Here's the problem with any argument that electronic voting can lead to truly massive voter fraud, of the kind that you suggest. All the news organizations take exit polls, and in fact they usually have a good idea as to the winner even before the polls close. If the exit polls massively disagreed with the result, there would be no question that fraud had occurred, especially if there was no paper trail to back up the votes.
Fraud can still occur. It's just that those conducting the fraud have to be extremely careful to avoid detection: only chaning a few dozen votes in areas where the vote is close to begin with, and so on. They always have to stay within statistical margins of error.
Let's forget the term "assault weapon" and focus on "fully automatic", which is better defined.
I was in the Canadian military, and while it's true that military people are not "super human", it's also true that we were kept on an extremely short leash as far as our weapons were concerned. In training, we were never given live ammunition until just before we were expected to shoot. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I was even allowed to fire the weapon in "full auto" mode while on the range. And screwing around on the range is a one-way trip to court martial.
In the normal course of daily life, we weren't even given the weapon's "bolt", a device which contains the firing pin, without which the rifle is a useless piece of metal. Even so, if you left your bolt-less rifle "insecure" (which could be as simple as leaving the room for a minute without locking it up), you would face charges.
I don't agree that the average citizen can be trusted to exercise an equivalent amount of self-control or security over a fully automatic weapon.
I'm 90% kidding. And I have no problem with citizens owning firearms -- my grandfather was a farmer, he needed a rifle to fight off the foxes that threatened his animals.
But seriously, I have never heard anyone explain why a private citizen needs to own a fully automatic assault rifle (other than "it's in the constitution", which is the traditional definition of begging the question).
All the rights have limits; for instance it's not free speech to shout "fire" in a crowded theater. The question is, where does one draw the line with the 2nd amendment? I say it's gone further than it safely should.
Imagine that after St. Louis is transformed into a smoking crater, the FBI director appears on national television and says, "We tried to find out who did this, but it's really, really hard. So we gave up."
I think the second amendment should be interpreted exactly as the founders intended. The government should not restrict the rights of citizens to own as many flintlock muskets as they want.
(Disclaimer: I am a Canadian living in the United States)
Agreed, but the point in the grandparent was that 90% of a city's population would be killed by ebola. I was using SARS as an example to point out that a similarly communicable disease only infected a tiny fraction of the population.
I don't dispute that thousands may have been exposed to SARS, but there are 4+ million people in the GTA. Those are pretty low odds.
The worst strain is airborne via coughing and it has a 90% kill rate.
If that's true, it's about as communicable as SARS, though more deadly. I lived in Toronto through the SARS crisis and it affected me not at all.
Multiplying a death rate by a population is misleading, because people will change their behaviour to avoid people with the disease, up to and including barricading themselves in their homes. In the case of SARS, the disease was brought under control through large-scale preventive quarantines.
Now in the case of smallpox, all bets are off, because the virus itself is airborne, not carried in droplets. You only have to pass within a few meters of a sick person to get infected.
We have enough WMD to destroy the earth 1000 times over, that's PLENTY to wipe out 100% of life (not including cockroaches I guess..).
I'm all for confronting the realities of WMD, but I don't like misleading statistics that are meant to frighten.
Statistics of this kind take the known casualties from Hiroshima and Nagasaki "per kiloton", and then multiply them by the number of kilotons in the Earth's arsenal. Thus, the only way we could kill all the humans on Earth 1000 times over is if they all agreed to gather together in one place and stay exposed.
Nuclear weapons are not as mystically destructive as people think. Yes, in a massive nuclear exchange, most large urban areas would be decimated, and fallout would claim many more. But it's relatively simple to protect yourself against blast and fallout, as long as you have a bit of warning and the bomb doesn't fall on top of your head.
And as for the article, none of the pathogens that were mentioned, such as Ebola, Anthrax, or Hantavirus, are massively contagious.
Ironically, I think people are so frightened of the exaggerated destructive power of these weapons that they try not to think about them and hope they go away. I think more people need to confront their reality, and scare tactics don't help.
You have the right point but the wrong explanation. Gucci does not want to endorse the fake Chinese watch, in part because the fake Chinese watch is likely of poor quality and would reflect badly on them, hence reducing the value inherent in their name.
Similarly, if Mozilla-branded merchandise turned out to be crap (or, in the Debian controversy, if the Debian folks accidentally distributed broken software under the "Firefox" name), the good will associated with the Mozilla brand would be reduced.
To put this in starker terms, under the GPL there is nothing preventing Microsoft from distributing a broken version of Linux. However, they can't call it Linux, because the trademark is owned by Linus Torvalds. This is a good thing.
And to respond to somebody above who said something to the effect of, "if you think derivative works could reflect badly on you, then you're not right for free software": firstly, sticking an icon on a T-shirt is not really a derivative work of software; and secondly, you can't throw out a crap T-shirt and get a free replacement from the official source, because they're not free. Apples and oranges.
Why don't we go back to the tried-and-true membrane keyboard? Oh yeah, because they suck.
Maybe keyboards should be like toasters: there should be a hatch on the bottom so that you can open them and shake out all the crud and debris that accumulate.
ps. Speaking of membrane keyboards, did anyone out there own a Timex Sinclair 1000? My first computer... 16K RAM and black and white only... those were the days.
The fundamentals have not changed between WW2 and now, and a draft was certainly needed to prosecute that "good war".
The biggest lesson of every military conflict since the first Gulf War is that manpower is almost irrelevant in the face of technology. Remember, in 1991, Iraq had one of the largest and most battle-experienced armies in the middle East. Yet they got spanked by a much smaller force of tecnologically superior Americans.
The 1999 war between NATO and Yugoslavia even put an end to the conventional wisdom that invasion by ground forces is required for victory.
In fact the trend in warfare is to involve as few humans as possible. The second Iraq war was the first large-scale use of unmanned drones in combat; some suggest that the current F-22 will be the last manned fighter jet, and that in the future all military aircraft will be robotic.
I can imagine a future hypothetical conflict between large, technologically equal adversaries, fought entirely by unmanned vehicles over land, sea, and air. Whichever side's unmanned vehicles ran out first would likely be forced to surrender, given the alternative of certain and pointless death for any human sent to combat the machines.
True, but the GG is appointed and hence not directly accountable to the people, either.
Also, if it ever did happen, a constitutional crisis would be almost guaranteed. In Canada, the nearest analog is the "King-Byng" affair of 1925, when in the midst of scandal the GG (Byng) refused to dissolve parliament at the request of the PM (Mackenzie King), and instead appointed Arthur Meighen as PM.
Something like this actually did happen in Australia in 1975. During a deadlock between the PM and the Senate, the GG intervened by unilaterally dismissing the PM, appointing the Senate leader in his place, and calling immediate elections. The dismissed PM was furious, and there were immediate angry demonstrations against the GG. Parliamentary sessions passed bills in confusion immediately afterward as nobody seemed to know who was in charge.
No GG would attempt to use this power except in the most egregious circumstances, by which time it might be too late anyway.
The main difference is that the Prime Minister of Canada has an enormous amount of power (proportionately) compared to the President of the USA. Consider, the PM:
- can appoint and dismiss cabinet members without parliamentary approval - can appoint federal judges, including supreme court justices, without approval - can appoint senators without approval - cannot be removed or impeached by parliament without also causing the collapse of the government
In a majority government situation (which is the rule, not the exception), the PM and cabinet have enough clout to pass virtually any bill that they see fit, without amendment.
I'm not so concerned about the PM being bought. I'm concerned about those around him having a hell of a lot of power, and being basically unaccountable to the public between elections. This is a recurring problem in Canadian government (remember Mulroney?).
Usually the dB refers to the signal power to noise power ratio (SNR) -- noise power is usually proportional to the noise variance. Thus, an SNR of 0 dB means that the signal power and the noise power is the same.
Ability to accurately distinguish bits in a communication system decreases with data rate (crudely speaking, this is because you get less time to "look" at each bit and distinguish it from noise.) For a given communication system, we have an acceptable probability of bit error, say 10^-6. Given this probability, usually we try to find the minimum SNR for a given data rate so that the criterion is achieved. To say that one system has 3 dB gain over another is to say that 3dB is the difference in SNR required to achieve the required probability of error. Since noise power is usually normalized, this means the difference in signal power is 3 dB.
Of course, you can look at the problem from the other direction and say, for fixed SNR, what is the difference in data rate? In this sense, SNR and data rate are interchangeable.
I don't know if they are being used right now (I think not), but what you're describing happens for a different reason. Digitized speech in a cell phone is passed through a lossy compression algorithm which is optimized for voice as opposed to general sounds (they're called "vocoders"). As such they can achieve huge gains in compression over general lossy compression, though music will always sound like crap.
Briefly, the big problem in data communication is achieving the Shannon limit, which is the maximum theoretical data rate at which information can be transmitted with arbitrarily low probability of error. Shannon proved his result in 1948, but until the Turbo guys, nobody knew how to achieve it.
The main problem is that optimal decoding of any non-trivial code is NP-hard, which has been known for about 30 years now (i.e., the only known algorithm has exponential complexity in the code length). The Turbo breakthrough was to show that a suboptimal decoder with O(n) complexity for code length n could nonetheless achieve excellent results. This is the so-called "Turbo principle".
There is an even "newer" class of codes called Low-Density Parity-Check Codes that can beat turbo codes. Turbo codes have a small gap to the Shannon limit, and these new codes can potentially eliminate the gap. Small gains are a big deal; the rule of thumb is that 1 dB of gain is equal to a million dollars of annual revenue for a wireless provider.
The twist is that these LDPC codes were actually proposed in a 1963 PhD thesis, but were disregarded as beyond the computational abilities of the time. They were only "rediscovered" in 1996, after the Turbo code furore.
Re:I wonder who will play homer?
on
The Simpsons Movie
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I'm sympathetic to the prof, especially if he's new faculty. This could be the only exposure that his potential students get to him. A determined effort to slander his teaching ability -- when very people know him anyway -- could literally ruin his career, as tenure decisions are made in part on teaching ability.
I can't think of a scenario in which someone's career could be ruined by a Slashdot troll.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the problem with any argument that electronic voting can lead to truly massive voter fraud, of the kind that you suggest. All the news organizations take exit polls, and in fact they usually have a good idea as to the winner even before the polls close. If the exit polls massively disagreed with the result, there would be no question that fraud had occurred, especially if there was no paper trail to back up the votes.
Fraud can still occur. It's just that those conducting the fraud have to be extremely careful to avoid detection: only chaning a few dozen votes in areas where the vote is close to begin with, and so on. They always have to stay within statistical margins of error.
Let's forget the term "assault weapon" and focus on "fully automatic", which is better defined.
I was in the Canadian military, and while it's true that military people are not "super human", it's also true that we were kept on an extremely short leash as far as our weapons were concerned. In training, we were never given live ammunition until just before we were expected to shoot. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I was even allowed to fire the weapon in "full auto" mode while on the range. And screwing around on the range is a one-way trip to court martial.
In the normal course of daily life, we weren't even given the weapon's "bolt", a device which contains the firing pin, without which the rifle is a useless piece of metal. Even so, if you left your bolt-less rifle "insecure" (which could be as simple as leaving the room for a minute without locking it up), you would face charges.
I don't agree that the average citizen can be trusted to exercise an equivalent amount of self-control or security over a fully automatic weapon.
I'm 90% kidding. And I have no problem with citizens owning firearms -- my grandfather was a farmer, he needed a rifle to fight off the foxes that threatened his animals.
But seriously, I have never heard anyone explain why a private citizen needs to own a fully automatic assault rifle (other than "it's in the constitution", which is the traditional definition of begging the question).
All the rights have limits; for instance it's not free speech to shout "fire" in a crowded theater. The question is, where does one draw the line with the 2nd amendment? I say it's gone further than it safely should.
Well, it's a start, right? Better than zero.
Imagine that after St. Louis is transformed into a smoking crater, the FBI director appears on national television and says, "We tried to find out who did this, but it's really, really hard. So we gave up."
I think the second amendment should be interpreted exactly as the founders intended. The government should not restrict the rights of citizens to own as many flintlock muskets as they want.
(Disclaimer: I am a Canadian living in the United States)
Yeah, that's rich. They have a log of everyone who received a copy of their cracked software. Guess who gets that information in a deal with the Feds?
Actually, I think this is pretty clever.
Warning - We think this file is a virus. Don't open it unless you are expecting this file and know what it is.
[checkbox] Don't show me this message again
Agreed, but the point in the grandparent was that 90% of a city's population would be killed by ebola. I was using SARS as an example to point out that a similarly communicable disease only infected a tiny fraction of the population.
I don't dispute that thousands may have been exposed to SARS, but there are 4+ million people in the GTA. Those are pretty low odds.
The worst strain is airborne via coughing and it has a 90% kill rate.
If that's true, it's about as communicable as SARS, though more deadly. I lived in Toronto through the SARS crisis and it affected me not at all.
Multiplying a death rate by a population is misleading, because people will change their behaviour to avoid people with the disease, up to and including barricading themselves in their homes. In the case of SARS, the disease was brought under control through large-scale preventive quarantines.
Now in the case of smallpox, all bets are off, because the virus itself is airborne, not carried in droplets. You only have to pass within a few meters of a sick person to get infected.
We have enough WMD to destroy the earth 1000 times over, that's PLENTY to wipe out 100% of life (not including cockroaches I guess..).
I'm all for confronting the realities of WMD, but I don't like misleading statistics that are meant to frighten.
Statistics of this kind take the known casualties from Hiroshima and Nagasaki "per kiloton", and then multiply them by the number of kilotons in the Earth's arsenal. Thus, the only way we could kill all the humans on Earth 1000 times over is if they all agreed to gather together in one place and stay exposed.
Nuclear weapons are not as mystically destructive as people think. Yes, in a massive nuclear exchange, most large urban areas would be decimated, and fallout would claim many more. But it's relatively simple to protect yourself against blast and fallout, as long as you have a bit of warning and the bomb doesn't fall on top of your head.
And as for the article, none of the pathogens that were mentioned, such as Ebola, Anthrax, or Hantavirus, are massively contagious.
Ironically, I think people are so frightened of the exaggerated destructive power of these weapons that they try not to think about them and hope they go away. I think more people need to confront their reality, and scare tactics don't help.
You have the right point but the wrong explanation. Gucci does not want to endorse the fake Chinese watch, in part because the fake Chinese watch is likely of poor quality and would reflect badly on them, hence reducing the value inherent in their name.
Similarly, if Mozilla-branded merchandise turned out to be crap (or, in the Debian controversy, if the Debian folks accidentally distributed broken software under the "Firefox" name), the good will associated with the Mozilla brand would be reduced.
To put this in starker terms, under the GPL there is nothing preventing Microsoft from distributing a broken version of Linux. However, they can't call it Linux, because the trademark is owned by Linus Torvalds. This is a good thing.
And to respond to somebody above who said something to the effect of, "if you think derivative works could reflect badly on you, then you're not right for free software": firstly, sticking an icon on a T-shirt is not really a derivative work of software; and secondly, you can't throw out a crap T-shirt and get a free replacement from the official source, because they're not free. Apples and oranges.
Why don't we go back to the tried-and-true membrane keyboard? Oh yeah, because they suck.
... 16K RAM and black and white only ... those were the days.
Maybe keyboards should be like toasters: there should be a hatch on the bottom so that you can open them and shake out all the crud and debris that accumulate.
ps. Speaking of membrane keyboards, did anyone out there own a Timex Sinclair 1000? My first computer
You can only call interplanetary dibs if you can see the planet as you call it. Just like calling shotgun.
The fundamentals have not changed between WW2 and now, and a draft was certainly needed to prosecute that "good war".
The biggest lesson of every military conflict since the first Gulf War is that manpower is almost irrelevant in the face of technology. Remember, in 1991, Iraq had one of the largest and most battle-experienced armies in the middle East. Yet they got spanked by a much smaller force of tecnologically superior Americans.
The 1999 war between NATO and Yugoslavia even put an end to the conventional wisdom that invasion by ground forces is required for victory.
In fact the trend in warfare is to involve as few humans as possible. The second Iraq war was the first large-scale use of unmanned drones in combat; some suggest that the current F-22 will be the last manned fighter jet, and that in the future all military aircraft will be robotic.
I can imagine a future hypothetical conflict between large, technologically equal adversaries, fought entirely by unmanned vehicles over land, sea, and air. Whichever side's unmanned vehicles ran out first would likely be forced to surrender, given the alternative of certain and pointless death for any human sent to combat the machines.
True, but the GG is appointed and hence not directly accountable to the people, either.
Also, if it ever did happen, a constitutional crisis would be almost guaranteed. In Canada, the nearest analog is the "King-Byng" affair of 1925, when in the midst of scandal the GG (Byng) refused to dissolve parliament at the request of the PM (Mackenzie King), and instead appointed Arthur Meighen as PM.
Something like this actually did happen in Australia in 1975. During a deadlock between the PM and the Senate, the GG intervened by unilaterally dismissing the PM, appointing the Senate leader in his place, and calling immediate elections. The dismissed PM was furious, and there were immediate angry demonstrations against the GG. Parliamentary sessions passed bills in confusion immediately afterward as nobody seemed to know who was in charge.
No GG would attempt to use this power except in the most egregious circumstances, by which time it might be too late anyway.
I mean involuntarily removed. The PM can certainly resign/retire voluntarily if he wants, as did Chretien.
The main difference is that the Prime Minister of Canada has an enormous amount of power (proportionately) compared to the President of the USA. Consider, the PM:
- can appoint and dismiss cabinet members without parliamentary approval
- can appoint federal judges, including supreme court justices, without approval
- can appoint senators without approval
- cannot be removed or impeached by parliament without also causing the collapse of the government
In a majority government situation (which is the rule, not the exception), the PM and cabinet have enough clout to pass virtually any bill that they see fit, without amendment.
I'm not so concerned about the PM being bought. I'm concerned about those around him having a hell of a lot of power, and being basically unaccountable to the public between elections. This is a recurring problem in Canadian government (remember Mulroney?).
Usually the dB refers to the signal power to noise power ratio (SNR) -- noise power is usually proportional to the noise variance. Thus, an SNR of 0 dB means that the signal power and the noise power is the same.
Ability to accurately distinguish bits in a communication system decreases with data rate (crudely speaking, this is because you get less time to "look" at each bit and distinguish it from noise.) For a given communication system, we have an acceptable probability of bit error, say 10^-6. Given this probability, usually we try to find the minimum SNR for a given data rate so that the criterion is achieved. To say that one system has 3 dB gain over another is to say that 3dB is the difference in SNR required to achieve the required probability of error. Since noise power is usually normalized, this means the difference in signal power is 3 dB.
Of course, you can look at the problem from the other direction and say, for fixed SNR, what is the difference in data rate? In this sense, SNR and data rate are interchangeable.
I don't know if they are being used right now (I think not), but what you're describing happens for a different reason. Digitized speech in a cell phone is passed through a lossy compression algorithm which is optimized for voice as opposed to general sounds (they're called "vocoders"). As such they can achieve huge gains in compression over general lossy compression, though music will always sound like crap.
Hey, I just finished my PhD on LDPC codes. Where do you work?
Briefly, the big problem in data communication is achieving the Shannon limit, which is the maximum theoretical data rate at which information can be transmitted with arbitrarily low probability of error. Shannon proved his result in 1948, but until the Turbo guys, nobody knew how to achieve it.
The main problem is that optimal decoding of any non-trivial code is NP-hard, which has been known for about 30 years now (i.e., the only known algorithm has exponential complexity in the code length). The Turbo breakthrough was to show that a suboptimal decoder with O(n) complexity for code length n could nonetheless achieve excellent results. This is the so-called "Turbo principle".
There is an even "newer" class of codes called Low-Density Parity-Check Codes that can beat turbo codes. Turbo codes have a small gap to the Shannon limit, and these new codes can potentially eliminate the gap. Small gains are a big deal; the rule of thumb is that 1 dB of gain is equal to a million dollars of annual revenue for a wireless provider.
The twist is that these LDPC codes were actually proposed in a 1963 PhD thesis, but were disregarded as beyond the computational abilities of the time. They were only "rediscovered" in 1996, after the Turbo code furore.
Of course the "purists" will want Dennis Franz as Homer, because he already played Homer, and Neil Patrick Harris as Bart, for the same reason.
Only half right. We have to find a way to make Linux and/or open source the shining alternative.
How do you know the comments are accurate?
To say someone is schizophrenic when you are not an expert in the field is libelous, in any case.
I'm sympathetic to the prof, especially if he's new faculty. This could be the only exposure that his potential students get to him. A determined effort to slander his teaching ability -- when very people know him anyway -- could literally ruin his career, as tenure decisions are made in part on teaching ability.
I can't think of a scenario in which someone's career could be ruined by a Slashdot troll.