Sure it does. In a typical local election in Norway, a largish county essentially will have to tabulate votes for 500-600 candidates (there are 63000 candidates for the next local elections in Norway, or about 1.4% of the population), which include fractional votes (transferred from other lists, as you can vote for a party, but still "tack on" your favorite candidates from other parties to give them a fraction of your vote). Despite the complexities of that voting system (it's a proportional system with lots of little wrinkles like the partial transfer mentioned), the results rarely cause conflicts or recounts and the results are generally complete or close enough within a day. Since vote counting is a trivially parallelisable problem, I simply don't see the problem.
Electronic voting is a "solution" that's only on the table due to massive lobbying from companies seeking to cash in on it that's managed to coopt the debate over how to fix a flawed paper system that would've been trivially fixable just by altering the ballots used.
It is inefficient, but it doesn't need to be efficient, it needs to be accurate and efficient enough to be countable in a reasonable amount of time. And while an individual human is inaccurate, there is a paper trail that allowed another human or more to check the first humans work, which frequently or always does happen in most countries.
Hanging chads is a bullshit argument - I've seen nobody argue that it isn't acceptable to use a voting machine that produces a printed voting card that's guaranteed to be valid.
But for that matter, that's overcomplicating it. In Norway, voting is handled by pre-printed lists of candidates for each party (we have proportional voting, so in county elections each list may have up to 60 or so names on it depending on the size of the local council, in parliament elections up to about 20 depending on region), and while people may alter the lists (see below) the simplest way to vote that most people use is to simply pick one of the lists and drop it in an envelope that is then dropped in the ballot box.
A rough count is then done simply by counting the number of lists from each party. It is simple, and it is extremely trivial to count and recount, and since any party can provide observers or people to participate in the counts there is accountability: Anyone participating in the count is under constant scrutiny and doing the count out in the open where a number of people can see any attempt at cheating.
This system works for a country where typically at least around 12-20 parties raise lists for any election, depending on region and whether it's a local election or for parliament. For the US where you in most circuits have the choice between 2-3 candidates it would be trivial, and you could brightly color the list to make the count a total no-brainer. Handle other ballot issues separately.
There is some complication in counting the number of votes for candidates for a party, as the order of which candidates are assigned to the seats won by each party is determined by the number of votes for that person. By default that is the same number of votes as number of lists of the party, but the number can be increased or decreased by certain allowed modifications of the list. Depending on whether it's a local, regional or parliamentary election, this can include for example adding names of people from other lists, altering the order or striking people of your list.
Despite that it rarely takes more than a day to finalize the count and there are rarely conflicts over the results.
Don't even think about arguing about how this only works for simple elections. In a local election for a county with 50 councillors and 12 parties raising lists, that means probably tabulating votes and alterations for at least 600 people (often somewhat more, as you also elect a number of people as stand in's in case of sickness or other valid leave), which includes fractional votes (if you add someone from another list to the list you vote for, a proportional fraction of your vote is transferred to the list of the candidate you add)
Didn't you even bother to read the sentence you quoted yourself. Fortify was used to find areas to investigate manually. These tools do have many shortcomings, but they do also find many legitimate problems. Using them to find starting points for manual investigations you might otherwise overlook is exactly the right way to use them. Believing them to produce a laundry list of actual problems is, as you pointed out, not.
Every digital camera I've owned have had a button to turn the display off. So unless you know for a fact that she didn't, you have no basis for claiming she was annoying the hell out of those behind her.
Actually, all that needs to happen for people to start scrambling is for IANA and RIPE to start to massively restrict allocations of new IPv4 addresses.
An option would be to refuse to hand out IPv4 addresses to ISPs for use for ADSL customers for more than say 20% of their need, for example. Since ISP's provide a huge chunk of the consumer routers used today, you'd quickly see IPv6 routers rolled out.
All it takes is will. Whether anyone has the balls to try to push something like that through, though, is another matter.
In poor countries, having children grow to adulthood is an insurance for your old age.
Industrialized countries all used to have similarly have high birthrates until life expectancy started increasing as better hygiene and medicine made an impact together with improved food availability, and particularly as infant mortality dropped.
However, birth rates in most sub-Saharan countries have now finally started falling, coinciding with growing urbanization, and steadily dropping infant mortality. In fact, in some countries the birth rate have dropped by 20-30 percent over the last couple of decades.
The particularly high birth rates over the last decades was similar to those found in Europe a century ago, just as the effects of reducing infant mortality was creating a huge gap because people were still reproducing according to the old patterns. Further reductions in infant mortality combined with education and improved availability of contraceptives was what closed that gap and brought European birthrates down over the following decades.
You can't ready that from a sample that include only high school students. The study does not say that people with high iq are less likely to have children, but that high school students with high iq are less likely to have had sex yet.
One likely cause is simply that those with higher iq often spending their time on activities that does not make them popular with teenage girls looking for fun.
Not really - you can always debt finance this, and both Google and AT&T would obviously have no problem finding banks or funds willing to help finance something like this with a lot more cash than they have in the bank, either as a plain loan or an investment or a mix - obviously the higher the price gets, the more likely it will be any bank that gets involved will insist on a standard loan agreement rather than risk they'd manage to make it back on an investment.
Re-read the article. $34K is the planned retail price for the car in Norway including the battery, not the price of the battery alone. The other price is excluding the battery which you will then lease instead.
And for Europe the price isn't bad, particularly as many countries have lower taxes for electric cars. Most people commute short distances where speed is limited anyway (I'd challenge anyone to try to get anywhere near top speed with this car in London during rush hour - average speed is between 10 and 15 mph), and so the limitations of this car means very little to most people. Since gas is more expensive here too, it can be economical at quite a higher price point than in the US.
You seem to imply there are 100-200 in fees on top of leasing the battery. The 100-200 is for leasing the battery - there are no other fees.
As for cost - a time will come when US gas costs get to where most of the rest of the industrialized world is know, and then it'll seem cheap to you too.
The "car sharing franchise" is a completely separate business. As far as I gathered they were talking about partnering with already existing car share businesses.
Until a few months ago, clearly China, since I didn't there have to again have my passport scanned, and my picture taken while some annoying officer of some agency insists on helping thus slowing everything down.
At least now they've scrapped those stupid booths.
I have to agree. I went to Beijing earlier this year. The visa was trivial to get, and immigration at Beijing International airport was a lot smoother to get through than what it usually is when I go to the US. In the US there's always lots of questions, finger printing, having my picture taken etc. In Beijing they just looked briefly at my passport and waved me through.
That, and their landing card doesn't have the list of ridiculous questions on it (sure, if I had committed genocide recently, I most certainly would tick the "yes" box...), though maybe that's a minus - the US visa vaiwer forms does have a certain comic value.
Unfortunately for the US, most people who care know history more than 20 years back, and don't only look at who the US has bombed but also all the other ways various US governments have done their best to interfere. There are literally hundreds of millions of people around the world that suffers or has suffered due to various US governments interference through decades of supplying weapons to dictators, assisting in coups, wars etc., and so it's hardly surprising that a few of them have gone over the edge and opted for extreme measures to hit back.
You said it yourself - if you poke people, they will react.
Welcome to the day when your spouse monitors your every move, organized crime monitors people they want to hit, your employer checks if you're going to interviews at a competitor or does anything else they object to, etc.
The problem is we ALL do things that others may object to, or that may be embarrassing in some situations, but that isn't wrong.
Do you want your mother to know about everything you do? Even if you're not doing anything wrong? I certainly would not want to live to the moral codes of an arbitrary number of people around me.
To people living in conservative societies (enough of them in the US...) or coming from conservative families this would be particularly stifling on their freedoms and abilities to make choices they want to make, but who would cause severe problems with their surroundings.
You claim you have "no expectation of privacy" when driving on a public road, but we all know that is bullshit. If a camera crew followed you around and streamed everything you did live onto the net for example, you would change behavior - as would most of us (and don't try to claim otherwise - you'd just make yourself a liar).
The way you act normally is based on an assumption on a certain level of anonymity that give you a level of privacy: Most of what you do while driving on a public road IS indeed for most purposes private - unless you live in a very tiny town, you will rarely be spotted by someone you know, and will rarely be filmed. While some of that anonymity can be stripped away by interviewing lots of people and showing your picture or describing your car, it takes a lot of effort, and thus presents a barrier to invading your privacy.
The problem with this effort isn't necessarily the number plate scanning. If everyone knows police cars will do this, then they'll know to expect less privacy when they are present. The problem is that there are no clear measures in place to limit how long numbers that the police have no interest in now get stored. The longer they are stored, the greater the chance they'll be misused or that access will get compromised.
And if you're not happy about what ACLU does, then become a member and fight for them to change focus, or start your own organization, and stop whining because they don't agree with you about where to put in their efforts.
You really are confused about what we're discussing here. Sure, every major company is looking at China... as a source of cheap labour... in fact the cheapest in the world, when you take into account the infrastructure that the Chinese government has set up. But this doesn't mean that Chinese people are affluent. It doesn't mean they can buy computers. It doesn't mean they have a good life. It doesn't mean anything other than that they're incredibly exploited. So yah, lots of companies are looking at China. So?
While I have no reason to doubt a lot of what you were writing, and agree with quite a bit of it, I do think you exaggerate a bit.
For starters, China is already the worlds largest cellphone market for example. Granted, this is in part because they are playing catch up, and in part because they have a larger population. It still means millions and millions of cellphones are sold there every year. So while there are lots of poor people, there's also a large and rapidly growing middle class.
China is also a very rapidly growing market for computers, with millions being sold a year. So while the computer penetration is low, it is growing.
While a lot of western companies look to China for cheap labor, for the above reasons a lot of them are also looking to China as one of the largest untapped markets for their products. In fact, the large PC makers have been struggling to get into the Chinese market for years with little success, which is one of the reasons Lenovo has managed to get to the size it has thanks to understanding how the local economy works.
A person may or may not have something to hide from the current government, but our insistence on privacy isn't merely about today, but about tomorrow, next year, next decade.
History is full of oppressive regimes that turned against it's population years after being heralded as liberators or elected. Why should we not fear what the government might consider a crime tomorrow, or next year?
There's been at least one case where someone set up a site offering free porn to anyone, all you'd need to do was fill in a CAPTCHA... It was used to create bogus accounts at one of the big webmail providers.
The problem is that the people who need to ignore them are the people who buy from them because they fall for the messages, not people who think "it's a spam, delete". If the rest of us ignore spam, that just makes it more profitable, as they won't have to deal with us.
That is besides the point. What you are formulating is a response to the classical "but if we don't have free will, I might just as well commit a crime, because it's not up to me anyway". The answer is "of course you can, but then you'll have to face the consequences". Whether you have free will or not, you'll face the consequences regardless, and so, yes, you should live your life as if you have free will and hope that you either have or "luck out".
However, the issue here is that regardless whether or not you do possess some form of "free will" that let you take actions that are not totally deterministic, many decisions that people make in their daily lives are very clearly a product of genetics and external events - not absolutely, but when looking at groups of people -, and so it is unfair or unrealistic to ascribe total responsibility for someones behavior to themselves only.
For example, it is well documented that people who were abused as children are more likely to abuse their own children. That does not mean that any specific individual that was abused can not overcome that and avoid abusing their own children as adults, but it also does mean that ascribing the full responsibility for that act on the individual is unfair and pointless, as the reality is that at least a subset of those people get affected by their experience in such as way that they make choices they would be less likely to make otherwise.
Unfair, because that person is unlikely to have sat down one day, uninfluenced by his/her upbringing, and have decided to abuse kids.
Unrealistic, because it means that punishment both as a general deterrent to others, and as a deterrent to re-offending, in many cases has no basis in reality.
To take this example to it's conclusion, that does not mean that someone who commits a crime shouldn't be made to take responsibility, and be punished, but that for the sake of society as much as or more than the individual who commits a crime, it is important to realize that punishment alone is not effective deterrent (as proven by reoffending rates).
A recognition of the level of control over genes and upbringing asserts over us should logically lead us to a far stronger focus on attempting to find ways to affect the physiological, psychological and environmental factors that drive various behavior, whether positive or negative, rather than assign all responsibility for an act solely on the individual and assume that as a group those individuals are all (or even most) able to change if we just give them enough incentive to change.
Another example is how much hormones (or synthetic drugs) affect our actions. Testosterone is a major factor in driving violence, for example. It is unrealistic then to say that people "freely choose" whether or not to beat eachother up. They "freely choose" within the parameters set by their genes, their brain chemistry, their upbringing and a vast number of other factors beyond the control of their conscious self. Depending on situation, that may give them wide latitude to make the right choice, or no choice at all.
Taking such ideas one step further and making service a requirement drives it pretty close to fascism. The entire concept of putting the state before the individual, is a cornerstone of fascist thinking.
As is limiting power to a subset of society based on the worth they have to the state.
It's an idea that is very closely linked to militaristic and authoritarian ideologies.
I haven't read enough of Heinlein (I know, a sin; I read lots of his short stories as a kid, but haven't read many of his novels) to make any assertions of whether that is the case in this case, but I can certainly see why Starship Troopers in particular would make someone consider Heinlein militaristic.
(Incidentally, since you mentioned the differences between the book and the movie, I love the movie, but I realize it has little to do with the book - the two should really be treated as separate stories - but it's an interesting example of what you can achieve by shifting the tone and imagery. To me the most interesting, and a bit scary, thing with the movie is how blatant they managed to make the fascist/nazi imagery, complete with nazi style propaganda and uniforms while still getting viewers to cheer for the human military)
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Electronic voting is a "solution" that's only on the table due to massive lobbying from companies seeking to cash in on it that's managed to coopt the debate over how to fix a flawed paper system that would've been trivially fixable just by altering the ballots used.
Hanging chads is a bullshit argument - I've seen nobody argue that it isn't acceptable to use a voting machine that produces a printed voting card that's guaranteed to be valid.
But for that matter, that's overcomplicating it. In Norway, voting is handled by pre-printed lists of candidates for each party (we have proportional voting, so in county elections each list may have up to 60 or so names on it depending on the size of the local council, in parliament elections up to about 20 depending on region), and while people may alter the lists (see below) the simplest way to vote that most people use is to simply pick one of the lists and drop it in an envelope that is then dropped in the ballot box.
A rough count is then done simply by counting the number of lists from each party. It is simple, and it is extremely trivial to count and recount, and since any party can provide observers or people to participate in the counts there is accountability: Anyone participating in the count is under constant scrutiny and doing the count out in the open where a number of people can see any attempt at cheating.
This system works for a country where typically at least around 12-20 parties raise lists for any election, depending on region and whether it's a local election or for parliament. For the US where you in most circuits have the choice between 2-3 candidates it would be trivial, and you could brightly color the list to make the count a total no-brainer. Handle other ballot issues separately.
There is some complication in counting the number of votes for candidates for a party, as the order of which candidates are assigned to the seats won by each party is determined by the number of votes for that person. By default that is the same number of votes as number of lists of the party, but the number can be increased or decreased by certain allowed modifications of the list. Depending on whether it's a local, regional or parliamentary election, this can include for example adding names of people from other lists, altering the order or striking people of your list.
Despite that it rarely takes more than a day to finalize the count and there are rarely conflicts over the results.
Don't even think about arguing about how this only works for simple elections. In a local election for a county with 50 councillors and 12 parties raising lists, that means probably tabulating votes and alterations for at least 600 people (often somewhat more, as you also elect a number of people as stand in's in case of sickness or other valid leave), which includes fractional votes (if you add someone from another list to the list you vote for, a proportional fraction of your vote is transferred to the list of the candidate you add)
Didn't you even bother to read the sentence you quoted yourself. Fortify was used to find areas to investigate manually. These tools do have many shortcomings, but they do also find many legitimate problems. Using them to find starting points for manual investigations you might otherwise overlook is exactly the right way to use them. Believing them to produce a laundry list of actual problems is, as you pointed out, not.
And even if they were, why would that imply the government should give them computers for free?
Every digital camera I've owned have had a button to turn the display off. So unless you know for a fact that she didn't, you have no basis for claiming she was annoying the hell out of those behind her.
An option would be to refuse to hand out IPv4 addresses to ISPs for use for ADSL customers for more than say 20% of their need, for example. Since ISP's provide a huge chunk of the consumer routers used today, you'd quickly see IPv6 routers rolled out.
All it takes is will. Whether anyone has the balls to try to push something like that through, though, is another matter.
Industrialized countries all used to have similarly have high birthrates until life expectancy started increasing as better hygiene and medicine made an impact together with improved food availability, and particularly as infant mortality dropped.
However, birth rates in most sub-Saharan countries have now finally started falling, coinciding with growing urbanization, and steadily dropping infant mortality. In fact, in some countries the birth rate have dropped by 20-30 percent over the last couple of decades.
The particularly high birth rates over the last decades was similar to those found in Europe a century ago, just as the effects of reducing infant mortality was creating a huge gap because people were still reproducing according to the old patterns. Further reductions in infant mortality combined with education and improved availability of contraceptives was what closed that gap and brought European birthrates down over the following decades.
One likely cause is simply that those with higher iq often spending their time on activities that does not make them popular with teenage girls looking for fun.
Not really - you can always debt finance this, and both Google and AT&T would obviously have no problem finding banks or funds willing to help finance something like this with a lot more cash than they have in the bank, either as a plain loan or an investment or a mix - obviously the higher the price gets, the more likely it will be any bank that gets involved will insist on a standard loan agreement rather than risk they'd manage to make it back on an investment.
And for Europe the price isn't bad, particularly as many countries have lower taxes for electric cars. Most people commute short distances where speed is limited anyway (I'd challenge anyone to try to get anywhere near top speed with this car in London during rush hour - average speed is between 10 and 15 mph), and so the limitations of this car means very little to most people. Since gas is more expensive here too, it can be economical at quite a higher price point than in the US.
As for cost - a time will come when US gas costs get to where most of the rest of the industrialized world is know, and then it'll seem cheap to you too.
In the UK, which has close to the worlds highest fuel taxes, tax makes up around 70% of the gas price.
The "car sharing franchise" is a completely separate business. As far as I gathered they were talking about partnering with already existing car share businesses.
Until a few months ago, clearly China, since I didn't there have to again have my passport scanned, and my picture taken while some annoying officer of some agency insists on helping thus slowing everything down.
At least now they've scrapped those stupid booths.
That, and their landing card doesn't have the list of ridiculous questions on it (sure, if I had committed genocide recently, I most certainly would tick the "yes" box...), though maybe that's a minus - the US visa vaiwer forms does have a certain comic value.
You said it yourself - if you poke people, they will react.
The problem is we ALL do things that others may object to, or that may be embarrassing in some situations, but that isn't wrong.
Do you want your mother to know about everything you do? Even if you're not doing anything wrong? I certainly would not want to live to the moral codes of an arbitrary number of people around me.
To people living in conservative societies (enough of them in the US...) or coming from conservative families this would be particularly stifling on their freedoms and abilities to make choices they want to make, but who would cause severe problems with their surroundings.
The way you act normally is based on an assumption on a certain level of anonymity that give you a level of privacy: Most of what you do while driving on a public road IS indeed for most purposes private - unless you live in a very tiny town, you will rarely be spotted by someone you know, and will rarely be filmed. While some of that anonymity can be stripped away by interviewing lots of people and showing your picture or describing your car, it takes a lot of effort, and thus presents a barrier to invading your privacy.
The problem with this effort isn't necessarily the number plate scanning. If everyone knows police cars will do this, then they'll know to expect less privacy when they are present. The problem is that there are no clear measures in place to limit how long numbers that the police have no interest in now get stored. The longer they are stored, the greater the chance they'll be misused or that access will get compromised.
And if you're not happy about what ACLU does, then become a member and fight for them to change focus, or start your own organization, and stop whining because they don't agree with you about where to put in their efforts.
While I have no reason to doubt a lot of what you were writing, and agree with quite a bit of it, I do think you exaggerate a bit.
For starters, China is already the worlds largest cellphone market for example. Granted, this is in part because they are playing catch up, and in part because they have a larger population. It still means millions and millions of cellphones are sold there every year. So while there are lots of poor people, there's also a large and rapidly growing middle class.
China is also a very rapidly growing market for computers, with millions being sold a year. So while the computer penetration is low, it is growing.
While a lot of western companies look to China for cheap labor, for the above reasons a lot of them are also looking to China as one of the largest untapped markets for their products. In fact, the large PC makers have been struggling to get into the Chinese market for years with little success, which is one of the reasons Lenovo has managed to get to the size it has thanks to understanding how the local economy works.
History is full of oppressive regimes that turned against it's population years after being heralded as liberators or elected. Why should we not fear what the government might consider a crime tomorrow, or next year?
That would leave you only 30-40 years or so behind the state of the art of compression algorithms...
There's been at least one case where someone set up a site offering free porn to anyone, all you'd need to do was fill in a CAPTCHA... It was used to create bogus accounts at one of the big webmail providers.
The problem is that the people who need to ignore them are the people who buy from them because they fall for the messages, not people who think "it's a spam, delete". If the rest of us ignore spam, that just makes it more profitable, as they won't have to deal with us.
However, the issue here is that regardless whether or not you do possess some form of "free will" that let you take actions that are not totally deterministic, many decisions that people make in their daily lives are very clearly a product of genetics and external events - not absolutely, but when looking at groups of people -, and so it is unfair or unrealistic to ascribe total responsibility for someones behavior to themselves only.
For example, it is well documented that people who were abused as children are more likely to abuse their own children. That does not mean that any specific individual that was abused can not overcome that and avoid abusing their own children as adults, but it also does mean that ascribing the full responsibility for that act on the individual is unfair and pointless, as the reality is that at least a subset of those people get affected by their experience in such as way that they make choices they would be less likely to make otherwise.
Unfair, because that person is unlikely to have sat down one day, uninfluenced by his/her upbringing, and have decided to abuse kids.
Unrealistic, because it means that punishment both as a general deterrent to others, and as a deterrent to re-offending, in many cases has no basis in reality.
To take this example to it's conclusion, that does not mean that someone who commits a crime shouldn't be made to take responsibility, and be punished, but that for the sake of society as much as or more than the individual who commits a crime, it is important to realize that punishment alone is not effective deterrent (as proven by reoffending rates).
A recognition of the level of control over genes and upbringing asserts over us should logically lead us to a far stronger focus on attempting to find ways to affect the physiological, psychological and environmental factors that drive various behavior, whether positive or negative, rather than assign all responsibility for an act solely on the individual and assume that as a group those individuals are all (or even most) able to change if we just give them enough incentive to change.
Another example is how much hormones (or synthetic drugs) affect our actions. Testosterone is a major factor in driving violence, for example. It is unrealistic then to say that people "freely choose" whether or not to beat eachother up. They "freely choose" within the parameters set by their genes, their brain chemistry, their upbringing and a vast number of other factors beyond the control of their conscious self. Depending on situation, that may give them wide latitude to make the right choice, or no choice at all.
As is limiting power to a subset of society based on the worth they have to the state.
It's an idea that is very closely linked to militaristic and authoritarian ideologies.
I haven't read enough of Heinlein (I know, a sin; I read lots of his short stories as a kid, but haven't read many of his novels) to make any assertions of whether that is the case in this case, but I can certainly see why Starship Troopers in particular would make someone consider Heinlein militaristic.
(Incidentally, since you mentioned the differences between the book and the movie, I love the movie, but I realize it has little to do with the book - the two should really be treated as separate stories - but it's an interesting example of what you can achieve by shifting the tone and imagery. To me the most interesting, and a bit scary, thing with the movie is how blatant they managed to make the fascist/nazi imagery, complete with nazi style propaganda and uniforms while still getting viewers to cheer for the human military)