Okay how about this for stuffing. You hack the machine and add in X ballots that match the hack on the machine. Again your system isn't that different from the one I was suggesting but still has the potental to be exploited. Also your voting recite allows for people to "sell" their votes. They secret ballot isn't just to protect you but the system. If you try to buy a vote directly you now have to trust that person that votes. Plus you could be intimidated to hand over your little number so someone could check on how you voted. I am just trying to show just how hard this problem really is to solve and that there isn't any easy solution.
Well I think it goes a lot like this. 1. Rails doesn't scale for me. 2. Rails didn't make me a great programmer. 3. Rails didn't make my hard task easy. A lot of it seems like they are upset that Rails wasn't magic. The problem with Rails is that I don't think it can live up to the hype. It sounds like a very good framework but people seem to think it is little short of magic. Kind of like XML , OOP, and 4GLs. They are not they are just tools and like every tool they have their good and bad points. Not everybody likes every tool. I have written Perl but I don't like it. I have written PHP and I don't like it a lot. I have written in Java and I do kind of like it. I have written in c++ and it was okay. How you feel about a language all depends on where you are at that time and what you are using it for. The same goes with frameworks.
"For personal/small-business accounting, there's GnuCash, although I don't know how easy it would be for a Quicken users to adopt." It isn't and it isn't as good according to my wife. It also doesn't integrate as well with banks as Quicken does. Could it? Maybe but right now it doesn't. I trust my wife on this one. She is a big Firefox, Gimp, OO.org user so she doesn't mind learning new software. Tax prep software is just a must have and I don't mind paying for it. I just want it for Linux. I am not a FOSS zealot I will use the best or only tool for the job. I always look at FOSS first but just being FOSS isn't good enough it has to work. So how about TurboTax for Linux:)
I can only think of three must have programs that Linux is lacking. Quicken, TurboTax/TaxCut, and if you have a small business QuickBooks.
Linux has Email, web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, and digital pictures covered. One place that you have issues is with codecs thanks to software patents but that can be fixed.
Quicken and a Tax program are the two killers for a lot of people.
Yea except he himself thought that it was no big deal to start with and harmless... So when does he start sticking those cocktail stick in his own eyes?
They probably have a few desktops that run Windows still. So maybe some copies of Office and some copies of McAffee that didn't have all the paperwork for them. Should just go and show that you should have gone all FOSS.
For super simple. Freenas.org offers will do the trick. Want to get fancy? Openfiler.com will do anything you could want. For hardware. Well if you have a spare case with a good power supply sitting around you could go with this. http://www.clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?itemno=A4842001 It will be low power and is pretty cheap. Just buy some DDR-2 ram and what hard drives you want and your good to go. This board does have two slots free so you do have some expansion options for more drives or even a raid if you want. If you don't want to build a system then you could get the $199 Walmart Linux PC which uses this motherboard. If you are going to put a lot of drives on it I would still upgrade the power supply. You could also pick this up at geeks.com http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=TS-X2002RS Or if you want just use what any old PC you have.
It all depends on what you want to do. There are some nice small NAS systems that you can just plug in as well.
Tesla was a brilliant nut. Wireless transmission of power was EXTREMLY inefficient. In other words just like his Tesla turbine it has limited applications and really isn't better than what our scientists can do now. No magic, no strange conspiracies just reality. Not as much fun but it is the truth.
I do agree. I do think that electronic machines need some type of auditing system. The one I hear about most is a paper tape that is stored internally in the machine. That I see as being close to useless in preventing intentional fraud. Frankly I was thinking out loud about how hard it would to make a perfect system free of human error. I think that is impossible. My suggestion would be a printed paper ballot that encoded the vote as a bar code as well as human readable. Frankly I don't think there was any fraud in NH. Maybe some errors but I doubt fraud. To me the prevention of errors seems like a bigger issue than fraud.
"2. Hand count the ballots in front of public overseers and representatives for individual candidates/parties. Heck, even put it on public access TV." People make mistakes. Counting millions of little pieces of paper by hand will not be perfect it never has. In fact that was the problem in 2000! You also would have to have TEAMS of people counting each set of votes. Which is what we had in 2000.
And how do you know that the ballot boxes where not stuffed? Or the ballots changed? Like that has never happened.
Your "solution" isn't perfect. I don't know if we can have a perfect system and have a true secret ballot. I think that recording the ballots electronically and printing that ballot with barcodes and text is probably going to be as good as it gets.
If there is a problem then you can scan the ballots. If there is a miss match then you need to see what the problem is. If you still don't trust the scan then you read each ballot and scan them see if they match and if they don't that is the problem. Not perfect but it does have multiple checks Even with that system I expect errors will happen... because they always do.
I don't know I just had a C-64. The problem with offloading processing to the 1541's drive is that the bloody thing was slower a snail. Of course many hackers made some cool fast loaders that really helped a lot. I remember when I first started working on PC. It made me nuts that I could format a floppy on my C-64 and then do other things while it formated. On a PC that cost 20x as much as my poor C64 when you formated a floppy that was all that you could do! If you count formating a floppy as a task then the C64 could multi-task much better than MS-DOS:)
people keep saying that but what is to keep the machine from printing the wrong data on the paper trail? I guess you could have the booth print the ballot and then the voter check the ballot and then put the ballot in a box... Except that someone might forget to put the ballot in the box. Or when they do a recount the ballot might be miss read. I guess you could use OCR but that isn't perfect. Or you could print a barcode that would reflect the ballot that is printed... Unless they hacked that so it didn't match.
But the original PC keyboard was terrible. Not the AT but the PC keyboard. The layout was rotten. Another terrible pc keyboard was the KayPro 16 luggable. Same bad layout but a lot worse feel.
The 1200XL came out after the C64 by a fair amount. It also did cost more. As to which had better graphics? That was up for debate. The C64 had better sound and the Atari had a much better floppy. The basic on the Atari was a good bit different than every other basic and many people felt the Basic on the 64 was better. Atari basic did support graphics and sound while the Commodore basic made you do peeks and pokes. I worked at a store that sold Ataris after I got my C64. We never got a 1200. Both good machines.
"There should be a distributed volunteer campaign for each user to read a page of the budget and look for outrageous tidbits." Yep but they should start by looking for their local pork. And then tell your congressperson that you don't want it. I already tried that with mine over the USS Forrestal (CV-59). On a good note it did get retired even over the objections of my Democratic Senator.
If energy is made from renewable resources then plastic can be made from air and water. Or as I pointed out coal, or as you pointed out from biomass. it is hard to make electronic grade copper from recycled material. Most if not all recycled copper is used for plumbing and other none electrical uses. And there are more and more uses for copper all the time. Everything from electrical motors in EV and Fuel Cell cars to transformers to traces on printed circuit boards. Aluminum isn't as good of a conductor for power transmission as copper. The reason that it is being used for power lines is that it is a lot cheaper. Not just pound for pound but you need a lot fewer power poles since it is a lot stronger and lighter than copper.
Well part of it is Firewire isn't a replacement for USB. I haven't seen a Firewire keyboard, mouse, printer, or joystick. Yes it is mediocre all the way around but it works well for some devices that Firewire doesn't work at all for. And works well just okay for many devices that Firewire works well for. Firewire will always be an port you have to get in addition to USB. so it will alway be less popular. But I would agree with you that it isn't dead.
Actually I was thinking that it could make geothermal a lot more practical. Most geothermal steam is pretty low in temperature so this could really help with geothermal power systems.
Not really. If the cost of oil gets high enough it will become cost effective to use other hydrocarbons for plastic production. Coal can be used to make anything oil is used to make. Plus it takes a good amount of energy to mine, transport, and smelt copper. So the cost of copper will most likely go even higher based on the cost of oil.
It is extremely unlikely that plastic will ever be more expensive than copper if for no other reason than there is a lot more Hydrogen and Carbon on the earth than copper.
1 They say that they can do 100mbits with green light now and hope to do 1Gbits with red light soon... I thought that the higher the frequency the higher the bandwidth?
As to the benefits over Cat5 I can see a few. One is cost. Copper is getting more and more expensive plastic is cheap. Not only that but it should be lighter to ship and easier to install since it is smaller than CAT5. Then you have safety. You don't have to worry about shorts and other issues with fiber. Not a huge problem but I can see where some people would like it. And you have the lack of EM from fiber. No not for safety reasons but for interference with other devices. I have never seen a problem with it but anytime you have a signal running on a wire you have the potental for EM.
What do you know... Oh wait:) Actually I was wondering if it would work better in the Great Lakes. Freshwater so less problem with rust, no really big storms, colder water than a lot of ports on the east cost. The thing is that there is a LOT of cheap land around their as well. Just wondering and figured you might know. I think data center wear houses seem like a better solution. Just use the container data centers and if you have to move the data center load them on trucks and move them.
Actually not that bad of an idea. There is a huge amount of code written in COBOL and running on mainframes around the world. Most of this code is at the heart of some of the biggest companies on the planet. People with mainframe skills are getting older and retiring and someone has to keep the stuff running. Maybe not the most important language or skill to learn but it isn't as funny as you think.
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Okay how about this for stuffing. You hack the machine and add in X ballots that match the hack on the machine.
Again your system isn't that different from the one I was suggesting but still has the potental to be exploited.
Also your voting recite allows for people to "sell" their votes. They secret ballot isn't just to protect you but the system. If you try to buy a vote directly you now have to trust that person that votes. Plus you could be intimidated to hand over your little number so someone could check on how you voted.
I am just trying to show just how hard this problem really is to solve and that there isn't any easy solution.
Well I think it goes a lot like this.
1. Rails doesn't scale for me.
2. Rails didn't make me a great programmer.
3. Rails didn't make my hard task easy.
A lot of it seems like they are upset that Rails wasn't magic.
The problem with Rails is that I don't think it can live up to the hype. It sounds like a very good framework but people seem to think it is little short of magic. Kind of like XML , OOP, and 4GLs. They are not they are just tools and like every tool they have their good and bad points.
Not everybody likes every tool. I have written Perl but I don't like it. I have written PHP and I don't like it a lot. I have written in Java and I do kind of like it. I have written in c++ and it was okay.
How you feel about a language all depends on where you are at that time and what you are using it for. The same goes with frameworks.
"For personal/small-business accounting, there's GnuCash, although I don't know how easy it would be for a Quicken users to adopt." :)
It isn't and it isn't as good according to my wife. It also doesn't integrate as well with banks as Quicken does. Could it? Maybe but right now it doesn't.
I trust my wife on this one. She is a big Firefox, Gimp, OO.org user so she doesn't mind learning new software.
Tax prep software is just a must have and I don't mind paying for it. I just want it for Linux.
I am not a FOSS zealot I will use the best or only tool for the job. I always look at FOSS first but just being FOSS isn't good enough it has to work.
So how about TurboTax for Linux
I can only think of three must have programs that Linux is lacking.
Quicken, TurboTax/TaxCut, and if you have a small business QuickBooks.
Linux has Email, web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, and digital pictures covered.
One place that you have issues is with codecs thanks to software patents but that can be fixed.
Quicken and a Tax program are the two killers for a lot of people.
Yea except he himself thought that it was no big deal to start with and harmless... So when does he start sticking those cocktail stick in his own eyes?
They probably have a few desktops that run Windows still. So maybe some copies of Office and some copies of McAffee that didn't have all the paperwork for them.
Should just go and show that you should have gone all FOSS.
For super simple.
Freenas.org offers will do the trick.
Want to get fancy? Openfiler.com will do anything you could want.
For hardware. Well if you have a spare case with a good power supply sitting around you could go with this. http://www.clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?itemno=A4842001
It will be low power and is pretty cheap. Just buy some DDR-2 ram and what hard drives you want and your good to go.
This board does have two slots free so you do have some expansion options for more drives or even a raid if you want.
If you don't want to build a system then you could get the $199 Walmart Linux PC which uses this motherboard. If you are going to put a lot of drives on it I would still upgrade the power supply.
You could also pick this up at geeks.com http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=TS-X2002RS
Or if you want just use what any old PC you have.
It all depends on what you want to do. There are some nice small NAS systems that you can just plug in as well.
Actually it seems that they did use paper ballots and the problems are from human error... Interesting to say the least.
Tesla was a brilliant nut. Wireless transmission of power was EXTREMLY inefficient. In other words just like his Tesla turbine it has limited applications and really isn't better than what our scientists can do now. No magic, no strange conspiracies just reality. Not as much fun but it is the truth.
I do agree.
I do think that electronic machines need some type of auditing system. The one I hear about most is a paper tape that is stored internally in the machine. That I see as being close to useless in preventing intentional fraud. Frankly I was thinking out loud about how hard it would to make a perfect system free of human error. I think that is impossible.
My suggestion would be a printed paper ballot that encoded the vote as a bar code as well as human readable. Frankly I don't think there was any fraud in NH. Maybe some errors but I doubt fraud. To me the prevention of errors seems like a bigger issue than fraud.
"2. Hand count the ballots in front of public overseers and representatives for individual candidates/parties. Heck, even put it on public access TV."
People make mistakes. Counting millions of little pieces of paper by hand will not be perfect it never has. In fact that was the problem in 2000!
You also would have to have TEAMS of people counting each set of votes. Which is what we had in 2000.
And how do you know that the ballot boxes where not stuffed? Or the ballots changed?
Like that has never happened.
Your "solution" isn't perfect. I don't know if we can have a perfect system and have a true secret ballot.
I think that recording the ballots electronically and printing that ballot with barcodes and text is probably going to be as good as it gets.
If there is a problem then you can scan the ballots. If there is a miss match then you need to see what the problem is.
If you still don't trust the scan then you read each ballot and scan them see if they match and if they don't that is the problem.
Not perfect but it does have multiple checks
Even with that system I expect errors will happen... because they always do.
I don't know I just had a C-64. The problem with offloading processing to the 1541's drive is that the bloody thing was slower a snail. Of course many hackers made some cool fast loaders that really helped a lot. :)
I remember when I first started working on PC. It made me nuts that I could format a floppy on my C-64 and then do other things while it formated. On a PC that cost 20x as much as my poor C64 when you formated a floppy that was all that you could do!
If you count formating a floppy as a task then the C64 could multi-task much better than MS-DOS
people keep saying that but what is to keep the machine from printing the wrong data on the paper trail?
I guess you could have the booth print the ballot and then the voter check the ballot and then put the ballot in a box...
Except that someone might forget to put the ballot in the box. Or when they do a recount the ballot might be miss read. I guess you could use OCR but that isn't perfect.
Or you could print a barcode that would reflect the ballot that is printed... Unless they hacked that so it didn't match.
But the original PC keyboard was terrible. Not the AT but the PC keyboard. The layout was rotten. Another terrible pc keyboard was the KayPro 16 luggable. Same bad layout but a lot worse feel.
It is only used for power lines. It was tried for house wiring but was dropped because of fire danger.
ummm... So the point is that a specialized connection will always be less popular than a more general purpose connection...
The 1200XL came out after the C64 by a fair amount. It also did cost more. As to which had better graphics? That was up for debate. The C64 had better sound and the Atari had a much better floppy. The basic on the Atari was a good bit different than every other basic and many people felt the Basic on the 64 was better. Atari basic did support graphics and sound while the Commodore basic made you do peeks and pokes.
I worked at a store that sold Ataris after I got my C64. We never got a 1200.
Both good machines.
"There should be a distributed volunteer campaign for each user to read a page of the budget and look for outrageous tidbits."
Yep but they should start by looking for their local pork. And then tell your congressperson that you don't want it.
I already tried that with mine over the USS Forrestal (CV-59). On a good note it did get retired even over the objections of my Democratic Senator.
If energy is made from renewable resources then plastic can be made from air and water. Or as I pointed out coal, or as you pointed out from biomass. it is hard to make electronic grade copper from recycled material. Most if not all recycled copper is used for plumbing and other none electrical uses. And there are more and more uses for copper all the time. Everything from electrical motors in EV and Fuel Cell cars to transformers to traces on printed circuit boards. Aluminum isn't as good of a conductor for power transmission as copper. The reason that it is being used for power lines is that it is a lot cheaper. Not just pound for pound but you need a lot fewer power poles since it is a lot stronger and lighter than copper.
Well part of it is Firewire isn't a replacement for USB. I haven't seen a Firewire keyboard, mouse, printer, or joystick. Yes it is mediocre all the way around but it works well for some devices that Firewire doesn't work at all for. And works well just okay for many devices that Firewire works well for. Firewire will always be an port you have to get in addition to USB. so it will alway be less popular. But I would agree with you that it isn't dead.
Actually I was thinking that it could make geothermal a lot more practical. Most geothermal steam is pretty low in temperature so this could really help with geothermal power systems.
Not really. If the cost of oil gets high enough it will become cost effective to use other hydrocarbons for plastic production. Coal can be used to make anything oil is used to make. Plus it takes a good amount of energy to mine, transport, and smelt copper. So the cost of copper will most likely go even higher based on the cost of oil.
It is extremely unlikely that plastic will ever be more expensive than copper if for no other reason than there is a lot more Hydrogen and Carbon on the earth than copper.
1 They say that they can do 100mbits with green light now and hope to do 1Gbits with red light soon... I thought that the higher the frequency the higher the bandwidth?
As to the benefits over Cat5 I can see a few.
One is cost. Copper is getting more and more expensive plastic is cheap. Not only that but it should be lighter to ship and easier to install since it is smaller than CAT5.
Then you have safety. You don't have to worry about shorts and other issues with fiber. Not a huge problem but I can see where some people would like it.
And you have the lack of EM from fiber. No not for safety reasons but for interference with other devices. I have never seen a problem with it but anytime you have a signal running on a wire you have the potental for EM.
What do you know... Oh wait :)
Actually I was wondering if it would work better in the Great Lakes. Freshwater so less problem with rust, no really big storms, colder water than a lot of ports on the east cost.
The thing is that there is a LOT of cheap land around their as well. Just wondering and figured you might know.
I think data center wear houses seem like a better solution. Just use the container data centers and if you have to move the data center load them on trucks and move them.
Actually not that bad of an idea. There is a huge amount of code written in COBOL and running on mainframes around the world. Most of this code is at the heart of some of the biggest companies on the planet. People with mainframe skills are getting older and retiring and someone has to keep the stuff running. Maybe not the most important language or skill to learn but it isn't as funny as you think.