I always wanted to build a car-stereo variant which would set the tuner to my FM transmitter, put the volume up all the way and blast "It's raining men" through their F-ing inconsiderate boom cars.
As somebody who ran a polling station once, hand-counting is pretty damned easy. A couple thousand voters go to each polling centre, There's a half-dozen or so polling booths, that's only a few hundred votes to count.
You count them in front of a peer and volunteer party representatives. Then to be pedantic, your peer counts them again.
The count starts, of course, once the polls close.
If you think of the level of real patriotism left in the U.S., is it really that hard to find a school or public facility to vote in? Is it really that hard to find people to sit at the polls? Is it really that hard to find people to watch over and audit this process?
These electronic voting companies make it sound like voting is drudgery which nobody will volunteer to help with... there is no end of volunteers!
BTW, I've been told that there's at least one state, I don't recall which one, (Winconsin? Wyoming?, some "W" state I've never been to) which uses a similar system to that of Canada.
But as I understand it, the BPL interference is a side effect of BPL. Your transmitter would have to be awfully powerful to interfere with BPL... since it is not using the radio signals to communicate, but the much stronger signals on the line.
I've been reading a few places that the Segway, when used for long periods of time can be hard on the knees. You're putting your full weight on your straightened knees while going over bumps and curbs.
I've seen a few mini-scooters these days which let you sit in a near-upright position. You'd have to put your foot down or stand when you stop, depending on your mobility that might not be an option, but if that were the case, a Segway would be quite risky for you.
You'd still have to buy the video capture hardware, and then you'd probably not be able to transcode and burn in real time, you'd have to have the know-how to prevent it from stuttering as it burned and you'd have to have the know-how to make it playable on a standard DVD player.
So depending on output quality, it may be cheaper, faster, and easier although certainly not as flexible. Yeah, you can probably find a cheap capture card, but how's the quality on that?
The trusted software would prevent the trusted OS from allowing printscreen to work. The trusted hardware could check to ensure that the code hasn't been modified and that a tamper-proof certified monitor is attached. Then the subliminal patterns in the scan codes could inform your DRM enabled digital camera that it cannot take a photo, or if it does, to attach the appropriate DRM status on the resultant photo.
Of course you would only use a trusted camera on your trusted computer because nothing else would work.
Hardware companies would only get the certifier keys if they produce nothing but trusted hardware. The marketplace for non-trusted hardware being minimal since "only pirates need that stuff", conventional recording devices will fade into history.
Finally, yes, you could just write it down and key it back in, but your trusted software places your identity in your documents so that if you redistribute them, they'll have a fingerprint to find out who did it... and if you do manage to produce an untrusted document... no trusted computer will open it since it is not trusted.
Do you want proof that the tipping point exists? Do you want proof that the tipping point is a problem? Do you want proof that the tipping point has been reached? Do you want proof that the problem is imminent? Do you want proof that no other affect will appear which counteracts the tipping point?
Or are you just going to change the question until you reach a point where science is forced to answer "we don't have the data", and raise your finger, proclaiming "a-ha! so this is an emotional argument!"
The bottom line is that there is a proponderance of evidence that the vast change in industry and global human activity has impacted our environment. Lakes are poluted, the oceans are polluted, even harmful chemicals are spreading through the arctic. Species are dying, there is no question that these things are real. The only question is... what is going to happen?
There is a personal ethical decision one must make to determine if these things are important to you. I think it is a legitimate decision for a person to say "hey, this is the world I live in, you're talking me destroying a world I won't be living in. I can't say it is important to me."
Now science doesn't have a full handle on what is going to happen. Humanity hasn't destroyed a planet before, so it is tough to tell how bad things might be. We should however, err on the side of caution. If we care about the world we leave behind, we should only be as damaging to the environment as the best of science says we can afford to be be.
Finally, if the majority of humanity feels that the environment is important, then to preserve their interests (the planet), regulations must be established to prevent those who do not share their interests from attaining immense profits from destructively exploiting the planet.
So as long as the scientists are out for debate on global warming, the government should treat it as seriously as if it were real... whether it is real or not.
If you don't care, and again, I think that is a legitimate position, you should not be refuting the science and pretending that it is in the best interest of those who do care, but you should simply state "I don't care!"
Of those who work for companies, most don't work as scientists, and of those that do, most don't work on research which the general public would find remotely interesting... like studying abrasion and powder formation on Cheerios.
A handful, a scant tiny handful might be pulled to be given 6 figure salaries to run long studies countering univeristy and government sponsored research, so as to fortify their company's position in the marketplace. Their agenda is clear, and they're not working as scientists, they're spreading jibberish and they're being paid well to counter the damage to their reputation... but... These might be the scientists which would rather create media circuses and travel the world spreading lies than hanging out in a lab devising new ways to abrade breakfast cereals.
I'm just saying that even if the majority of scientists are in corporate back pockets, it's no worse than the fact that most of the working population is in the back pocket of one corporation or another... we don't all feel such undying corporate loyalty as to irrationally defend our company's policies.
While comments tend to get inaccurate quickly, I think you're right about high-level comments.
Lately when writing code by myself, I've been writing comments before the code... I mean temporally. Write some high-level steps. Find some commonalities in those steps, create functions which contain blobs of steps. I'll also create verbose decriptions of key variables.
Then I'll do a second pass, writing in loops to touch objects or do whatever, but instead of doing any dirtywork, the actions are all program stubs. Then I verify the logic is good.
I then create a set of tests which call on the functions, trying to test their premises and break them.
Then I start replacing the stubs with print-like statements of the code which will be replacing them, so that I can see in sequence what kind of actions will be run.
Then I run the tests again... adding to them if necessary
I then start replacing the print-like statements with live codes, the print-like statements being redirected into debugging output.
Finally, I'll write the "real" app, which draws upon all the routines in the proper form, following pretty close to the steps above. This goes really fast because the tests usually make great templates for the final app. The tests also act as supplimentary function documentation.
Lots of comments get deleted in the process, but a few describing the flow logic remain. They're generally good comments and can be mapped onto the original design documents (scraps of paper with flow diagrams and stuff).
Again, this is only when I'm the only coder. For most purposes, if I have somebody helping me, they get flustered when I try to spend time defining clear interfaces or provide stub functions for them to code against... "What is this? This isn't done? This doesn't do anything? I could write this cr*p! What is this "stub" sh!t! What do you mean I can't use a global variable to pass parameters to my function!". But I nor they are professional programmers, I just wind up doing a fair bit of scripting and coding in my job. I've only had one coworker who understood clearly defined interfaces... but then that was also because we didn't understand one another's programming languages or environments. I could pass them the interface rules and they had to code against them blindly. They were thrilled when they saw stub routines triggered by their code and vice-versa.
Only the soft-tails. A bigger difference is that you don't have the gears to go at high speeds. You have to keep a stupidly high cadence to maintain 50+km/h on a mountain bike.
If you replace the gears, the tires, use a light bike and make some modifications to the handlebars, then you're almost doing as well as a road bike... but your gears will be too large and soft to handle popping over logs, you'll lose your nice tiny front gears for killer uphills, you won't have the traction necessary for really steep mucky slopes, and your handlebars will just be a nuicense on the trails... and it is still not as good as a road bike.
People who occasionally ride and brag about the ease of 30+km/h averages on a mountain bike are full of it. I'm sure they're discarding their bad times. I'm happy if I can average 25km/h... that's with the odd long 40km/h backwind and the odd long 12km/hr uphill headwind. Unless I'm sprinting, I don't see much difference in my average over 1 hour, or 6 hours.
Going faster than 40km/hr on a normal mountain bike is just uncomfortable. Fun, but if you need to pedal at all to stay there, uncomfortable.
Why do I ride a mountain bike? A cheap road bike is too fragile for traffic, an expensive road bike will be stolen, and a hybrid isn't quite worth the small difference in comfort and performance...
I encountered this problem in an Alpha Romeo, silly thing has three pedals on the floorboard, all identical and evenly spaced. Nice for trick driving, horrible for learning standard.
Slowly pulling up to a corner, I tap the brakes, which happens to accelerate me, which makes me tap the brakes harder... all of which happened in about half a second... so I release the brakes and the gas... Nobody explained heel-toe manuvers to me.
I knew exactly what mistake I made, but in an unfamiliar car with an unfamiliar transmission on an unfamiliar road, there wasn't enough time to react, I didn't have the reflexes in that car. Today, if there was a problem, I'd probably floor the clutch and pull the handbrake before hitting the corner, then release the brake into the corner and finish stopping with the handbrake.
Fortunately, I tend to drive conservatively, so the extra speed wasn't a problem for the car's excellent cornering.
I have to wonder though, how close were the pedals on the Audi? I can understand the brake and gas being close on a performance car with a standard transmission, but for a luxury car with automatic transmission? I'd expect nothing less than a big fat wide footbrake in the middle of the floor and a tall skinny gas pedal on the far right.
Having driven a fair number of rental cars, it's a PITA to figure out how to activate and deactivate cruise control on most models. Each manufacturer has their own idea how it works, and each model has its own idosyncracies.
The only good common feature is to kind-of shut it off when you touch the brake.
I usually actually read the manual for the cruise control, then I'll only try setting it when I have at least 20 car lengths ahead and behind me of empty highway (well... that's really the only time you should use it)
I drove one, they're a nice alternative for automatic, but you don't put it park or drive like you do with an automatic.
It's more like a computer controlled manual transmission where the shifter is replaced with a joystick and the clutch is removed.
If you try to use them as a manual, you'll find they shift slowly, you can't skip gears easily, but you can use your transmission to slow you down long hills or help you in bad weather.
My point being that it's fully electronic, if the comptuer failed, I wouldn't know how pull it out of gear, and if cruise control was stuck... all I'd have is steering and the parking brake.
And amazingly hard to get back into your homecountry without your ID:-)
I kept an encrypted copy of my passport on a password protected webserver for a while. I changed to swapping photocopies of passports with my companions, until we remembered that border guards are F-ing stupid when it comes to rules.. even if you're standing next to the person you're holding the copy of, they'll freak out on you for holding a forgery of somebody's documents.
...I just haven't gotten around to putting my passport back on a webserver.
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I always wanted to build a car-stereo variant which would set the tuner to my FM transmitter, put the volume up all the way and blast "It's raining men" through their F-ing inconsiderate boom cars.
As somebody who ran a polling station once, hand-counting is pretty damned easy. A couple thousand voters go to each polling centre, There's a half-dozen or so polling booths, that's only a few hundred votes to count.
You count them in front of a peer and volunteer party representatives. Then to be pedantic, your peer counts them again.
The count starts, of course, once the polls close.
If you think of the level of real patriotism left in the U.S., is it really that hard to find a school or public facility to vote in? Is it really that hard to find people to sit at the polls? Is it really that hard to find people to watch over and audit this process?
These electronic voting companies make it sound like voting is drudgery which nobody will volunteer to help with... there is no end of volunteers!
BTW, I've been told that there's at least one state, I don't recall which one, (Winconsin? Wyoming?, some "W" state I've never been to) which uses a similar system to that of Canada.
Yes, we will mass-archive mail so that future generations might be able to filter out the spam.
Sure, but you're not really selling to 17 year olds, you're selling to 40-something year olds with 17 year old kids.
i can make a MUCH better computer for that price.
Sure, but it won't have anywhere near as big a profit margin!
Now I can build a car computer to boot Linux and play Oggs!
But as I understand it, the BPL interference is a side effect of BPL. Your transmitter would have to be awfully powerful to interfere with BPL... since it is not using the radio signals to communicate, but the much stronger signals on the line.
I've been reading a few places that the Segway, when used for long periods of time can be hard on the knees. You're putting your full weight on your straightened knees while going over bumps and curbs.
I've seen a few mini-scooters these days which let you sit in a near-upright position. You'd have to put your foot down or stand when you stop, depending on your mobility that might not be an option, but if that were the case, a Segway would be quite risky for you.
http://www.hailichina.com/cpjs03.htm
Yeah, I know, the Segway might even let you wander around a grocery store.
You'd still have to buy the video capture hardware, and then you'd probably not be able to transcode and burn in real time, you'd have to have the know-how to prevent it from stuttering as it burned and you'd have to have the know-how to make it playable on a standard DVD player.
So depending on output quality, it may be cheaper, faster, and easier although certainly not as flexible. Yeah, you can probably find a cheap capture card, but how's the quality on that?
The trusted software would prevent the trusted OS from allowing printscreen to work. The trusted hardware could check to ensure that the code hasn't been modified and that a tamper-proof certified monitor is attached. Then the subliminal patterns in the scan codes could inform your DRM enabled digital camera that it cannot take a photo, or if it does, to attach the appropriate DRM status on the resultant photo.
Of course you would only use a trusted camera on your trusted computer because nothing else would work.
Hardware companies would only get the certifier keys if they produce nothing but trusted hardware. The marketplace for non-trusted hardware being minimal since "only pirates need that stuff", conventional recording devices will fade into history.
Finally, yes, you could just write it down and key it back in, but your trusted software places your identity in your documents so that if you redistribute them, they'll have a fingerprint to find out who did it... and if you do manage to produce an untrusted document... no trusted computer will open it since it is not trusted.
DRM is a long term plan.
Tipping point? Proof, please?
Do you want proof that the tipping point exists? Do you want proof that the tipping point is a problem? Do you want proof that the tipping point has been reached? Do you want proof that the problem is imminent? Do you want proof that no other affect will appear which counteracts the tipping point?
Or are you just going to change the question until you reach a point where science is forced to answer "we don't have the data", and raise your finger, proclaiming "a-ha! so this is an emotional argument!"
The bottom line is that there is a proponderance of evidence that the vast change in industry and global human activity has impacted our environment. Lakes are poluted, the oceans are polluted, even harmful chemicals are spreading through the arctic. Species are dying, there is no question that these things are real. The only question is... what is going to happen?
There is a personal ethical decision one must make to determine if these things are important to you. I think it is a legitimate decision for a person to say "hey, this is the world I live in, you're talking me destroying a world I won't be living in. I can't say it is important to me."
Now science doesn't have a full handle on what is going to happen. Humanity hasn't destroyed a planet before, so it is tough to tell how bad things might be. We should however, err on the side of caution. If we care about the world we leave behind, we should only be as damaging to the environment as the best of science says we can afford to be be.
Finally, if the majority of humanity feels that the environment is important, then to preserve their interests (the planet), regulations must be established to prevent those who do not share their interests from attaining immense profits from destructively exploiting the planet.
So as long as the scientists are out for debate on global warming, the government should treat it as seriously as if it were real... whether it is real or not.
If you don't care, and again, I think that is a legitimate position, you should not be refuting the science and pretending that it is in the best interest of those who do care, but you should simply state "I don't care!"
Of those who work for companies, most don't work as scientists, and of those that do, most don't work on research which the general public would find remotely interesting... like studying abrasion and powder formation on Cheerios.
A handful, a scant tiny handful might be pulled to be given 6 figure salaries to run long studies countering univeristy and government sponsored research, so as to fortify their company's position in the marketplace. Their agenda is clear, and they're not working as scientists, they're spreading jibberish and they're being paid well to counter the damage to their reputation... but... These might be the scientists which would rather create media circuses and travel the world spreading lies than hanging out in a lab devising new ways to abrade breakfast cereals.
I'm just saying that even if the majority of scientists are in corporate back pockets, it's no worse than the fact that most of the working population is in the back pocket of one corporation or another... we don't all feel such undying corporate loyalty as to irrationally defend our company's policies.
While comments tend to get inaccurate quickly, I think you're right about high-level comments.
Lately when writing code by myself, I've been writing comments before the code... I mean temporally. Write some high-level steps. Find some commonalities in those steps, create functions which contain blobs of steps. I'll also create verbose decriptions of key variables.
Then I'll do a second pass, writing in loops to touch objects or do whatever, but instead of doing any dirtywork, the actions are all program stubs. Then I verify the logic is good.
I then create a set of tests which call on the functions, trying to test their premises and break them.
Then I start replacing the stubs with print-like statements of the code which will be replacing them, so that I can see in sequence what kind of actions will be run.
Then I run the tests again... adding to them if necessary
I then start replacing the print-like statements with live codes, the print-like statements being redirected into debugging output.
Finally, I'll write the "real" app, which draws upon all the routines in the proper form, following pretty close to the steps above. This goes really fast because the tests usually make great templates for the final app. The tests also act as supplimentary function documentation.
Lots of comments get deleted in the process, but a few describing the flow logic remain. They're generally good comments and can be mapped onto the original design documents (scraps of paper with flow diagrams and stuff).
Again, this is only when I'm the only coder. For most purposes, if I have somebody helping me, they get flustered when I try to spend time defining clear interfaces or provide stub functions for them to code against... "What is this? This isn't done? This doesn't do anything? I could write this cr*p! What is this "stub" sh!t! What do you mean I can't use a global variable to pass parameters to my function!". But I nor they are professional programmers, I just wind up doing a fair bit of scripting and coding in my job. I've only had one coworker who understood clearly defined interfaces... but then that was also because we didn't understand one another's programming languages or environments. I could pass them the interface rules and they had to code against them blindly. They were thrilled when they saw stub routines triggered by their code and vice-versa.
Commenting must be 100% accurate else it is detrimental to understanding the code.
Sometimes code changes don't result in updated comments...
Once I find an inaccurate comment in somebody's code, I have to start rewriting or deleting all the comments because I can't trust them anymore.
Only the soft-tails. A bigger difference is that you don't have the gears to go at high speeds. You have to keep a stupidly high cadence to maintain 50+km/h on a mountain bike.
If you replace the gears, the tires, use a light bike and make some modifications to the handlebars, then you're almost doing as well as a road bike... but your gears will be too large and soft to handle popping over logs, you'll lose your nice tiny front gears for killer uphills, you won't have the traction necessary for really steep mucky slopes, and your handlebars will just be a nuicense on the trails... and it is still not as good as a road bike.
People who occasionally ride and brag about the ease of 30+km/h averages on a mountain bike are full of it. I'm sure they're discarding their bad times. I'm happy if I can average 25km/h... that's with the odd long 40km/h backwind and the odd long 12km/hr uphill headwind. Unless I'm sprinting, I don't see much difference in my average over 1 hour, or 6 hours.
Going faster than 40km/hr on a normal mountain bike is just uncomfortable. Fun, but if you need to pedal at all to stay there, uncomfortable.
Why do I ride a mountain bike? A cheap road bike is too fragile for traffic, an expensive road bike will be stolen, and a hybrid isn't quite worth the small difference in comfort and performance...
I encountered this problem in an Alpha Romeo, silly thing has three pedals on the floorboard, all identical and evenly spaced. Nice for trick driving, horrible for learning standard.
Slowly pulling up to a corner, I tap the brakes, which happens to accelerate me, which makes me tap the brakes harder... all of which happened in about half a second... so I release the brakes and the gas... Nobody explained heel-toe manuvers to me.
I knew exactly what mistake I made, but in an unfamiliar car with an unfamiliar transmission on an unfamiliar road, there wasn't enough time to react, I didn't have the reflexes in that car. Today, if there was a problem, I'd probably floor the clutch and pull the handbrake before hitting the corner, then release the brake into the corner and finish stopping with the handbrake.
Fortunately, I tend to drive conservatively, so the extra speed wasn't a problem for the car's excellent cornering.
I have to wonder though, how close were the pedals on the Audi? I can understand the brake and gas being close on a performance car with a standard transmission, but for a luxury car with automatic transmission? I'd expect nothing less than a big fat wide footbrake in the middle of the floor and a tall skinny gas pedal on the far right.
Having driven a fair number of rental cars, it's a PITA to figure out how to activate and deactivate cruise control on most models. Each manufacturer has their own idea how it works, and each model has its own idosyncracies.
The only good common feature is to kind-of shut it off when you touch the brake.
I usually actually read the manual for the cruise control, then I'll only try setting it when I have at least 20 car lengths ahead and behind me of empty highway (well... that's really the only time you should use it)
Maybe they'd be happier if it were called a "Private Patriotic Cyber Security Scan" or "Antiterrorist driving".
But "Wardriving", that's just doubleplusuncuddly.
I drove one, they're a nice alternative for automatic, but you don't put it park or drive like you do with an automatic.
It's more like a computer controlled manual transmission where the shifter is replaced with a joystick and the clutch is removed.
If you try to use them as a manual, you'll find they shift slowly, you can't skip gears easily, but you can use your transmission to slow you down long hills or help you in bad weather.
My point being that it's fully electronic, if the comptuer failed, I wouldn't know how pull it out of gear, and if cruise control was stuck... all I'd have is steering and the parking brake.
Hmmm... does this work for a Tiptronic transmission?
Yay!
I'll stick to Irish Coffee.
Einstein never won a Nobel prize for Relativity, he won it for the photoelectric effect.
...sorry, just had to say it. Prohibition funds organized crime of all sorts.
And amazingly hard to get back into your homecountry without your ID :-)
I kept an encrypted copy of my passport on a password protected webserver for a while. I changed to swapping photocopies of passports with my companions, until we remembered that border guards are F-ing stupid when it comes to rules.. even if you're standing next to the person you're holding the copy of, they'll freak out on you for holding a forgery of somebody's documents.
...I just haven't gotten around to putting my passport back on a webserver.
Please provide references to the connection between the Ozone layer and volcanoes. Here are some to the contrary:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/enviro/EnviroRe publish_496920.htm
http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/search.php?di splay_article=vn504ozoneed