No, it's an art. Science tries to figure out how the world works by forming hypotheses and testing them with experiment. Maths never worries about the real world in that way; it's a creative, abstract activity, takes considerable discipline to master, with its own idea of beauty. Its only distinguishing feature among the arts is a strict notion of correctness (again, based in reason not experiment), although one could simply make it an indispensible part of beauty.
Disclaimer: My degree is maths, so I have some vague idea what I'm talking about =p
Why in h@ll are you pushing the inches/metre number, which is approximate, and not the exact (and what I've always found easy to remember) 25.4 mm/inch?
Try not paying the rent euphemised as "property tax" to the landlord that prefers to call itself "government" and find out what that lease laughingly called a "deed" means...
You think you're safe with Shrubya at the wheel? MWAHAHAHAHA
(But if you can explain to me how some cavedwelling ragtop in Afghanistan got NORAD to play with itself for a full hour on 9/11 without resorting to connections like his dozens of siblings in joint business ventures with the Bushes, I may give you the benefit of some doubt.)
Actually I think the relevant bit is "unfit to be reissued"... If there were actually an RFID tag there, I'd be inclined to poke out Jackson's eye. Or just cut a little X in it. Most people would still treat the result as perfectly good money, and thus it would *still be* perfectly good money -- paper money being nothing but faith.
But once the bill drifts back to the Fed, it would not want to recirculate it, 'cause the precious RFID is dead... so although the bill was not actually damaged as money, any more than, say, by tearing a speck off a corner (even less, actually, since you wouldn't have to remove any material to cripple an RFID), the Fed could say you blocked its reissue because their precious RFID was dead.
They hold all the cards as to what "reissue" means.
BUT...what would make some sense, is a digital system the produces a paper ballot verified by the voter which is then deposited as a ballot. Some polls are then selected for auditing; the paper is counted and checked against the digital total.
Of course the trick is that selection of polls; tt must be random. In particular, independent of anyone even remotely positioned to bejigger the machines. That selection should be done *after* the polls are closed (so it can't affect which machines get jiggered), and the selection and the count should be open to public inspection (to ensure randomisation of the former and legitimacy of the latter).
And, naturally, any disputed polls are recounted from paper.
Oh yeah; if the random audit is "sufficiently off" then *all* polls are considered disputed. Then ya gotta watch the person that gets to decide "sufficiently off." There should be some entrenched statistical formula so there is at least objectivity, although it could still have biases.
>[there's a reason] not to give people paper printouts of their vote. It makes your vote really really easy to sell, inviting a whole other kind of corruption.
But this is only against letting a voter take the "receipt" out of the polling station. It has no bearing on treating a receipt as a paper ballot to be collected.
>I think the best way to insure these machines aren't used nefariously is to do rigorous exit polling
HA! And just why to you think the Bush regime got rid of the exit polls?
IMO the only way to ensure the machines aren't used nefariously is not to use them. As someone who's programmed kaputeys for 30 years, and who's been deputy returning officer twice, I would never bring myself to trust a little black box to be counting my vote correctly. There is no way I or any witness can observe purely electronic counting and ensure that it's done correctly. Show me the code? Nonsense. Unless I built the machine myself, I could never be certain of what it was doing (and obviously I would then be the only one who knew). There is way too much motivation for tampering and it's way too easy to hide it.
i've been building and running the LAN at the local kaputey store, for `nothing.' It's the only one for leagues, so anything that helps it go saves me gas getting stuff. Plus this store has very good prices. And I get to rummage in the junk drawers.
I gave up thinking of kaputeys as a source of income years ago, after I read Matloff's layout of the hard facts (which accorded with what I'd learned on my own).
and not always `low level,' why which i mean innocuous. for instance, they've been pushing vaccination on and off for two centuries, despite the heaps of science proving the stuff is unsafe and ineffective.
Of course not, that's disobedient. If one reads the article instead of confining oneself to what the filter says, one ruins the whole purpose of the filters - controlling what one thinks.
Oh, Ralphie Doncaster, is that what he's up to now. I went to university with him. Personally, I'd count my fingers after dealing with him.
Looks like he's up to to his favourite university games too (he got in hot water at Acadia for network mischief):
[usenet]
`AIDS and gays conflict with Ralph's religion'? I never noticed any religion in him deeper than lucre (although of course people can change, libel-deflecting disclaimers etc).
Speaking as a Canadian, sometime poll clerk and deputy returning officer, you're... close enough:) The reporting is by tree, each poll reports to the Returning Officer for that riding. The count is supervised by at least two members of the public, usually candidte's agents but necessarily. There are thus at least four witnesses to each poll's count. Counts are usually published poll-by-poll next day (it's probably a legal requirement).
There are a couple of sticky points. One, although it's a nearly-universal counting method, it's far from Condorcet. As for applying it down south, as I've been able to grok Mercan elections; We vote for one thing at a time, you seem to have to vote for everything *between* dogcatcher and Prezedent. You run, in effect, a dozen times as many elections as we do.
Slashdot Mirror
As for whether math is a sport: I don't think so, myself. But under Suits' criteria, organ playing is a sport.
No, it's an art. Science tries to figure out how the world works by forming hypotheses and testing them with experiment. Maths never worries about the real world in that way; it's a creative, abstract activity, takes considerable discipline to master, with its own idea of beauty. Its only distinguishing feature among the arts is a strict notion of correctness (again, based in reason not experiment), although one could simply make it an indispensible part of beauty.
Disclaimer: My degree is maths, so I have some vague idea what I'm talking about =p
Creative Computing maybe? I remember the pix ... seems to me the sample plot was a parabola =p
45 min? Try a week. (Photocell-powered? try a month.)
So far as that goes, there's a difference between metric and SI, too.
An ounce of gold is heavier than an ounce of water is heavier than an ounce of sugar. SI screwed up some good jokes.
I once thought a mile was 1609.334m. Looking at this mess, I now feel silly at having been upset the 6th digit was wrong =p
Why in h@ll are you pushing the inches/metre number, which is approximate, and not the exact (and what I've always found easy to remember) 25.4 mm/inch?
>I owe nothing to the gov't.
...
Try not paying the rent euphemised as "property tax" to the landlord that prefers to call itself "government" and find out what that lease laughingly called a "deed" means
Anonymous Coward: ... more often then not the case is that they are hoodlums and bad guys ...
... the honest hard working law abiding MAJORITY ...
... Is it bad I don't know who one of them is?
QuickSilver_999:
'k, these are the two I wanna lock in a room until only one is ambulatory
You think you're safe with Shrubya at the wheel? MWAHAHAHAHA
(But if you can explain to me how some cavedwelling ragtop in Afghanistan got NORAD to play with itself for a full hour on 9/11 without resorting to connections like his dozens of siblings in joint business ventures with the Bushes, I may give you the benefit of some doubt.)
I noticed that too. 'Cause in the US these days any cop who finds you with that much money mutters "drug-related" and relieves you of it...
Actually I think the relevant bit is "unfit to be reissued" ... If there were actually an RFID tag there, I'd be inclined to poke out Jackson's eye. Or just cut a little X in it. Most people would still treat the result as perfectly good money, and thus it would *still be* perfectly good money -- paper money being nothing but faith.
... so although the bill was not actually damaged as money, any more than, say, by tearing a speck off a corner (even less, actually, since you wouldn't have to remove any material to cripple an RFID), the Fed could say you blocked its reissue because their precious RFID was dead.
But once the bill drifts back to the Fed, it would not want to recirculate it, 'cause the precious RFID is dead
They hold all the cards as to what "reissue" means.
> once geeks realize that they can't compile the open source version to the binary ... ... and then there's the Ken Thompson attractor.
BUT...what would make some sense, is a digital system the produces a paper ballot verified by the voter which is then deposited as a ballot. Some polls are then selected for auditing; the paper is counted and checked against the digital total.
Of course the trick is that selection of polls; tt must be random. In particular, independent of anyone even remotely positioned to bejigger the machines. That selection should be done *after* the polls are closed (so it can't affect which machines get jiggered), and the selection and the count should be open to public inspection (to ensure randomisation of the former and legitimacy of the latter).
And, naturally, any disputed polls are recounted from paper.
Oh yeah; if the random audit is "sufficiently off" then *all* polls are considered disputed. Then ya gotta watch the person that gets to decide "sufficiently off." There should be some entrenched statistical formula so there is at least objectivity, although it could still have biases.
>[there's a reason] not to give people paper printouts of their vote. It makes your vote really really easy to sell, inviting a whole other kind of corruption.
But this is only against letting a voter take the "receipt" out of the polling station. It has no bearing on treating a receipt as a paper ballot to be collected.
>I think the best way to insure these machines aren't used nefariously is to do rigorous exit polling
HA! And just why to you think the Bush regime got rid of the exit polls?
IMO the only way to ensure the machines aren't used nefariously is not to use them. As someone who's programmed kaputeys for 30 years, and who's been deputy returning officer twice, I would never bring myself to trust a little black box to be counting my vote correctly. There is no way I or any witness can observe purely electronic counting and ensure that it's done correctly. Show me the code? Nonsense. Unless I built the machine myself, I could never be certain of what it was doing (and obviously I would then be the only one who knew). There is way too much motivation for tampering and it's way too easy to hide it.
Give me my stupid ol' fashioned paper n pencil.
Ob'ry(?) irrel'nt (but not unrel'ted) comic:q uest=251
http://hackles.org/cgi-bin/archives.pl?re
i've been building and running the LAN at the local kaputey store, for `nothing.' It's the only one for leagues, so anything that helps it go saves me gas getting stuff. Plus this store has very good prices. And I get to rummage in the junk drawers.
I gave up thinking of kaputeys as a source of income years ago, after I read Matloff's layout of the hard facts (which accorded with what I'd learned on my own).
and not always `low level,' why which i mean innocuous. for instance, they've been pushing vaccination on and off for two centuries, despite the heaps of science proving the stuff is unsafe and ineffective.
Of course not, that's disobedient. If one reads the article instead of confining oneself to what the filter says, one ruins the whole purpose of the filters - controlling what one thinks.
*tch* Anarchists
Looks like he's up to to his favourite university games too (he got in hot water at Acadia for network mischief): [usenet] `AIDS and gays conflict with Ralph's religion'? I never noticed any religion in him deeper than lucre (although of course people can change, libel-deflecting disclaimers etc).
Couldn't resist. (Although cwms, IIRC, aren't exactly nice to radio.)
Is no one else bothered by this new US legal fashion of conviction without trial?
> The reporting is by tree,
NOT by tree, i meant. *Preview. Preview, preview.*
Speaking as a Canadian, sometime poll clerk and deputy returning officer, you're ... close enough :) The reporting is by tree, each poll reports to the Returning Officer for that riding. The count is supervised by at least two members of the public, usually candidte's agents but necessarily. There are thus at least four witnesses to each poll's count. Counts are usually published poll-by-poll next day (it's probably a legal requirement).
There are a couple of sticky points. One, although it's a nearly-universal counting method, it's far from Condorcet. As for applying it down south, as I've been able to grok Mercan elections; We vote for one thing at a time, you seem to have to vote for everything *between* dogcatcher and Prezedent. You run, in effect, a dozen times as many elections as we do.