It wouldn't have "seeped out", but you're on the right track. hydrogen + oxygen + energy = water. and water + energy = hydrogen + oxygen. We understand a lot of the surface chemical processes on this planet. We don't understand all the subterranean processes, but we have an idea.
Non-terrestrial bodies can carry water. Landing on a single comet and saying "no comets have Earth-like water" is like saying "We've only found life on Earth, therefore no other life exists."
I think some people have a very homogenous view of the universe. Once you've sampled a few, you've sampled them all.
Even on the Earth, there isn't a lot of water. This may give a better visualization.
Slashdot's archive policy used to be much longer. I think it was at least 6 months. I'm not sure why they changed it. It may be for the sake of managing comment spam posts. It looks like they're removing them now. At least I haven't noticed posts for knockoff merchandise lately. I still read at -1, since people still downvote perfectly good comments.
Even on Facebook, we sometimes have running conversations for weeks. There, it's all in who your friends are. The ones I friend can usually keep a conversation going. Sometimes well beyond when it should just die.
Well... I worked for a company who dealt with lots of PII (like, info on *every* person in the US). We put together a system to monitor what TOR nodes existed, and compared attacks to TOR nodes. It was significantly used as an attack vector, not only because of the anonymity, but because the attacker could change IPs frequently. Not a single legitimate user used TOR.
We decided it was worth protecting our users, and the PII of everyone in the US, to refuse any traffic from TOR.
Banks doing the same thing does seem like it's in the best interest of the customers.
If you are a legitimate user, and some 3rd party logs into your account and transfers money out, would you prefer the bank to say "Sorry, it was some random person, and we have no way to find or prosecute them. They will likely do it again." or "The intruder was found and prosecuted."
Depending on the theft, you may or may not get your funds back. If someone goes in and transfers funds as you, some banks aren't willing to refund the transaction. Transfers aren't handled like credit card transactions, which are easily refunded.
Even if your bank does give you the stolen money back, that means they've absorbed the cost. So your loss ($1 or $1M) and refund, is now added to the fees, because the bank's operating expenses are higher.
I'd prefer the "inconvenience" of not being allowed to use TOR and other anonymous relays, and not have the bank have a huge and expensive fee schedule to make up for losses that are impossible to recoup from the thieves.
Well, I do still log in occasionally, and comment. I gave up on submitting stories a long time ago, since I've had all of one published ever, and countless other good ones ignored.
Conversations on any story dry up pretty quickly. There's usually a 3 day lifespan at best. So after today, I doubt there will be many (if any) more comments.
It's pointy-clicky-approve, rather than investigation of the story.
Then again, this is a glorified blog, not a real news site. They don't have the staff, nor the need, to do research. They are also linking other sources, so it is up to them to do their fact checking.
People have frequently overestimated what Slashdot is for, and then they complain about it. It's not like the format has changed. It's been like this since I started reading it years ago.
It's just less interesting now, and regulars are no longer regulars. I still check in occasionally, hoping it has improved, but it hasn't.
When would it be ok for them to stop looking? A year and $182.5M later? 10 years and $1,825M later? An infinitely ongoing mission, searching every square foot of the bottom of the Indian Ocean, Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, and Pacific Ocean? MH370's maximum range covers an awful lot of area, including a lot of land.
So 264 days later, and still no answer. If your cost estimate is right, that's $132 million to find nothing. It is ok to just say "we couldn't find it". They did their due diligence and then some.
I presented it as a not-so-plausible scenario. It could be possible to have landed in one piece, so no debris was found. Consider this aircraft which landed itself after the pilot ejected. It's a very doubtful scenario, but not totally impossible.
As others have said, there was likely an electrical fire. It's possible everyone onboard were incapacitated or dead when it hit the water. So they'd be looking for a crash with no loose debris, so nothing to float ashore.
Still, the ocean is a really big place, so they may not ever find anything, even if it did break up when it hit. If debris did wash ashore in Australia, that's still a *huge* area to find relatively little wreckage.
At some point they have to give up search, rescue, and recovery operations.
No, I was just trying to say that they've been searching for months. The chances of finding it are growing slimmer constantly. They should stop now, until further tangible evidence shows up. Like part of the plane washes up on a beach.
Airlines have insurance, which should be enough to carry out reasonable search and rescue (well, recovery at this point) efforts. The reasonable period has long since passed.
Don't misunderstand me, I agree. There should be continued search efforts, funded by the airline that lost it. No government is responsible for the loss of those lives. They aren't responsible for notifying the families of the passengers. It is totally up to Malaysia airlines to fund the continued search. Some financial backing can come from governments that represent the passengers, but it shouldn't be a continuing national effort.
As someone else mentioned, Australia is looking for 239 people, while more than that die domestically every day. Even his perception is wrong. There were 6 citizens of Australia on that flight. By passenger count, China should have the largest interest, with 152 citizens lost. As the airline is based in Malaysia, they could be financially responsible for the continuing search.
I believe it's to the point where it's "lost", and until further evidence shows up (washes ashore), it can safely be left marked as in the "lost at sea". That does happen sometimes. Searching could continue when there is new reliable evidence. Otherwise at this time it is a waste of manpower and resources.
They want closure. They're not likely to get it soon though.
They may not even be looking for floating debris. If the pilot was still in control, he may have made a controlled landing. Like the landing on the Hudson. So it may be a intact aircraft at the bottom of the ocean.
It's doubtful that they'd make a landing like that in open seas, but it's (remotely) possible.
But they are really looking for a really small needle in a fucking huge wet moving haystack.
I just created an account for myself. Apparently men can't see what the competition is like (males interested in women can't search for other males). I picked a few people (friends) who haven't used the site, and they aren't present. I don't see anything on the site that shows how old my account is, but it only has the very basic information that I just provided, so I'd say they hadn't previously auto-created my account from Facebook.
When I "created" mine just now, I did the lost password search using the same email address that I use with Facebook. Apparently they let you create an account that way, if you didn't have one already.
I did notice that they have a one-click account creation, so she could have clicked it in the past to log in, and forgot about it.
I was going to say something like that, but not as well. I've been in interviews where someone is asked about their experience.
"What experience do you have?"
"I spent 6 years at [university] earning my Masters degree."
"Ok, what *work* experience do you have?"
"I worked for 6 years earning my Masters degree."
"Lets try this again. Have you ever been employed and paid for work in this field?"
"We had projects at [university] where we worked on various projects to earn my Masters degree."
I'm not saying that the original post is that kind of person. He says he worked in IT infrastructure for years. I would think he would have been exposed to the development side, at least a little bit.
Unfortunately, with the questions asked, I suspect it may be more like my example above. If he had the necessary experience, he'd already know, as the owner of whatever new company he's starting, the lead dev is going to provide the best answers to those questions. The lead dev is going to have their own opinions and methods that everyone on their team is going to work with. Unless he's going to do the CEO/CTO/CIO/lead dev rolls all at the same time, which isn't going to work as well as he'd hope.
There's no good reason for trying to make your own OBDII reader. There's a good bit to it. Get an ELM327 compatible reader. I strongly recommend the bluetooth versions, not the serial/USB. You end up with some funny problems, like if there is a difference in ground potential between the computer reading it and the OBDII bus, you can fry the reader.
My bluetooth OBDII reader has been great. I plug it in, or have the driver plug it in, and then I can read data from the passenger seat while we're driving. No wires required, except possibly to charge my laptop, tablet, or phone. They only cost a few bucks on eBay, and despite what you may see some brand name purists say, the generic bluetooth ones work fine.
I lost two name brand serial readers from "mysterious" circumstances (i.e., ground potential difference), at over $30/ea. I've only replaced my cheap bluetooth OBDII reader when I misplaced it. Since I spent about $7 on it, that didn't hurt as much. If it fell under a friend's car seat, I won't care if they keep it.
If you read up on the ELM327 chip , you'll see that it uses 2, 3, or 4 pins from the OBD connector for data. The bluetooth ones also use 2 more pins for power. (block diagram, page 1)
That also gives you all the information you need, if you want to code your own interface (like you would with an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
Just to answer everything including the original post... His remote start, door lock, etc, may be possible on some CAN bus vehicles. That's not an OBDII thing. It may be best to do those functions with good old fashion relays. I just finished decomputerizing a 1999 truck (EFI to carb conversion). It's amazing how many miles of wires are no longer necessary, and I still have all the gauges working.:) Actually, they work better than before, which is interesting. Gauges that were jumpy for no good reason are now stable and accurate. I guess there were more than mechanical issues.
We recently put servers up on a new circuit. One of them was a mail server. It immediately refused by Yahoo for the same reasons. I tried everything conceivable to fix it, and nothing helped. That IP wasn't listed anywhere as being blocked, but it was.
We needed a second block of IPs, because we simply ran out of space in the first rather quickly (we were migrating a lot of servers). I switched the primary IP on the machine from the first block to the second, and suddenly those refused emails went through fine.
So, it may be a matter of changing your IPs. Another solution may be to put up a smart host somewhere, and relay all your outgoing mail through it. Doing that, when a provider decides to block it, you can just switch to another smart host rather painlessly.
In sendmail, the.mc file would have this line:
define(`SMART_HOST', `relay.example.com')
In sendmail.conf (if you like to do it manually"
# "Smart" relay host (may be null)
DS relay.example.com
On your relay server, you'd just need to make sure that the IP of your real mail server is authorized to relay through the relay server.
At the speeds commercial aircraft are moving, yes, I could see a pilot mistaking a bird soaring for a RC airplane.
I was in a Cessna, in the pattern to land, I had just a couple seconds to avoid a buzzard. That was, nothing visible to "what's that?" to "oh shit!". I banked hard hard to miss it. The others in the plane were a bit freaked, and happy at the same time. They didn't realize what was happening, but the one who saw the bird barely miss the windshield was very happy I did it. It would have hit his side. That roughly a 5 pound bird with a 65 inch wingspan. That'd be a pretty big drone.
Here is a video of another pilot with a similar incident, except he didn't even have time to evade. He was going a bit faster than I was.
Commercial aircraft are moving much faster, and the pilots are busy doing pesky things like preparing to land. Seeing a bird or drone is nothing more than a glance and a "I saw something".
You can find lots of bird strike videos on YouTube.
With the number of birds (animal kind) in the air versus the number of RC aircraft and drones, statistically I'd say most sightings were birds.
At one job, I was tasked with coordinating the installation of that kind of unit in our fleet vehicles. It wasn't a secret that we were installing them, but we had to install them so they weren't in the way. We were using the "GE Security NavLogix".
The control box was generally zip tied to or near the steering column. It had a combined GPS receiver and cell antenna. The GPS receiver puck was put on the dash, usually in the front left corner. That let us avoid putting extra holes in the body and/or introducing leaks.
New drivers had no problem identifying and defeating them. "Defeating" was usually "accidentally" putting a foil bag over the GPS puck. That way they couldn't get in trouble for speeding.
If a vehicle wasn't tracking properly, half the time it was the control unit failed. The rest was the driver defeating it. We couldn't really tell if an intermittent failure was intentional or not, except when tech came in with foil still over the puck. I didn't really care. I'd just tell the driver "move the foil before someone sees it." We had enough units that were flaky, we couldn't tell which was which.
If you work on your own cars (and friend's cars), then an out of place device is pretty obvious. I can tell you the function of every part. If there was some mystery part, it would definitely get my attention. Trackers require visibility of the sky, and power.
If you want to know how weak GPS can be, play Ingress for a while. My phone mounted up on the dash always has a good lock. The phone of a passenger holding it in their hand frequently loses it's GPS data, or it's not accurate enough to play. Passengers riding in the middle of the vehicle can have a really hard time playing. We've all learned the tricks, like waving our phone by the window to (hopefully) get a location.
A device behind the glove box may be a valid receiver, and may get data service to upload telemetry data. It will probably never get GPS data.
Ya.. I never get the hype, or the demands. People are willing to spend lots of money, and even more time, arguing about what thing you can write a letter with is better.
It's not like that's a growing technology. It puts letters on a page, sometimes with some graphics. I'd like to introduce them to Mr. Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg. He had some ideas in that area.
Yes, voter records are public information. I believe they list your name, address, DOB, your registered party, precinct information, and date you voted. It's been a while since I've personally seen them, so I may have missed something.
Here's the Florida statement on it. They say pretty much what I said.
Slashdot Mirror
It wouldn't have "seeped out", but you're on the right track. hydrogen + oxygen + energy = water. and water + energy = hydrogen + oxygen. We understand a lot of the surface chemical processes on this planet. We don't understand all the subterranean processes, but we have an idea.
Non-terrestrial bodies can carry water. Landing on a single comet and saying "no comets have Earth-like water" is like saying "We've only found life on Earth, therefore no other life exists."
I think some people have a very homogenous view of the universe. Once you've sampled a few, you've sampled them all.
Even on the Earth, there isn't a lot of water. This may give a better visualization.
http://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html
Betteridge's law of headlines. No is always the answer. :)
Slashdot's archive policy used to be much longer. I think it was at least 6 months. I'm not sure why they changed it. It may be for the sake of managing comment spam posts. It looks like they're removing them now. At least I haven't noticed posts for knockoff merchandise lately. I still read at -1, since people still downvote perfectly good comments.
Even on Facebook, we sometimes have running conversations for weeks. There, it's all in who your friends are. The ones I friend can usually keep a conversation going. Sometimes well beyond when it should just die.
Well ... I worked for a company who dealt with lots of PII (like, info on *every* person in the US). We put together a system to monitor what TOR nodes existed, and compared attacks to TOR nodes. It was significantly used as an attack vector, not only because of the anonymity, but because the attacker could change IPs frequently. Not a single legitimate user used TOR.
We decided it was worth protecting our users, and the PII of everyone in the US, to refuse any traffic from TOR.
Banks doing the same thing does seem like it's in the best interest of the customers.
If you are a legitimate user, and some 3rd party logs into your account and transfers money out, would you prefer the bank to say "Sorry, it was some random person, and we have no way to find or prosecute them. They will likely do it again." or "The intruder was found and prosecuted."
Depending on the theft, you may or may not get your funds back. If someone goes in and transfers funds as you, some banks aren't willing to refund the transaction. Transfers aren't handled like credit card transactions, which are easily refunded.
Even if your bank does give you the stolen money back, that means they've absorbed the cost. So your loss ($1 or $1M) and refund, is now added to the fees, because the bank's operating expenses are higher.
I'd prefer the "inconvenience" of not being allowed to use TOR and other anonymous relays, and not have the bank have a huge and expensive fee schedule to make up for losses that are impossible to recoup from the thieves.
Well, I do still log in occasionally, and comment. I gave up on submitting stories a long time ago, since I've had all of one published ever, and countless other good ones ignored.
Conversations on any story dry up pretty quickly. There's usually a 3 day lifespan at best. So after today, I doubt there will be many (if any) more comments.
I can accept that conclusion. :)
It's pointy-clicky-approve, rather than investigation of the story.
Then again, this is a glorified blog, not a real news site. They don't have the staff, nor the need, to do research. They are also linking other sources, so it is up to them to do their fact checking.
People have frequently overestimated what Slashdot is for, and then they complain about it. It's not like the format has changed. It's been like this since I started reading it years ago.
It's just less interesting now, and regulars are no longer regulars. I still check in occasionally, hoping it has improved, but it hasn't.
It's a good thing we haven't invented any sort of robotics.
When would it be ok for them to stop looking? A year and $182.5M later? 10 years and $1,825M later? An infinitely ongoing mission, searching every square foot of the bottom of the Indian Ocean, Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, and Pacific Ocean? MH370's maximum range covers an awful lot of area, including a lot of land.
So 264 days later, and still no answer. If your cost estimate is right, that's $132 million to find nothing. It is ok to just say "we couldn't find it". They did their due diligence and then some.
I presented it as a not-so-plausible scenario. It could be possible to have landed in one piece, so no debris was found. Consider this aircraft which landed itself after the pilot ejected. It's a very doubtful scenario, but not totally impossible.
As others have said, there was likely an electrical fire. It's possible everyone onboard were incapacitated or dead when it hit the water. So they'd be looking for a crash with no loose debris, so nothing to float ashore.
Still, the ocean is a really big place, so they may not ever find anything, even if it did break up when it hit. If debris did wash ashore in Australia, that's still a *huge* area to find relatively little wreckage.
At some point they have to give up search, rescue, and recovery operations.
No, I was just trying to say that they've been searching for months. The chances of finding it are growing slimmer constantly. They should stop now, until further tangible evidence shows up. Like part of the plane washes up on a beach.
Airlines have insurance, which should be enough to carry out reasonable search and rescue (well, recovery at this point) efforts. The reasonable period has long since passed.
Don't misunderstand me, I agree. There should be continued search efforts, funded by the airline that lost it. No government is responsible for the loss of those lives. They aren't responsible for notifying the families of the passengers. It is totally up to Malaysia airlines to fund the continued search. Some financial backing can come from governments that represent the passengers, but it shouldn't be a continuing national effort.
As someone else mentioned, Australia is looking for 239 people, while more than that die domestically every day. Even his perception is wrong. There were 6 citizens of Australia on that flight. By passenger count, China should have the largest interest, with 152 citizens lost. As the airline is based in Malaysia, they could be financially responsible for the continuing search.
I believe it's to the point where it's "lost", and until further evidence shows up (washes ashore), it can safely be left marked as in the "lost at sea". That does happen sometimes. Searching could continue when there is new reliable evidence. Otherwise at this time it is a waste of manpower and resources.
They want closure. They're not likely to get it soon though.
They may not even be looking for floating debris. If the pilot was still in control, he may have made a controlled landing. Like the landing on the Hudson. So it may be a intact aircraft at the bottom of the ocean.
It's doubtful that they'd make a landing like that in open seas, but it's (remotely) possible.
But they are really looking for a really small needle in a fucking huge wet moving haystack.
I just created an account for myself. Apparently men can't see what the competition is like (males interested in women can't search for other males). I picked a few people (friends) who haven't used the site, and they aren't present. I don't see anything on the site that shows how old my account is, but it only has the very basic information that I just provided, so I'd say they hadn't previously auto-created my account from Facebook.
When I "created" mine just now, I did the lost password search using the same email address that I use with Facebook. Apparently they let you create an account that way, if you didn't have one already.
I did notice that they have a one-click account creation, so she could have clicked it in the past to log in, and forgot about it.
So much for a perfectly crappy conspiracy.
The way to make them was shown at Defcon years ago, and there is plenty of information online on how to make a femtocell.
You could make one and use it, but unless you're only intercepting your own phone, you'll likely get some unwelcome attention from law enforcement.
I was going to say something like that, but not as well. I've been in interviews where someone is asked about their experience.
"What experience do you have?"
"I spent 6 years at [university] earning my Masters degree."
"Ok, what *work* experience do you have?"
"I worked for 6 years earning my Masters degree."
"Lets try this again. Have you ever been employed and paid for work in this field?"
"We had projects at [university] where we worked on various projects to earn my Masters degree."
I'm not saying that the original post is that kind of person. He says he worked in IT infrastructure for years. I would think he would have been exposed to the development side, at least a little bit.
Unfortunately, with the questions asked, I suspect it may be more like my example above. If he had the necessary experience, he'd already know, as the owner of whatever new company he's starting, the lead dev is going to provide the best answers to those questions. The lead dev is going to have their own opinions and methods that everyone on their team is going to work with. Unless he's going to do the CEO/CTO/CIO/lead dev rolls all at the same time, which isn't going to work as well as he'd hope.
There's no good reason for trying to make your own OBDII reader. There's a good bit to it. Get an ELM327 compatible reader. I strongly recommend the bluetooth versions, not the serial/USB. You end up with some funny problems, like if there is a difference in ground potential between the computer reading it and the OBDII bus, you can fry the reader.
My bluetooth OBDII reader has been great. I plug it in, or have the driver plug it in, and then I can read data from the passenger seat while we're driving. No wires required, except possibly to charge my laptop, tablet, or phone. They only cost a few bucks on eBay, and despite what you may see some brand name purists say, the generic bluetooth ones work fine.
I lost two name brand serial readers from "mysterious" circumstances (i.e., ground potential difference), at over $30/ea. I've only replaced my cheap bluetooth OBDII reader when I misplaced it. Since I spent about $7 on it, that didn't hurt as much. If it fell under a friend's car seat, I won't care if they keep it.
If you read up on the ELM327 chip , you'll see that it uses 2, 3, or 4 pins from the OBD connector for data. The bluetooth ones also use 2 more pins for power. (block diagram, page 1)
That also gives you all the information you need, if you want to code your own interface (like you would with an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
Just to answer everything including the original post... :) Actually, they work better than before, which is interesting. Gauges that were jumpy for no good reason are now stable and accurate. I guess there were more than mechanical issues.
His remote start, door lock, etc, may be possible on some CAN bus vehicles. That's not an OBDII thing. It may be best to do those functions with good old fashion relays. I just finished decomputerizing a 1999 truck (EFI to carb conversion). It's amazing how many miles of wires are no longer necessary, and I still have all the gauges working.
We recently put servers up on a new circuit. One of them was a mail server. It immediately refused by Yahoo for the same reasons. I tried everything conceivable to fix it, and nothing helped. That IP wasn't listed anywhere as being blocked, but it was.
We needed a second block of IPs, because we simply ran out of space in the first rather quickly (we were migrating a lot of servers). I switched the primary IP on the machine from the first block to the second, and suddenly those refused emails went through fine.
So, it may be a matter of changing your IPs. Another solution may be to put up a smart host somewhere, and relay all your outgoing mail through it. Doing that, when a provider decides to block it, you can just switch to another smart host rather painlessly.
In sendmail, the .mc file would have this line:
In sendmail.conf (if you like to do it manually"
# "Smart" relay host (may be null)
On your relay server, you'd just need to make sure that the IP of your real mail server is authorized to relay through the relay server.
At the speeds commercial aircraft are moving, yes, I could see a pilot mistaking a bird soaring for a RC airplane.
I was in a Cessna, in the pattern to land, I had just a couple seconds to avoid a buzzard. That was, nothing visible to "what's that?" to "oh shit!". I banked hard hard to miss it. The others in the plane were a bit freaked, and happy at the same time. They didn't realize what was happening, but the one who saw the bird barely miss the windshield was very happy I did it. It would have hit his side. That roughly a 5 pound bird with a 65 inch wingspan. That'd be a pretty big drone.
Here is a video of another pilot with a similar incident, except he didn't even have time to evade. He was going a bit faster than I was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--XhLJMzRB4
Commercial aircraft are moving much faster, and the pilots are busy doing pesky things like preparing to land. Seeing a bird or drone is nothing more than a glance and a "I saw something".
You can find lots of bird strike videos on YouTube.
With the number of birds (animal kind) in the air versus the number of RC aircraft and drones, statistically I'd say most sightings were birds.
TV magic doesn't work the same as the real world.
At one job, I was tasked with coordinating the installation of that kind of unit in our fleet vehicles. It wasn't a secret that we were installing them, but we had to install them so they weren't in the way. We were using the "GE Security NavLogix".
The control box was generally zip tied to or near the steering column. It had a combined GPS receiver and cell antenna. The GPS receiver puck was put on the dash, usually in the front left corner. That let us avoid putting extra holes in the body and/or introducing leaks.
New drivers had no problem identifying and defeating them. "Defeating" was usually "accidentally" putting a foil bag over the GPS puck. That way they couldn't get in trouble for speeding.
If a vehicle wasn't tracking properly, half the time it was the control unit failed. The rest was the driver defeating it. We couldn't really tell if an intermittent failure was intentional or not, except when tech came in with foil still over the puck. I didn't really care. I'd just tell the driver "move the foil before someone sees it." We had enough units that were flaky, we couldn't tell which was which.
If you work on your own cars (and friend's cars), then an out of place device is pretty obvious. I can tell you the function of every part. If there was some mystery part, it would definitely get my attention. Trackers require visibility of the sky, and power.
If you want to know how weak GPS can be, play Ingress for a while. My phone mounted up on the dash always has a good lock. The phone of a passenger holding it in their hand frequently loses it's GPS data, or it's not accurate enough to play. Passengers riding in the middle of the vehicle can have a really hard time playing. We've all learned the tricks, like waving our phone by the window to (hopefully) get a location.
A device behind the glove box may be a valid receiver, and may get data service to upload telemetry data. It will probably never get GPS data.
Ya.. I never get the hype, or the demands. People are willing to spend lots of money, and even more time, arguing about what thing you can write a letter with is better.
It's not like that's a growing technology. It puts letters on a page, sometimes with some graphics. I'd like to introduce them to Mr. Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg. He had some ideas in that area.
Yes, voter records are public information. I believe they list your name, address, DOB, your registered party, precinct information, and date you voted. It's been a while since I've personally seen them, so I may have missed something.
Here's the Florida statement on it. They say pretty much what I said.
http://election.dos.state.fl.u...
Sure you can do that. They'll (kind of) accept it too. Reducing your payment amount will result in reduction of your service.
When you pay less than your bill, they'll simply reduce your service to 0.