The Inquirer is more of a rumor site than a news site. They have a pretty good track record for their rumors, but they don't have people on record backing this one up.
What NVidia eventually does may not bear much resemblance to the story.
Fifth, print all electronic votes on a government issued printer roll for verification. Get the treasury to design it for anti-counterfeiting.
The problem with this is that often you know in what order people voted on the machine. If you also know what the votes were, in order, or have any way of finding out, you can determine who voted for whom.
The only feasible paper method is to print out a card or sheet, have the voter check it, and then deposit it somewhere. Personally I like the idea of having the casting machine do the first count and then scanning or going through by hand with the paper later if needed or as an audit rather than the marking/OCR solution the article proposes.
Right, because no one EVER goes outside the lines, or makes a stray mark, or doesn't erase something they should have.
Electronic machines can prevent "overvotes" and warn the voter against "undervotes." Yes, they have issues, but they have benefits too. I run a precinct on election day and our machines are very easy to use (easier than an ATM for the voter). The lack of an auditable paper trail is my only concern about these particular machines.
Right. Like those effective and accurate butterfly ballots and ballots with hanging/dimpled/torn chads that made the 2000 election in Florida beyond question of who won?
Yeah, voters are going to react really, really well to someone coming into the polling place, playing with the machine for 10 minutes, counting votes before and after and saying "Don't worry, I'll erase all this when I'm done.'
As a general comment on these "the sky is falling articles," it was very easy to rig the vote on a lot of the older technology as well.
The only thing they stopped us from playing (early 80's) was "chicken." One person would sit on another person's shoulders. Your opposing team would do the same. Then, crash together and try to throw the other person on top to the ground (grass). I think there were some minor bruises and twisted wrists from the few days we were allowed to do this.
The original X-prize was to encourage development in an area without much activity and where it was small companies already doing the work. I'm sure Celera Genomics could win this prize more easily than anyone. What do they need with $10M? There are billions being suck into genomics research, why would anyone think another $10M is going to accomplish anything other than publicity?
That doesn't work. The decay of a particle is an exponential fall-off with a half life. The most probable time for a decay to happen is actually just after production.
A meson gun might be a beam of pions (pions are one type of meson and the most stable). At the energies provided by the Tevatron, you need several meters of steel to filter out a reasonable number of these pions. They cause interactions that release other (lower energy) pions and you get a cascade effect. Yeah, you wouldn't want to be hit by an intense pion beam.
Of course, why bother with pions? A beam of protons would have the same effect (that's how you produce a beam of mesons).
I'll skip commenting on anything after "pass through the hull.":-)
This is a really cool measurement. But the summary is a little sensationalist. First, the B-sub-s is not the only particle that oscillates between matter and anti-matter. Kaons have been known to do this for decades and regular B mesons have been observed to do this for 20 years or so. In fact we've known for a long time that B-sub-s mesons oscillated. What we didn't know is how fast. We knew "really fast" but not a number.
In fact, the cool thing is that a B-sub-s, statistically, will oscillate many times between particle and anti-particle before it ultimately decays. Nothing else in this class of particles will do that. For instance, most B mesons will not change flavor before decaying.
Um, I pay $5 for HD service and another $5 for the DVR. But even if I'm paying $10/month for the DVR, I *don't* have to pay for the hardware up front and if something better comes along in a couple of years, I can jump ship. Plus, another poster stated just renting the cable card may cost $5-10 from your cable provider.
Let's look at this over 5 years:
Comcast cost = 5*12*$10 or $600.
TiVo cost: $800 + 5*12*$5 (cable card) + 5*12*$13 (TiVo service) or $800 + $300 + $780 or $1880
It seems to me that TiVo is three times more expensive over the reasonable life of the box. That may be worth it to some, but not to me.
This is exactly right. There is nothing to be concerned about here.
I would say the "The Lifeboat Foundation's" chances of building a self sustaining space colony by 2020 are about a quadrillion times greater than the chance of a man-made mini-black hole eating us all.
I think I'd regret responding to the complete misunderstanding of forces and neutrinos in the body of your post. That would take pages.
Let me just respond to your title. That is completely wrong as well. Now, I think the alternative gravity guys are probably wrong and at this point I think they are stretching their theories to their limits. Dark matter is the "easiest" explanation. But, what they are doing is science. They are coming up with an alternate theory that makes predictions and testing them. The are countering circumstantial evidence for DM with another theory. They are not picking just one small thing, saying "Well that can't be true because of [insert some non-science babble like you just posted] so clearly God created everything." in contradiction to vast bodies of scientific evidence. And the alternative gravity people are publishing in peer-reviewed journals.
ID can't say any of those things. While the motivations may be similar (not wanting to give up on old ways of thinking about things) the methodology is completely different.
Well, I'm not a big fan of this clause and don't plan to use GPLv3 for my web app, but there is a difference in your two cases.
In the phpBB2 case you are running the code explicitly for the user to provide input from his output. In the GIMP case, you are just distributing output from the program from your own inputs.
If you came along and said "I have a service where for $20 (or free) I'll take your photograph and pass it though my handy, closed-source filter that I added onto the Gimp and then give you the output" THAT would be analogous to the phpBB2 case.
But you have a good point. The service industry is information in, information out, and if some of that information happens to pass through internally modifified Free Software tools, does that mean you have to open up all those tools?
Look at how screwed up our country gets when the president and the congress are all of the same party (now for instance) and think again. Your suggestion would make that much more likely. That's a disaster in a two party system and the separation of powers and election of individuals in the constitution virtually guarantees a two party system. America needs divided government to put the brakes on government power. It serves the same purpose as multi-party government in parlimentary systems.
The thing that should be kept fairly reliable is the recording of data. With that stage, it is important to do the work quickly and reliably. And of course if the software does crash, it is important to pick up and keep going after that.
It's not quite that simple anymore. Ten years or so ago, you were right. These detectors have always produced a lot more data than could be saved on magnetic tape or disc, so there is a process called triggering or filtering in which the data flow was reduced. 10-20 years ago this was (typically) done in two or three steps all by looking at electronic signals and using some very fast but robust electronics.
These days, the data flows are so high and the events being looked for are so specialized that the later parts of this filtering process actually use significant portions of the offline software. The algorithms are sometimes tuned to be faster but less efficient in finding all the interactions, but the basic code is the same and your higher level filters are just running reconstruction jobs. In fact, I would not be surprised if the upgrades (in 2015, say) to these big experiments (CMS & ATLAS) use computers at the lowest level of the triggering.
If you have a crash halfway through the data file, you just lost half the events unless you try to figure out where the crash was, then go to n+1 events and resume. So it is no longer possible just to worry about the software later.
GnuCash is not really a GNOME app as far as I know. It's built with GTK. It does store some info in.gconf (that gets lost occassionally). Does that make it a GNOME app? It's not part of the GNOME project, of that I am pretty sure.
What about if I watch but don't buy anything? Does my "contract" with ABC allow that? Am I allowed to change the channel? Am I allowed to get up and get a beer while the commercials are on? Do I have to watch the commercials after the last scene too? Where do my rights begin and end in your world? I own or rent the equipment and someone else is trying to control it. Where do their rights begin and end?
Speaking of Lost, I actually watched all the commercials of one episode (or slowly fast forwarded through them instead of using 30-second skip) in order to find the fake Hanso corporation commercial I'd heard would be there.
Strangely, that commercial was in the last break.:-)
It's a major advantage, but not one that is fundamentally different from a VCR (that thing that blinks 12:00 next to your TV).
The two fundamentally different things about a DVR:
1) You can watch a show that is still recording. If I get home at 6:30, I can watch the news that started at 6:00 and not wait until 7:00 to rewind the VCR and watch then
2) You can watch things in whatever order you want, not watch the last thing on the tape first so that you can rewind and re-claim that space.
I suppose the program guide can be replicated by VCR+ or something like that, but I never had something to use it.
Then there are issues like quality, huge amounts or storage, etc. but that's not fundamentally different.
Slashdot Mirror
The Inquirer is more of a rumor site than a news site. They have a pretty good track record for their rumors, but they don't have people on record backing this one up.
What NVidia eventually does may not bear much resemblance to the story.
In my precinct, you fill out an application for a ballot. When you finally vote, that is put, in order, into what you might call a notebook.
Who votes is public record. How they vote is not. Not that this has much to do with the current discussion.
Fifth, print all electronic votes on a government issued printer roll for verification. Get the treasury to design it for anti-counterfeiting.
The problem with this is that often you know in what order people voted on the machine. If you also know what the votes were, in order, or have any way of finding out, you can determine who voted for whom.
The only feasible paper method is to print out a card or sheet, have the voter check it, and then deposit it somewhere. Personally I like the idea of having the casting machine do the first count and then scanning or going through by hand with the paper later if needed or as an audit rather than the marking/OCR solution the article proposes.
Right, because no one EVER goes outside the lines, or makes a stray mark, or doesn't erase something they should have.
Electronic machines can prevent "overvotes" and warn the voter against "undervotes." Yes, they have issues, but they have benefits too. I run a precinct on election day and our machines are very easy to use (easier than an ATM for the voter). The lack of an auditable paper trail is my only concern about these particular machines.
Right. Like those effective and accurate butterfly ballots and ballots with hanging/dimpled/torn chads that made the 2000 election in Florida beyond question of who won?
Exactly.
Yeah, voters are going to react really, really well to someone coming into the polling place, playing with the machine for 10 minutes, counting votes before and after and saying "Don't worry, I'll erase all this when I'm done.'
As a general comment on these "the sky is falling articles," it was very easy to rig the vote on a lot of the older technology as well.
The only thing they stopped us from playing (early 80's) was "chicken." One person would sit on another person's shoulders. Your opposing team would do the same. Then, crash together and try to throw the other person on top to the ground (grass). I think there were some minor bruises and twisted wrists from the few days we were allowed to do this.
The original X-prize was to encourage development in an area without much activity and where it was small companies already doing the work. I'm sure Celera Genomics could win this prize more easily than anyone. What do they need with $10M? There are billions being suck into genomics research, why would anyone think another $10M is going to accomplish anything other than publicity?
Or the fact that I've been reaching in my pocket to see what time it is for almost 10 years now. I gave up wearing a watch when I first got a pager.
That doesn't work. The decay of a particle is an exponential fall-off with a half life. The most probable time for a decay to happen is actually just after production.
In order to have any chance of success, this project needs several billion dollars of non-U.S. funding. And that ain't coming to an ALC.
Well....
:-)
A meson gun might be a beam of pions (pions are one type of meson and the most stable). At the energies provided by the Tevatron, you need several meters of steel to filter out a reasonable number of these pions. They cause interactions that release other (lower energy) pions and you get a cascade effect. Yeah, you wouldn't want to be hit by an intense pion beam.
Of course, why bother with pions? A beam of protons would have the same effect (that's how you produce a beam of mesons).
I'll skip commenting on anything after "pass through the hull."
Disclaimer: I am a particle physicist.
This is a really cool measurement. But the summary is a little sensationalist. First, the B-sub-s is not the only particle that oscillates between matter and anti-matter. Kaons have been known to do this for decades and regular B mesons have been observed to do this for 20 years or so. In fact we've known for a long time that B-sub-s mesons oscillated. What we didn't know is how fast. We knew "really fast" but not a number.
In fact, the cool thing is that a B-sub-s, statistically, will oscillate many times between particle and anti-particle before it ultimately decays. Nothing else in this class of particles will do that. For instance, most B mesons will not change flavor before decaying.
But, this is a very interesting result.
Um, I pay $5 for HD service and another $5 for the DVR. But even if I'm paying $10/month for the DVR, I *don't* have to pay for the hardware up front and if something better comes along in a couple of years, I can jump ship. Plus, another poster stated just renting the cable card may cost $5-10 from your cable provider.
Let's look at this over 5 years:
Comcast cost = 5*12*$10 or $600.
TiVo cost: $800 + 5*12*$5 (cable card) + 5*12*$13 (TiVo service) or $800 + $300 + $780 or $1880
It seems to me that TiVo is three times more expensive over the reasonable life of the box. That may be worth it to some, but not to me.
This is exactly right. There is nothing to be concerned about here.
I would say the "The Lifeboat Foundation's" chances of building a self sustaining space colony by 2020 are about a quadrillion times greater than the chance of a man-made mini-black hole eating us all.
I think I'd regret responding to the complete misunderstanding of forces and neutrinos in the body of your post. That would take pages.
Let me just respond to your title. That is completely wrong as well. Now, I think the alternative gravity guys are probably wrong and at this point I think they are stretching their theories to their limits. Dark matter is the "easiest" explanation. But, what they are doing is science. They are coming up with an alternate theory that makes predictions and testing them. The are countering circumstantial evidence for DM with another theory. They are not picking just one small thing, saying "Well that can't be true because of [insert some non-science babble like you just posted] so clearly God created everything." in contradiction to vast bodies of scientific evidence. And the alternative gravity people are publishing in peer-reviewed journals.
ID can't say any of those things. While the motivations may be similar (not wanting to give up on old ways of thinking about things) the methodology is completely different.
MJ? Michael Jordon? What did he do (or not do)?
Well, I'm not a big fan of this clause and don't plan to use GPLv3 for my web app, but there is a difference in your two cases.
In the phpBB2 case you are running the code explicitly for the user to provide input from his output. In the GIMP case, you are just distributing output from the program from your own inputs.
If you came along and said "I have a service where for $20 (or free) I'll take your photograph and pass it though my handy, closed-source filter that I added onto the Gimp and then give you the output" THAT would be analogous to the phpBB2 case.
But you have a good point. The service industry is information in, information out, and if some of that information happens to pass through internally modifified Free Software tools, does that mean you have to open up all those tools?
Look at how screwed up our country gets when the president and the congress are all of the same party (now for instance) and think again. Your suggestion would make that much more likely. That's a disaster in a two party system and the separation of powers and election of individuals in the constitution virtually guarantees a two party system. America needs divided government to put the brakes on government power. It serves the same purpose as multi-party government in parlimentary systems.
It's not quite that simple anymore. Ten years or so ago, you were right. These detectors have always produced a lot more data than could be saved on magnetic tape or disc, so there is a process called triggering or filtering in which the data flow was reduced. 10-20 years ago this was (typically) done in two or three steps all by looking at electronic signals and using some very fast but robust electronics.
These days, the data flows are so high and the events being looked for are so specialized that the later parts of this filtering process actually use significant portions of the offline software. The algorithms are sometimes tuned to be faster but less efficient in finding all the interactions, but the basic code is the same and your higher level filters are just running reconstruction jobs. In fact, I would not be surprised if the upgrades (in 2015, say) to these big experiments (CMS & ATLAS) use computers at the lowest level of the triggering.
If you have a crash halfway through the data file, you just lost half the events unless you try to figure out where the crash was, then go to n+1 events and resume. So it is no longer possible just to worry about the software later.
GnuCash is not really a GNOME app as far as I know. It's built with GTK. It does store some info in .gconf (that gets lost occassionally). Does that make it a GNOME app? It's not part of the GNOME project, of that I am pretty sure.
What about if I watch but don't buy anything? Does my "contract" with ABC allow that? Am I allowed to change the channel? Am I allowed to get up and get a beer while the commercials are on? Do I have to watch the commercials after the last scene too? Where do my rights begin and end in your world? I own or rent the equipment and someone else is trying to control it. Where do their rights begin and end?
Speaking of Lost, I actually watched all the commercials of one episode (or slowly fast forwarded through them instead of using 30-second skip) in order to find the fake Hanso corporation commercial I'd heard would be there.
:-)
Strangely, that commercial was in the last break.
It's a major advantage, but not one that is fundamentally different from a VCR (that thing that blinks 12:00 next to your TV).
The two fundamentally different things about a DVR:
1) You can watch a show that is still recording. If I get home at 6:30, I can watch the news that started at 6:00 and not wait until 7:00 to rewind the VCR and watch then
2) You can watch things in whatever order you want, not watch the last thing on the tape first so that you can rewind and re-claim that space.
I suppose the program guide can be replicated by VCR+ or something like that, but I never had something to use it.
Then there are issues like quality, huge amounts or storage, etc. but that's not fundamentally different.