Except, of course, that the data confirms the Keynseian approach, and contradicts the "Republican" economic model. Stimulus spending clearly boosts a troubled economy, while the tax cuts for the rich don't. It's easy to see why, when you follow the money.
If you give a rich person a tax break when the economy is down, they (primarily) save it for later, because they want to insulate themselves from the economic uncertainty, so it doesn't enter the economy. Note that, in practice, low top marginal tax rates discourage investment in business, because the executives can suck the money out of the business and keep almost all of it. High top marginal tax rates, in real life, discourage executives from paying themselves extremely high salaries, so they invest in their business and pay their employees better. The result of the decreasing top marginal tax rate since the 1970s has been, in real terms, for the executive salaries to skyrocket, while worker salaries have dropped over time, while the reverse was true when the top marginal tax rates were higher. Since 80 years of data confirms that cutting taxes on the top incomes is bad for the economy as a whole, there's not much reason that *this time* it'll work out better.
If you hire a bunch of construction workers to work on roads and bridges, those people use their salaries to pay rent/mortgages, buy food, etc., so all of the money immediately circulates into the economy. And, of course, you have more/better roads and bridges, which broadly boosts the economy because people can get to work, shop, etc. Similarly, hiring police and teachers, etc., all goes straight into the economy, as well as providing services of value to society. And those consumers with jobs create demand that drives additional business.
And, for what it's worth, 80 years of data supports the Keynesian economic model - governments should save money (e.g. under Clinton) so that they can spend more money (e.g. under Bush and Obama) when the economy turns down, evening out the economic booms and busts. Whenever country try the opposite (spend more money when the economy is strong, and cut spending when the economy is weak) it invariably turns out to (1) wipe out savings (Bush Jr), and (2) eaggerate the boom/bust cycle, making recessions worse/longer (e.g. the 1930s, Austerity in the EU now).
That's why the concensus of economists before the stimulus was passed was that there needed to be more government spending (average 2x the stimulus) and that it should be focused on the most effective types of spending (direct hiring, infrastructure). Unfortunately, politics in the US is such that the stimulus spending was 1/2 what economists said was needed, and 1/2 of that was wasted on tax breaks that didn't boost the economy, so the stimulus was, in effect, 1/4th what economic models said was needed, causing the recession to be deeper, and drag on longer, than it should have.
It could have been worse - the same kind of "austerity" thinking took stronger hold in Europe, where it did more damage.
As is often the case, the headline is completely misleading. The federal government isn't demanding first priority to cloud resources.
They are saying that they can't move national security and emergency services into public clouds until the cloud providers can give them the guaranteed uptime that they have now with dedicated servers, so they're going to keep running those services on dedicated servers. This is worth talking about in that it's an exception to the general rule that the federal government is trying to move everything to cloud providers.
The article even notes that there are some specialized cloud providers (e.g. Terramark's Federal group) that offer a higher level SLA than the public cloud providers, specifically aimed at providing the kind of SLA required for national security and emergency services.
+1 for the Pebble. I love tech, and watches, and I've been waiting for many years for someone to make a good looking, programmable eInk watch. There's a reason that they raised $10m on Kickstarter. Of course, you can't buy one now - they had the integrity to stop taking people's money at $10m, when they could have kept taking orders like crazy for another week, because they didn't want to commit to making more than 80k watches in the first batch. But that means that you can't even order one one, though you can (http://www.getpebble.com/) see a nice video, read about the SDK on the dev blog, etc.
Sure, not every kickstarter will deliver, but if you just want to buy stuff, without taking any risk, you should go to a store, not kickstarter. Kickstarter is for buying into potential startups early, which is fun, and can get you amazing, unique, creative things that you can't get from larger companies, but it can also disappear if the project fails, etc.
What I've noticed in Kickstarter is that people who succeed in one kickstarter and deliver end up forming a series of kick starters, which get funded instantly, because those people have fans and a track record. I recently had one project (Tabber, from Music Everywhere, a brilliant idea) cancel because they realized that they got in over their heads. So they returned the money, and are spending more time maturing their product and looking for larger scale investment, which is exactly what they should have done. And because they handled it professionally, when they are ready to come back, they'll be funded again.
So don't let one project running into trouble sour you on Kickstarter - there are lots of other great things going on there.
TV services (cable, fiber) are a terrible deal. I've got amazing bandwidth+hulu_netflix for $120/month, and my data+TV service, with much less bandwidth, used to cost about $200, and I can watch pretty much anything I like over the internet. Sure, it's not quite as easy to use, but my "TV service" has been gone for two years, and my kids are fine with it.
The compression used for digital TV broadcast doesn't make sense over the internet. The cost equation is different, and broadcast bits are much cheaper than internet bits (because the same bit goes to millions of receivers at the same time, so minimal servers/storage, very efficient fan-out, etc., compare to video-on-demand). And the availability is different, because TV channels have garanteed bandwidth (either satellite channels or multicast in dedicated channels over cable), while internet bandwidth is a high variable, shared resource. The result of this is that the pristine HD TV signal that you can broadcast (multicast) cannot be delivered unicast, because the cost would be too high, or it wouldn't work at all because most consumers don't have that much available bandwidth, and the ISPs don't have enough capacity to deliver an HD video stream for every customer from the general internet. So compression and adaptive bandwidth delivery are the first steps - each content provider does the best they can in the available bandwidth. Beyond that, intelligent P2P delivery can help quite a bit - a few years ago I ran some global tests (delivered a huge video to a few million users, captured tons of data) and intelligent P2P networks can save 80-99% of the internet bandwidth. That is, delivering video always consumes "edge" bandwidth because it has to get into your house, but you can control where the video comes from. If you use p2p networking intelligently, you can deliver data from nearby neighbors (e.g. same cable head end, same fiber loop), pulling very little data from the internet, making the economics of high quality video delivery much, much better - very similar economics to multicast, but optimized based on consumer demand rather than publisher push.
Very true - there are original Star Trek episodes that are incoherent as broadcast now, because they don't shorten it by carefully editing it down, they just rip out a chunk from wherever is convenient. Quite often they remove the entire teaser, removing the episode's setup, or they remove the third quarter of the show, skipping from mid-plot to the conclusion.
I agree that the market for SD vs. HD has split, with SD cameras selling as dirt cheap (under $100) toys for kids, or as expendible second cameras, while HD cameras ($2-300) have better optics, better sensors, etc., and sell for higher prices. That being said, the actual cost of making an HD camcorder has to be significantly higher than for SD camcorders; I know that the sensors cost significantly more, for example.
My point, though, was that using a Lytro to shoot video would cost a lot more than shooting stills, because you'd need faster electronics (to process and store 30 FPS instead of a few FPS). The Lytro already has a "supercomputer in a chip" to process still photo's - it would cost more, if it's even possible, to include 10x the CPU to keep up with a video feed. And storage bandwidth. And storage capacity. I'm not saying that it's impossible, but it certainly wouldn't cost the same as the current Lytro.
For example, let's just look at storage capacity. The $499 Lytro can store 750 images, which at 30 FPS would be 25 seconds. Let's imagine the wanted to store at least 2 hours of video - that would be 216,000 frames, or 288x as much storage. That won't be free. Then do the same calculation for CPU and storage bandwidth (faster storage costs much more than slower storage).
What it comes down to is that while I'd love to see Lytro-style video, the cost would be extremely high, and my guess is that it'd be too expensive for consumers, and not good enough for professionals.
"Actually, cameras have been pretty good at this for a while, with eye tracking and autofocus."
Yep, I had a camcorder with auto-focus wherever you looked. It worked pretty well. The trick with the Lytro is that you don't need to track the eye for taking the photo, but for viewing the photo. And whil a few cameras do eye tracking, mainstream PCs don't. I've seen some tech demo's, and it'd be great if it caught on...:-)
"Actually, I think they've really missed a trick. Isn't "3D" the big trend this year? Why not launch with a zoomless stereoscopic camera that you point about like a pair of binoculars (hence small LCD requirement), then power the PC end (yes, I know, this device is Mac only for no sensible reason) with eyetracking and 3D TV support."
They've demoed the ability to generate 3D stereo pair images from a single 'light field' picture, so while it's not in the initial release, it's supposedly going to be added after launch, along with some other cool capabilities (e.g. they've also shown a Bladerunner-esque ability to shift perspective slightly to see behind things), and they've also talked about opening up an API or their file format in the future, once things settle down.
I think it's intially Mac-only because it's faster to develop on one platform. Perhaps they picked Mac because it's very popular with photographers, it's a good target market economically, or perhaps it was simply what their engineers preferred? In any case, they're going to release a Windows version of their software post-launch. So now Windows users get to feel a little of what Mac users run into all the time.:-)
Cell phones are subsidized, in that the carrier covers a chunk of the cost, providing the phone to the buyer at below the carrier's cost, which is paid for by jacking up the monthly fees to subsidize the initial purchase. The subsidy coming from the monthly fees is slightly hidden, in that the carriers (in the US) charge the same fees for users with subsidized and non-subsidized fees, but the subsidy is quite obvious when you're buying the phone, and you get different prices depending on the length of the contract you're locked into.
A discount is simply a lower price, such as run for a promotion. There's no added charge to customers to pay for a straight discount.
A rebate is money send to purchasers later, if they do the right paperwork. This is usually a con in that people mentally subtract the rebate from the purchase price, but often fail to do the paperwork, or the rebate doesn't get sent (the rebate servicing companies are always extremely slow, and require consumer persistence to get the rebate actually paid). For example, if you buy something for $100 with a $20 rebate, you think you paid $80, but actually you paid $100 unless you file the paperwork, wait 2 months, and make a few phone calls to the rebate servicing company. And since most people give up, they're not really saving the $20. Like a discount, there's no added cost elsewhere to pay for the rebate.
A coupon is when the buyer is issued a discount, which is taken off at purchase time. So it's more fair than a rebate (which often doesn't arrive). Oddly, however, people often clip and collect coupons, then buy things that they have coupons for, but don't actually use the coupons. So couponing turns out to be fairly effective as a marketing tool that doesn't cost much at all. Like a discount or rebate, there's no added cost elsewhere to subsidize the coupon.
Buying phones outright in the US never makes sense, because you don't get a discount on your monthly bill for NOT subsidizing the phone purchase. Basically, the deck is stack towards forcing consumers to buy new phones every 18 months (or however often their carrier allows them to buy a new, subsidized phone), so they're perpetually locked into 2 year contracts. So the only reason to pay an extra $2-400 for your phone is to avoid being locked into your contract, which is pretty abstract, since people plan on having cell phone service forever, and figure that they might as well get the credit towards the phone while they're at it.
In a fair system (i.e. pretty much anywhere outside of the US) carriers have to offer unlocked phones and service, which is cheaper than the fees that you pay when you're given a phone subsidy. In those markets you can compare the subsidy to the monthly savings to work out the ROI.
The point is that the communication channel used to deliver SMS is already in place and paid for, because it's the control channel for the voice network. SMS is just messaging in the control channel, which would otherwise be empty most of the time, paid for by building the voice network that customers are already paying for, so there's no actual additional cost to delivering SMS. Just insanely high margins.
The have demoed this capability, though it won't be in the initial software. But I'd expect the effect to be unpleasant, for the same reason that photos taking with long "depth of focus" lenses, where everything is in focus, tend to be irritating - everything being equally in focus is distracting.
The way the eye focuses is very different from a camera - you actually have less visual resolution where you're "not looking" than in the center of your vision, and you automatically focus your eye to the depth of whatever you're looking at, so while it feels like everything is in focus, it's not all in focus at once, the center is sharp and in focus, and everything else is fuzzy until you look straight at it.
Theoretically the Lytro could do that as well, automatically focusing wherever you look, though of course, it would need to know where you're looking, which isn't something normal computers know. Clicking a mouse on the image to focus there isn't as automatic, of course, but it's similar to what we do naturally with our eyes.
I'd also point out that while you could capture photo's where everything is in focus - there are cameras that do that now, and the Lytro can do that as well - but the result is that the photo's are unpleasant to look at, because everything being in focus means that there's no visual focus of where to look in the picture. That's OK sometimes, but not normally...
The Lytro takes still pictures, and can take 350 pictures in the 8 GB model, and 750 pictures in the 16 GB model.
Video would be prohibitively large. Aside from storage, it's probably not possible for the camera to take and store 30 FPS of data at 10 M rays per image, which I would guess would be about 10x typical video data rates. They'd need faster sensors, faster RAM, etc., which would push up the complexity and price quite a bit. In comparison, look how much more HD camcorders cost than SD camcorders, and scale it up at least that much again, if not more.
There are quite a few free and/or open source CAD programs.
Google SketchUp is free, though not open source. It is quite friendly to use, runs cross-platform, and can produce STL using an open source plugin. My son has been using it since he was 5, and it's easy to make nice looking things in it.
OpenSCAD is an open source programming language used for CAD modeling. It's great (I'm a programmer, YMMV) because it allows you to describe exactly what you want, and it's easy to make things parametric, meaning that you can write (for example) an OpenSCAD script to make measuring cups, and you can make any size measuring cup, labeled exactly as you want it, by setting two variables. Sure, not for the visual artist, but great for engineering.
A lot of people like FreeCAD, though I haven't used it.
There's a myth among non-technical people that computerized voting would take out the human element of fraud.
Of course, as with many other things, computers serve as a magnifier, allowing fraud to be performed more efficiently and on a much larger scale than could be possible manually with paper ballots.
Every national election since DREs were introduced had what look a lot like massive security problems. Of course, since DREs can' t be audited, and the actual votes cast can't be recounted, it's impossible to prove fraud. But based on statistical analysis, DRE and non-DRE voting in different precincts in the same election have resulted in quite suspicious results, such as the non-DRE voting matching the exit polls by a small fraction of a percent, but the DRE voting being off by 7%.
It's a shame that Ben Nelson's proposal that "requires states to provide the federal office with audit reports from the hand counting of the voter verified paper ballots" got stuck in committee. It's almost like most Senators aren't too interested in election fraud. But then, they won their elections...
The trick is to NOT use a DRE, but instead use a Voter Verified Paper Ballot. That is, the electronic device can help you vote, preventing overvotes and warning on undervotes, reading aloud to seeing impaired voters, etc., but the result is a printed out paper ballot which the voter then casts by putting it into a ballot box. The votes can be counted efficiently (i.e. scanned), and the paper ballots can be audited (by a separate system from a seprate vendor) and recounted.
That's untraceable and secure. There are a few systems like this (my favorite is the open source system at http://www.openvotingconsortium.org./ One nice thing is that you only have to trust the voter to verify the ballot - if the count is forged, the audit will find it. This means that you don't have to trust the software, just the process. That's a good thing.
Easy to do with DREs. Just wait for a secret touchscreen sequence, and until election day "do the right thing." On election day, one person pokes all of the DREs, after which they display whatever the voter wants to see, but record votes however your programmer wants the election to go.
There's absolutely no way to detect this without being able to inspect the code, compile it yourself, and deploy your binaries to the DREs.
While I agree with your basic point, regarding (2), you can't give out receipts for votes that indicate how you voted, or produce a record of the votes that can be used to prove how someone specific voted, because that enables vote buying, which is a form of fraud that we're trying to prevent. This single requirement is what makes voting systems hard to secure, because you can't apply the mechanisms that have been securing accounting for hundreds of years.
Instead you have to have ballots that can't be tied to specific voters, with multiple observers and a clear chain of custody through the entire process in order to prevent fraud (or, at least, make it very hard to do on a large scale without being detected).
"If common sense is lacking in the e-voting community, is it actually 'common'?"
Most of the DRE systems appear to be so easy to commit fraud on a massive scale that they were either to designed by morons who knew absolutely nothing about security out to make a quick buck, or were designed by people who really wanted to make elections extremely easy to rig. Given that in at least one case someone was hired to do the latter, it's hard to believe that the comple lack of security in all DRE systems was by accident. Even an idiot can figure out, for example, that running the voting database with the default usernames and passwords, or collecting votes via WiFi "to eliminate messy cabling", are terrible ideas.
"I am a poll worker in Virginia, and we follow a very similar protocol for our DRE voting machines. "
While it sounds like you're trying to do a good job, there are many fundamental problems with DRE machines.
- The software is proprietary, and not open to inspection, only to "black box" testing, which cannot only detect some kinds of errors, and cannot be counted on to detect all errors or intentional fraud. - There is no way to prove that the vote recorded by the DRE is the same as the vote cast. The lack of voter verification of the actual recorded vote is the fundamental problem with DREs, rendering them unsuitable for use in elections. Note that printing a record of the vote within the machine does not help, because the receipt inside the machine is not verified by the voter, so there's no way to validate that it reflects actual votes cast, so it cannot be used as the basis of an audit or recount. - There is no way to prove that the vote recorded by the DRE cooresponds to the votes reported. - There is no way to audit reported vote counts against actual votes cast, so no way to discover fraud or error in the voting system. - There is no way to recount actual votes cast by voters. You can recount whatever the software happened to record, but that can easily be different from the vote cost.
Or, as NIST put it "Simply put, the DRE architecture’s inability to provide for independent audits of its electronic records makes it a poor choice for an environment in which detecting errors and fraud is important."
There are advantages the electronic voting systems, such as providing immediate voter feedback to prevent overvoting and warning of undervoting, and assisting seeing impaired voters.
The right way to go, I believe, is to use electronic voting systems to assist voters in producing a paper ballot (AKA the Voter Verified Paper Ballot), which the voter can then inspect and cast. That gives the advantages of a DRE, but with the added benefit that the election results can be (relatively) trusted. That is, for example, the type of system used in Nevada after the Gaming Commission rejected all of the DRE systems. This is particularly relevant, because they're the only state with significant experience in securing DRE-like devices, because they certify gambling machines, which are under similar attacks to DREs.
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Except, of course, that the data confirms the Keynseian approach, and contradicts the "Republican" economic model. Stimulus spending clearly boosts a troubled economy, while the tax cuts for the rich don't. It's easy to see why, when you follow the money.
If you give a rich person a tax break when the economy is down, they (primarily) save it for later, because they want to insulate themselves from the economic uncertainty, so it doesn't enter the economy. Note that, in practice, low top marginal tax rates discourage investment in business, because the executives can suck the money out of the business and keep almost all of it. High top marginal tax rates, in real life, discourage executives from paying themselves extremely high salaries, so they invest in their business and pay their employees better. The result of the decreasing top marginal tax rate since the 1970s has been, in real terms, for the executive salaries to skyrocket, while worker salaries have dropped over time, while the reverse was true when the top marginal tax rates were higher. Since 80 years of data confirms that cutting taxes on the top incomes is bad for the economy as a whole, there's not much reason that *this time* it'll work out better.
If you hire a bunch of construction workers to work on roads and bridges, those people use their salaries to pay rent/mortgages, buy food, etc., so all of the money immediately circulates into the economy. And, of course, you have more/better roads and bridges, which broadly boosts the economy because people can get to work, shop, etc. Similarly, hiring police and teachers, etc., all goes straight into the economy, as well as providing services of value to society. And those consumers with jobs create demand that drives additional business.
And, for what it's worth, 80 years of data supports the Keynesian economic model - governments should save money (e.g. under Clinton) so that they can spend more money (e.g. under Bush and Obama) when the economy turns down, evening out the economic booms and busts. Whenever country try the opposite (spend more money when the economy is strong, and cut spending when the economy is weak) it invariably turns out to (1) wipe out savings (Bush Jr), and (2) eaggerate the boom/bust cycle, making recessions worse/longer (e.g. the 1930s, Austerity in the EU now).
That's why the concensus of economists before the stimulus was passed was that there needed to be more government spending (average 2x the stimulus) and that it should be focused on the most effective types of spending (direct hiring, infrastructure). Unfortunately, politics in the US is such that the stimulus spending was 1/2 what economists said was needed, and 1/2 of that was wasted on tax breaks that didn't boost the economy, so the stimulus was, in effect, 1/4th what economic models said was needed, causing the recession to be deeper, and drag on longer, than it should have.
It could have been worse - the same kind of "austerity" thinking took stronger hold in Europe, where it did more damage.
As is often the case, the headline is completely misleading. The federal government isn't demanding first priority to cloud resources.
They are saying that they can't move national security and emergency services into public clouds until the cloud providers can give them the guaranteed uptime that they have now with dedicated servers, so they're going to keep running those services on dedicated servers. This is worth talking about in that it's an exception to the general rule that the federal government is trying to move everything to cloud providers.
The article even notes that there are some specialized cloud providers (e.g. Terramark's Federal group) that offer a higher level SLA than the public cloud providers, specifically aimed at providing the kind of SLA required for national security and emergency services.
Please RTFA before flaming.
+1 for the Pebble. I love tech, and watches, and I've been waiting for many years for someone to make a good looking, programmable eInk watch. There's a reason that they raised $10m on Kickstarter. Of course, you can't buy one now - they had the integrity to stop taking people's money at $10m, when they could have kept taking orders like crazy for another week, because they didn't want to commit to making more than 80k watches in the first batch. But that means that you can't even order one one, though you can (http://www.getpebble.com/) see a nice video, read about the SDK on the dev blog, etc.
Sure, not every kickstarter will deliver, but if you just want to buy stuff, without taking any risk, you should go to a store, not kickstarter. Kickstarter is for buying into potential startups early, which is fun, and can get you amazing, unique, creative things that you can't get from larger companies, but it can also disappear if the project fails, etc.
What I've noticed in Kickstarter is that people who succeed in one kickstarter and deliver end up forming a series of kick starters, which get funded instantly, because those people have fans and a track record. I recently had one project (Tabber, from Music Everywhere, a brilliant idea) cancel because they realized that they got in over their heads. So they returned the money, and are spending more time maturing their product and looking for larger scale investment, which is exactly what they should have done. And because they handled it professionally, when they are ready to come back, they'll be funded again.
So don't let one project running into trouble sour you on Kickstarter - there are lots of other great things going on there.
TV services (cable, fiber) are a terrible deal. I've got amazing bandwidth+hulu_netflix for $120/month, and my data+TV service, with much less bandwidth, used to cost about $200, and I can watch pretty much anything I like over the internet. Sure, it's not quite as easy to use, but my "TV service" has been gone for two years, and my kids are fine with it.
The compression used for digital TV broadcast doesn't make sense over the internet. The cost equation is different, and broadcast bits are much cheaper than internet bits (because the same bit goes to millions of receivers at the same time, so minimal servers/storage, very efficient fan-out, etc., compare to video-on-demand). And the availability is different, because TV channels have garanteed bandwidth (either satellite channels or multicast in dedicated channels over cable), while internet bandwidth is a high variable, shared resource. The result of this is that the pristine HD TV signal that you can broadcast (multicast) cannot be delivered unicast, because the cost would be too high, or it wouldn't work at all because most consumers don't have that much available bandwidth, and the ISPs don't have enough capacity to deliver an HD video stream for every customer from the general internet. So compression and adaptive bandwidth delivery are the first steps - each content provider does the best they can in the available bandwidth. Beyond that, intelligent P2P delivery can help quite a bit - a few years ago I ran some global tests (delivered a huge video to a few million users, captured tons of data) and intelligent P2P networks can save 80-99% of the internet bandwidth. That is, delivering video always consumes "edge" bandwidth because it has to get into your house, but you can control where the video comes from. If you use p2p networking intelligently, you can deliver data from nearby neighbors (e.g. same cable head end, same fiber loop), pulling very little data from the internet, making the economics of high quality video delivery much, much better - very similar economics to multicast, but optimized based on consumer demand rather than publisher push.
Very true - there are original Star Trek episodes that are incoherent as broadcast now, because they don't shorten it by carefully editing it down, they just rip out a chunk from wherever is convenient. Quite often they remove the entire teaser, removing the episode's setup, or they remove the third quarter of the show, skipping from mid-plot to the conclusion.
I agree that the market for SD vs. HD has split, with SD cameras selling as dirt cheap (under $100) toys for kids, or as expendible second cameras, while HD cameras ($2-300) have better optics, better sensors, etc., and sell for higher prices. That being said, the actual cost of making an HD camcorder has to be significantly higher than for SD camcorders; I know that the sensors cost significantly more, for example.
My point, though, was that using a Lytro to shoot video would cost a lot more than shooting stills, because you'd need faster electronics (to process and store 30 FPS instead of a few FPS). The Lytro already has a "supercomputer in a chip" to process still photo's - it would cost more, if it's even possible, to include 10x the CPU to keep up with a video feed. And storage bandwidth. And storage capacity. I'm not saying that it's impossible, but it certainly wouldn't cost the same as the current Lytro.
For example, let's just look at storage capacity. The $499 Lytro can store 750 images, which at 30 FPS would be 25 seconds. Let's imagine the wanted to store at least 2 hours of video - that would be 216,000 frames, or 288x as much storage. That won't be free. Then do the same calculation for CPU and storage bandwidth (faster storage costs much more than slower storage).
What it comes down to is that while I'd love to see Lytro-style video, the cost would be extremely high, and my guess is that it'd be too expensive for consumers, and not good enough for professionals.
"Actually, cameras have been pretty good at this for a while, with eye tracking and autofocus."
Yep, I had a camcorder with auto-focus wherever you looked. It worked pretty well. The trick with the Lytro is that you don't need to track the eye for taking the photo, but for viewing the photo. And whil a few cameras do eye tracking, mainstream PCs don't. I've seen some tech demo's, and it'd be great if it caught on... :-)
"Actually, I think they've really missed a trick. Isn't "3D" the big trend this year? Why not launch with a zoomless stereoscopic camera that you point about like a pair of binoculars (hence small LCD requirement), then power the PC end (yes, I know, this device is Mac only for no sensible reason) with eyetracking and 3D TV support."
They've demoed the ability to generate 3D stereo pair images from a single 'light field' picture, so while it's not in the initial release, it's supposedly going to be added after launch, along with some other cool capabilities (e.g. they've also shown a Bladerunner-esque ability to shift perspective slightly to see behind things), and they've also talked about opening up an API or their file format in the future, once things settle down.
I think it's intially Mac-only because it's faster to develop on one platform. Perhaps they picked Mac because it's very popular with photographers, it's a good target market economically, or perhaps it was simply what their engineers preferred? In any case, they're going to release a Windows version of their software post-launch. So now Windows users get to feel a little of what Mac users run into all the time. :-)
Those words don't mean the same thing.
Cell phones are subsidized, in that the carrier covers a chunk of the cost, providing the phone to the buyer at below the carrier's cost, which is paid for by jacking up the monthly fees to subsidize the initial purchase. The subsidy coming from the monthly fees is slightly hidden, in that the carriers (in the US) charge the same fees for users with subsidized and non-subsidized fees, but the subsidy is quite obvious when you're buying the phone, and you get different prices depending on the length of the contract you're locked into.
A discount is simply a lower price, such as run for a promotion. There's no added charge to customers to pay for a straight discount.
A rebate is money send to purchasers later, if they do the right paperwork. This is usually a con in that people mentally subtract the rebate from the purchase price, but often fail to do the paperwork, or the rebate doesn't get sent (the rebate servicing companies are always extremely slow, and require consumer persistence to get the rebate actually paid). For example, if you buy something for $100 with a $20 rebate, you think you paid $80, but actually you paid $100 unless you file the paperwork, wait 2 months, and make a few phone calls to the rebate servicing company. And since most people give up, they're not really saving the $20. Like a discount, there's no added cost elsewhere to pay for the rebate.
A coupon is when the buyer is issued a discount, which is taken off at purchase time. So it's more fair than a rebate (which often doesn't arrive). Oddly, however, people often clip and collect coupons, then buy things that they have coupons for, but don't actually use the coupons. So couponing turns out to be fairly effective as a marketing tool that doesn't cost much at all. Like a discount or rebate, there's no added cost elsewhere to subsidize the coupon.
Buying phones outright in the US never makes sense, because you don't get a discount on your monthly bill for NOT subsidizing the phone purchase. Basically, the deck is stack towards forcing consumers to buy new phones every 18 months (or however often their carrier allows them to buy a new, subsidized phone), so they're perpetually locked into 2 year contracts. So the only reason to pay an extra $2-400 for your phone is to avoid being locked into your contract, which is pretty abstract, since people plan on having cell phone service forever, and figure that they might as well get the credit towards the phone while they're at it.
In a fair system (i.e. pretty much anywhere outside of the US) carriers have to offer unlocked phones and service, which is cheaper than the fees that you pay when you're given a phone subsidy. In those markets you can compare the subsidy to the monthly savings to work out the ROI.
The point is that the communication channel used to deliver SMS is already in place and paid for, because it's the control channel for the voice network. SMS is just messaging in the control channel, which would otherwise be empty most of the time, paid for by building the voice network that customers are already paying for, so there's no actual additional cost to delivering SMS. Just insanely high margins.
The have demoed this capability, though it won't be in the initial software. But I'd expect the effect to be unpleasant, for the same reason that photos taking with long "depth of focus" lenses, where everything is in focus, tend to be irritating - everything being equally in focus is distracting.
The way the eye focuses is very different from a camera - you actually have less visual resolution where you're "not looking" than in the center of your vision, and you automatically focus your eye to the depth of whatever you're looking at, so while it feels like everything is in focus, it's not all in focus at once, the center is sharp and in focus, and everything else is fuzzy until you look straight at it.
Theoretically the Lytro could do that as well, automatically focusing wherever you look, though of course, it would need to know where you're looking, which isn't something normal computers know. Clicking a mouse on the image to focus there isn't as automatic, of course, but it's similar to what we do naturally with our eyes.
I'd also point out that while you could capture photo's where everything is in focus - there are cameras that do that now, and the Lytro can do that as well - but the result is that the photo's are unpleasant to look at, because everything being in focus means that there's no visual focus of where to look in the picture. That's OK sometimes, but not normally...
The Lytro takes still pictures, and can take 350 pictures in the 8 GB model, and 750 pictures in the 16 GB model.
Video would be prohibitively large. Aside from storage, it's probably not possible for the camera to take and store 30 FPS of data at 10 M rays per image, which I would guess would be about 10x typical video data rates. They'd need faster sensors, faster RAM, etc., which would push up the complexity and price quite a bit. In comparison, look how much more HD camcorders cost than SD camcorders, and scale it up at least that much again, if not more.
Still, would be seriously cool.
There are quite a few free and/or open source CAD programs.
Google SketchUp is free, though not open source. It is quite friendly to use, runs cross-platform, and can produce STL using an open source plugin. My son has been using it since he was 5, and it's easy to make nice looking things in it.
OpenSCAD is an open source programming language used for CAD modeling. It's great (I'm a programmer, YMMV) because it allows you to describe exactly what you want, and it's easy to make things parametric, meaning that you can write (for example) an OpenSCAD script to make measuring cups, and you can make any size measuring cup, labeled exactly as you want it, by setting two variables. Sure, not for the visual artist, but great for engineering.
A lot of people like FreeCAD, though I haven't used it.
There's a myth among non-technical people that computerized voting would take out the human element of fraud.
Of course, as with many other things, computers serve as a magnifier, allowing fraud to be performed more efficiently and on a much larger scale than could be possible manually with paper ballots.
Every national election since DREs were introduced had what look a lot like massive security problems. Of course, since DREs can' t be audited, and the actual votes cast can't be recounted, it's impossible to prove fraud. But based on statistical analysis, DRE and non-DRE voting in different precincts in the same election have resulted in quite suspicious results, such as the non-DRE voting matching the exit polls by a small fraction of a percent, but the DRE voting being off by 7%.
It's a shame that Ben Nelson's proposal that "requires states to provide the federal office with audit reports from the hand counting of the voter verified paper ballots" got stuck in committee. It's almost like most Senators aren't too interested in election fraud. But then, they won their elections...
The trick is to NOT use a DRE, but instead use a Voter Verified Paper Ballot. That is, the electronic device can help you vote, preventing overvotes and warning on undervotes, reading aloud to seeing impaired voters, etc., but the result is a printed out paper ballot which the voter then casts by putting it into a ballot box. The votes can be counted efficiently (i.e. scanned), and the paper ballots can be audited (by a separate system from a seprate vendor) and recounted.
That's untraceable and secure. There are a few systems like this (my favorite is the open source system at http://www.openvotingconsortium.org./ One nice thing is that you only have to trust the voter to verify the ballot - if the count is forged, the audit will find it. This means that you don't have to trust the software, just the process. That's a good thing.
Easy to do with DREs. Just wait for a secret touchscreen sequence, and until election day "do the right thing." On election day, one person pokes all of the DREs, after which they display whatever the voter wants to see, but record votes however your programmer wants the election to go.
There's absolutely no way to detect this without being able to inspect the code, compile it yourself, and deploy your binaries to the DREs.
While I agree with your basic point, regarding (2), you can't give out receipts for votes that indicate how you voted, or produce a record of the votes that can be used to prove how someone specific voted, because that enables vote buying, which is a form of fraud that we're trying to prevent. This single requirement is what makes voting systems hard to secure, because you can't apply the mechanisms that have been securing accounting for hundreds of years.
Instead you have to have ballots that can't be tied to specific voters, with multiple observers and a clear chain of custody through the entire process in order to prevent fraud (or, at least, make it very hard to do on a large scale without being detected).
Paper ballots, with proper handling and counting procedures, work quite well.
"If common sense is lacking in the e-voting community, is it actually 'common'?"
Most of the DRE systems appear to be so easy to commit fraud on a massive scale that they were either to designed by morons who knew absolutely nothing about security out to make a quick buck, or were designed by people who really wanted to make elections extremely easy to rig. Given that in at least one case someone was hired to do the latter, it's hard to believe that the comple lack of security in all DRE systems was by accident. Even an idiot can figure out, for example, that running the voting database with the default usernames and passwords, or collecting votes via WiFi "to eliminate messy cabling", are terrible ideas.
"I am a poll worker in Virginia, and we follow a very similar protocol for our DRE voting machines. "
While it sounds like you're trying to do a good job, there are many fundamental problems with DRE machines.
- The software is proprietary, and not open to inspection, only to "black box" testing, which cannot only detect some kinds of errors, and cannot be counted on to detect all errors or intentional fraud.
- There is no way to prove that the vote recorded by the DRE is the same as the vote cast. The lack of voter verification of the actual recorded vote is the fundamental problem with DREs, rendering them unsuitable for use in elections. Note that printing a record of the vote within the machine does not help, because the receipt inside the machine is not verified by the voter, so there's no way to validate that it reflects actual votes cast, so it cannot be used as the basis of an audit or recount.
- There is no way to prove that the vote recorded by the DRE cooresponds to the votes reported.
- There is no way to audit reported vote counts against actual votes cast, so no way to discover fraud or error in the voting system.
- There is no way to recount actual votes cast by voters. You can recount whatever the software happened to record, but that can easily be different from the vote cost.
Or, as NIST put it "Simply put, the DRE architecture’s inability to provide for independent audits of its electronic records makes it a poor choice for an environment in which detecting errors and fraud is important."
There are advantages the electronic voting systems, such as providing immediate voter feedback to prevent overvoting and warning of undervoting, and assisting seeing impaired voters.
The right way to go, I believe, is to use electronic voting systems to assist voters in producing a paper ballot (AKA the Voter Verified Paper Ballot), which the voter can then inspect and cast. That gives the advantages of a DRE, but with the added benefit that the election results can be (relatively) trusted. That is, for example, the type of system used in Nevada after the Gaming Commission rejected all of the DRE systems. This is particularly relevant, because they're the only state with significant experience in securing DRE-like devices, because they certify gambling machines, which are under similar attacks to DREs.
Check out http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ for an open source system that does the right thing.