>An ARM chip in most data collection circumstances won't get as hot as an asphalt highway.
Doesn't matter - it might not get as hot as the highway itself, but it will get exactly as hot as the ambient air if powered off, and then immediately start heating up further when powered on. Basic thermodynamics demands that ambient air will *always* be cooler than an operating processor, unless you're refrigerating the chip directly.
Now, if you stick the whole thing in a well-insulated sealed box like a styrofoam cooler, along with a big chunk of thermal mass with a lot of surface area, like a cement "radiator" (much better than metals and better than most rock), you may be able to keep the whole thing well below ambient temperatures throughout the hottest part of the day, especially if you paint it solar-white or keep it in the shade. That would depend on the exact power consumption of the device, color of the box, amount of insulation and air space, and the size and surface area of the thermal mass though. You'd want to have an engineer run the numbers to be sure though.
Or just pour some cement into the bottom of a cheap styrafoam cooler. You could probably get some mounting bolts neatly embedded into a nice big protective hole in the cement (so that if you drop the thing device-first, it stays safe in its hole instead of being smashed flat) by screwing them into a block of styrofoam that you partially submerge bolt--heads first, and then pull out after the cement cures.
I know I still love my TI-85 calculator - I must have a first-year 1992 model as I think of the timing. That sucker has taken almost 30 years of abuse and is still going strong. I just have to remember to replace the AAs every couple of years when I cant crank the screen darkness high enough any more.
Anyway - I recall them being quite proud of the durability of the thing in their marketing, and could easily see them being an outlier in the "durable-products" category.
An excellent solution. Makes production slightly more complicated, but it shouldn't be by much.
I like the "physical button" security model for most internet-connected things as well - make sure someone has to be physically present to confirm any potentially harmful action. It seems to me that that's the single most cost-effective layer of security you can add. If it's *really* important, then you make it physically impossible to take a harmful action without that button being pushed. Then you only have to worry about physical security.
>Gun ownership should require at least minimal training, with exceptions of course for military, police, and others with prior weapons training.
That doesn't sound like any sort of exception at all - just recognizing that such training is already a part of certain occupations. I'd certainly hope that cops get much better training than required just to own a gun, considering how much more likely they are to be firing their weapon in a populated area.
A bold statement, considering wehaven't actually mentioned any particular system. A straightforward electronic counting of paper ballots, designed specifically to be as small and easily-understood as possible, should be pretty easy for any decent programmer to audit.
It's worth mentioning that personally I think any electronic voting or tallying machine should be an embedded system with no operating system at all, and be as minimalist as possible for exactly that reason - every line of code on the machine that's not critical to serving its purpose only serves to obfuscate the critical components, and potentially hide malicious elements that could interfere with the proper functioning of those critical components.
Not even that - script kiddies are still trying to bypass security - these guys were just following the instructions on the box to see if the manager had been stupid enough to not change the factory-default passcode.
Seems to me that default passwords not being changed is a common enough security threat, across a wide range of devices, that any programmer should defend against it as a standard security precaution. Perhaps simply have the device refuse to operate at all until the password/code is changed, instead simply displaying a message demanding that the passcode be changed before proceeding.
You probably want initial setup and diagnostics to work normally, but refuse to actually pump any gas, forward any packets, or whatever else the device is supposed to do, until the code is changed.
Why would you say that? Most people don't even understand all the details of how the current election system works.
All you really need is that the system be straightforward enough that most people know somebody they trust who is capable of understanding the system well enough to assure them that it's trustworthy.
You can get into all sorts of counting complexities like condorcet voting, etc., but that's something completely independent from "can I trust the integrity of the system"
We could, though you you need to manage far more (but far smaller) countings. And either do it immediately after the polls close, or arrange for the ballots at each polling place to be guarded by a cross-party group overnight.
Heck, make the "boxes" small enough, and you could even "volunteer" voters for counting duty throughout the day. Show up to vote, and have a 10% chance of being pulled aside to the counting room to tally a couple packets of maybe 50 ballots each, instead of waiting in line. That lets each box get counted 10 independent times without putting an undue burden on anyone. Make sure everyone knows their count has to agree with a previous one before they're allowed to leave, but don't tell them what that count is. That should help keep everyone motivated to count carefully and accurately. (In practice, you probably don't want to enforce that on the first few counts of each box, so that there's a good chance that one of the previous counts is correct.) A well-designed ballot
> This isn't a democracy, by the way. Of course it is. Or, at least it's supposed to be. A democratic republic is one of the many forms that democracy can take. The basic unifying principles being that the authority of the government is taken to flow from the people, and that the people control the government (to varying degrees) by voting.
Republic: "A state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives..."[1] Democracy: "A system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."[2]
They are not mutually exclusive, and the U.S. is (supposed to be) both.
Actually it is about science - but the real science is mostly studying the hazards of living in space, and how to mitigate them. The astronauts are highly-competent lab rats - the additional science they perform themselves is mostly just icing on the cake.
And we're not doing that "just because it's there", but because space offers an *enormous* font of wealth and opportunity, and the only possible place our species can survive in the long term. But first we have to develop the technology to survive there.
We can't. Ever. Not really. Not without rewriting the laws of physics. 1.3 light-seconds away means 2.6 seconds of unavoidable lag. You might be able to operate a "Diablo style" point-and-click RPG style interface serviceably with that kind of lag, micro-managing a limited-intelligence robot, but it will always be woefully inadequate for a "First Person" VR experience.
Not necessarily completely unserviceable, especially with 360* VR recording so that you can at least look around in "real time" (though 1.3 seconds into the past). Take things slow and easy, and as long as there's no chaotic interference on the moon, you could get things done. Eventually.
Much better though to have the operator *also* on the moon, comfortably secure within a nice safe habitat while they operate the same telepresence robot in real time.
Or, combine the two. A Moonie technician can be operating a "cyborg" body in real time, while a team on Earth offer guidance from a 2.6 seconds in the past.
Now think construction, mining, refining,etc. - all the things that will need to be done routinely, as somebody's go-to-work-every-morning day job, if we're going to actually colonize space instead of just having a few off-planet laboratories.
Lots of people talk about having autonomous robots to do all that for us, and I'm sure someday we will, but probably not for a very long time - by all appearances the AI required to handle that is still a long way off. We've made great strides on robotic bodies though, and telepresence effectively lets you create cyborgs - human minds controlling robotic bodies as if they were their own. A fleet of automated robots to do the "dumb" tasks, complemented by a team of body-hopping "cyborgs" doing the stuff that needs a human touch? You might well be able to actually have an entire industrial park where people work every day, but rarely if ever set foot in the flesh. And of course such a system would scale beautifully as automation improved - all the "workers" are already robots, it's only a question of whether they're controlled by a human mind or an AI.
Most people aren't in it for the risk, that's just the price of admission. And if you can dramatically lower the risk by making robotic-EVAs a perfectly viable alternative for most things, instead of a dangerous, unpleasant, in-person ordeal, then you greatly increase the amount you accomplish with a given amount of manpower.
You still need people on-location, facing the unavoidable risks that come with that. But they don't have to be outside on a regular basis, doing all the dangerous construction, maintenance, mining, etc. that is needed, with nothing but a easily-damaged space suit between them and near-instant death.
Not even remotely. They're teleoperated, but telepresence allows you to "be there", interacting with the remote location using a robotic proxy, often via a VR interface (as appears to be the case here). That's not remotely possible with the lag involved beyond Earth orbit.
There are admittedly currently some big problems with how we handle things - but we could require things to be handled better with minimal difficulty.
For example, as paper ballots are collected put them in a box until it's full. Then seal the box and slap a label on it that gives it a unique identifier, along with listing the IDs of the immediately previous and next boxes from that polling place, or "does not exist" for the first and last boxes from a particular election and polling place. For further security and convenience, also keep a receipt of all the labels printed so that boxes can be easily validated against the receipts before opening, to more easily detect missing or improperly labeled boxes.
Now you have a doubly-linked-list of boxes, and can easily recognize when one is lost, or an extra added, by confirming that each box does in fact belong to a valid and unbroken linked list. Any box without a valid label is discarded as a fake, though someone with sufficient access could still duplicate a box label (which would be obvious), or replace one, if they have access to make the original disappear.
To take it a step further, if you want the convenience/redundancy of electronic vote counting along with much greater security: electronically tally the ballots in each box before sealing it, with the totals displayed on the label along with a cryptographic hash of the tallies, the linked-list IDs, and the hash from the previous box. Use a good enough hash, and it will be basically impossible to tamper with any of the information recorded on the labels without also tampering with all of the subsequent labels.
In addition, keep a second "receipt" copy of each label on a single unbroken printout, with every poll worker getting a copy so that a massive cross-party conspiracy is necessary to tamper with the vote tallies.
Any box that doesn't show up on the receipt is fake. Any box that gets lost, still has its tally on the receipt as a backup. And if you're doing a manual recount, either as the definitive count, or as an audit, you can do it on a per-box basis - you just need to make sure you only ever have one box open at a time, and validate that the tallies on the box are correct. If the vote tallies don't match the label within an acceptable margin of error, then you know that there was tampering either in the initial tally, or with the box itself, and have to perform a new election if there's a potential of the outcome being changed.
Or, as a simpler purely human solution: after the polls close the sealed ballot boxes are *immediately* taken to the counting place under the supervision of a cross-party group of observers, where they get handed over to another cross-party group who provide a receipt listing the number of boxes and their individual ID codes, then remain on constant guard in the same room as the boxes until such time as the counting takes place. Any avoidable delay or other dereliction of duty by the observer groups to be considered proof of ill intent and carry an automatic felony charge for everyone involved. Any failure to *provide* the observer groups, or adequate instruction, is an automatic felony charge for the bureaucrat responsible for running the poll. While tallying, only one box is ever to be opened at a time within any room, and then re-sealed with all ballots within, and its tally clearly marked on the outside. No boxes leave any room except accompanied by an observer group who transports them directly to their destination, under the risk of the same automatic felony charges.
> I don't trust them to implement an auditable system that guarantees privacy based on a solid understanding of modern crypto.
Neither do I, which is why an auditable paper trail is so important. Until someone actually manages to make an independently tested, audited, open-source, electronic voting system with perfect security, the only way to ensure that elections aren't rigged is to be to have an unhackable paper trail.
Well, that, and to *actually perform* random manual recounts on a frequent and wide-spread basis to verify that electronic rigging isn't taking place.
Granted, there's a lot of room for improvement on maintaining the integrity of paper ballots - but the problems pale in comparison to those of the electronic alternatives.
It's got nothing to do with Trump (unless you're implying he won because the election was rigged?)
Election integrity is the single most important aspect of a democracy, and the fact that apparently only Democrats seem concerned with the fact that so many of our elections can be easily and invisibly rigged should be deeply disturbing. *Especially* to Republican-leaning voters, since it means that at best their politicians don't actually care about election integrity, and at worst intend to rig elections so that they don't have to depend on your support to maintain power.
>with the goal of substantially reducing the amount of money spent sending food and air up to those demanding humans on the International Space Station.
I'm embarrassed to see that level of missing-the-point from IEEE Spectrum, even as a joke (I hope). Robotic telepresence has nothing to do with reducing the human presence on the ISS - the ISS exists primarily to develop the technologies to keep humans alive and healthy in space (discovering the biggest problems being step one in that process).
Telepresence robots are about allowing us to expand our capabilities far beyond the ISS without the costs and risks of subjecting all the necessary workers to the risks. Especially by allowing people to work remotely in the hazardous environments in space, rather than having to go EVA. Perhaps some of the workers will remote in from Earth, though with a round-trip lag that increases to more than 133 milliseconds between surface and low orbit (the time taken for a light to travel halfway around the Earth and back again), they will substantially increase reaction times, and thus be unsuitable for anything that requires any kind of fast reflexes. But that still leaves a *lot* of jobs that could be done remotely, if slightly awkwardly. With practice you could probably compensate for the extra ~1/8th of a second of lag fairly well, especially if lag was artificially added so that it remained constant at the worst-case situation, rather than constantly changing.
They're hardly limited to orbital applications either - the moon would introduce a minimum of 2.6 seconds of lag for Earth-based operators, which would probably be too much to manually compensate for with anything that involves any reflexes - but you might be able to develop "AI reflexes" that can anticipate your intentions well enough for most situations. Or, you just have the operators safely inside a lunar habitat while they work remotely on the surface without worrying about radiation, oxygen, etc. Save the EVAs for recreation and especially difficult problems (though it seems to me that a good telepresence robot should be at least as dexterous as a person wearing bulky vacuum/radiation gloves.)
And of course, there's no reason a telepresence robot has to be bound by human limitations. A 10m tall robot torso with its "eyes" 60 cm apart would let an operator do large-scale assembly at an apparent 1/10th scale, without the awkwardness normally associated with operating banks of levers, etc. to control the dozens of degrees of freedom available.
Math, and a grasp of the scale of the problem being discussed.
There are around 800M active phone numbers allocated in the U.S. If they called each one just 3 times, that's 2.4 billion calls.
Alternately, there's about 290M people 20y or older in the U.S. If each one gets an average of just one illegal robocall per week (I wish!), that's 15 billion illegal calls per year.
And nothing in the article gives any indication of what sort of time span they're talking about - it seems very unlikely that a company would get caught and charged after only a single year. If they were, we'd be hearing stories like this every few weeks.
Since they don't tell us the two mid-range amounts, all we know for sure is that the total fines were between $4.5M and 9.5M for "billions" of calls. "Billions" is probably at least 2 billion, and likely more, so the fine per call was probably substantially less than $9.5M/2B =~ $0.005/call.
Meanwhile, a quick search suggests the going rate for legitimate robocall-selling companies is between about $0.06 and $0.02/call depending on volume. So, at the extreme high end, the fines *maybe* amount to about( $0.005/$0.02=) 25% of gross income, and likely *far* less than that. $7M in total fines, 3 billion calls, and an average price of $0.04/call translates to only ($5M/3B calls / [$0.04/call] =) 5.8% of gross income.
Sounds like just the cost of doing business to me, hardly enough to seriously discourage other illegal robocalling companies.
Sure, it's only ever one very narrow family line that evolves into any particular descendant species. But Dromaeosauridae would hardly be considered a bird - it had teeth, no beak (it had a narrow snout), and no hollow bones, for starters. It was a feathered dinosaur of the branch from which birds probably evolved, but it wasn't especially similar to modern birds. The basic body layout was there, mostly, but most of the distinguishing features of birds had yet to evolve. It had feathers, but those appear to have evolved almost 200 million year ago - sauropods probably benefited from "fur" almost as much as mammals did.
Now compare that to the difference between the pseudo-rodents of the time and modern mammals (humans included) Pretty much all our defining features were already present, only the morphology and more subtle details have changed.
We could argue all day about exactly when the "magic threshold" between theropods and birds was crossed - but in the end it's a fairly arbitrary linguistic distinction. My point is that the actual biological differences between those late theropods and modern birds are far larger than the differences between the pseudo-rodents of the same period and modern mammals such as humans. And thus claiming "birds are dinosaurs", rather than dinosaur-descendants, is a much less well-founded claim than "mammals (humans included) are pseudo-rodents".
There were certainly similarities to modern birds, but they were decidedly NOT birds yet. The differences between them and modern birds are on the same order as the difference between those rodents and modern humans. Larger actually - humans are pretty much the same the exact same body plan as those rodents, just distorted. Birds evolved beaks, lost their teeth, developed hollow bones, and many more such drastic changes over the same time period. We both mostly lost our tails, so I think we can call that a draw.
Excellent strategy - I've got nothing else to say about your post, but apparently it's time for my semi-annual dig at your sig:
Birds are dinosaurs in exactly the same way that humans are small rodents. Both our family lines have gone though some pretty major changes in the last 66 million years, and it makes no sense to say that we are now what we were then. Heck, why stop at what we were a few tens of millions of years ago? By the same logic both humans, birds, and trees, etc. are all single-celled organisms from the primoridal ooze.
He was the founder, but don't think he was ever CEO. He hired Brendan Iribe for the job in 2012, when his kickstarter exceeded $1million, and long before the buyout by Facebook. And Iribe stepped down last year when the CEO of Oculus position was replaced by a Facebook VP of VR
Slashdot Mirror
>An ARM chip in most data collection circumstances won't get as hot as an asphalt highway.
Doesn't matter - it might not get as hot as the highway itself, but it will get exactly as hot as the ambient air if powered off, and then immediately start heating up further when powered on. Basic thermodynamics demands that ambient air will *always* be cooler than an operating processor, unless you're refrigerating the chip directly.
Now, if you stick the whole thing in a well-insulated sealed box like a styrofoam cooler, along with a big chunk of thermal mass with a lot of surface area, like a cement "radiator" (much better than metals and better than most rock), you may be able to keep the whole thing well below ambient temperatures throughout the hottest part of the day, especially if you paint it solar-white or keep it in the shade. That would depend on the exact power consumption of the device, color of the box, amount of insulation and air space, and the size and surface area of the thermal mass though. You'd want to have an engineer run the numbers to be sure though.
Or just pour some cement into the bottom of a cheap styrafoam cooler. You could probably get some mounting bolts neatly embedded into a nice big protective hole in the cement (so that if you drop the thing device-first, it stays safe in its hole instead of being smashed flat) by screwing them into a block of styrofoam that you partially submerge bolt--heads first, and then pull out after the cement cures.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox...
Cool! (or Hot!, I suppose)
So is that typical, or is TI an exception?
I know I still love my TI-85 calculator - I must have a first-year 1992 model as I think of the timing. That sucker has taken almost 30 years of abuse and is still going strong. I just have to remember to replace the AAs every couple of years when I cant crank the screen darkness high enough any more.
Anyway - I recall them being quite proud of the durability of the thing in their marketing, and could easily see them being an outlier in the "durable-products" category.
An excellent solution. Makes production slightly more complicated, but it shouldn't be by much.
I like the "physical button" security model for most internet-connected things as well - make sure someone has to be physically present to confirm any potentially harmful action. It seems to me that that's the single most cost-effective layer of security you can add. If it's *really* important, then you make it physically impossible to take a harmful action without that button being pushed. Then you only have to worry about physical security.
>Gun ownership should require at least minimal training, with exceptions of course for military, police, and others with prior weapons training.
That doesn't sound like any sort of exception at all - just recognizing that such training is already a part of certain occupations. I'd certainly hope that cops get much better training than required just to own a gun, considering how much more likely they are to be firing their weapon in a populated area.
A bold statement, considering wehaven't actually mentioned any particular system. A straightforward electronic counting of paper ballots, designed specifically to be as small and easily-understood as possible, should be pretty easy for any decent programmer to audit.
It's worth mentioning that personally I think any electronic voting or tallying machine should be an embedded system with no operating system at all, and be as minimalist as possible for exactly that reason - every line of code on the machine that's not critical to serving its purpose only serves to obfuscate the critical components, and potentially hide malicious elements that could interfere with the proper functioning of those critical components.
Not even that - script kiddies are still trying to bypass security - these guys were just following the instructions on the box to see if the manager had been stupid enough to not change the factory-default passcode.
Seems to me that default passwords not being changed is a common enough security threat, across a wide range of devices, that any programmer should defend against it as a standard security precaution. Perhaps simply have the device refuse to operate at all until the password/code is changed, instead simply displaying a message demanding that the passcode be changed before proceeding.
You probably want initial setup and diagnostics to work normally, but refuse to actually pump any gas, forward any packets, or whatever else the device is supposed to do, until the code is changed.
Why would you say that? Most people don't even understand all the details of how the current election system works.
All you really need is that the system be straightforward enough that most people know somebody they trust who is capable of understanding the system well enough to assure them that it's trustworthy.
You can get into all sorts of counting complexities like condorcet voting, etc., but that's something completely independent from "can I trust the integrity of the system"
We could, though you you need to manage far more (but far smaller) countings. And either do it immediately after the polls close, or arrange for the ballots at each polling place to be guarded by a cross-party group overnight.
Heck, make the "boxes" small enough, and you could even "volunteer" voters for counting duty throughout the day. Show up to vote, and have a 10% chance of being pulled aside to the counting room to tally a couple packets of maybe 50 ballots each, instead of waiting in line. That lets each box get counted 10 independent times without putting an undue burden on anyone. Make sure everyone knows their count has to agree with a previous one before they're allowed to leave, but don't tell them what that count is. That should help keep everyone motivated to count carefully and accurately. (In practice, you probably don't want to enforce that on the first few counts of each box, so that there's a good chance that one of the previous counts is correct.) A well-designed ballot
> This isn't a democracy, by the way.
Of course it is. Or, at least it's supposed to be. A democratic republic is one of the many forms that democracy can take. The basic unifying principles being that the authority of the government is taken to flow from the people, and that the people control the government (to varying degrees) by voting.
Republic: "A state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives..."[1]
Democracy: "A system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."[2]
They are not mutually exclusive, and the U.S. is (supposed to be) both.
Actually it is about science - but the real science is mostly studying the hazards of living in space, and how to mitigate them. The astronauts are highly-competent lab rats - the additional science they perform themselves is mostly just icing on the cake.
And we're not doing that "just because it's there", but because space offers an *enormous* font of wealth and opportunity, and the only possible place our species can survive in the long term. But first we have to develop the technology to survive there.
We can't. Ever. Not really. Not without rewriting the laws of physics. 1.3 light-seconds away means 2.6 seconds of unavoidable lag. You might be able to operate a "Diablo style" point-and-click RPG style interface serviceably with that kind of lag, micro-managing a limited-intelligence robot, but it will always be woefully inadequate for a "First Person" VR experience.
Not necessarily completely unserviceable, especially with 360* VR recording so that you can at least look around in "real time" (though 1.3 seconds into the past). Take things slow and easy, and as long as there's no chaotic interference on the moon, you could get things done. Eventually.
Much better though to have the operator *also* on the moon, comfortably secure within a nice safe habitat while they operate the same telepresence robot in real time.
Or, combine the two. A Moonie technician can be operating a "cyborg" body in real time, while a team on Earth offer guidance from a 2.6 seconds in the past.
Quite so.
Now think construction, mining, refining,etc. - all the things that will need to be done routinely, as somebody's go-to-work-every-morning day job, if we're going to actually colonize space instead of just having a few off-planet laboratories.
Lots of people talk about having autonomous robots to do all that for us, and I'm sure someday we will, but probably not for a very long time - by all appearances the AI required to handle that is still a long way off. We've made great strides on robotic bodies though, and telepresence effectively lets you create cyborgs - human minds controlling robotic bodies as if they were their own. A fleet of automated robots to do the "dumb" tasks, complemented by a team of body-hopping "cyborgs" doing the stuff that needs a human touch? You might well be able to actually have an entire industrial park where people work every day, but rarely if ever set foot in the flesh. And of course such a system would scale beautifully as automation improved - all the "workers" are already robots, it's only a question of whether they're controlled by a human mind or an AI.
Most people aren't in it for the risk, that's just the price of admission. And if you can dramatically lower the risk by making robotic-EVAs a perfectly viable alternative for most things, instead of a dangerous, unpleasant, in-person ordeal, then you greatly increase the amount you accomplish with a given amount of manpower.
You still need people on-location, facing the unavoidable risks that come with that. But they don't have to be outside on a regular basis, doing all the dangerous construction, maintenance, mining, etc. that is needed, with nothing but a easily-damaged space suit between them and near-instant death.
I suppose for clarity I should say: ...interacting with the remote location in real time using a robotic proxy...
Not even remotely. They're teleoperated, but telepresence allows you to "be there", interacting with the remote location using a robotic proxy, often via a VR interface (as appears to be the case here). That's not remotely possible with the lag involved beyond Earth orbit.
There are admittedly currently some big problems with how we handle things - but we could require things to be handled better with minimal difficulty.
For example, as paper ballots are collected put them in a box until it's full. Then seal the box and slap a label on it that gives it a unique identifier, along with listing the IDs of the immediately previous and next boxes from that polling place, or "does not exist" for the first and last boxes from a particular election and polling place. For further security and convenience, also keep a receipt of all the labels printed so that boxes can be easily validated against the receipts before opening, to more easily detect missing or improperly labeled boxes.
Now you have a doubly-linked-list of boxes, and can easily recognize when one is lost, or an extra added, by confirming that each box does in fact belong to a valid and unbroken linked list. Any box without a valid label is discarded as a fake, though someone with sufficient access could still duplicate a box label (which would be obvious), or replace one, if they have access to make the original disappear.
To take it a step further, if you want the convenience/redundancy of electronic vote counting along with much greater security: electronically tally the ballots in each box before sealing it, with the totals displayed on the label along with a cryptographic hash of the tallies, the linked-list IDs, and the hash from the previous box. Use a good enough hash, and it will be basically impossible to tamper with any of the information recorded on the labels without also tampering with all of the subsequent labels.
In addition, keep a second "receipt" copy of each label on a single unbroken printout, with every poll worker getting a copy so that a massive cross-party conspiracy is necessary to tamper with the vote tallies.
Any box that doesn't show up on the receipt is fake. Any box that gets lost, still has its tally on the receipt as a backup. And if you're doing a manual recount, either as the definitive count, or as an audit, you can do it on a per-box basis - you just need to make sure you only ever have one box open at a time, and validate that the tallies on the box are correct. If the vote tallies don't match the label within an acceptable margin of error, then you know that there was tampering either in the initial tally, or with the box itself, and have to perform a new election if there's a potential of the outcome being changed.
Or, as a simpler purely human solution: after the polls close the sealed ballot boxes are *immediately* taken to the counting place under the supervision of a cross-party group of observers, where they get handed over to another cross-party group who provide a receipt listing the number of boxes and their individual ID codes, then remain on constant guard in the same room as the boxes until such time as the counting takes place. Any avoidable delay or other dereliction of duty by the observer groups to be considered proof of ill intent and carry an automatic felony charge for everyone involved. Any failure to *provide* the observer groups, or adequate instruction, is an automatic felony charge for the bureaucrat responsible for running the poll. While tallying, only one box is ever to be opened at a time within any room, and then re-sealed with all ballots within, and its tally clearly marked on the outside. No boxes leave any room except accompanied by an observer group who transports them directly to their destination, under the risk of the same automatic felony charges.
> I don't trust them to implement an auditable system that guarantees privacy based on a solid understanding of modern crypto.
Neither do I, which is why an auditable paper trail is so important. Until someone actually manages to make an independently tested, audited, open-source, electronic voting system with perfect security, the only way to ensure that elections aren't rigged is to be to have an unhackable paper trail.
Well, that, and to *actually perform* random manual recounts on a frequent and wide-spread basis to verify that electronic rigging isn't taking place.
Granted, there's a lot of room for improvement on maintaining the integrity of paper ballots - but the problems pale in comparison to those of the electronic alternatives.
It's got nothing to do with Trump (unless you're implying he won because the election was rigged?)
Election integrity is the single most important aspect of a democracy, and the fact that apparently only Democrats seem concerned with the fact that so many of our elections can be easily and invisibly rigged should be deeply disturbing. *Especially* to Republican-leaning voters, since it means that at best their politicians don't actually care about election integrity, and at worst intend to rig elections so that they don't have to depend on your support to maintain power.
>with the goal of substantially reducing the amount of money spent sending food and air up to those demanding humans on the International Space Station.
I'm embarrassed to see that level of missing-the-point from IEEE Spectrum, even as a joke (I hope). Robotic telepresence has nothing to do with reducing the human presence on the ISS - the ISS exists primarily to develop the technologies to keep humans alive and healthy in space (discovering the biggest problems being step one in that process).
Telepresence robots are about allowing us to expand our capabilities far beyond the ISS without the costs and risks of subjecting all the necessary workers to the risks. Especially by allowing people to work remotely in the hazardous environments in space, rather than having to go EVA. Perhaps some of the workers will remote in from Earth, though with a round-trip lag that increases to more than 133 milliseconds between surface and low orbit (the time taken for a light to travel halfway around the Earth and back again), they will substantially increase reaction times, and thus be unsuitable for anything that requires any kind of fast reflexes. But that still leaves a *lot* of jobs that could be done remotely, if slightly awkwardly. With practice you could probably compensate for the extra ~1/8th of a second of lag fairly well, especially if lag was artificially added so that it remained constant at the worst-case situation, rather than constantly changing.
They're hardly limited to orbital applications either - the moon would introduce a minimum of 2.6 seconds of lag for Earth-based operators, which would probably be too much to manually compensate for with anything that involves any reflexes - but you might be able to develop "AI reflexes" that can anticipate your intentions well enough for most situations. Or, you just have the operators safely inside a lunar habitat while they work remotely on the surface without worrying about radiation, oxygen, etc. Save the EVAs for recreation and especially difficult problems (though it seems to me that a good telepresence robot should be at least as dexterous as a person wearing bulky vacuum/radiation gloves.)
And of course, there's no reason a telepresence robot has to be bound by human limitations. A 10m tall robot torso with its "eyes" 60 cm apart would let an operator do large-scale assembly at an apparent 1/10th scale, without the awkwardness normally associated with operating banks of levers, etc. to control the dozens of degrees of freedom available.
Math, and a grasp of the scale of the problem being discussed.
There are around 800M active phone numbers allocated in the U.S. If they called each one just 3 times, that's 2.4 billion calls.
Alternately, there's about 290M people 20y or older in the U.S. If each one gets an average of just one illegal robocall per week (I wish!), that's 15 billion illegal calls per year.
And nothing in the article gives any indication of what sort of time span they're talking about - it seems very unlikely that a company would get caught and charged after only a single year. If they were, we'd be hearing stories like this every few weeks.
Since they don't tell us the two mid-range amounts, all we know for sure is that the total fines were between $4.5M and 9.5M for "billions" of calls. "Billions" is probably at least 2 billion, and likely more, so the fine per call was probably substantially less than $9.5M/2B =~ $0.005/call.
Meanwhile, a quick search suggests the going rate for legitimate robocall-selling companies is between about $0.06 and $0.02/call depending on volume.
So, at the extreme high end, the fines *maybe* amount to about( $0.005/$0.02=) 25% of gross income, and likely *far* less than that. $7M in total fines, 3 billion calls, and an average price of $0.04/call translates to only ($5M/3B calls / [$0.04/call] =) 5.8% of gross income.
Sounds like just the cost of doing business to me, hardly enough to seriously discourage other illegal robocalling companies.
Sure, it's only ever one very narrow family line that evolves into any particular descendant species. But Dromaeosauridae would hardly be considered a bird - it had teeth, no beak (it had a narrow snout), and no hollow bones, for starters. It was a feathered dinosaur of the branch from which birds probably evolved, but it wasn't especially similar to modern birds. The basic body layout was there, mostly, but most of the distinguishing features of birds had yet to evolve. It had feathers, but those appear to have evolved almost 200 million year ago - sauropods probably benefited from "fur" almost as much as mammals did.
Now compare that to the difference between the pseudo-rodents of the time and modern mammals (humans included) Pretty much all our defining features were already present, only the morphology and more subtle details have changed.
We could argue all day about exactly when the "magic threshold" between theropods and birds was crossed - but in the end it's a fairly arbitrary linguistic distinction. My point is that the actual biological differences between those late theropods and modern birds are far larger than the differences between the pseudo-rodents of the same period and modern mammals such as humans. And thus claiming "birds are dinosaurs", rather than dinosaur-descendants, is a much less well-founded claim than "mammals (humans included) are pseudo-rodents".
There were certainly similarities to modern birds, but they were decidedly NOT birds yet. The differences between them and modern birds are on the same order as the difference between those rodents and modern humans. Larger actually - humans are pretty much the same the exact same body plan as those rodents, just distorted. Birds evolved beaks, lost their teeth, developed hollow bones, and many more such drastic changes over the same time period. We both mostly lost our tails, so I think we can call that a draw.
Excellent strategy - I've got nothing else to say about your post, but apparently it's time for my semi-annual dig at your sig:
Birds are dinosaurs in exactly the same way that humans are small rodents. Both our family lines have gone though some pretty major changes in the last 66 million years, and it makes no sense to say that we are now what we were then. Heck, why stop at what we were a few tens of millions of years ago? By the same logic both humans, birds, and trees, etc. are all single-celled organisms from the primoridal ooze.
He was the founder, but don't think he was ever CEO. He hired Brendan Iribe for the job in 2012, when his kickstarter exceeded $1million, and long before the buyout by Facebook. And Iribe stepped down last year when the CEO of Oculus position was replaced by a Facebook VP of VR