Since most of the ideas floated so far center around diamond (carbon) you'd need to find a source on the moon. It might make more sense to go to a carbon-rich asteriod first, instead of the moon.
The "real scientists" and "actual experts" you refer to are working on something quite different; they usurped the term "nanotechnology," applied it to micro fabrication at reduced scales and thus created much of the current confusion.
In outline:
Drexler came up with an idea (let's call it "eutactic chemistry" for the moment). He called it "nanotehnology".
People doing (or wanting to do) conventional micro-fabrication at nanometer scales liked the term "nanotechnology" and started applying it to what they were doing (which we can call "sub-micro fabrication" for the moment).
SF writers and journalists muddied the waters even more.
The people working on sub-micro fabrication started getting asked all sorts of (to them) goofy questions about what could and couldn't be done with eutactic chemistry. They were told that this Dr. Drexler was claiming all sorts of things that were obviously not possible with sub-micro fabrication. They said he was crazy and didn't know what he was talking about. Of course, everyone was using the same word (nanotechnology) so the misunderstanting wasn't so obvious.
SF writers and journalists muddied the waters even more (lather, rinse, and repeat)
Having met them both (and read a fair amount of their work) I trust Drexler more than Smalley. For one thing, if you try to trace down one of Smalley's points you tend to be given additional combative claims, straw men, argument from authority, argument from incredulity, etc. whereas when you question Drexler he tends to drill down to math & physics, with numbers you can check.
I think the thing that marginalized Drexler was attempting to educate the public, and inviting a diverse range of people to "participate" in the exploration of the idea of nanotechnology, as a way to encourage discussion and foster education. At least, I think that was his goal. But opening the door this wide let a lot of nut cases in, all of whom wanted to be associated with him, and now he's terminally linked with them.
This may be more subtle than you're interested in, but it's one of the oldest special effect in the book: dimensioned values (speed, size, viscocity, acceleration, etc.) to not all scale together. By messing with them, you can make things appear larger/smaller/closer/stickier, etc. than they really are. It's most obvious in old model work where this wasn't done correctly--the minature dam bursts, and the water rushes out at full speed, rather than the proportionaly slower rate it "should" have, and the effect instantly looks fake.
Does that discount the possibility of fraud in this election, or suggest fraud in the last 6 as well?
Ocam's razor would suggest the former, at least if you limit yourself to just the data under consideration.
But when you start looking deeper the water gets muddier. There are accusations of election fraud in Florida dating back at least to 1959 (the Dade County "Metro" vote) and a whole host of election-and-budget related corruption scandals even before that). There have been numerous convictions, but mostly of "bag man" level people. Most of the Watergate burglers (the "cubans") were from Miami. And so on, and so on. There seems to be a fairly well documented pattern of misconduct involving Republicans + Cuba + CIA + mafia + Florida that runs back into antiquity.
So, thinking about it, I'm not so sure what to assume about the last six presidential elections.
How odd. Someone modded the parent post "overrated" even though it (at this point) hasn't had any other moderation.
I suspect who ever did it didn't bother reading the linked article (which details the events to which I refered). In short, they went to pick up copies of the records to which they were granted under their Freedom Of Information Act request. They were instead given newly generated records (the printer had date stampted them). They pointed this out, and were told they would have to come back the next day to get photocopies of the real data. They came back the next day (ariving a bit early) and found the elections officials doing something in the warehouse that involved black plastic garbage bags. They were told the bags were "on the way to the shredder"; it later turned out that these bags contained the official records, which did not match the "copies" they had been given.
Heck, as soon as the first vote that couldn't be saved comes in, the machine should refuse to allow any more voting until the election official rectifies the situation.
Better, it should stop after the last vote that it can save, rather than the first one that it can't.
Not rocket science. But, given that some precincts had these machines and others didn't, possibly election rigging.
After Bev Harris catching the elections officials red-handed disposing of ballots, poll-logs, and other interesting documents on Tuesday, I suspect things may get interesting down there as well. Even more interesting, it's the same people who had -16K votes for Gore in 2000.
Who knows, it may even make the newspapers someday.
The problem w/ dynamically typed languages is that you cannot find bugs with static analysis tools (as easily) because there is a lack of formality in your code (type declarations).
If you don't have the option of aliasing, casting, untagged unions, etc. in the language either, your point may well hold. As it stands, strongly typed languages generally leak (allow the programmer to "get around" the formal specification) more than dynamically typed languages--enough so that there is no net advantage.
Plus, while static typing catches some errors (e.g. string vs. int) it generally doesn't catch others of the same sort (prime int vs. non-prime int) and encourages the programmer to ignore them. Thinking of all such errors as either "value errors" (strong checking) or "interface errors" (duck typing) and dealing with them in one go gives, IMHO, better, more consistant results.
I don't think these electronic voting machine problems should be characterized as trivial "glitches". They are complete failures of the software, since the whole purpose of these machines is to accurately count votes. Would losing a few hundred database records at your company be considered a glitch?
To put a finer point on it, what would you call an "error" in banking software that systematically deposited money into the wrong persons account? A glitch? Or what about a spyware program that consistently failed to report one particular company's spyware?
It isn't as if this software "failed" in the usual sense of the word--which implies that no benifit accrued to anyone. They didn't spit out error messages. They didn't burst into flames, or lock up. Instead, they superficially appeared to work perfectly but in fact were secretly highly biased.
Ever use a calculator? Do you trust the results? Yes you do, because the accuracy of it's results are well known and trusted.
In the same way e-voting will become trusted.
A calculator is a bad example here. Why? Because there isn't much riding on the correct functioning of a calculator, at least not in any a priori descernable way. There's no motive for anyone to cheat.
A better example would be a slot machine, where the user is not the owner or manufacturer and all parties have a considerable interest in the outcome. Do you think all the slot machines that have ever been made are "honest"?
I fear the only way e-voting machines will get trusted is the same way slot machines got trusted--by putting on a big show, passing out boze and cash, and hoping people get destracted by the bright lights.
The problems usually come with ballots that are not clearly marked
But in this case, it came from software systematically giving one party an other party's votes. I don't think this is "voter error" unless the error is in blindly trusting our election officials.
I find it funny that they only talk about Democrat shorts by electronic voting. No mention of Republican.
Not so, unless if by "they" you mean the popular media. There seems to be a strong effort to characterize this as "whining Democrats" which I (as a Republican who values integrity over party politics) find disgusting. Most of the people actively involved in this are concerned not about who won any given election, but about how can we insure that the process is honest. I don't care what party somebody is with, if they cheated I want them nailed.
There's no reason any honest American shouldn't demand that these issues be resolved, and refuse to take "shut up at watch TV" for an answer. Painting this as a partisan issue just makes me more convinced that some people (in politics, and the media) don't want the exit polls/voting machines/vote counting machines looked at too closely.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Another pompous "expert"?
on
Holub on Patterns
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Strongly typed != Statically typed
You are confusing two concepts here. Smalltalk, for example, is dynamically typed yet it doesn't have all the casting about that C does; the typing is strong and dynamic while C's is static and weak/leaky. What gets you into trouble is the weak/leaky typing, not the dynamic typing.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Another pompous "expert"?
on
Holub on Patterns
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think you are missing his point. In ruby, as in SmallTalk, or any other real OO language, "+=" is just a message (in this case, one that is automatically defined when you define "+"), to say that it's better or worse than another semantically equivalent message is just silly.
Yes, they are semantically distinct in Java, but that is a statement about Java, not about OO programming.
The major problem as I see it, at least in the US, is lack of pressure from vigilant voters on decision makers who should know better
But the guy on TV said it was all OK. Those people complaining about the voting machines are just sore losers. At least, that's what I think he said. It was the guy that does the news right before the show with the girl who swears a lot.
The old lever-system machines were notoriously inaccurate.
Furthermore, will they be due to design or manufacturing error (e.g. a gear that consistently slips in one direction on all units, shifting the outcome in the same way, or as in this case, a coding error) or wear-and-tear error (e.g. a gear that wears out on one machine, causing mis-counts or mis-recordings).
It's my understanding that the pull-lever machines had a paper trail of sorts, for use in recounts.
What's more interesting is that the old pull-lever machines had confirmed cases of intentional errors--election rigging. What's even more interesting, Ransom Shoup was convicted in 1979 of conspiracy and obstruction of justice one of these cases. He's the CEO of Advanced Voting Systems, one of the fine voting machine companies that provided equipment used in the most recent election.
I beg to differ. People have fought and died over this very issue. Perhaps you honestly don't care, or perhaps you just wish that others did not. But the fact of the matter is that the importance of honest elections may be the one issue that almost all Americans agree on.
This isn't about some small percentage of ballots being "spoiled" or some nebulous "voter error"; this is about the systematic miscounting of ballots, giving votes cast for one party to another. And it raises an interesting question:
If this is a bug in the software-as-certified, did it happen in every other machine of this make and model--which should have been identical? If not, why not? And how did software with such an eggregious error get certified in the first place? And if the bug wasn't in the software-as-certified, why and how did this machine come to be running uncertified software that systematically miscounts ballots?
These aren't the sort of things that can be explained away as "glitches"--they are examples of either fraud or gross incompetence on someone's part, and given the stakes I'd doubt gross incompetence.
We aren't asking for a perfect system, but we can quite reasonably demand an honest one.
It seemed like propaganda? Normally when someone says that, they mean that someone was trying to convince them of something that wasn't true for nefarious purposes. What do you claim wasn't true? And more importantly, what sort of nefarious purposes to you suppose people have for wanting to make sure that elections are fair, or at least not quietly rigged?
And the point isn't that computers are bad, but that trusting a machine that was programmed by someone you have no reason to trust to do a process that you have no way to verify, when you are not allowed to see either the code or the data, is foolish. When the stakes can be valued in the multiple billions of dollars and some of the third parties have fraud convictions on their records, it's a little worse than just foolish.
It isn't about red team vs. blue team, or sore losers, "desired results" or any of the other nonsense that is being thrown about to cloud the issue. I happen to be a republican, but I'm adamant about wanting this looked into. Why? Because honest matters more to me than "winning."
The way I was raised, if you cheated you didn't win, no matter what the score board says.
I have yet to hear a rational reason why anyone should oppose doing whatever it takes to make sure elections are fair, unless they are either cheaters or suspect that their side cheated and value victory more than integrity. What bothers me is that there are so many people in both parties that seem to fall into the later category.
It isn't a matter of "cool"; it's a matter of reliability. We have a lot of RH 9 boxes, and very few (a half dozen or so) Fedora boxes, but there many more problems with the Fedora Boxes. It may be shiny but that doesn't matter much if it doesn't work correctly.
RH9 -> FC1 was a drop in stability, and FC1 -> FC2 wasn't much of an improvement. I haven't seen enough of FC3 to rate it, but I can understand people's concerns.
Slashdot Mirror
Since most of the ideas floated so far center around diamond (carbon) you'd need to find a source on the moon. It might make more sense to go to a carbon-rich asteriod first, instead of the moon.
--MarkusQ
The "real scientists" and "actual experts" you refer to are working on something quite different; they usurped the term "nanotechnology," applied it to micro fabrication at reduced scales and thus created much of the current confusion.
In outline:
- Drexler came up with an idea (let's call it "eutactic chemistry" for the moment). He called it "nanotehnology".
- People doing (or wanting to do) conventional micro-fabrication at nanometer scales liked the term "nanotechnology" and started applying it to what they were doing (which we can call "sub-micro fabrication" for the moment).
- SF writers and journalists muddied the waters even more.
- The people working on sub-micro fabrication started getting asked all sorts of (to them) goofy questions about what could and couldn't be done with eutactic chemistry. They were told that this Dr. Drexler was claiming all sorts of things that were obviously not possible with sub-micro fabrication. They said he was crazy and didn't know what he was talking about. Of course, everyone was using the same word (nanotechnology) so the misunderstanting wasn't so obvious.
- SF writers and journalists muddied the waters even more (lather, rinse, and repeat)
--MarkusQHaving met them both (and read a fair amount of their work) I trust Drexler more than Smalley. For one thing, if you try to trace down one of Smalley's points you tend to be given additional combative claims, straw men, argument from authority, argument from incredulity, etc. whereas when you question Drexler he tends to drill down to math & physics, with numbers you can check.
I think the thing that marginalized Drexler was attempting to educate the public, and inviting a diverse range of people to "participate" in the exploration of the idea of nanotechnology, as a way to encourage discussion and foster education. At least, I think that was his goal. But opening the door this wide let a lot of nut cases in, all of whom wanted to be associated with him, and now he's terminally linked with them.
With friends like he has, you don't need enemies.
--MarkusQ
For ideas, check out the second chapter of Drexler's Nanosystems, google for Reynolds Number, and look around...
--MarkusQ
Ocam's razor would suggest the former, at least if you limit yourself to just the data under consideration.
But when you start looking deeper the water gets muddier. There are accusations of election fraud in Florida dating back at least to 1959 (the Dade County "Metro" vote) and a whole host of election-and-budget related corruption scandals even before that). There have been numerous convictions, but mostly of "bag man" level people. Most of the Watergate burglers (the "cubans") were from Miami. And so on, and so on. There seems to be a fairly well documented pattern of misconduct involving Republicans + Cuba + CIA + mafia + Florida that runs back into antiquity.
So, thinking about it, I'm not so sure what to assume about the last six presidential elections.
-- MarkusQ
How odd. Someone modded the parent post "overrated" even though it (at this point) hasn't had any other moderation.
I suspect who ever did it didn't bother reading the linked article (which details the events to which I refered). In short, they went to pick up copies of the records to which they were granted under their Freedom Of Information Act request. They were instead given newly generated records (the printer had date stampted them). They pointed this out, and were told they would have to come back the next day to get photocopies of the real data. They came back the next day (ariving a bit early) and found the elections officials doing something in the warehouse that involved black plastic garbage bags. They were told the bags were "on the way to the shredder"; it later turned out that these bags contained the official records, which did not match the "copies" they had been given.
Not that that's suspicious or anything.
-- MarkusQ
Better, it should stop after the last vote that it can save, rather than the first one that it can't.
Not rocket science. But, given that some precincts had these machines and others didn't, possibly election rigging.
-- MarkusQ
After Bev Harris catching the elections officials red-handed disposing of ballots, poll-logs, and other interesting documents on Tuesday, I suspect things may get interesting down there as well. Even more interesting, it's the same people who had -16K votes for Gore in 2000.
Who knows, it may even make the newspapers someday.
-- MarkusQ
If you don't have the option of aliasing, casting, untagged unions, etc. in the language either, your point may well hold. As it stands, strongly typed languages generally leak (allow the programmer to "get around" the formal specification) more than dynamically typed languages--enough so that there is no net advantage.
Plus, while static typing catches some errors (e.g. string vs. int) it generally doesn't catch others of the same sort (prime int vs. non-prime int) and encourages the programmer to ignore them. Thinking of all such errors as either "value errors" (strong checking) or "interface errors" (duck typing) and dealing with them in one go gives, IMHO, better, more consistant results.
-- MarkusQ
To put a finer point on it, what would you call an "error" in banking software that systematically deposited money into the wrong persons account? A glitch? Or what about a spyware program that consistently failed to report one particular company's spyware?
It isn't as if this software "failed" in the usual sense of the word--which implies that no benifit accrued to anyone. They didn't spit out error messages. They didn't burst into flames, or lock up. Instead, they superficially appeared to work perfectly but in fact were secretly highly biased.
-- MarkusQ
A calculator is a bad example here. Why? Because there isn't much riding on the correct functioning of a calculator, at least not in any a priori descernable way. There's no motive for anyone to cheat.
A better example would be a slot machine, where the user is not the owner or manufacturer and all parties have a considerable interest in the outcome. Do you think all the slot machines that have ever been made are "honest"?
I fear the only way e-voting machines will get trusted is the same way slot machines got trusted--by putting on a big show, passing out boze and cash, and hoping people get destracted by the bright lights.
-- MarkusQ
But in this case, it came from software systematically giving one party an other party's votes. I don't think this is "voter error" unless the error is in blindly trusting our election officials.
-- MarkusQ
I find it funny that they only talk about Democrat shorts by electronic voting. No mention of Republican.
Not so, unless if by "they" you mean the popular media. There seems to be a strong effort to characterize this as "whining Democrats" which I (as a Republican who values integrity over party politics) find disgusting. Most of the people actively involved in this are concerned not about who won any given election, but about how can we insure that the process is honest. I don't care what party somebody is with, if they cheated I want them nailed.
There's no reason any honest American shouldn't demand that these issues be resolved, and refuse to take "shut up at watch TV" for an answer. Painting this as a partisan issue just makes me more convinced that some people (in politics, and the media) don't want the exit polls/voting machines/vote counting machines looked at too closely.
-- MarkusQ
Strongly typed != Statically typed
You are confusing two concepts here. Smalltalk, for example, is dynamically typed yet it doesn't have all the casting about that C does; the typing is strong and dynamic while C's is static and weak/leaky. What gets you into trouble is the weak/leaky typing, not the dynamic typing.
-- MarkusQ
I think you are missing his point. In ruby, as in SmallTalk, or any other real OO language, "+=" is just a message (in this case, one that is automatically defined when you define "+"), to say that it's better or worse than another semantically equivalent message is just silly.
Yes, they are semantically distinct in Java, but that is a statement about Java, not about OO programming.
-- MarkusQ
But the guy on TV said it was all OK. Those people complaining about the voting machines are just sore losers. At least, that's what I think he said. It was the guy that does the news right before the show with the girl who swears a lot.
-- Joe Average
What's more interesting is that the old pull-lever machines had confirmed cases of intentional errors--election rigging. What's even more interesting, Ransom Shoup was convicted in 1979 of conspiracy and obstruction of justice one of these cases. He's the CEO of Advanced Voting Systems, one of the fine voting machine companies that provided equipment used in the most recent election.
-- MarkusQ
no one has cared in the past, no one cares now
I beg to differ. People have fought and died over this very issue. Perhaps you honestly don't care, or perhaps you just wish that others did not. But the fact of the matter is that the importance of honest elections may be the one issue that almost all Americans agree on.
-- MarkusQ
This isn't about some small percentage of ballots being "spoiled" or some nebulous "voter error"; this is about the systematic miscounting of ballots, giving votes cast for one party to another. And it raises an interesting question:
If this is a bug in the software-as-certified, did it happen in every other machine of this make and model--which should have been identical? If not, why not? And how did software with such an eggregious error get certified in the first place? And if the bug wasn't in the software-as-certified, why and how did this machine come to be running uncertified software that systematically miscounts ballots?
These aren't the sort of things that can be explained away as "glitches"--they are examples of either fraud or gross incompetence on someone's part, and given the stakes I'd doubt gross incompetence.
We aren't asking for a perfect system, but we can quite reasonably demand an honest one.
-- MarkusQ
I agree with all your points save this one. I'm not expecting 100% accuracy, but I am demanding 100% honesty.
-- MarkusQ
That's not a bug... it's a feature. I think that's what we're all afraid of.
-- MarkusQ
It seemed like propaganda? Normally when someone says that, they mean that someone was trying to convince them of something that wasn't true for nefarious purposes. What do you claim wasn't true? And more importantly, what sort of nefarious purposes to you suppose people have for wanting to make sure that elections are fair, or at least not quietly rigged?
And the point isn't that computers are bad, but that trusting a machine that was programmed by someone you have no reason to trust to do a process that you have no way to verify, when you are not allowed to see either the code or the data, is foolish. When the stakes can be valued in the multiple billions of dollars and some of the third parties have fraud convictions on their records, it's a little worse than just foolish.
-- MarkusQ
It isn't about red team vs. blue team, or sore losers, "desired results" or any of the other nonsense that is being thrown about to cloud the issue. I happen to be a republican, but I'm adamant about wanting this looked into. Why? Because honest matters more to me than "winning."
The way I was raised, if you cheated you didn't win, no matter what the score board says.
I have yet to hear a rational reason why anyone should oppose doing whatever it takes to make sure elections are fair, unless they are either cheaters or suspect that their side cheated and value victory more than integrity. What bothers me is that there are so many people in both parties that seem to fall into the later category.
-- MarkusQ
It isn't a matter of "cool"; it's a matter of reliability. We have a lot of RH 9 boxes, and very few (a half dozen or so) Fedora boxes, but there many more problems with the Fedora Boxes. It may be shiny but that doesn't matter much if it doesn't work correctly.
RH9 -> FC1 was a drop in stability, and FC1 -> FC2 wasn't much of an improvement. I haven't seen enough of FC3 to rate it, but I can understand people's concerns.
-- MarkusQ
IIRC, some of its nifty features were:
- Threads as a way of life, rather than as an afterthought.
- A semantic file system.
- An interesting object model/UI fusion.
- The support of famous SF authors.
I've no idea if these will all be true of the port though.-- MarkusQ