results. I don't have the exact numbers, but it turn out that Bush was VERY strongly favored by those who attended church regularly, those who said that honesty and integrity were their top consideration and who belonged to families with children. Gore was favored just as strongly by those who never go to church, who count experience and intelligence as the most important factor and who have no children in their families. For candidates who are "very similar" they certainly have managed to attract very dis-similar support.
Re:Thoughts on the Electoral College
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
You are about the 5th or 6th person to bring up this article in the last week. For more discussion see, for example, "And The Winner Is... Nobody!" by CmdrTaco on Wednesday November 08, @09:16AM EST
I particularly like my own views on this topic which you can find there, but I suppose everybody is entitled to their own stupid opinion;-)
There is always a way.
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
I recall how in Chicago on some machines of this type votes for one candidate were registered
before leaving the warehouse. The totals were inspected when the machines arrived at the polls, but fake paper zeroes were stuck over the counters. They fell off into the works when the first real votes came in. I forget how this scam was detected.
I am not nearly into the details of hacking/cracking methods as many/.ers seem to be, but couldn't one senerio go like this:
A DNS server is cracked and made to direct at home voters to a phoney site, (perhaps in some 3rd world country), where an apparently genuine ballot is displayed. The voter supplies his correct pw, marks the ballot and hits submit. The fake system now logs into the real vote server and uses the voter's authentic pw to cast an entirely different vote. Later the logs on the DNS server are doctored and that machine restored to normal operation. Where is the evidence of the fraud to be found?
Re:Do you know who you voted for
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
Assuming some form of computerized online voting, it shouldn't be difficult to detect something like votes for multiple candidates to a single office, but how to detect that a voter really wanted candidate A but accidentally marked for B instead?
Typing in a name, or even a few intials, instead of simply making a mark would give the system something checkable - but that could be discriminatory against illiterates and morons, (a block much courted by most politicians).
One idea that occurs to me is that if the candidates involved give prior approval they could be recorded in the system as being in certain ideological categories strongly at odds with certain other ideological categories. Then a voter in NY, for example, could be warned that his voting for Bush for President and Hillary Clinton for Senator is a possible error.
Re:Here's what you all seem to be forgetting...
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 2
There are at least two ways that the Feds may end up imposing uniform voting procedures.
1. The "Federal funds" method. The Federal government will foot the bill for the capital investment and maybe operational costs too provided the states "voluntarily" submit to Federal rules.
2. The "shades of meaning" method. Someone will advance an interpretation of some phrase in the Constitution as authorizing a Federal takeover and no matter how long a stretch it may be if it is politically popular enough the Supreme Court will roll over and bless it.
Re:What's with tthis registration thing?
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
In this country one reason for registration is to establish that you are a resident of the local district for at least a minimal time prior to the vote. This is to prevent people with no knowledge or real interest in local affairs from diluting the votes of the presumably knowledgeable and interested residents. Registration also helps to prevent votes being fraudulantly cast by the same person from multiple locations.
This is the biggest problem with the moderation system. Modding up isn't used to say "this is a good post". Instead, it seems to be a way of
saying "I agree with you"
I strongly agree with this. In at least 2 previous discussions where the Electoral College was NOT off-topic moderators have been clearly biased toward the EC defenders.
It isn't the "largest blocs of people" but the largest bloc of "swing" voters that politicians would most care about. In modern times, at least, it seems to me that Democrats tend to have a lock on cities and Republicans on the suburbs. If anything the "farmers, people from small towns, and other small, local groups" are exactly the groups that would get more attention in a simple majority system.
The guy IS a turkey, but you do not give him due credit. Look at it this way: in a moderately lop-sided simple majority vote election the voters who backed the loser have at least the feeling that their votes were useless since their candidate didn't even come close to winning. OTOH, those who backed the winner know that any one, or any few, of them didn't matter since their candidate would have won without their votes. The Electoral College tends to make such conclusions harder to draw because it introduces an essentially random signal into the process making elections that are not TOO lop-sided less predictable.
You would be suprised by how many physicists are bored by the notion of determinism. This guy probably went into physics in the first place after hearing about quantum uncertainty.
Then we would have about 50 times more lawyers and bureaucrats occupied with counting X-marks, punch-holes and mechanical readouts than we do now. Sounds good to me.
and while we are at it we can also recall that we have a free market economy, an independent judiciary, and coastlines on two great oceans -- none of which has anything to do with whether a particular method of voting is fair or not. Even in a republic, if elections are to be held at all they ought to be fair. That we have rejected "pure democracy" doesn't mean that anything goes electorally speaking. It is your last two sentences that, though debatable, are relevent to this discussion. Your first sentence is not.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it was the 8088, but apart from that I entirely agree.
Each country's patent office feels compelled to give every notion offered by one of their nationals the extreme benefit of the doubt for fear that some other country's PO will claim it for one of their own and somehow, however unlikely, it will prove to be of some value. Remember these are bureaucrats and their first rule is C.Y.A.
The fly wheel idea is different and it would slow the rotation of the earth. So that kind of generator would lenghten the day while the Wells Turbine generators would shorten both the month, (as measured by pahse of the moon), and the year.
The fly wheel generator can be run in reverse as a motor. This would allow energy to be taken from the rotation of the earth at one location and put back in at another. Used this way, it is a mechanism for transmitting energy rather than generating it.
won't this afford MS a fine way to duck respondsability for any problem, (especially viruses), that could arise if the "option" is switched off? If MS can say "Sorry, we can't help you since you are not using our recommended option and your problem could be due to an unregistered executable" then how many users will decide they have no real option after all?
I fail to see where my post contained any "patent bashing". Methinks the patent attorney protesteth too much.
In case nobody has patented the fly-wheel idea, keep a copy of this post as evidence of prior art, along with my opinion that the idea is too obvious to merit patent protection.
Point two: (Largely negates point one). I worked for a Japanese company for almost 8 years and I think you can safely bet the mortgage money that the decision has been made in Japan and nothing you say will make the least difference.
Interesting. I would have thought there would be more participation because employed people would have all day to get to the polls. So a holiday could cause apthetic voters to simply stay home where if they had to go to work they might think "Oh well, I may as well vote while I'm out anyway". Some others would find time to get to the polls which would otherwise not exist in their normally hectic schedules. Is there any data anywhere to indicate what the actual net effect would be? Regardless of which effect is greater, having the holiday would would tend to favor the energetic over the listless. Would that be bad?
The Bill of rights is considered to protect two different categories of rights: those enjoyed by the States and those enjoyed by the people. Since the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, no one of the fundamental rights of life, liberty or property, recognized and guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, can be denied or abridged by a State in respect to any person within its jurisdiction. This is known as the "incorporation doctrine." Since freedom of speech is a right held by the people States are not free to violate it.
For one thing, they do not constitute a coherent (electoral) voting bloc as such. Vermont's 3 votes cancel Arkansas 3 votes, Maine's 4 votes cancels Indiana's 4 votes and so on. The influence of the small states is limited to whatever the net difference of small state votes happens to come to.
For another thing, the winner take all aspect favors the big states. If Delaware casts all 3 of its votes one way instead of 2 and 1 that is only a differnce of 1 electoral vote while if California casts all 54 votes for one side instead of 28 and 26 it makes a 28 vote difference. If you were competitive in both states where would you do your campaigning?
Finally, even in small states the interests of voters varies. At best, given winner take all, it is only the majority interest in the state that is represented, (and over represented). That is a distortion of the authentic, fragmented, state interest - if the state can even be said to have an interest apart from the interests of the voters.
All in all, the size of the small state advantage is probably too small to really matter and to the extent it even exists it is by no means clear exactly who the real beneficiaires are or whether their benefit is deserved.
Some think tank or group of academic researchers or government agency such as the FEC could conduct tests of various balloting methods and determine before-hand, (before the outcome of a real election was at stake), what systemic error rates apply to various systems. This should be done.
I know that many peolple, especially the Naderites, have argued that the candidates are hardly distinguishable. This is also a very popular view among those who want an excuse for not voting. However I believe the nearly 50/50 vote actually results from nearly equal sized populations with strongly opposed views. I was listening to a report on the radio last night about some exit polling results. I don't have the exact numbers, but it turn out that Bush was VERY strongly favored by those who attended church regularly, those who said that honesty and integrity were their top consideration and who belonged to families with children. Gore was favored just as strongly by those who never go to church, who count experience and intelligence as the most important factor and who have no children in their families. For candidates who are "very similar" they certainly have managed to attract very dis-similar support.
You are about the 5th or 6th person to bring up this article in the last week. For more discussion see, for example, "And The Winner Is... Nobody!" by CmdrTaco on Wednesday November 08, @09:16AM EST ;-)
I particularly like my own views on this topic which you can find there, but I suppose everybody is entitled to their own stupid opinion
I recall how in Chicago on some machines of this type votes for one candidate were registered before leaving the warehouse. The totals were inspected when the machines arrived at the polls, but fake paper zeroes were stuck over the counters. They fell off into the works when the first real votes came in. I forget how this scam was detected.
I am not nearly into the details of hacking/cracking methods as many /.ers seem to be, but couldn't one senerio go like this:
A DNS server is cracked and made to direct at home voters to a phoney site, (perhaps in some 3rd world country), where an apparently genuine ballot is displayed. The voter supplies his correct pw, marks the ballot and hits submit. The fake system now logs into the real vote server and uses the voter's authentic pw to cast an entirely different vote. Later the logs on the DNS server are doctored and that machine restored to normal operation. Where is the evidence of the fraud to be found?
Assuming some form of computerized online voting, it shouldn't be difficult to detect something like votes for multiple candidates to a single office, but how to detect that a voter really wanted candidate A but accidentally marked for B instead? Typing in a name, or even a few intials, instead of simply making a mark would give the system something checkable - but that could be discriminatory against illiterates and morons, (a block much courted by most politicians).
One idea that occurs to me is that if the candidates involved give prior approval they could be recorded in the system as being in certain ideological categories strongly at odds with certain other ideological categories. Then a voter in NY, for example, could be warned that his voting for Bush for President and Hillary Clinton for Senator is a possible error.
There are at least two ways that the Feds may end up imposing uniform voting procedures.
1. The "Federal funds" method. The Federal government will foot the bill for the capital investment and maybe operational costs too provided the states "voluntarily" submit to Federal rules.
2. The "shades of meaning" method. Someone will advance an interpretation of some phrase in the Constitution as authorizing a Federal takeover and no matter how long a stretch it may be if it is politically popular enough the Supreme Court will roll over and bless it.
In this country one reason for registration is to establish that you are a resident of the local district for at least a minimal time prior to the vote. This is to prevent people with no knowledge or real interest in local affairs from diluting the votes of the presumably knowledgeable and interested residents. Registration also helps to prevent votes being fraudulantly cast by the same person from multiple locations.
It isn't the "largest blocs of people" but the largest bloc of "swing" voters that politicians would most care about. In modern times, at least, it seems to me that Democrats tend to have a lock on cities and Republicans on the suburbs. If anything the "farmers, people from small towns, and other small, local groups" are exactly the groups that would get more attention in a simple majority system.
Wonderful! In fact even every NON-voter gets maximum power to determine the election. Wow! 100% participation - the democaratic ideal!
You would be suprised by how many physicists are bored by the notion of determinism. This guy probably went into physics in the first place after hearing about quantum uncertainty.
Then we would have about 50 times more lawyers and bureaucrats occupied with counting X-marks, punch-holes and mechanical readouts than we do now. Sounds good to me.
and while we are at it we can also recall that we have a free market economy, an independent judiciary, and coastlines on two great oceans -- none of which has anything to do with whether a particular method of voting is fair or not. Even in a republic, if elections are to be held at all they ought to be fair. That we have rejected "pure democracy" doesn't mean that anything goes electorally speaking. It is your last two sentences that, though debatable, are relevent to this discussion. Your first sentence is not.