At best, this shows that Bush got more votes in heavily democratic regions than statistics would have predicted (if the same methods were applied to elections from 1960 on, how many other "surprises" would there be?).
But the assumption that this occured because the Republicans cheated ignores an equally statistically possible explaination. The new machines were harder to tamper with, and there was less traditional cheating.
Surely everyone hasn't forgotten the "good old days" of Dailey in Chicago and of LBJ in Texas? Cheating in elections isn't new, and doesn't require electronics... so just what part of this research proves that there simply wasn't less cheating?
btw: I am registered as a Democrat
Re:What day of the week is it?
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Between the money to SCO" of course, you READ the article and noticed this choice bit: "Arguably the most important question I asked Scott McNealy was, "What proprietary code had to be taken out of Solaris in preparation for open sourcing it?" McNealy responded by saying that the process of open sourcing Solaris actually started five years ago. "There were hundreds of encumbrances to open sourcing Solaris. Some of them we had to buy out, others we had to eliminate. We had to pay SCO more money so we could open the code -- I couldn't say anything about that at the time, but now I can tell you that we paid them that license fee to expand our rights to the code," he said, referring to the February 2003 multi-million-dollar purchase of expanded Unix SVR4 license rights from the SCO Group. That was at the beginning of SCO's war on Linux, and the timing of Sun's license purchase was suspicious. At the time it was widely theorized in the online press that Sun had purchased the expanded Unix licenses to help fund SCO's lawsuit against Sun's lifelong nemesis IBM and public attacks on Sun's part-time rival, GNU/Linux; if what McNealy says is true, a lot of pundits owe him an apology."
Humm, a very different perspective can be found at
http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
Where Gary Reback, famed IP attorney, says:
My own introduction to the realities of the patent system came in the 1980s, when my client, Sun Microsystems--then a small company--was accused by IBM of patent infringement. Threatening a massive lawsuit, IBM demanded a meeting to present its claims. Fourteen IBM lawyers and their assistants, all clad in the requisite dark blue suits, crowded into the largest conference room Sun had.
The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.
After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.
An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
...
In corporate America, this type of shakedown is repeated weekly.
A long time ago, in a job far, far away, I had to deal with some radio astronomy data.
The raw data was pretty much noise (quasar output).There were two data streams, from opposite sides of the earth, listening to the same noise source)
The data (after extraction) was very, very small. I can't recall if it would have been on the order of Tb to Kb but it might well have been. We didn't have that much storage, so we had to compute (using custom hardware) in near real time.
With appropriate temporary storage, much simpler (and probably more accurate) computational solutions are practical.
It's possible they mean reduced not compressed (to use appropriate buzz words). Data reduction can be quite steep (e.g. count the number of LGM found in the current sample. Typically all your data reduces to 0;>).
Actually back in the 1980's the Standards Committee formally changed the name to Fortran. Of course, it only "took effect" in 1991 when that revision of the Standard was formally adopted.
For what it's worth, the orignal IBM paper used a capital F and small caps for the ORTRAN. The choice of all capitals after that time was driven, to some extent, by the lack of lower case characters in early computer character sets (12 5-bit "bytes" in a CDC 60-bit word for example).
While Walt was certainly a major part of the F effort, it was not his work alone. Dick Hendrickson, David Epstein, Michael Metcalf, John Reid and Loren Meissner all had hands in it (working from memory).
In it's early days, it was a preprocessor which enforced restrictions, and relied upon a full compiler behind it to actually do the compilation. It used to be mated to more than one compiler as a backend.
Lead-acid batteries don't have to have any liquid. The most common lead acid batteries in EVs today are Optima Yellow Tops. Optima employs spiral wound "plates" suspended in a glass mat.
You can drill into these suckers and not spill apreciable amounts of acid.
Actually stuffing lead acids batteries to 80% quickly has been found to *increase* their battery life.
Lead-Acid battery life is generally best if the batteries are capable of deep cycles, but aren't really deeply cycled.
Typical EV battery pack lifespans are dramatically decreased by user abuse (and without very intensive user care, or good automation this is typical).
The tango features possibly the most advanced battery management system yet deployed, and was designed by Lee Hart who has extensive experience in EV battery pack maintance.
http://creativecommons.org
You may recall Prof. Lessing from his fight against the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (Eldred vs. Ashcroft).
Createivecommons provides some fully worked out licensing schemes, providing a variety of options.
From your brief description, I conjecture you might want to look up "Conservancies" on their site.
McNealy has repeatedly and publically identified Sun's enemy as Microsoft.
Linux is Sun's ally against Microsoft.
As for timing,anyone who has dealt with Sun's Legal department surely must know that the deal had to be in the works for a while; almost certainly before SCO started making rabid dog noises.
Those that have noted that Sun had an x86 port before are correct. But how many device drivers from a few years back are current enough to be useful? If SCO had a sizable repository of "IP clean" device drivers of even near current utility, a few hundred K is a good deal for Sun.
...tipping over... the Sparrow is more stable than it looks, but less stable than it feels. As for the claims of spontaneous starting, I know of no reported incidents with any production Sparrow (there are a variety of interlocks which make this impossible; no doubt there was a time before such were installed)
Ed Thorpe, the fellow whose picture is the paper, has installed a state of art charger. Recharge time is about 30minutes.
I've put a slightly dated, full writeup about my experiences commuting with a Sparrow at www.geocities.com/khbkhb/12kmil.pdf
There is an active user community as a yahoo egroup, and their website is: http://geocities.com/sparrow_ev
As opposed to a purely theoretical interest, I own a Sparrow. I've got a bit over 13K miles on it, mostly on my 50mi commute (25x2).
The most fundamental errors were business not technological (failing to hire engineers in general, firing the ones they had, not paying suppliers, creating a massive dealer network before there was a solid design, etc.). The next batch of errors were in execution (no two assembled out of the same parts and bulit exactly alike, no quality control, no torque specs, changed suppliers for key components before the new components were tested, etc.).
The Sparrow is a wonderful proof of concept, one can build a usable commuter, battery powered EV with no breakthrough (or even leading edge) technology. However, tossing aside convention is a must (not a flaw). Light weight, and small size, and lowered rolling resistance confer a great many technical advantages.
I don't think the good professor is purely concerned with bad people doing evil with science. From reading the article, it would seem that he is concerned that good people doing good research might inadvertently kill us all. So classification wouldn't help.
Restricting dangerous experiments to safe locations would. It seems to me that the professor is making a strong arguement for serious space colonization, for two reasons:
1) Doing some classes of nasty experiments on, say, neptune would greatly reduce the consequences to out of control experiments (e.g. nanobots and grey goo)
2) If the professor is right, that we only have a 50-50 chance of not destroying the earth in the "near" future, having a self sufficient backup colony or six would be prudent.
I think there is a critical difference between a contractor and a consultant. The former is hired to complete a specified task (the more specific the better). The latter is hired to provide information, knowledge, expertise, etc. in order to make better decisions.
So I'm puzzled at the claim that "make a minimal number of decisions" is to be applied to a consultant. Surely when you consult a lawyer you expect advice, not someone to just file the papers you specify;>
There are active groups dedicated to such vehicles. One such is the power-assist elist on yahoogroups (formerly egroups.com).
http://www.power-assist.org/
The list has both ICE and EV partisans.
Most of the commerical and homebrew systems strike me as more clearly thought out than the "headline" design. I don't see why the/. editors thought this particularly newsworthy.
Interestingly, few of the posters answered what I read as the critical question.
www.reason.com has many articles over the years (or their print version if you have a library handy). Indeed, if memory serves, sometimes they even had book reviews which focused on this topic.
While Reason, being libertarian oriented, does have a leaning towards "the NRA" in this area, I think their articles actually provided figures and had some logical analysis as well.
When I was being treated for bilateral tendonitis, the contention was that as keyboards evolved from manual typewriters (typesetters, keypunches, etc.) to electric, and then to computer, the indidence of such problems increased.
This was attributed to higher typing speeds, and smaller motions (small muscles driven past the fatigue point, over a long period of time).
Assuming the physicans treating me were correct, I'd have guessed at a "zero force" device would be a step in the wrong direction.
Also, if gestures are the right solution, why not just recycle the design of the Theremin (see http://www.thereminworld.com/).
While there would be no tactile feedback (although with some of the advanced gaming research that might be feasible to add) there would be fun sound effects...
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At best, this shows that Bush got more votes in heavily democratic regions than statistics would have predicted (if the same methods were applied to elections from 1960 on, how many other "surprises" would there be?).
... so just what part of this research proves that there simply wasn't less cheating?
But the assumption that this occured because the Republicans cheated ignores an equally statistically possible explaination. The new machines were harder to tamper with, and there was less traditional cheating.
Surely everyone hasn't forgotten the "good old days" of Dailey in Chicago and of LBJ in Texas? Cheating in elections isn't new, and doesn't require electronics
btw: I am registered as a Democrat
"Between the money to SCO" of course, you READ the article and noticed this choice bit: "Arguably the most important question I asked Scott McNealy was, "What proprietary code had to be taken out of Solaris in preparation for open sourcing it?" McNealy responded by saying that the process of open sourcing Solaris actually started five years ago. "There were hundreds of encumbrances to open sourcing Solaris. Some of them we had to buy out, others we had to eliminate. We had to pay SCO more money so we could open the code -- I couldn't say anything about that at the time, but now I can tell you that we paid them that license fee to expand our rights to the code," he said, referring to the February 2003 multi-million-dollar purchase of expanded Unix SVR4 license rights from the SCO Group. That was at the beginning of SCO's war on Linux, and the timing of Sun's license purchase was suspicious. At the time it was widely theorized in the online press that Sun had purchased the expanded Unix licenses to help fund SCO's lawsuit against Sun's lifelong nemesis IBM and public attacks on Sun's part-time rival, GNU/Linux; if what McNealy says is true, a lot of pundits owe him an apology."
My own introduction to the realities of the patent system came in the 1980s, when my client, Sun Microsystems--then a small company--was accused by IBM of patent infringement. Threatening a massive lawsuit, IBM demanded a meeting to present its claims. Fourteen IBM lawyers and their assistants, all clad in the requisite dark blue suits, crowded into the largest conference room Sun had.
The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process. After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.
An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
Mac OS X proves it doesn't have to be that way. By default there is no root, but to act like root you have to manually login again.
Nontechnical people seem, to get it quickly.
Many of the Epson photo printers have individual ink tanks per color (and have for a few releases).
_ 2200.html
Pantone, and others have cartridges which work (indeed, there's even a set of shades of grey for folks doing pure b&w photography).
The archival quality of the Epson branded inks is state of the art.
Even a 2 year old Epson is quite good: http://www.steves-digicams.com/2002_reviews/epson
Admittedly we went with a kodak dyesub instead, but I know serious photo professionals who swear by their Epsons.
Rather than a demo?
Booting this system (pre-release JDS 2) I stare at Tux and a heading of Linux x.y.z-n for about a minute during each boot.
A long time ago, in a job far, far away, I had to deal with some radio astronomy data.
;>).
The raw data was pretty much noise (quasar output).There were two data streams, from opposite sides of the earth, listening to the same noise source)
The data (after extraction) was very, very small. I can't recall if it would have been on the order of Tb to Kb but it might well have been. We didn't have that much storage, so we had to compute (using custom hardware) in near real time.
With appropriate temporary storage, much simpler (and probably more accurate) computational solutions are practical.
It's possible they mean reduced not compressed (to use appropriate buzz words). Data reduction can be quite steep (e.g. count the number of LGM found in the current sample. Typically all your data reduces to 0
Actually back in the 1980's the Standards Committee formally changed the name to Fortran. Of course, it only "took effect" in 1991 when that revision of the Standard was formally adopted.
For what it's worth, the orignal IBM paper used a capital F and small caps for the ORTRAN. The choice of all capitals after that time was driven, to some extent, by the lack of lower case characters in early computer character sets (12 5-bit "bytes" in a CDC 60-bit word for example).
While Walt was certainly a major part of the F effort, it was not his work alone. Dick Hendrickson, David Epstein, Michael Metcalf, John Reid and Loren Meissner all had hands in it (working from memory).
In it's early days, it was a preprocessor which enforced restrictions, and relied upon a full compiler behind it to actually do the compilation. It used to be mated to more than one compiler as a backend.
Lead-acid batteries don't have to have any liquid. The most common lead acid batteries in EVs today are Optima Yellow Tops. Optima employs spiral wound "plates" suspended in a glass mat.
l
You can drill into these suckers and not spill apreciable amounts of acid.
For more details, see
http://www.pro-x-equip.com/optima_batteries.htm
Actually stuffing lead acids batteries to 80% quickly has been found to *increase* their battery life.
Lead-Acid battery life is generally best if the batteries are capable of deep cycles, but aren't really deeply cycled.
Typical EV battery pack lifespans are dramatically decreased by user abuse (and without very intensive user care, or good automation this is typical).
The tango features possibly the most advanced battery management system yet deployed, and was designed by Lee Hart who has extensive experience in EV battery pack maintance.
http://creativecommons.org You may recall Prof. Lessing from his fight against the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (Eldred vs. Ashcroft). Createivecommons provides some fully worked out licensing schemes, providing a variety of options. From your brief description, I conjecture you might want to look up "Conservancies" on their site.
McNealy has repeatedly and publically identified Sun's enemy as Microsoft.
Linux is Sun's ally against Microsoft.
As for timing,anyone who has dealt with Sun's Legal department surely must know that the deal had to be in the works for a while; almost certainly before SCO started making rabid dog noises.
Those that have noted that Sun had an x86 port before are correct. But how many device drivers from a few years back are current enough to be useful? If SCO had a sizable repository of "IP clean" device drivers of even near current utility, a few hundred K is a good deal for Sun.
Guess the Iraqi military thought this would be a good approach as well.
Low tech may beat high tech, but it's certainly not a "no brainer".
...tipping over... the Sparrow is more stable than it looks, but less stable than it feels. As for the claims of spontaneous starting, I know of no reported incidents with any production Sparrow (there are a variety of interlocks which make this impossible; no doubt there was a time before such were installed)
Ed Thorpe, the fellow whose picture is the paper, has installed a state of art charger. Recharge time is about 30minutes.
I've put a slightly dated, full writeup about my experiences commuting with a Sparrow at www.geocities.com/khbkhb/12kmil.pdf
There is an active user community as a yahoo egroup, and their website is: http://geocities.com/sparrow_ev
Actually, the law in question (as I understand it) is Federal regulation.
Three wheels, possibly enclosed, and must be under 1500lbs gross weight.
btw: I've clocked 80mph in my Sparrow.
As opposed to a purely theoretical interest, I own a Sparrow. I've got a bit over 13K miles on it, mostly on my 50mi commute (25x2).
The most fundamental errors were business not technological (failing to hire engineers in general, firing the ones they had, not paying suppliers, creating a massive dealer network before there was a solid design, etc.). The next batch of errors were in execution (no two assembled out of the same parts and bulit exactly alike, no quality control, no torque specs, changed suppliers for key components before the new components were tested, etc.).
The Sparrow is a wonderful proof of concept, one can build a usable commuter, battery powered EV with no breakthrough (or even leading edge) technology. However, tossing aside convention is a must (not a flaw). Light weight, and small size, and lowered rolling resistance confer a great many technical advantages.
I don't think the good professor is purely concerned with bad people doing evil with science. From reading the article, it would seem that he is concerned that good people doing good research might inadvertently kill us all. So classification wouldn't help.
Restricting dangerous experiments to safe locations would. It seems to me that the professor is making a strong arguement for serious space colonization, for two reasons:
1) Doing some classes of nasty experiments on, say, neptune would greatly reduce the consequences to out of control experiments (e.g. nanobots and grey goo)
2) If the professor is right, that we only have a 50-50 chance of not destroying the earth in the "near" future, having a self sufficient backup colony or six would be prudent.
I think there is a critical difference between a contractor and a consultant. The former is hired to complete a specified task (the more specific the better). The latter is hired to provide information, knowledge, expertise, etc. in order to make better decisions.
;>
So I'm puzzled at the claim that "make a minimal number of decisions" is to be applied to a consultant. Surely when you consult a lawyer you expect advice, not someone to just file the papers you specify
al jeezra is but one venue for "opposing" views. For example: http://www2.arabnews.com and www.jordantimes.com/ just for starters.
There are active groups dedicated to such vehicles. One such is the power-assist elist on yahoogroups (formerly egroups.com).
/. editors thought this particularly newsworthy.
http://www.power-assist.org/
The list has both ICE and EV partisans.
Most of the commerical and homebrew systems strike me as more clearly thought out than the "headline" design. I don't see why the
OS X recognizes 2 button USB mice out of the box. Is your issue that Apple doesn't *ship* the mouse?
sigh clock speed isn't performance. Work done per unit time is performance. Work done per watt is a plausible performance metric as well.
I don't know that the 16000 is the cat's PJ's, but complaining that the CPU clock speed isn't as fast as some other processor is --- well, naive.
Interestingly, few of the posters answered what I read as the critical question.
www.reason.com has many articles over the years (or their print version if you have a library handy). Indeed, if memory serves, sometimes they even had book reviews which focused on this topic.
While Reason, being libertarian oriented, does have a leaning towards "the NRA" in this area, I think their articles actually provided figures and had some logical analysis as well.
When I was being treated for bilateral tendonitis, the contention was that as keyboards evolved from manual typewriters (typesetters, keypunches, etc.) to electric, and then to computer, the indidence of such problems increased.
...
This was attributed to higher typing speeds, and smaller motions (small muscles driven past the fatigue point, over a long period of time).
Assuming the physicans treating me were correct, I'd have guessed at a "zero force" device would be a step in the wrong direction.
Also, if gestures are the right solution, why not just recycle the design of the Theremin (see http://www.thereminworld.com/).
While there would be no tactile feedback (although with some of the advanced gaming research that might be feasible to add) there would be fun sound effects