Steve Jobs obviously has good taste in sensing trends and managing to bring them to market just a little more quickly than others. You could make a list of things that were more or less in the air, that the Mac wasn't first to offer, but successfully offered on a large scale six to twelve months ahead of the PC world.
All of these points can of course be debated depending on how you count "introduced on a large scale" and "when," but...
--Introducing the Sony 3.5" floppy in the first place --Screens with black text on a white background --Easy-to-use workgroup-strength plug-and-play networking --Laser printers --SCSI interface --DROPPING floppies as standard equipment --USB ports (!) --Optical mice as standard equipment
Of course, the standard PC answer is to any Mac innovation is "Who cares? If it's of any real importance PCs will have it in a year anyway. And it will be cheaper." To which the Mac answer is, "Yeah, and it won't work as well."
This is a Bad Thing. It is simply another indicator of USENET's decline. And that's a Bad Thing, because the alternatives (the web-based forums, many of them excellent--let me plug bikeforums.net as a superb example) are all under corporate, rather than community control. They are simply not committed to the same degree of openness and free-as-in-freedom that USENET is.
It is one more sign that the Wild West days of the Internet are coming to an end and the Internet is coming more and more thoroughly under the control of business interests.
and Ovonics, and the Hiller flying platform, and Tesla's wireless power tranmission, and the GeOS operating system, and a thousand and one other brilliantly innovative things that coulda been a contender... things that still make the people that knew them cast longing looks into a wonderful past.
What made these things so wonderful was that they were 10% real and 90% handwaving. None of them were outright fakery and none of their inventors were outright charlatans, but for all the glitter of gold dust it was never clear that any of them were backed by a real vein that could actually be mined.
I can't think of any case offhand where "Me-too only with more" has been a successful marketing strategy. This is lazy marketing...
Of course, if you ask existing customers who like and use a product X what they ''want,'' those customers, just having faced a difficult struggle choosing from different price points in a product line will say something like "I'd like to get the features of the top model at the price of the entry model." Or if they're more ambitious, "I'd like twice the storage, half the size, and half the price." (About the only thing you won't hear from iPod owners is "And I'd like it to play the music twice as fast!).
What the strategy never takes into account is that in the time it takes to bring the me-too-but-more product to market, the manufacturer of the product they're gunning for will probably improve their product.
As for "choice," most computer users I know never change the home page of their browser from the one that's set by the manufacturer. Consumers will happily buy into the all-Apple iPod ecosystem and won't care unless it becomes obvious that the PC download music stores have dropped prices to, say, $0.25 per song, or have a grotesquely larger selection.
It may be a shame, but all the issues about lock-in, DRM, etc. don't matter to consumers until they personally get bitten, and so far Apple has taken great care not to bite consumers much.
It also helps that Apple's stuff works. The number of articles I've read about "iPod killers" by PC-centric sources that acknowledge up front that whatever they're testing wouldn't install, or froze, or had DRM authorization problems is astonishing.
A friend of mine who is just an average PC-centric engineer bought an iPod for his wife. Because it was reputedly a good product and easy to use. His wife, who is mildly computer-phobic, had no problems with it. It just worked. A few weeks later he bought one for himself. He likes it.
Another friend who bought some fairly pricey high-end gadget from Creative, I think, reminds me of all the personal computer enthusiasts of the late 1970s. It constantly presents him with challenges, which he enjoys surmounting. He is a chorus director who brings his player and powered speakers to rehearsals to play us things. It never works, and there is always some good reason why he can't play that particular thing that particular day.
...when someone posts an article describing how to double the speed of one of those--maybe by running them on 240VAC and using a Peltier cooler to keep the motor from burning out?--then I'll be impressed.
I'm afraid I don't personally know which is the wire on an IBM 650 accounting machine that can be cut to increase its performance by 50%, but I knew people who said they knew...
Barney Google?
on
Google Tidbits
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Too bad... I thought it was a portmanteau of Googol, ten to the hundredth power, and Barney Google ("Baaaaarrrney Google! with the goo- goo- googly eyes!"), whose name is correctly spelled with a -gle. Barney Google was a comic strip icon of the Roaring Twenties, and the title of the Billy Rose hit song of the same name and era.
Barney's horse Spark Plug was so popular that Sparky became an common sobriquet; indeed that is the source of Charles M. Schulz's nickname.
Google lives on in rare cameo appearances in the comic strip, generally known as "Snuffy Smith," whose full title is actually "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith"
...in my experience means: "Visible to the naked eye of an experienced observer under the age of 40 with good eyesight whose eyes have been dark-adapted for at least half an hour, on a clear night in dry weather with no moon, at time at least three hours after sunset or three hours when the object is at least 40 degrees above the horizon, on a hill with dry air at least a fifty miles from any town with a population of over 2,000."
If you can see and count seven Pleiades and if you are in a place where you would notice the Milky Way without anyone mentioning it to you, then, sure, it might be visible to the naked eye.
To the average Joe stumbling out into his suburban backward, it's not all that conspicuous even in binoculars.
Telling people that the comet is "visible to the naked eye" is just setting them up for disappointment, particularly after they've seen innumerable big-observatory long-exposure photos showing huge comets with long dramatic tails... or cartoons where the animator has somehow gotten comets confused with bolides.
The last time Halley's came around, a Boston Globe columnist trotted out the usual mantra about finding a spot on a hill far from city lights. So, with some persistence, I phoned him up and said that I was really tired of columns telling me to find a spot on a hill far from city lights that didn't tell me where to find such a hill within thirty miles of Boston. I mean, Great Blue Hill with its spectacular view of the dazzling city lights of Boston is exactly what you don't want. He said "I really have no answer for you. There is a place I go to but it's sixty miles from Boston and it's private property."
When you have a really good view of the sky, which I've had maybe half a dozen times in my life, it's hard to find the constellations because you see too many starts. The bright stars that the H. A. Rey diagrams connect with dots are almost lost in a sparkly mist of hundreds of other visible stars that seem nearly as bright. I'm convinced that the ancients did not see the constellations as stick figures, but as three-dimensional solid images in those sparkly clouds. I've no doubt that under those circumstances, the comet would be a conspicious and truly "naked-eye" object.
The article makes perfect sense and the issues are legitimate. The thing is, they are generic issues in the PC world we live in today. They aren't any better if you use Microsoft software.
The average user is placed in situations, probably several times a week, where in theory he is voluntarily authorizing something but in practice has virtually no way to know whether it is safe to click OK or not.
Today's software is constantly giving you scary warnings about things that are perfectly OK, while constantly encouraging you to OK things which are not at all in your best interests to OK.
My favorites are all the Microsoft uninstalls which ask me whether I want to delete QQXXZZ.DLL, without telling me what QQXXZZ.DLL is or what it does or what other applications might be using it. (In fact, it seems to expect me to know that. Hey, the OS might be in a position to know whether some other application uses that DLL, but I certainly am not. And my wife, of course, doesn't even know what a DLL is...
(Now, about that pageful of medium-gray type on a light-gray background that's on the back of the car rental agreement you are presented with, in the airport, with a line of irritable people behind you...)
Huh. Somebody needs to visit the Long Now foundation and recalibrate their idea of what "long term" means.
Thirty years is "archival?" The crappiest stuff in the world will last thirty years. Canon is bragging about thirty years?
And that's probably an exaggeration. There are probably a lot of asterisks about humidity, and what kind of glass it is stored under. (A lot of those CD-R's that manufacturers said were going to last a century are starting to fail in less than ten years).
Light purple spirit duplicator documents will last thirty years. Even if they're a lighter purple than the day they were printed.
Books printed on World War II paper have lasted more than thirty years.
Any old black-and-white photo will last a century, easy. After a hundred years or so it may not have a full rich Ansel Adams tone scale, but you can see that your baby has Great-Grandma's dimple just fine. And that's the one that was sitting in that leather frame on Grandpa's office desk for all those decades...
So, these inkjet photos. Sure, you can always print them out again... except that our supposedly permanent digital media are, of course, only permanent if we are vigilant conservators ready to recopy everything over to a new format every decade or so as technology advances.
Two hundred years from now historians are going to know more about the 1800s than they do about the 2000's.
In Pigeon Cove, near Rockport, Massachusetts starting in 1922, a mechanical engineer named Elis F. Stenman built a house out of tightly rolled, varnished newspaper. He also built furniture for the house including tables, chairs, cabinets, bookcases, a piano, and a grandfather clock.
The front of the grandfather clock incorporates newspapers from the capital cities of each of the (then) forty-eight states, all oriented so that the name of the paper and city neatly face forward and are readable, although the varnish has gotten quite dark with age.
The house survives today. It is just off by itself in on a little nondescript road. There is relatively little publicity. No visitor's area or parking lot, you just park on the street.
I don't think I would travel a great distance to see it, but if I were in the Cape Ann area I certainly would take a look at it. Well worth half-an-hour of anyone's time. You are aware of being in the presence of someone very original who by gosh knew what he wanted to do and did it.
More here and here.
(Oh, and I think the Forest Products Laboratory of Madison, Wisconsin also has or had a demonstration house built out of some kind of cardboard-like material).
I still don't get it. This seems like a negative-sum game, a lose-lose situation.
Maybe the article is deliberately vague to avoid giving away how-tos?.
If I call up a pizza parlor and order fifty pizzas to be delivered to my neighbor (and the pizzas are delivered and I'm not caught, etc.) it costs my neighbor money. It actually benefits the pizza parlor. (Unless my neighbor yells enough and the pizza parlor takes back the pizzas...).
Either way, it only affects me in the subtlest of ways. With respect to _money_, and fraud is usually about money, it doesn't help me. I don't get a dime out of it.
Usually, what motivates fraud is that the fraudster _makes money_.
Sure, in the pizza parlor place if I run a competing establishment, I might hope that my neighbor will be so annoyed that he'll switch pizzerias. That's pretty darn subtle, though.
Taking money out of Google's pocket or out of Google's advertisers' pocket isn't the same as putting it _in_ the fraudster's pocket. How does the fraudster benefit financially?
The site says: "To assure that your credit file is disclosed only to you, the nationwide consumer credit reporting companies will authenticate your identity utilizing the personal identification information you provide on this site, including, but not limited to, your Social Security number, and then require that you answer certain questions."
But what information on my credit report is known to me that is not known to my immediate family members, my employer, my physician's office, etc.?
I always wonder about the mechanical details and just what the mechanical considerations are that have enabled them to make these bigger, flatter, slimmer vacuum tubes strong
It looks as if that 30-inch tube has a flat screen and a 16:9 aspect ratio. That would make it about 26x15 inches = a bit shy of 400 square inches, at 15 pounds per square inch = 6000 pounds. Can you imagine a 26x15 inch flat sheet of glass supporting the weight of a small SUV, even if it is well supported all around its edge?
Is that some special kind of glass? How thick is it? Is the pressure and weight actually taken by some kind of laminated plastic? Or what?
It's been decades since I saw slow-motio movies of a CRT imploding...
"...In my opinion, Linux is thoroughly infested with patent violations. I have in my hand 228 cases of pieces of code which would appear to be either card-carrying patent violations, or certainly disloyal to the cause of intellectual property, but which nevertheless are still helping to shape the functioning of Linux..."
These devices and their users, as I understand it, are required to "accept any interference" from nearby devices.
Virtually every low-powered RF gadget I've ever bought--wireless telephones, wireless headphones, etc. have more or less worked when I bought them, then within a few years have gradually become more or less useless due to interference from similarly-equipped neighbors.
Doubtless the specs on this equipment will claim umpteen-bit DACs, 100 db signal-to-noise ratio, and 0.01% THD. And in practice the sound you get will be deliciously high-fidelity--in between the buzzes, the dropouts, and the blurps.
No doubt the marketplace's response will be to sell us higher and higher-powered versions of these devices... instead of bragging about their 200-watt amplifiers, people will brag about their 200-milliwatt Bluetooth repeaters.
And when the teenage kids drive by the house in their tricked-out cars, you'll be able to enjoy a brief sampling of their music taste in the comfort of your own living room.
Traditional election fraud, conducted by low-tech means, is available to everyone, of either party. How much occurs is dependent on the energy and venality of the party's local organization and the degree of incompetence, corruption, and bias of the local officials. That means it cuts both ways. And it cannot be kept secret. It may not be possible to stop it, but people know that it is going on. And it happens "retail," on a local level, precinct by precinct.
Terrible as it is, a small amount of traditional fraud does not imperil the entire system. If party A and party B are roughly equal in power, then the amount of fraud perpetrated by party A will be roughly balanced by the amount of fraud perpetrated by party B. It is in effect just an intensification of legal methods of influencing elections, e.g. by spending money on advertising.
The difference with electronic voting fraud is the possibility that a single entity, such as a voting machine manufacturer in cahoots with a political party, could create systematic and hard-to-detect vote fraud on a national scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jobs obviously has good taste in sensing trends and managing to bring them to market just a little more quickly than others. You could make a list of things that were more or less in the air, that the Mac wasn't first to offer, but successfully offered on a large scale six to twelve months ahead of the PC world.
All of these points can of course be debated depending on how you count "introduced on a large scale" and "when," but...
--Introducing the Sony 3.5" floppy in the first place
--Screens with black text on a white background
--Easy-to-use workgroup-strength plug-and-play networking
--Laser printers
--SCSI interface
--DROPPING floppies as standard equipment
--USB ports (!)
--Optical mice as standard equipment
Of course, the standard PC answer is to any Mac innovation is "Who cares? If it's of any real importance PCs will have it in a year anyway. And it will be cheaper." To which the Mac answer is, "Yeah, and it won't work as well."
This is a Bad Thing. It is simply another indicator of USENET's decline. And that's a Bad Thing, because the alternatives (the web-based forums, many of them excellent--let me plug bikeforums.net as a superb example) are all under corporate, rather than community control. They are simply not committed to the same degree of openness and free-as-in-freedom that USENET is.
It is one more sign that the Wild West days of the Internet are coming to an end and the Internet is coming more and more thoroughly under the control of business interests.
...Accepting free products is unethical, plain and simple.
If the companies that give out the freebies didn't think it would influence the recipients, they wouldn't do it.
...One ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them.
and Ovonics, and the Hiller flying platform, and Tesla's wireless power tranmission, and the GeOS operating system, and a thousand and one other brilliantly innovative things that coulda been a contender... things that still make the people that knew them cast longing looks into a wonderful past.
What made these things so wonderful was that they were 10% real and 90% handwaving. None of them were outright fakery and none of their inventors were outright charlatans, but for all the glitter of gold dust it was never clear that any of them were backed by a real vein that could actually be mined.
Because he's a professor?
Because it sounds credible (which it does?)
Because he says "I was in government at the time the story broke?"
Should I believe everything Theodore Postol says? He's a professor, too.
This story is nothing but a set of assertions. There's not so much as a single citation to back any of this up.
...in the upper level lounge, like the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser?
I can't think of any case offhand where "Me-too only with more" has been a successful marketing strategy. This is lazy marketing...
Of course, if you ask existing customers who like and use a product X what they ''want,'' those customers, just having faced a difficult struggle choosing from different price points in a product line will say something like "I'd like to get the features of the top model at the price of the entry model." Or if they're more ambitious, "I'd like twice the storage, half the size, and half the price." (About the only thing you won't hear from iPod owners is "And I'd like it to play the music twice as fast!).
What the strategy never takes into account is that in the time it takes to bring the me-too-but-more product to market, the manufacturer of the product they're gunning for will probably improve their product.
As for "choice," most computer users I know never change the home page of their browser from the one that's set by the manufacturer. Consumers will happily buy into the all-Apple iPod ecosystem and won't care unless it becomes obvious that the PC download music stores have dropped prices to, say, $0.25 per song, or have a grotesquely larger selection.
It may be a shame, but all the issues about lock-in, DRM, etc. don't matter to consumers until they personally get bitten, and so far Apple has taken great care not to bite consumers much.
It also helps that Apple's stuff works. The number of articles I've read about "iPod killers" by PC-centric sources that acknowledge up front that whatever they're testing wouldn't install, or froze, or had DRM authorization problems is astonishing.
A friend of mine who is just an average PC-centric engineer bought an iPod for his wife. Because it was reputedly a good product and easy to use. His wife, who is mildly computer-phobic, had no problems with it. It just worked. A few weeks later he bought one for himself. He likes it.
Another friend who bought some fairly pricey high-end gadget from Creative, I think, reminds me of all the personal computer enthusiasts of the late 1970s. It constantly presents him with challenges, which he enjoys surmounting. He is a chorus director who brings his player and powered speakers to rehearsals to play us things. It never works, and there is always some good reason why he can't play that particular thing that particular day.
...when someone posts an article describing how to double the speed of one of those--maybe by running them on 240VAC and using a Peltier cooler to keep the motor from burning out?--then I'll be impressed.
I'm afraid I don't personally know which is the wire on an IBM 650 accounting machine that can be cut to increase its performance by 50%, but I knew people who said they knew...
Too bad... I thought it was a portmanteau of Googol, ten to the hundredth power, and Barney Google ("Baaaaarrrney Google! with the goo- goo- googly eyes!"), whose name is correctly spelled with a -gle. Barney Google was a comic strip icon of the Roaring Twenties, and the title of the Billy Rose hit song of the same name and era.
Barney's horse Spark Plug was so popular that Sparky became an common sobriquet; indeed that is the source of Charles M. Schulz's nickname.
Google lives on in rare cameo appearances in the comic strip, generally known as "Snuffy Smith," whose full title is actually "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith"
Apple provided mouse training in an application that was included in the diskettes shipped with the very first Macintosh in early 1984.
When it comes to catering to the home user, Microsoft is definitely catching up to Apple. Watch out, Apple--they're only twenty years behind you now!
That's Slashvertising plain and simple.
...in my experience means: "Visible to the naked eye of an experienced observer under the age of 40 with good eyesight whose eyes have been dark-adapted for at least half an hour, on a clear night in dry weather with no moon, at time at least three hours after sunset or three hours when the object is at least 40 degrees above the horizon, on a hill with dry air at least a fifty miles from any town with a population of over 2,000 ."
If you can see and count seven Pleiades and if you are in a place where you would notice the Milky Way without anyone mentioning it to you, then, sure, it might be visible to the naked eye.
To the average Joe stumbling out into his suburban backward, it's not all that conspicuous even in binoculars.
Telling people that the comet is "visible to the naked eye" is just setting them up for disappointment, particularly after they've seen innumerable big-observatory long-exposure photos showing huge comets with long dramatic tails... or cartoons where the animator has somehow gotten comets confused with bolides.
The last time Halley's came around, a Boston Globe columnist trotted out the usual mantra about finding a spot on a hill far from city lights. So, with some persistence, I phoned him up and said that I was really tired of columns telling me to find a spot on a hill far from city lights that didn't tell me where to find such a hill within thirty miles of Boston. I mean, Great Blue Hill with its spectacular view of the dazzling city lights of Boston is exactly what you don't want. He said "I really have no answer for you. There is a place I go to but it's sixty miles from Boston and it's private property."
When you have a really good view of the sky, which I've had maybe half a dozen times in my life, it's hard to find the constellations because you see too many starts. The bright stars that the H. A. Rey diagrams connect with dots are almost lost in a sparkly mist of hundreds of other visible stars that seem nearly as bright. I'm convinced that the ancients did not see the constellations as stick figures, but as three-dimensional solid images in those sparkly clouds. I've no doubt that under those circumstances, the comet would be a conspicious and truly "naked-eye" object.
I thought I saw an article about that earlier, but on second glance it turned out to about self-heating coffee. Yawn.
Now, as for self-heating systems...
The article makes perfect sense and the issues are legitimate. The thing is, they are generic issues in the PC world we live in today. They aren't any better if you use Microsoft software.
The average user is placed in situations, probably several times a week, where in theory he is voluntarily authorizing something but in practice has virtually no way to know whether it is safe to click OK or not.
Today's software is constantly giving you scary warnings about things that are perfectly OK, while constantly encouraging you to OK things which are not at all in your best interests to OK.
My favorites are all the Microsoft uninstalls which ask me whether I want to delete QQXXZZ.DLL, without telling me what QQXXZZ.DLL is or what it does or what other applications might be using it. (In fact, it seems to expect me to know that. Hey, the OS might be in a position to know whether some other application uses that DLL, but I certainly am not. And my wife, of course, doesn't even know what a DLL is...
(Now, about that pageful of medium-gray type on a light-gray background that's on the back of the car rental agreement you are presented with, in the airport, with a line of irritable people behind you...)
But will a "mushroom rubber" protect you against Amanita phalloides?
Huh. Somebody needs to visit the Long Now foundation and recalibrate their idea of what "long term" means.
Thirty years is "archival?" The crappiest stuff in the world will last thirty years. Canon is bragging about thirty years?
And that's probably an exaggeration. There are probably a lot of asterisks about humidity, and what kind of glass it is stored under. (A lot of those CD-R's that manufacturers said were going to last a century are starting to fail in less than ten years).
Light purple spirit duplicator documents will last thirty years. Even if they're a lighter purple than the day they were printed.
Books printed on World War II paper have lasted more than thirty years.
Any old black-and-white photo will last a century, easy. After a hundred years or so it may not have a full rich Ansel Adams tone scale, but you can see that your baby has Great-Grandma's dimple just fine. And that's the one that was sitting in that leather frame on Grandpa's office desk for all those decades...
So, these inkjet photos. Sure, you can always print them out again... except that our supposedly permanent digital media are, of course, only permanent if we are vigilant conservators ready to recopy everything over to a new format every decade or so as technology advances.
Two hundred years from now historians are going to know more about the 1800s than they do about the 2000's.
In Pigeon Cove, near Rockport, Massachusetts starting in 1922, a mechanical engineer named Elis F. Stenman built a house out of tightly rolled, varnished newspaper. He also built furniture for the house including tables, chairs, cabinets, bookcases, a piano, and a grandfather clock.
The front of the grandfather clock incorporates newspapers from the capital cities of each of the (then) forty-eight states, all oriented so that the name of the paper and city neatly face forward and are readable, although the varnish has gotten quite dark with age.
The house survives today. It is just off by itself in on a little nondescript road. There is relatively little publicity. No visitor's area or parking lot, you just park on the street.
I don't think I would travel a great distance to see it, but if I were in the Cape Ann area I certainly would take a look at it. Well worth half-an-hour of anyone's time. You are aware of being in the presence of someone very original who by gosh knew what he wanted to do and did it.
More here and here.
(Oh, and I think the Forest Products Laboratory of Madison, Wisconsin also has or had a demonstration house built out of some kind of cardboard-like material).
I still don't get it. This seems like a negative-sum game, a lose-lose situation.
Maybe the article is deliberately vague to avoid giving away how-tos?.
If I call up a pizza parlor and order fifty pizzas to be delivered to my neighbor (and the pizzas are delivered and I'm not caught, etc.) it costs my neighbor money. It actually benefits the pizza parlor. (Unless my neighbor yells enough and the pizza parlor takes back the pizzas...).
Either way, it only affects me in the subtlest of ways. With respect to _money_, and fraud is usually about money, it doesn't help me. I don't get a dime out of it.
Usually, what motivates fraud is that the fraudster _makes money_.
Sure, in the pizza parlor place if I run a competing establishment, I might hope that my neighbor will be so annoyed that he'll switch pizzerias. That's pretty darn subtle, though.
Taking money out of Google's pocket or out of Google's advertisers' pocket isn't the same as putting it _in_ the fraudster's pocket. How does the fraudster benefit financially?
What exactly will prevent this?
The site says: "To assure that your credit file is disclosed only to you, the nationwide consumer credit reporting companies will authenticate your identity utilizing the personal identification information you provide on this site, including, but not limited to, your Social Security number, and then require that you answer certain questions."
But what information on my credit report is known to me that is not known to my immediate family members, my employer, my physician's office, etc.?
I always wonder about the mechanical details and just what the mechanical considerations are that have enabled them to make these bigger, flatter, slimmer vacuum tubes strong
It looks as if that 30-inch tube has a flat screen and a 16:9 aspect ratio. That would make it about 26x15 inches = a bit shy of 400 square inches, at 15 pounds per square inch = 6000 pounds. Can you imagine a 26x15 inch flat sheet of glass supporting the weight of a small SUV, even if it is well supported all around its edge?
Is that some special kind of glass? How thick is it? Is the pressure and weight actually taken by some kind of laminated plastic? Or what?
It's been decades since I saw slow-motio movies of a CRT imploding...
"...In my opinion, Linux is thoroughly infested with patent violations. I have in my hand 228 cases of pieces of code which would appear to be either card-carrying patent violations, or certainly disloyal to the cause of intellectual property, but which nevertheless are still helping to shape the functioning of Linux..."
(if you don't get it...)
"The impulses are only 20 ms in length. Neurons in the brain need about 40 ms to recognize the light source."
What garbage! By that reasoning, the flash from a camera ought to be invisible.
These devices and their users, as I understand it, are required to "accept any interference" from nearby devices.
Virtually every low-powered RF gadget I've ever bought--wireless telephones, wireless headphones, etc. have more or less worked when I bought them, then within a few years have gradually become more or less useless due to interference from similarly-equipped neighbors.
Doubtless the specs on this equipment will claim umpteen-bit DACs, 100 db signal-to-noise ratio, and 0.01% THD. And in practice the sound you get will be deliciously high-fidelity--in between the buzzes, the dropouts, and the blurps.
No doubt the marketplace's response will be to sell us higher and higher-powered versions of these devices... instead of bragging about their 200-watt amplifiers, people will brag about their 200-milliwatt Bluetooth repeaters.
And when the teenage kids drive by the house in their tricked-out cars, you'll be able to enjoy a brief sampling of their music taste in the comfort of your own living room.
Well, not really.
Traditional election fraud, conducted by low-tech means, is available to everyone, of either party. How much occurs is dependent on the energy and venality of the party's local organization and the degree of incompetence, corruption, and bias of the local officials. That means it cuts both ways. And it cannot be kept secret. It may not be possible to stop it, but people know that it is going on. And it happens "retail," on a local level, precinct by precinct.
Terrible as it is, a small amount of traditional fraud does not imperil the entire system. If party A and party B are roughly equal in power, then the amount of fraud perpetrated by party A will be roughly balanced by the amount of fraud perpetrated by party B. It is in effect just an intensification of legal methods of influencing elections, e.g. by spending money on advertising.
The difference with electronic voting fraud is the possibility that a single entity, such as a voting machine manufacturer in cahoots with a political party, could create systematic and hard-to-detect vote fraud on a national scale.