You know, this is really funny. You need a photo ID to buy alcohol, and that is fine with everybody, but voting? nosire
Ack...perhaps I exaggerated that point. But think about the implications! In the cradle of Democracy you need an ID card to exercise your right to vote...ooo...the state legislature will get burned down for that. God help you if you need to be fingerprinted for said ID card (in those states that do it.)
My point about affiliation is not technical, and it isn't about privacy either, but about the way it makes it easier to use redistricting to preempt the election. Is Ohio special in that respect?
Definitely not. You just have much less data on voting affiliations...but it's enough to indicate general affiliation patterns--enough to draw out districs. So only 20% of voters participate in the primaries..it's plenty.
And that's an outstanding point...but isn't that why they chose to do this in Virginia, whose legislature passed UCITA, thereby sidestepping the federal 11th amendment issue?
But it is also the case that voter registration is one of the mechanisms that keep voters tournout low.
It's an interesting point, but I wonder if that has a historical basis. For instance, the Ohio Constitution of 1851 required you to register to vote one year before the election. The state Constitution was amended two times, the first time to change that to six months, and the the second time to change that to 30 days, which is what it is currently.
I have to wonder why the state's constitution founders felt that the registration had to be done so far in advance.
In addition, registration requires you to state your political affiliation.
Not in all states, Ohio doesn't require it. You state your political affiliation here by voting in the primary and selecting which party you want to vote in the primary for.
Registration is also used since while most people have some form of photographic identification, it never has been required for voting, like it is in some countries, so a different system to prevent fraud is used. I know that many Americans would be upset if they were asked for photo id in order to vote (I certainly would be furious.)
My understanding was that the IRS could not share (most)info with the SSA and vice-versa. Yes the IRS does use the SSN as the taxpayer key, but you will note that you have never received a form from the IRS saying how much is owed to you when you retire.
There are actually a lot of safeguards with IRS info being shared between governmental agencies. For instance, I was told of an anecdote concerning a HUD project that wanted to find out if its tenants had made more income a few years ago (and therefore were overcompensated benefits wise.) They were not allowed to ask the IRS for the information. So HUD had the IRS send the tenants who had been overcompensated letters saying that HUD wanted to see your tax forms, and carbon copied the letters back to HUD.
It was a quirky way of doing things, but it got around the information sharing restrictions.
IMO your example only states that system-trust is needed and for that to happen an infrastructure is needed that can handle a smart card.
I think that's an interesting way to look at it, but I think that it is virtually impossible to assemble a good infrastructure with respect to something like national identification cards or state driver's licenses. There are too many business, governmental offices and individuals.
I like to say that the most dangerous location in any metropolitan area is the international airport. First there is the pervasive illusion of security as discussed in my last post, I don't care if you required DNA and fingerprints instead of just driver's licenses to fly a plan, it wouldn't really matter, because of the main problem. Too many people. An airport like Port Columbus has about 10,000 people walking through it on a daily basis, with 1000 employees, maybe? But Atlanta Hartsfield has 125,000 people walking through it with well over 5000 airline and airport employees. The idea that you could somehow secure such an unwiedly environment is not only absurd, but I think it's dangerous because it's giving people a false sense of security. Now you're talking about securing a state's entire driver's license issuance system, or a nation's identification card infrastructure. The weaknesses are too big.
I guess you're right. We should just give up; the criminals have won. We'll never be able to beat them, so we should stop trying.
And funny enough, I think you have hit the nail on the head.
Sheese. The idea is to take forgery out of the range of possibility for your average crook. Some will beat it, yes. But at a cost and level of difficulty far beyond your average crackhead's capabilities
But let us consider the situation in California. Here we had a state with the nation's most sophisticated driver's license issuing system. Electronically archived photographs, fingerprints and they were collecting SSN's for license issuance (a combo not found in any other state at that time.)
Shortly after the introduction of that system, California had the worst bout of identity theft that sends chills through other states DMV's.
The problem was esentially the illusion of security. Not that it wasn't a secure system, but that it was trumpeted by the DMV at that time as uncopyable and stuff. So the level of trust associated with the new driver's license skyrocketed. If you were carrying one around, everyone knew it was protected by all these security implementations and biometrics, whereas people would scrutinize the previous license much more vigialntly.
The result was that the average crook had far more to gain by obtaining a good fradulent California license, even if the costs were higher. Therefore the much higher gains justified the much higher costs. In no state were DMV employees being bribed thousands of dollars for liceneses, except California.
The situation is slightly better today because the state DMV makes no pretense that the license is a very good authenticator of identity.
In my study of issues concerning identity fraud and stuff, I find something rather amusing. Identity fraud was unusual and very low key until about the late 1960's and the early 1970's...that's for most states. For Ohio, my home state, it was 1969. Why? In 1969 Ohio added the picture to the driver's license, which suddenly made identity theft possible, through the trust of a document that shouldnt have existed.
I have a Visor Deluxe which has the 8MB ram chip problem. The hotfix is fine, but my battery usage went way way up, so I decided to see if Handspring would send a new one..and they did, as noted, by FedEx.
However, the replacement sent could not Hotsync...so I requested a second replacement.
The second replacement could hotsync...but would crash a lot and require soft and hard resets all the damn time.
The third replacement came with a little quality control sheet indicating to me that it passed all the tests except the "memory" test. Sure enough...it has the 8MB ram chip problem which I called about in the first place.
A Canadian friend of mine noted that car insurance in Canada is far more expensive than it is in the United States. Apparently, Canadian law requires you to have an absurd amount of liability insurance...like over $1,000,000 per year. That, and some other onerous regulations makes it very expensive.
I live in Ohio...one of the nation's cheapest states for insurance. While we have some really big population densities and high traffic (more land zoned urban than any other state) insurance costs by state are more dictated by laws and probability of auto theft. Michigan and Pennsylvania have really high rates because those are "no fault" states. NJ, FL, CA, TX have really high insurance rates because there is an extremely high probability of auto theft (thieves take the stolen vehicle across the border or the ocean.) Except for Lake Erie, Ohio is landlocked.
I am 22, own a 95 Saab Convertible, pay about $1300 per year, and am registered in a high population county.($250 deductible, 100/100/300)
It always has amazed me that this discrimination exists too...I say that if it were opposite (i.e. women as a group were considered the worse drivers) then gender based ratings would have already been prohibited.
Consider it this way, when you go to an insurance company and ask them for a rate, the question on gender breaks down to whether you have a penis or a vagina. The penis people seem to be worse drivers, but does that mean you (assuming you have a penis) are also a worse driver than if you had a vagina?
However, the above is true only if you're at an equilibrium point, when all factors are in balance and you're forced to trade off one for another. The fact of the matter is, most software is difficult to use simply because it is poorly designed, with skill or little thought given to the end user experience -- end of story.
He he. We are never at the end of *any* story.
Who is saying that we are not at the equilibrium point, given a company's resources and goals in designing a particular software product? When I look at some of Microsoft's more severe UI gaffs, I see other priorities that were put in place over UI. When Microsoft does go out of it's way to study UI, it's all-inclusive bureaucratic structure prevents it from making good UI decisions (I have a friend who works for a human factors firm who often works with MS.) Since that is the case, the ultimate equilibrium is not reachable, since MS is tripping over itself, and taking the software project to some other lower equilibrium. While a theoretical equilibrium does exist and is higher, it is not obtainable. That doesn't mean that the point at which MS, or any other software company, is operating is not an equilibrium where factors are balanced. Indeed, for any software project, the company is rewarded for finding the best equilibrium given its resources.
I would agree that this is a good example "hiding the machine from the user", but this is just a natural progresion of computer science.
This is indeed true...but
Should car makers include displays for compression per cylinder? Mixture? Exaust spectralnalysis?
is not a natural progression of automobile engineering.
While dump, core and RAM were there in the beginning of computer science, compression per cylinder, mixture (to an extent) and exhaust spectranalysis are relatively new. When engines were first being constructed, the makers had an idea that those were issues, but had no way of measuring those elements nor a really good way of manipulating them. When newer cars came along, tools to maniuplate and measure them appeared. But on the whole, useful cars were constructed without anyone knowing exhaust spectranalysis.
I can't think of a computer science equivalent, which would have to be something that always was at play, but only recently was understood.
It so happens that Slashdot has two articles on carbon nanotubules today...one on their heat conducting properties, the other on its potential use as a rigging cable for a space elevator.
The space elevator article said that the carbon nanotubules may have a strength as high as 200 giga pascals. However, this article says
"Ironically, the same weak linkages that make carbon nanotubes superior for heat conductance could deflate scientists' earlier expectation that bun-dles of them would provide unrivaled mechanical strength."
Umm...I think that the scientists from the second article better call the scientists in the first article.:-)
It so happens that Slashdot has two articles on carbon nanotubules today...one on their heat conducting properties, the other on its potential use as a rigging cable for a space elevator.
The space elevator article said that the carbon nanotubules may have a strength as high as 200 giga pascals. However, this article says
"Ironically, the same weak linkages that make carbon nanotubes superior for heat conductance could deflate scientists' earlier expectation that bun-dles of them would provide unrivaled mechanical strength."
Umm...I think that the scientists from the second article better call the scientists in the first article.:-)
The thing that bothers me about this is that it is yet another use for the driver's license (presumably the "card" discussed in the article summary) that really shouldn't be there.
If I may remind you, prior to 1975, many states did not issue licenses with pictures (Ohio, my home state, started in 1972, perhaps a bit earlier, but not much.)
The picture wasn't actually added for driver's licensing purposes, but most people accepted it that way. In fact, some states put photos on them but then said they couldn't be used for identification purposes, much like the Social Security Number, which was just as much of a fraud.
Either way, I would like to see more people in more states opt out of having a photographic driver's license, and I think that that would improve our rights to anonymity in performing transactions.
In the old days, the main way that Barnes and Noble sold books was by the B+N catalog (and if you ever bought from them...you would likely still have a couple dozen hidden in your house somewhere.) The B+N catalog had differential pricing in it, in order to purchase an item from them, you had to give them your catalog number. I noticed that the catalogs I would get would have different prices in them from the catalogs my father got, although they did look the same.
Several years ago I was watching...uhh...think it was Montel, as I was flipping through the channels. They had some consumer expert come on and talk about differential pricing in Victoria's Secret catalogs. It wasn't making a big difference unless you spent a huge sum of money. They had this weird example of how one person would save $100 if she bought $500 worth of clothing from one catalog instead of another.
What's deeply funny to me is the way that they scandalized such a good, family, American institution like Victoria's Secret. And I don't care how much lingerie someone owns, they likely do not buy that much of it.
The fact that Mazda decided to recall the vehicles was it's own decision, not a Government mandate. Government mandated recalls (or threats to recall) come usually from either safety related issues (but the car has to be 7 years and younger I believe) or emissions related issues (10 years and younger.) If the automaker wanted to issue a recall for an issue that had not known about (that is to say, only is manifesting after years of service) and the issue is neither emissions nor safety related, and the vehicle is out of warranty, then the automaker will issue the recall for customer service reasons.
No one has brought up the Mitsubishi recalls that were in the news recently, but those were forced because of the automaker had previously knowledge of design defects.
I have been thinking about this issue for a while myself. I am currently the chair of the Libertarian Party of Franklin County, Ohio, and a candidate for the Ohio House of Representatives, District 21 (eastern Columbus.)
One thing that really gets people to the polls is the appearance of a horse race. There are 435 congressional seats up in November, but the general belief is that 10 or 15 can actually go one way or another. The Ohio 12th Congressional district (eastern Franklin, Delaware and Licking counties) is the only one in Ohio that is considered a possibility for going one way or another. It actually has a good mix of urban democrats and suburban republicans.
However, the other 420 or so are pretty guessable. It all has to do with good ol' gerrymandering, but it's the "nice" type of gerrymandering.
For instance, there are 99 Ohio house districts. You could do a poll and say that 60% of Ohioans will vote republican and 40% will vote Democrat. Now, knowing that, the districts are gerrymandered so that approximately happens.
I believe this has an awesome effect on voter apathy. If you live in a district designed to go democrat (like the 21st) and you are a democrat, you might as well not vote, since your fellow democrats will take care of the race anyway. If you are a republican, you definitely need not vote, because you will be voting for the loser.
Politicians don't like 50/50 districts...it's much cheaper for the districts to be gerrymandered in the first place to get the same results than making good 50/50 districts, requiring the candidates to raise and spend gigantic sums of money to campaign. Funny enough, gerrymandering keeps corporate money out of politics, just a wee bit.:-)
The solution to all of this is to seriously considering alternative voting systems, like preference voting in large multi candidate areas.
Second, I think we can say that whoever has the majority of seats in the house after Nov. 2000 will have no small effect on the political direction of the country. In essence, that means that only those voters participating in elections in the 10 to 15 50/50 congressional districts will have a say in the running of the country, as they will decide which party maintains majority.
That is a bit of a stretch, but I think you get the general point.
The second problem I see is how politicians talk about politics. Heck, I make this mistake too. De Tocqueville noted that Americans were always forming little organizations to solve problems and such. Politicians come onto the scene promising to solve problems for people. In doing so, that just enocourages voter apathy, since both (or all the candidates) will end up promising to solve the problem in their own way, meaning that people just won't have to worry about it once the candidate gets into office. Now you have to remember that this is coming from a Libertarian, and that my beliefs usually center around small-government and free market solutions...blah blah blah. So in my mind, big government has introduced the idea that someone is always working on the problems and issues at hand, and that's our general expectations of politicians and bureaucrats. Politicians and Bureaucrats certainly dont' want you to get invovled trying to help solve the problems yourself. With that attitude, and the fact that both parties are vying for control to solve the same problems, people just become apathetic because now they dont' need to think about them. So why should they vote too?
One quick thought about the presidential electoral system. The fact that our states are winner takes all is a modern fabrication, there is no Constitutional requirement that winner takes all be used. But it makes sense for the states, especially large ones, to use winner takes all...because it makes that state a very powerful selector in the presidential race. So eventually, all the states went to winner takes all, in order to maximize their influence and attractiveness during the election (if a couple of votes could mean losing the whole state, then the candidate needs to spends lots of time campaigning there.) Since it is a federal issue, Congress could just step in and require that the electors vote proportionally based on results of the general election. I guess that would be ok, but the big states (like Ohio, a gigantic state that could go democrat for Gore if it's raining in Cincinnati, or Bush if it's snowing in Cleveland) would have lots to lose in the process, and the big states control a large amount of Congress anyway.
I basically posted this elsewhere, but thought it was appropriate here too.
The thing that is bothering me is this, I look at countries that have made sincere attempts at keeping corporate structures from infiltrating government, and it seems like the result is a much higher level of corporate malfeasance in governmental affairs. Germany I think is the best example of this, seems like no matter what they do, corporations have much more power than they do in the states...I look at Siemens, Bosch or DaimlerChrysler. The same thing for France, for Sweden, definitely for Japan (which is slightly different, but anyway.)
There are two essential problems here, first, by regulating industries, the tendency is that you create regulations which inhibit small companies emerging to compete with the larger companies. Germans may hate big companies, but it is absolutely impossible for an entrepreneur to create their own little company in the German regulatory environment. The fact that there are no little companies is just plain disturbing to me.
The second reason, strongly associated with the first, is that when regulations come into play, only big companies have the resources to deal with those regulations, and influence the regulations. It seems impossible to avoid this, even if you were to ban any type of campaign financing. Fact is, leaders of big companies get attention no matter what.
My sincere question is, can you show me a country whose regulatory environment has successfully keeped companies small and outside of the political process as much as possible? As I said, the performance of the attempts don't seem very good.
The thing that is bothering me is this, I look at countries that have made sincere attempts at keeping corporate structures from infiltrating government, and it seems like the result is a much higher level of corporate malfeasance in governmental affairs. Germany I think is the best example of this, seems like no matter what they do, corporations have much more power than they do in the states...I look at Siemens, Bosch or DaimlerChrysler. The same thing for France, for Sweden, definitely for Japan (which is slightly different, but anyway.)
There are two essential problems here, first, by regulating industries, the tendency is that you create regulations which inhibit small companies emerging to compete with the larger companies. Germans may hate big companies, but it is absolutely impossible for an entrepreneur to create their own little company in the German regulatory environment. The fact that there are no little companies is just plain disturbing to me.
The second reason, strongly associated with the first, is that when regulations come into play, only big companies have the resources to deal with those regulations, and influence the regulations. It seems impossible to avoid this, even if you were to ban any type of campaign financing. Fact is, leaders of big companies get attention no matter what.
My sincere question is, can you show me a country whose regulatory environment has successfully keeped companies small and outside of the political process as much as possible? As I said, the performance of the attempts don't seem very good.
That huge cost difference is due to the price of fuel for the Concorde. During design, they didn't expect the oil crises of the 70's, nor how much fuel the final aircraft was going to consume for how little payload/few passengers it can carry.
The environmental stuff you are talking about was no minor thing...the noise of the aircraft is tremendous even at slow speeds. (You have to remember, by the time that the Concorde could actually do commercial service (1976 or so) Boeing had already given up on making its own supersonic aircraft.) So the Concorde was prohibited to come into the US, at the request of communities surrounding the airports. I forgot how they fixed that problem, I think it was some sorta special agreement that allowed more routes to Europe for US based carriers.
I knew that the plate transfer fees in Illinois were on the high side, and I also heard that the yearly plate fees went up to over $70 bucks a year? Ohio fees are not that bad for car ownership. Admittedly, both are states could be worst, we could be paying ad valorem fees like Kentucky or Colorado.
Now here's an intersting deal, I drive a 95 Saab Convertible, just got it for $14500, it has 52k miles. An outstanding deal on an oustanding car, but really, the car's first few years depreciation is hideous, which makes it such a good deal now.
One thing you notice these days about cars is that automakers are selling them loaded, and people expect them loaded. If I get into a new car today and I don't power windows and door locks, I think that something is seriously wrong with the person. It used to be that 20-30% of new Accords were the DX, which had no options on it, these days it's like 5%...and now it's the EX that's the most popular (adds bigger engine and sunroof) as opposed to the LX which is a fairly well equipped automobile. I would bet that taking into account so many cars with all of these features is also raising up the price much more than it would have ten years ago when we weren't so crazy about power windows and stuff.
Yeah I know, I would be perfectly happy to find median new car price figures, but no one seems to be as concerned with that (not enough people taking proper statistics classes I guess.) Your malibu took a pretty big drop depreciation wise, making it a much more affordable car.
It may be true that's it's a lot of money, but so are other cars. The average price of a new car in the United States is *over* $22,000. That makes the Insight a bit below average cost wise.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, this is really funny. You need a photo ID to buy alcohol, and that is fine with everybody, but voting? nosire
Ack...perhaps I exaggerated that point. But think about the implications! In the cradle of Democracy you need an ID card to exercise your right to vote...ooo...the state legislature will get burned down for that. God help you if you need to be fingerprinted for said ID card (in those states that do it.)
My point about affiliation is not technical, and it isn't about privacy either, but about the way it makes it easier to use redistricting to preempt the election. Is Ohio special in that respect?
Definitely not. You just have much less data on voting affiliations...but it's enough to indicate general affiliation patterns--enough to draw out districs. So only 20% of voters participate in the primaries..it's plenty.
And that's an outstanding point...but isn't that why they chose to do this in Virginia, whose legislature passed UCITA, thereby sidestepping the federal 11th amendment issue?
But it is also the case that voter registration is one of the mechanisms that keep voters tournout low.
It's an interesting point, but I wonder if that has a historical basis. For instance, the Ohio Constitution of 1851 required you to register to vote one year before the election. The state Constitution was amended two times, the first time to change that to six months, and the the second time to change that to 30 days, which is what it is currently.
I have to wonder why the state's constitution founders felt that the registration had to be done so far in advance.
In addition, registration requires you to state your political affiliation.
Not in all states, Ohio doesn't require it. You state your political affiliation here by voting in the primary and selecting which party you want to vote in the primary for.
Registration is also used since while most people have some form of photographic identification, it never has been required for voting, like it is in some countries, so a different system to prevent fraud is used. I know that many Americans would be upset if they were asked for photo id in order to vote (I certainly would be furious.)
My understanding was that the IRS could not share (most)info with the SSA and vice-versa. Yes the IRS does use the SSN as the taxpayer key, but you will note that you have never received a form from the IRS saying how much is owed to you when you retire.
There are actually a lot of safeguards with IRS info being shared between governmental agencies. For instance, I was told of an anecdote concerning a HUD project that wanted to find out if its tenants had made more income a few years ago (and therefore were overcompensated benefits wise.) They were not allowed to ask the IRS for the information. So HUD had the IRS send the tenants who had been overcompensated letters saying that HUD wanted to see your tax forms, and carbon copied the letters back to HUD.
It was a quirky way of doing things, but it got around the information sharing restrictions.
IMO your example only states that system-trust is needed and for that to happen an infrastructure is needed that can handle a smart card.
I think that's an interesting way to look at it, but I think that it is virtually impossible to assemble a good infrastructure with respect to something like national identification cards or state driver's licenses. There are too many business, governmental offices and individuals.
I like to say that the most dangerous location in any metropolitan area is the international airport. First there is the pervasive illusion of security as discussed in my last post, I don't care if you required DNA and fingerprints instead of just driver's licenses to fly a plan, it wouldn't really matter, because of the main problem. Too many people. An airport like Port Columbus has about 10,000 people walking through it on a daily basis, with 1000 employees, maybe? But Atlanta Hartsfield has 125,000 people walking through it with well over 5000 airline and airport employees. The idea that you could somehow secure such an unwiedly environment is not only absurd, but I think it's dangerous because it's giving people a false sense of security. Now you're talking about securing a state's entire driver's license issuance system, or a nation's identification card infrastructure. The weaknesses are too big.
I guess you're right. We should just give up; the criminals have won. We'll never be able to beat them, so we should stop trying.
And funny enough, I think you have hit the nail on the head.
Sheese. The idea is to take forgery out of the range of possibility for your average crook. Some will beat it, yes. But at a cost and level of difficulty far beyond your average crackhead's capabilities
But let us consider the situation in California. Here we had a state with the nation's most sophisticated driver's license issuing system. Electronically archived photographs, fingerprints and they were collecting SSN's for license issuance (a combo not found in any other state at that time.)
Shortly after the introduction of that system, California had the worst bout of identity theft that sends chills through other states DMV's.
The problem was esentially the illusion of security. Not that it wasn't a secure system, but that it was trumpeted by the DMV at that time as uncopyable and stuff. So the level of trust associated with the new driver's license skyrocketed. If you were carrying one around, everyone knew it was protected by all these security implementations and biometrics, whereas people would scrutinize the previous license much more vigialntly.
The result was that the average crook had far more to gain by obtaining a good fradulent California license, even if the costs were higher. Therefore the much higher gains justified the much higher costs. In no state were DMV employees being bribed thousands of dollars for liceneses, except California.
The situation is slightly better today because the state DMV makes no pretense that the license is a very good authenticator of identity.
In my study of issues concerning identity fraud and stuff, I find something rather amusing. Identity fraud was unusual and very low key until about the late 1960's and the early 1970's...that's for most states. For Ohio, my home state, it was 1969. Why? In 1969 Ohio added the picture to the driver's license, which suddenly made identity theft possible, through the trust of a document that shouldnt have existed.
I have a Visor Deluxe which has the 8MB ram chip problem. The hotfix is fine, but my battery usage went way way up, so I decided to see if Handspring would send a new one..and they did, as noted, by FedEx.
However, the replacement sent could not Hotsync...so I requested a second replacement.
The second replacement could hotsync...but would crash a lot and require soft and hard resets all the damn time.
The third replacement came with a little quality control sheet indicating to me that it passed all the tests except the "memory" test. Sure enough...it has the 8MB ram chip problem which I called about in the first place.
A Canadian friend of mine noted that car insurance in Canada is far more expensive than it is in the United States. Apparently, Canadian law requires you to have an absurd amount of liability insurance...like over $1,000,000 per year. That, and some other onerous regulations makes it very expensive.
I live in Ohio...one of the nation's cheapest states for insurance. While we have some really big population densities and high traffic (more land zoned urban than any other state) insurance costs by state are more dictated by laws and probability of auto theft. Michigan and Pennsylvania have really high rates because those are "no fault" states. NJ, FL, CA, TX have really high insurance rates because there is an extremely high probability of auto theft (thieves take the stolen vehicle across the border or the ocean.) Except for Lake Erie, Ohio is landlocked.
I am 22, own a 95 Saab Convertible, pay about $1300 per year, and am registered in a high population county.($250 deductible, 100/100/300)
It always has amazed me that this discrimination exists too...I say that if it were opposite (i.e. women as a group were considered the worse drivers) then gender based ratings would have already been prohibited.
Consider it this way, when you go to an insurance company and ask them for a rate, the question on gender breaks down to whether you have a penis or a vagina. The penis people seem to be worse drivers, but does that mean you (assuming you have a penis) are also a worse driver than if you had a vagina?
However, the above is true only if you're at an equilibrium point, when all factors are in balance and you're forced to trade off one for another. The fact of the matter is, most software is difficult to use simply because it is poorly designed, with skill or little thought given to the end user experience -- end of story.
He he. We are never at the end of *any* story.
Who is saying that we are not at the equilibrium point, given a company's resources and goals in designing a particular software product? When I look at some of Microsoft's more severe UI gaffs, I see other priorities that were put in place over UI. When Microsoft does go out of it's way to study UI, it's all-inclusive bureaucratic structure prevents it from making good UI decisions (I have a friend who works for a human factors firm who often works with MS.) Since that is the case, the ultimate equilibrium is not reachable, since MS is tripping over itself, and taking the software project to some other lower equilibrium. While a theoretical equilibrium does exist and is higher, it is not obtainable. That doesn't mean that the point at which MS, or any other software company, is operating is not an equilibrium where factors are balanced. Indeed, for any software project, the company is rewarded for finding the best equilibrium given its resources.
I would agree that this is a good example "hiding the machine from the user", but this is just a natural progresion of computer science.
This is indeed true...but
Should car makers include displays for compression per cylinder? Mixture? Exaust spectralnalysis?
is not a natural progression of automobile engineering.
While dump, core and RAM were there in the beginning of computer science, compression per cylinder, mixture (to an extent) and exhaust spectranalysis are relatively new. When engines were first being constructed, the makers had an idea that those were issues, but had no way of measuring those elements nor a really good way of manipulating them. When newer cars came along, tools to maniuplate and measure them appeared. But on the whole, useful cars were constructed without anyone knowing exhaust spectranalysis.
I can't think of a computer science equivalent, which would have to be something that always was at play, but only recently was understood.
It so happens that Slashdot has two articles on carbon nanotubules today...one on their heat conducting properties, the other on its potential use as a rigging cable for a space elevator.
:-)
The space elevator article said that the carbon nanotubules may have a strength as high as 200 giga pascals. However, this article says
"Ironically, the same weak linkages that make carbon nanotubes superior for heat conductance could deflate scientists' earlier expectation that bun-dles of them would provide unrivaled mechanical strength."
Umm...I think that the scientists from the second article better call the scientists in the first article.
Did anyone else notice this?
It so happens that Slashdot has two articles on carbon nanotubules today...one on their heat conducting properties, the other on its potential use as a rigging cable for a space elevator.
:-)
The space elevator article said that the carbon nanotubules may have a strength as high as 200 giga pascals. However, this article says
"Ironically, the same weak linkages that make carbon nanotubes superior for heat conductance could deflate scientists' earlier expectation that bun-dles of them would provide unrivaled mechanical strength."
Umm...I think that the scientists from the second article better call the scientists in the first article.
Did anyone else notice this?
The thing that bothers me about this is that it is yet another use for the driver's license (presumably the "card" discussed in the article summary) that really shouldn't be there.
If I may remind you, prior to 1975, many states did not issue licenses with pictures (Ohio, my home state, started in 1972, perhaps a bit earlier, but not much.)
The picture wasn't actually added for driver's licensing purposes, but most people accepted it that way. In fact, some states put photos on them but then said they couldn't be used for identification purposes, much like the Social Security Number, which was just as much of a fraud.
Either way, I would like to see more people in more states opt out of having a photographic driver's license, and I think that that would improve our rights to anonymity in performing transactions.
In the old days, the main way that Barnes and Noble sold books was by the B+N catalog (and if you ever bought from them...you would likely still have a couple dozen hidden in your house somewhere.) The B+N catalog had differential pricing in it, in order to purchase an item from them, you had to give them your catalog number. I noticed that the catalogs I would get would have different prices in them from the catalogs my father got, although they did look the same.
Several years ago I was watching...uhh...think it was Montel, as I was flipping through the channels. They had some consumer expert come on and talk about differential pricing in Victoria's Secret catalogs. It wasn't making a big difference unless you spent a huge sum of money. They had this weird example of how one person would save $100 if she bought $500 worth of clothing from one catalog instead of another.
What's deeply funny to me is the way that they scandalized such a good, family, American institution like Victoria's Secret. And I don't care how much lingerie someone owns, they likely do not buy that much of it.
The fact that Mazda decided to recall the vehicles was it's own decision, not a Government mandate. Government mandated recalls (or threats to recall) come usually from either safety related issues (but the car has to be 7 years and younger I believe) or emissions related issues (10 years and younger.) If the automaker wanted to issue a recall for an issue that had not known about (that is to say, only is manifesting after years of service) and the issue is neither emissions nor safety related, and the vehicle is out of warranty, then the automaker will issue the recall for customer service reasons.
No one has brought up the Mitsubishi recalls that were in the news recently, but those were forced because of the automaker had previously knowledge of design defects.
I have been thinking about this issue for a while myself. I am currently the chair of the Libertarian Party of Franklin County, Ohio, and a candidate for the Ohio House of Representatives, District 21 (eastern Columbus.)
:-)
One thing that really gets people to the polls is the appearance of a horse race. There are 435 congressional seats up in November, but the general belief is that 10 or 15 can actually go one way or another. The Ohio 12th Congressional district (eastern Franklin, Delaware and Licking counties) is the only one in Ohio that is considered a possibility for going one way or another. It actually has a good mix of urban democrats and suburban republicans.
However, the other 420 or so are pretty guessable. It all has to do with good ol' gerrymandering, but it's the "nice" type of gerrymandering.
For instance, there are 99 Ohio house districts. You could do a poll and say that 60% of Ohioans will vote republican and 40% will vote Democrat. Now, knowing that, the districts are gerrymandered so that approximately happens.
I believe this has an awesome effect on voter apathy. If you live in a district designed to go democrat (like the 21st) and you are a democrat, you might as well not vote, since your fellow democrats will take care of the race anyway. If you are a republican, you definitely need not vote, because you will be voting for the loser.
Politicians don't like 50/50 districts...it's much cheaper for the districts to be gerrymandered in the first place to get the same results than making good 50/50 districts, requiring the candidates to raise and spend gigantic sums of money to campaign. Funny enough, gerrymandering keeps corporate money out of politics, just a wee bit.
The solution to all of this is to seriously considering alternative voting systems, like preference voting in large multi candidate areas.
Second, I think we can say that whoever has the majority of seats in the house after Nov. 2000 will have no small effect on the political direction of the country. In essence, that means that only those voters participating in elections in the 10 to 15 50/50 congressional districts will have a say in the running of the country, as they will decide which party maintains majority.
That is a bit of a stretch, but I think you get the general point.
The second problem I see is how politicians talk about politics. Heck, I make this mistake too. De Tocqueville noted that Americans were always forming little organizations to solve problems and such. Politicians come onto the scene promising to solve problems for people. In doing so, that just enocourages voter apathy, since both (or all the candidates) will end up promising to solve the problem in their own way, meaning that people just won't have to worry about it once the candidate gets into office. Now you have to remember that this is coming from a Libertarian, and that my beliefs usually center around small-government and free market solutions...blah blah blah. So in my mind, big government has introduced the idea that someone is always working on the problems and issues at hand, and that's our general expectations of politicians and bureaucrats. Politicians and Bureaucrats certainly dont' want you to get invovled trying to help solve the problems yourself. With that attitude, and the fact that both parties are vying for control to solve the same problems, people just become apathetic because now they dont' need to think about them. So why should they vote too?
One quick thought about the presidential electoral system. The fact that our states are winner takes all is a modern fabrication, there is no Constitutional requirement that winner takes all be used. But it makes sense for the states, especially large ones, to use winner takes all...because it makes that state a very powerful selector in the presidential race. So eventually, all the states went to winner takes all, in order to maximize their influence and attractiveness during the election (if a couple of votes could mean losing the whole state, then the candidate needs to spends lots of time campaigning there.) Since it is a federal issue, Congress could just step in and require that the electors vote proportionally based on results of the general election. I guess that would be ok, but the big states (like Ohio, a gigantic state that could go democrat for Gore if it's raining in Cincinnati, or Bush if it's snowing in Cleveland) would have lots to lose in the process, and the big states control a large amount of Congress anyway.
The link should be http://www.thelantern.com/archives/gendisp.asp?id= 927117612076
I wrote an aticle on that found here http://www.thelantern.com/archives/gendisp.asp?id= 927117612076"?
What's interesting about your situation is, you have proof that the fingerprints were actually collected and held by security forces. Hmm....
I basically posted this elsewhere, but thought it was appropriate here too.
The thing that is bothering me is this, I look at countries that have made sincere attempts at keeping corporate structures from infiltrating government, and it seems like the result is a much higher level of corporate malfeasance in governmental affairs. Germany I think is the best example of this, seems like no matter what they do, corporations have much more power than they do in the states...I look at Siemens, Bosch or DaimlerChrysler. The same thing for France, for Sweden, definitely for Japan (which is slightly different, but anyway.)
There are two essential problems here, first, by regulating industries, the tendency is that you create regulations which inhibit small companies emerging to compete with the larger companies. Germans may hate big companies, but it is absolutely impossible for an entrepreneur to create their own little company in the German regulatory environment. The fact that there are no little companies is just plain disturbing to me.
The second reason, strongly associated with the first, is that when regulations come into play, only big companies have the resources to deal with those regulations, and influence the regulations. It seems impossible to avoid this, even if you were to ban any type of campaign financing. Fact is, leaders of big companies get attention no matter what.
My sincere question is, can you show me a country whose regulatory environment has successfully keeped companies small and outside of the political process as much as possible? As I said, the performance of the attempts don't seem very good.
The thing that is bothering me is this, I look at countries that have made sincere attempts at keeping corporate structures from infiltrating government, and it seems like the result is a much higher level of corporate malfeasance in governmental affairs. Germany I think is the best example of this, seems like no matter what they do, corporations have much more power than they do in the states...I look at Siemens, Bosch or DaimlerChrysler. The same thing for France, for Sweden, definitely for Japan (which is slightly different, but anyway.)
There are two essential problems here, first, by regulating industries, the tendency is that you create regulations which inhibit small companies emerging to compete with the larger companies. Germans may hate big companies, but it is absolutely impossible for an entrepreneur to create their own little company in the German regulatory environment. The fact that there are no little companies is just plain disturbing to me.
The second reason, strongly associated with the first, is that when regulations come into play, only big companies have the resources to deal with those regulations, and influence the regulations. It seems impossible to avoid this, even if you were to ban any type of campaign financing. Fact is, leaders of big companies get attention no matter what.
My sincere question is, can you show me a country whose regulatory environment has successfully keeped companies small and outside of the political process as much as possible? As I said, the performance of the attempts don't seem very good.
That huge cost difference is due to the price of fuel for the Concorde. During design, they didn't expect the oil crises of the 70's, nor how much fuel the final aircraft was going to consume for how little payload/few passengers it can carry.
The environmental stuff you are talking about was no minor thing...the noise of the aircraft is tremendous even at slow speeds. (You have to remember, by the time that the Concorde could actually do commercial service (1976 or so) Boeing had already given up on making its own supersonic aircraft.) So the Concorde was prohibited to come into the US, at the request of communities surrounding the airports. I forgot how they fixed that problem, I think it was some sorta special agreement that allowed more routes to Europe for US based carriers.
I knew that the plate transfer fees in Illinois were on the high side, and I also heard that the yearly plate fees went up to over $70 bucks a year? Ohio fees are not that bad for car ownership. Admittedly, both are states could be worst, we could be paying ad valorem fees like Kentucky or Colorado.
Now here's an intersting deal, I drive a 95 Saab Convertible, just got it for $14500, it has 52k miles. An outstanding deal on an oustanding car, but really, the car's first few years depreciation is hideous, which makes it such a good deal now.
One thing you notice these days about cars is that automakers are selling them loaded, and people expect them loaded. If I get into a new car today and I don't power windows and door locks, I think that something is seriously wrong with the person. It used to be that 20-30% of new Accords were the DX, which had no options on it, these days it's like 5%...and now it's the EX that's the most popular (adds bigger engine and sunroof) as opposed to the LX which is a fairly well equipped automobile. I would bet that taking into account so many cars with all of these features is also raising up the price much more than it would have ten years ago when we weren't so crazy about power windows and stuff.
Yeah I know, I would be perfectly happy to find median new car price figures, but no one seems to be as concerned with that (not enough people taking proper statistics classes I guess.) Your malibu took a pretty big drop depreciation wise, making it a much more affordable car.
It may be true that's it's a lot of money, but so are other cars. The average price of a new car in the United States is *over* $22,000. That makes the Insight a bit below average cost wise.