It's only a problem if you don't sleep at least once every day. My batteries need to be charged well before my watch's one does.
I have the Huawei watch, always on display, and it still has over 60% charge left every night when I put it on the charger. I don't see any reason I'd need more charge than that.
And here is the big one, they looked at active subscribers, and found they watch stuff. Well of course, if they can't find anything to watch, they cancel their subscription!
A more interesting comparison would be how many people have cancelled in various places in the months following the loss of major studio deals.
Maybe, it's hard to tell. While laws usually require the ability to open the doors mechanically from inside, they do not require that it's easy to figure out how (and they really should!) Which often leads to the manual release mechanism be hidden under a carpet flap somewhere out of the way that you'd only know about if you spent hours reading the manual. Personally I think that's a horrible design, and that any manual method should be obvious, and easy to figure out when the occupant is in full panic mode. Cars I've seen that do it right usually make it part of the door handle itself, pull to open electronically, pull harder to open manually. But I've also seen many that hide it under a carpet flap. Example of poorly done: I sat in a Corvette at an auto-show, the car had no power, the person manning the booth had to tell each person how to manually open the door with the pull under the carpet. Example of well done: Tesla Model S front doors, pull the door handle harder than normal and it goes from electronic to manual. (example of poorly done, Tesla Model S rear doors, manual release is behind a carpet flap under the seats)
Example of well done: cars with manual door handles, I mean really, what possible reason could there be for that manual lever to be an electronic switch instead of a manual release in the first place? it's just more things to go wrong, more expense, and less safety.
Hey, if you know how to run large internet connected systems better than Google, maybe you should step up and compete. As obviously you think they're clueless about such things and you know better.
I look forward to all your new systems that make Google obsolete.
Android, or even your desktop OS aren't the point. You are correct that consumer level devices have no problem "fixing" their clock by a second when they discover it. The problem is when you have tons and tons of real time transactions that have to be kept in a very precise order. How do you easily and reliably determine which event happened first if the numerical timestamp isn't sequential? Smearing the second ensures that timestamps, of any precision, remain sequential. This can be crucial for some of these large real-time organizations. The only other somewhat practical solution is to implement it like we do leap years, however as leap seconds are not as predictable, you run the risk of whether every system has the correct version of the database with the leap-seconds enumerated, and add extra computing resources on every translation to human readable formats. Google correctly points out that no current consumer OS currently has this capability, and you'll find that data-centre OSes are generally the same. While Google can control one or two of those, they can't guarantee that every device they send something to will also support it.
The leap second smear is a very elegant solution to a real, and somewhat complex, problem.
Of course they will. In fact, eventually they'll mandate it. They'll want the police to be able to stop your car remotely. Of course eventually someone other than the police will use the same method, but "think of the children" or "terrorists!" will cause them to implement it anyway.
No. In a civil war the arsenals of any civilians will be meaningless. The military arsenal will be all that matters. So the question always comes down to who has control over what parts of the military.
(or do you really think your hunting rifle is going to win against a cruise missile?)
Well, labour here is more expensive than in the USA, and our unemployment rate, although it fluctuates, is generally about the same as in the USA. And judging by the lack of lines at our polls, I suspect we hire more polling staff per capita. Our election results are 100% human counted, and results are usually out within 1-2 hours of the polls closing.
Chain of custody is not that hard. Each observer can apply their seal to the ballot box after counting. If any of the seals are tampered with, or not present, you know that someone needs to go to jail, probably the person who was handed the ballot box to transport it to the warehouse it's being stored at pending potential re-counts. If that's not enough for you, you can physically send all the observers together in the same vehicle with the boxes to the location where they'll be stored, and that location can either be sealed by all the parties, or kept watch over by all the parties.
so what purpose does it serve to send everyone to a convention where they cast ballots for president?
A system could easily be designed to do the exact same thing without specific people voting for something already voted on a month earlier by the entire population. the "wiggle room" you talk about makes it undemocratic, the rest is simply unrepresentative.
So, is the electoral college useless because it will never vote any other way than as directed? in which case it should be abolished as it does nothing. Or is the electoral college undemocratic because they could some day decide to vote in a way other than as directed? in which case it should be abolished as it goes against the will of the people.
Our wait times are less than 5 minutes. I once had to stand in a line of THREE people to vote, it was horrible! Staff is paid for by the federal government. If you aren't willing to pay for elections, why not just skip voting all together? Not to mention, that the staff is probably cheaper than the machines given that they're only working one day every 4 years. The staff is already there anyway, you need them to run the polling station during the day, and they stay an extra hour or two after the end to count the ballots. Unless of course you're deliberately trying to suppress voter turnout by understaffing your polling stations with the specific goal of causing long delays to vote. In which case your way is far more effective than ours.
Places that don't use see through ballot boxes. So voters don't know there are already 1000 ballots in the box at start of voting.
no need for fancy glass/plastic ballot boxes. Cardboard works fine. But as they are assembled in front of the observers from each party, they know that they don't have any ballots in them.
Places that don't mark voters thumbs. So voters can register and vote multiple times.
oft quoted by some people, and yet with no proof that it has ever changed an electoral outcome where proper voter lists and registration cards have been used.
Places that don't check voter IDs. So ineligible voters can register and vote, often many times.
see above. voter lists, coupled with voter registration cards are sufficient. mandatory ID laws are usually used to suppress democracy, not enhance it.
Places that accept ballot boxes 'found' in the trunks of partisan 'election observers' cars, after the partisan knew exactly how many votes were needed.
Which would never fly. Observers from each party get used along the way, and ballot boxes don't appear in the trunks of random vehicles without a LOT of questions being asked. Especially ones that weren't sealed by all the parties in attendance.
And by more secure you mean less secure. How do you know the machine is reading them right? having multiple people look at each ballot is far more secure.
As for number of workers, the workers are already there anyway, they were needed to run the polling station while people were voting, they stay after and count the ballots. It only takes an hour or two.
Unless of course you deliberately do not have enough polling stations and staff for your population in an attempt to suppress voter turnout, in which case your way works better.
once you get over a few thousand voters, the mechanics don't really change with scale, you just have to scale up the number of staff and the number of polling stations to match (something you obviously haven't done based on the long lines to vote)
As for geography. Are you walking the results to Washington? if not, what difference does distance make?
Once you get over a few thousand people the mechanics are the same regardless. You just need more of each thing.
Decide how many people a polling station can accommodate without unreasonably long lines (or in our case, any line at all really) and then figure out how many stations you need.
figure out how many ballots are likely to be cast at each station (based on the number or people from the last calculation) and figure out how many staff members you need to count them.
Do the same thing all the way up the chain, from how many people you need at each district, or region level, and above.
Unless you're claiming that 300 million+ people try to vote all at one polling station, in which case the system is even more messed up than I thought!
The recounts we're talking about here are where we have several people (one from each campaign, at least) looking at each ballot to make sure they agree.
We do that on the first count. not only on re-counts.
No need for clear ballot boxes. You know they aren't pre-stuffed because the observers from each party are on hand as the boxes are assembled. (keeps it cheap as you can use cardboard for ballot boxes) No real need for thumb marking ink either, there are a multitude of ways of identifying voters, and no matter what some people say, without such policies there has never been any proof that election outcomes are actually being altered by people pretending to be other people while voting. (and it has been investigated many times)
Open counting is the one part I agree with. Without the ballots being counted in front of observers from all the parties, you have no way of knowing that there is any integrity in the system.
Did I hold mexico up as a shining example of how it's to be done?
Paper and pencil don't guarantee fraud free results. But coupled with observers from all the parties at every step along the way, audited number of ballots and ballot boxes, and the elector placing their ballot in the box, it makes it nearly impossible to do without all the parties knowing about it.
Digital black boxes with no audit trail though make fraud impossible to detect.
Do you think that other countries don't vote for things other than their leader?
We have multiple ballots for multiple issues. (no one ballot ever has more than one item on it)
Now we do spread things out a bit, with municipal, provincial, and federal votes happening at different times, but we still manage to vote for all these things without the complexity.
I've tried Aloe (from the plant itself) and while it's certainly better than nothing, it is nowhere near as good as a proper lidocaine cream or gel. I tend to use SolarCaine (not their Aloe version, the original one) As an added bonus, you don't end up all sticky afterwards.
If my next car comes with those features, they will be neutralized one way or another.
A device in the A-Pillar? Remove it. If the car won't work without it, move it to the trunk.
A camera? Remove it. If the car won't work without it, move it to the trunk where it can stare at a picture of my face looking at the right angle. Needs a moving image? sure, I have an old smartphone I can use to display a short video loop of my blinking and looking straight ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
It's only a problem if you don't sleep at least once every day. My batteries need to be charged well before my watch's one does.
I have the Huawei watch, always on display, and it still has over 60% charge left every night when I put it on the charger. I don't see any reason I'd need more charge than that.
And here is the big one, they looked at active subscribers, and found they watch stuff. Well of course, if they can't find anything to watch, they cancel their subscription!
A more interesting comparison would be how many people have cancelled in various places in the months following the loss of major studio deals.
Maybe, it's hard to tell.
While laws usually require the ability to open the doors mechanically from inside, they do not require that it's easy to figure out how (and they really should!)
Which often leads to the manual release mechanism be hidden under a carpet flap somewhere out of the way that you'd only know about if you spent hours reading the manual.
Personally I think that's a horrible design, and that any manual method should be obvious, and easy to figure out when the occupant is in full panic mode. Cars I've seen that do it right usually make it part of the door handle itself, pull to open electronically, pull harder to open manually. But I've also seen many that hide it under a carpet flap.
Example of poorly done: I sat in a Corvette at an auto-show, the car had no power, the person manning the booth had to tell each person how to manually open the door with the pull under the carpet.
Example of well done: Tesla Model S front doors, pull the door handle harder than normal and it goes from electronic to manual. (example of poorly done, Tesla Model S rear doors, manual release is behind a carpet flap under the seats)
Example of well done: cars with manual door handles, I mean really, what possible reason could there be for that manual lever to be an electronic switch instead of a manual release in the first place? it's just more things to go wrong, more expense, and less safety.
Hey, if you know how to run large internet connected systems better than Google, maybe you should step up and compete. As obviously you think they're clueless about such things and you know better.
I look forward to all your new systems that make Google obsolete.
If the servers can't sync within a full second, we should give up on NTP entirely.
Many things require far more precise timing than that.
Android, or even your desktop OS aren't the point. You are correct that consumer level devices have no problem "fixing" their clock by a second when they discover it. The problem is when you have tons and tons of real time transactions that have to be kept in a very precise order. How do you easily and reliably determine which event happened first if the numerical timestamp isn't sequential? Smearing the second ensures that timestamps, of any precision, remain sequential. This can be crucial for some of these large real-time organizations.
The only other somewhat practical solution is to implement it like we do leap years, however as leap seconds are not as predictable, you run the risk of whether every system has the correct version of the database with the leap-seconds enumerated, and add extra computing resources on every translation to human readable formats. Google correctly points out that no current consumer OS currently has this capability, and you'll find that data-centre OSes are generally the same. While Google can control one or two of those, they can't guarantee that every device they send something to will also support it.
The leap second smear is a very elegant solution to a real, and somewhat complex, problem.
Of course they will. In fact, eventually they'll mandate it. They'll want the police to be able to stop your car remotely. Of course eventually someone other than the police will use the same method, but "think of the children" or "terrorists!" will cause them to implement it anyway.
No. In a civil war the arsenals of any civilians will be meaningless. The military arsenal will be all that matters. So the question always comes down to who has control over what parts of the military.
(or do you really think your hunting rifle is going to win against a cruise missile?)
Well, labour here is more expensive than in the USA, and our unemployment rate, although it fluctuates, is generally about the same as in the USA.
And judging by the lack of lines at our polls, I suspect we hire more polling staff per capita. Our election results are 100% human counted, and results are usually out within 1-2 hours of the polls closing.
Wait... you mean you wait for the votes to be
counted... by hand?
Yes, and we usually have results at least as fast, or faster, than using your methods. (election results within 1-2 hours of polls closing on average)
Chain of custody is not that hard. Each observer can apply their seal to the ballot box after counting. If any of the seals are tampered with, or not present, you know that someone needs to go to jail, probably the person who was handed the ballot box to transport it to the warehouse it's being stored at pending potential re-counts. If that's not enough for you, you can physically send all the observers together in the same vehicle with the boxes to the location where they'll be stored, and that location can either be sealed by all the parties, or kept watch over by all the parties.
This isn't that hard.
so what purpose does it serve to send everyone to a convention where they cast ballots for president?
A system could easily be designed to do the exact same thing without specific people voting for something already voted on a month earlier by the entire population. the "wiggle room" you talk about makes it undemocratic, the rest is simply unrepresentative.
So, is the electoral college useless because it will never vote any other way than as directed? in which case it should be abolished as it does nothing.
Or is the electoral college undemocratic because they could some day decide to vote in a way other than as directed? in which case it should be abolished as it goes against the will of the people.
Which one of those reasons do you subscribe to?
Our wait times are less than 5 minutes. I once had to stand in a line of THREE people to vote, it was horrible!
Staff is paid for by the federal government. If you aren't willing to pay for elections, why not just skip voting all together? Not to mention, that the staff is probably cheaper than the machines given that they're only working one day every 4 years.
The staff is already there anyway, you need them to run the polling station during the day, and they stay an extra hour or two after the end to count the ballots. Unless of course you're deliberately trying to suppress voter turnout by understaffing your polling stations with the specific goal of causing long delays to vote. In which case your way is far more effective than ours.
You're missing a bunch of ways to cheat:
Maybe, but you haven't listed any that work.
Places that don't use see through ballot boxes. So voters don't know there are already 1000 ballots in the box at start of voting.
no need for fancy glass/plastic ballot boxes. Cardboard works fine. But as they are assembled in front of the observers from each party, they know that they don't have any ballots in them.
Places that don't mark voters thumbs. So voters can register and vote multiple times.
oft quoted by some people, and yet with no proof that it has ever changed an electoral outcome where proper voter lists and registration cards have been used.
Places that don't check voter IDs. So ineligible voters can register and vote, often many times.
see above. voter lists, coupled with voter registration cards are sufficient. mandatory ID laws are usually used to suppress democracy, not enhance it.
Places that accept ballot boxes 'found' in the trunks of partisan 'election observers' cars, after the partisan knew exactly how many votes were needed.
Which would never fly. Observers from each party get used along the way, and ballot boxes don't appear in the trunks of random vehicles without a LOT of questions being asked. Especially ones that weren't sealed by all the parties in attendance.
Which the observers watch happen and call you out on.
This is how civilized countries catch those cheaters.
And by more secure you mean less secure. How do you know the machine is reading them right? having multiple people look at each ballot is far more secure.
As for number of workers, the workers are already there anyway, they were needed to run the polling station while people were voting, they stay after and count the ballots. It only takes an hour or two.
Unless of course you deliberately do not have enough polling stations and staff for your population in an attempt to suppress voter turnout, in which case your way works better.
both questions are 100% irrelevant.
once you get over a few thousand voters, the mechanics don't really change with scale, you just have to scale up the number of staff and the number of polling stations to match (something you obviously haven't done based on the long lines to vote)
As for geography. Are you walking the results to Washington? if not, what difference does distance make?
100% irrelevant.
Once you get over a few thousand people the mechanics are the same regardless. You just need more of each thing.
Decide how many people a polling station can accommodate without unreasonably long lines (or in our case, any line at all really) and then figure out how many stations you need.
figure out how many ballots are likely to be cast at each station (based on the number or people from the last calculation) and figure out how many staff members you need to count them.
Do the same thing all the way up the chain, from how many people you need at each district, or region level, and above.
Unless you're claiming that 300 million+ people try to vote all at one polling station, in which case the system is even more messed up than I thought!
The recounts we're talking about here are where we have several people (one from each campaign, at least) looking at each ballot to make sure they agree.
We do that on the first count. not only on re-counts.
No need for clear ballot boxes. You know they aren't pre-stuffed because the observers from each party are on hand as the boxes are assembled. (keeps it cheap as you can use cardboard for ballot boxes)
No real need for thumb marking ink either, there are a multitude of ways of identifying voters, and no matter what some people say, without such policies there has never been any proof that election outcomes are actually being altered by people pretending to be other people while voting. (and it has been investigated many times)
Open counting is the one part I agree with. Without the ballots being counted in front of observers from all the parties, you have no way of knowing that there is any integrity in the system.
Did I hold mexico up as a shining example of how it's to be done?
Paper and pencil don't guarantee fraud free results. But coupled with observers from all the parties at every step along the way, audited number of ballots and ballot boxes, and the elector placing their ballot in the box, it makes it nearly impossible to do without all the parties knowing about it.
Digital black boxes with no audit trail though make fraud impossible to detect.
Do you think that other countries don't vote for things other than their leader?
We have multiple ballots for multiple issues. (no one ballot ever has more than one item on it)
Now we do spread things out a bit, with municipal, provincial, and federal votes happening at different times, but we still manage to vote for all these things without the complexity.
Better yet, buy something that actually works.
I've tried Aloe (from the plant itself) and while it's certainly better than nothing, it is nowhere near as good as a proper lidocaine cream or gel. I tend to use SolarCaine (not their Aloe version, the original one) As an added bonus, you don't end up all sticky afterwards.
If my next car comes with those features, they will be neutralized one way or another.
A device in the A-Pillar? Remove it. If the car won't work without it, move it to the trunk.
A camera? Remove it. If the car won't work without it, move it to the trunk where it can stare at a picture of my face looking at the right angle. Needs a moving image? sure, I have an old smartphone I can use to display a short video loop of my blinking and looking straight ahead.