The whole idea of having traceable pieces of paper, physical manifestations of the intentions of actual voters,
has served us well. Anybody can see it. Anybody can understand how it works. Anybody can observe the process in action. These
are good things.
The only issue I have is proportional representation, or the lack thereof. We've had a couple of referenda on the
subject here in B.C., both of which have been defeated by massive FUD campaigns.
I've seen this one up close. Over the last couple of years I've lost a lot of weight, 150 pounds. Nothing
fancy, just counting calories and exercising. It's done wonders for my physical and mental health, and has attracted a lot of attention.
People stop me in the hallways, in the elevators, hell, even in the street.
"How much weight have you lost?"
"How did you do it?"
"You look amazing!"
If losing this much weight means I look amazing, I attract attention, people like me, maybe if I lose some more, I'll look even more amazing. And attract more attention, and
people will like me even more. There's the slippery slope. I've resisted it, partly because I'm not so emotionally fucked up as
to crave that
sort of attention, and partly because excessively thin middle-aged women get a certain "hard" look that I dont like, and don't want for myself.
I'm not toothpick skinny, but am slim and nicely curvy. I'm a woman, dammit, not a stick insect. I like it.
As for photoshopped/anorexic models, I shop at places that use reasonable looking models (and carry clothes in reasonable sizes), and ignore the places that don't. If more people did so,
things would change. The dollar is mightier than the sword.
Actually, this is the algorithm I use. The next time it will be wrong is in 2100, and I don't expect to still be around, nor do I expect
any code I've written to still be running.
I also see nothing complicated with elementary school arithmetic, but I guess that's just me.
North Korea's exports the most to China and imports the most from China and Algeria, according to the
CIA World Factbook.
In Canada we ditched $1000 bills years ago, since the authorities figured the only people who would
need that much cash are up to no good. The biggest cash purchase I've ever made (about $1500) was with a wad of $100 bills.
I have several honeypot email accounts, and one kept getting emails
that suggested it was somehow a member of a French on-line dating/introduction service.
The web site had no way to delete one's account, nor did the proprietors respond to emails.
My solution? I logged in and updated "my" personal information. I got nasty,
every bit of the sickest crap I could think of.
When I studied some Russian as an undergrad I was intrigued by the way that Russian applies the perfect/imperfect
concept to the future, as well as to the past. How does this affect Russians and how they
view the future?
I'm also reminded of how important the subjunctive mood is in Spanish. Not that it affects perceptions of the future (mañana, anybody?),
but the whole cultural thing that even when you actually say "This is so...", the implication is more like "God willing that it be so..."
I've always felt that the biggest issue for space exploration was when a certain U.S. president
changed the requirements. It wasn't enough to send people to the Moon. People were already working on that. It had to be done before
31 December 1969.
This made some approaches more viable than others. As a hurry-up job they didn't care about the post-Apollo
future. Get them to the Moon, get them back, by the end of the decade. Only one way would work in the time available, a man in a can. And that's the way they did it.
With more time they would have done it differently. Part of a system, a unified plan.
It's sort of what you might get if, for example, in 1935 somebody had said "we need an airplane that can carry 400 people,
and we need it now". The resulting airplane might have resembled the Spruce Goose, a brilliant, but
sterile, achievement. They would not have designed a 747, because too much development needed to
happen first.
I've listened to a couple of leap seconds on WWV. I've recorded them too. I think I need to get out more. They sound
like tick...tick...tick...(silence 23:59:59)...(silence 23:59:60)...BEEP (00:00:00)...tick...tick...tick...
I'm a woman. And I shop at H&M. I'm wearing an H&M sweater right now, in fact.
I don't see H&M's virtual models as anything different than the plastic mannequins in the stores.
It would be nice if they were identified as such, that's all. I just had a look at their web page and while some of the models
are obviously synthetic, some look like they might be real women. While they have other issues,
I applaud American Apparel for using realistic-looking women in their ads.
I shop there, too,
My viewpoint is different in another way. I'm tall and leggy, of reasonable weight, and I exercise regularly.
I actually do look like a model. OK, I'm 50, so an older, retired model. Big deal...
I just cancelled my cable. The cable company's subscription model meant I was
spending $$$ every month for half a dozen programs, spread across three different tiers of channels.
Since I can get everything I want over the air, streamed or on iTunes, I pulled the plug.
I supplement this with (mainly overseas) DVDs.
Anna Pihl can arrest me any time she wants.:-)
Unlike others around here, I actually like Pan Am. It passes an important
test, though without ads, the run time is a paltry 40 minutes.
That's an awful lot of ads in an hour. Ouch!
I loved Micro Men. The Beeb show absolutely no interest
in releasing it on DVD, but it's on YouTube. I'm getting really fucking tired of waiting for banner ads to load
on YouTube, but if you want to see it, start here.
Some of the original people have cameos, like Sophie Wilson as the exasperated barmaid toward the end.
Its also patented and extremely easy to find very detailed instructions for the basic processes. You won't have the same level of quality as company produced products as they not only had the patent information, they also had existing years of experience which these guys don't have.
The information however, is not lost and won't be. Thats kind of one of the points/features of the patent system. Why is it that people focus exclusively on the shitty side of patents, then completely forget them when it comes to the actual purpose they exist?
The hard part is what isn't in the patents. The tolerances, the times, the temperatures, fiddly proportions.
Trade secret stuff, in other words.
I have a couple of packs of Polaroid film in the fridge. They should have patent numbers on them somewhere.
What's left of my last box of Type 59 4x5 film is starting to show its age, with lower-than-usual contrast and a green colour
shift. The few sheets I have left of Type 57 4x5 black and white still work OK.
I will sometimes wander around with a screwdriver, because everybody knows there is nothing more terrifying
than a software engineer with a screwdriver.
Just being myself is usually enough to scare the crap out of people.
When I went to Australia a few years ago one of my must sees was The Dish. I got
a good deal on a one-way car rental from Melbourne to Sydney and went exploring.
The people at Parkes showed me a very good time. They were mapping pulsars in the Large Magellanic Cloud when I was there. I
had my first naked-eye view of Alpha Centauri and the Southern Cross from the plane, but had my first decent view of the Eta Carinae
region from St. Kilda Beach in Melbourne. The Magellanic Clouds had to wait; I first saw them from the countryside near Echuca, Victoria.
I stayed a couple of nights in Forbes, NSW, which played Parkes
in The Dish. Parkes itself is all strip malls and fast food joints now, and it would be difficult
to make a movie set in 1969 there. As an astronomer I hit Coonabarabran and drove up to Siding Spring. As a fan of aussie TV I
hit Barwon Heads (Seachange) and saw Goat Island (Water Rats) from one of the harbour ferries.
I spent an afternoon at the public library a few years ago and was amused to see
The Dish (then under construction) as a feature article in Sky & Telescope the month I was born.
Shrug. Probably like spam, where you only need a tiny percentage of suckers, er, customers, to turn a profit.
If I'm home when they call I play dumb and try to waste as much of their time as I can. My answering machine message
is helpful for this. Since the outgoing message is brief, it has long since played before
the telemarketer comes along and they keep saying "Hello? Hello?" in to dead air.
At work we get lots of calls for the company we used to be, which hasn't existed for ten years now. I tell them, bluntly,
that if their database is that far out of date we have nothing to talk about.
A company I used to work for were in the process of developing some new products when
I started. They were very good with lasers, since an early product of theirs was
a storage device that stored a terabyte of data on optical media.
At the time (early 1990s) the market for
storing such vast quantities of data was limited. Worse, the main customers were three-letter agencies
who had security concerns about buying from a non-U.S. company, so they sold the product line to a U.S. company
and went on to other things.
They proceeded to develop some good stuff, but also developed some real crap, and supported it all miserably. Along the way
they fucked me over badly. They were subsequently bought out and asset-stripped. I'm still here. They're not. Serves the bastards
right...:-)
Every plane has to have the maps and approaches for every airport on their route. But it's more than that. They also need all of the maps for every airport near their route, in case they have to do an emergency landing...
This sounds like instrument approach stuff. On every cross-country flight I've done I've taken my charts and
airport sketches with frequencies and stuff (e.g. circuit patterns and altitudes). If I need to divert somewhere, I pull out the
Canada Flight
Supplement and look up what I need.
Every now and then I'll download and play with one of the "alternative" OSs. The box I'm typing this on (a Mac running Lion)
has VMware installs of Haiku,
Syllable
(what AtheOS evolved in to),
Minix, and several flavours of Linux. What next? MVS under
Hercules, perhaps?
Technically, Minix is the most interesting. Haiku is the prettiest.
I'm currently getting mountains of spam exhorting me to remodel my home, buy a new patio deck, buy
business cards, even find a new apartment.
Stuff that looks like junk mail I'd get on paper, except that it's cluttering up my email. Lots comes from
some filth calling themselves Eclipse Media Online, who hope I enjoyed receiving their garbage. Yeah, right.
I actually do like getting email from companies I do business with, everybody from
Mouser to Sephora.
Emails from Barefoot Tess tend to be hard on my bank account.:-)
I was amused to read in the article how the record companies are
increasingly dependent on older releases, since newer releases are distributed through different means that don't
involve them. This begs the usual question, who guaranteed that a particular business model would be
a valid one forever? I wasn't aware of any such guarantees.
They also invoke ILLEGAL DOWNLOADING as part of the reason for their decline
in sales. Gasp. Eek. Yikes. No evidence, of course, but they know
it's happening. For sure. Yup.
The fact that many of the new releases are crap doesn't seem to enter in to it...
My first Linux box was a 486/66 that originally came with 4 MB of RAM, but I upgraded it to 32 MB. It compiled kernel 2.0.36 in a couple of hours. I started my thesis work on it, but got a used Pentium motherboard along the way
and finished it on a Pentium 233MMX. Which I still have.
Slashdot Mirror
What problem are they attempting to solve?
The whole idea of having traceable pieces of paper, physical manifestations of the intentions of actual voters, has served us well. Anybody can see it. Anybody can understand how it works. Anybody can observe the process in action. These are good things.
The only issue I have is proportional representation, or the lack thereof. We've had a couple of referenda on the subject here in B.C., both of which have been defeated by massive FUD campaigns.
...laura
I've seen this one up close. Over the last couple of years I've lost a lot of weight, 150 pounds. Nothing fancy, just counting calories and exercising. It's done wonders for my physical and mental health, and has attracted a lot of attention. People stop me in the hallways, in the elevators, hell, even in the street.
"How much weight have you lost?"
"How did you do it?"
"You look amazing!"
If losing this much weight means I look amazing, I attract attention, people like me, maybe if I lose some more, I'll look even more amazing. And attract more attention, and people will like me even more. There's the slippery slope. I've resisted it, partly because I'm not so emotionally fucked up as to crave that sort of attention, and partly because excessively thin middle-aged women get a certain "hard" look that I dont like, and don't want for myself. I'm not toothpick skinny, but am slim and nicely curvy. I'm a woman, dammit, not a stick insect. I like it.
As for photoshopped/anorexic models, I shop at places that use reasonable looking models (and carry clothes in reasonable sizes), and ignore the places that don't. If more people did so, things would change. The dollar is mightier than the sword.
...laura
if (year % 4 == 0) ?
Actually, this is the algorithm I use. The next time it will be wrong is in 2100, and I don't expect to still be around, nor do I expect any code I've written to still be running.
I also see nothing complicated with elementary school arithmetic, but I guess that's just me.
...laura
I respect Minix for its attempt at doing something different from the monolithic OSs we almost invariably use.
Linux and its ilk are very powerful, but they're not the only way to solve problems. Keep up the good work!
...laura
North Korea's exports the most to China and imports the most from China and Algeria, according to the CIA World Factbook.
In Canada we ditched $1000 bills years ago, since the authorities figured the only people who would need that much cash are up to no good. The biggest cash purchase I've ever made (about $1500) was with a wad of $100 bills.
...laura
I have several honeypot email accounts, and one kept getting emails that suggested it was somehow a member of a French on-line dating/introduction service.
The web site had no way to delete one's account, nor did the proprietors respond to emails.
My solution? I logged in and updated "my" personal information. I got nasty, every bit of the sickest crap I could think of.
They pulled my account within the hour. :-)
...laura
When I studied some Russian as an undergrad I was intrigued by the way that Russian applies the perfect/imperfect concept to the future, as well as to the past. How does this affect Russians and how they view the future?
I'm also reminded of how important the subjunctive mood is in Spanish. Not that it affects perceptions of the future (mañana, anybody?), but the whole cultural thing that even when you actually say "This is so...", the implication is more like "God willing that it be so..."
...laura
I've always felt that the biggest issue for space exploration was when a certain U.S. president changed the requirements. It wasn't enough to send people to the Moon. People were already working on that. It had to be done before 31 December 1969. This made some approaches more viable than others. As a hurry-up job they didn't care about the post-Apollo future. Get them to the Moon, get them back, by the end of the decade. Only one way would work in the time available, a man in a can. And that's the way they did it. With more time they would have done it differently. Part of a system, a unified plan.
It's sort of what you might get if, for example, in 1935 somebody had said "we need an airplane that can carry 400 people, and we need it now". The resulting airplane might have resembled the Spruce Goose, a brilliant, but sterile, achievement. They would not have designed a 747, because too much development needed to happen first.
...laura
We all know the drill by now.
The government will listen intently to everybody, then do exactly what Big Copyright told them to do.
...laura
I've listened to a couple of leap seconds on WWV. I've recorded them too. I think I need to get out more. They sound like tick...tick...tick...(silence 23:59:59)...(silence 23:59:60)...BEEP (00:00:00)...tick...tick...tick...
...laura
I'm a woman. And I shop at H&M. I'm wearing an H&M sweater right now, in fact.
I don't see H&M's virtual models as anything different than the plastic mannequins in the stores. It would be nice if they were identified as such, that's all. I just had a look at their web page and while some of the models are obviously synthetic, some look like they might be real women. While they have other issues, I applaud American Apparel for using realistic-looking women in their ads. I shop there, too,
My viewpoint is different in another way. I'm tall and leggy, of reasonable weight, and I exercise regularly. I actually do look like a model. OK, I'm 50, so an older, retired model. Big deal...
...laura
I just cancelled my cable. The cable company's subscription model meant I was spending $$$ every month for half a dozen programs, spread across three different tiers of channels. Since I can get everything I want over the air, streamed or on iTunes, I pulled the plug. I supplement this with (mainly overseas) DVDs. Anna Pihl can arrest me any time she wants. :-)
Unlike others around here, I actually like Pan Am. It passes an important test, though without ads, the run time is a paltry 40 minutes. That's an awful lot of ads in an hour. Ouch!
...laura
This is the only one I know of, but I hope others will follow. Jacob magazine ads also state that they aren't retouched. Good for them!
...laura
I loved Micro Men. The Beeb show absolutely no interest in releasing it on DVD, but it's on YouTube. I'm getting really fucking tired of waiting for banner ads to load on YouTube, but if you want to see it, start here.
Some of the original people have cameos, like Sophie Wilson as the exasperated barmaid toward the end.
...laura
Its also patented and extremely easy to find very detailed instructions for the basic processes. You won't have the same level of quality as company produced products as they not only had the patent information, they also had existing years of experience which these guys don't have.
The information however, is not lost and won't be. Thats kind of one of the points/features of the patent system. Why is it that people focus exclusively on the shitty side of patents, then completely forget them when it comes to the actual purpose they exist?
The hard part is what isn't in the patents. The tolerances, the times, the temperatures, fiddly proportions. Trade secret stuff, in other words.
I have a couple of packs of Polaroid film in the fridge. They should have patent numbers on them somewhere. What's left of my last box of Type 59 4x5 film is starting to show its age, with lower-than-usual contrast and a green colour shift. The few sheets I have left of Type 57 4x5 black and white still work OK.
...laura
I will sometimes wander around with a screwdriver, because everybody knows there is nothing more terrifying than a software engineer with a screwdriver.
Just being myself is usually enough to scare the crap out of people.
...laura
When I went to Australia a few years ago one of my must sees was The Dish. I got a good deal on a one-way car rental from Melbourne to Sydney and went exploring.
The people at Parkes showed me a very good time. They were mapping pulsars in the Large Magellanic Cloud when I was there. I had my first naked-eye view of Alpha Centauri and the Southern Cross from the plane, but had my first decent view of the Eta Carinae region from St. Kilda Beach in Melbourne. The Magellanic Clouds had to wait; I first saw them from the countryside near Echuca, Victoria.
I stayed a couple of nights in Forbes, NSW, which played Parkes in The Dish. Parkes itself is all strip malls and fast food joints now, and it would be difficult to make a movie set in 1969 there. As an astronomer I hit Coonabarabran and drove up to Siding Spring. As a fan of aussie TV I hit Barwon Heads (Seachange) and saw Goat Island (Water Rats) from one of the harbour ferries.
I spent an afternoon at the public library a few years ago and was amused to see The Dish (then under construction) as a feature article in Sky & Telescope the month I was born.
...laura
Shrug. Probably like spam, where you only need a tiny percentage of suckers, er, customers, to turn a profit.
If I'm home when they call I play dumb and try to waste as much of their time as I can. My answering machine message is helpful for this. Since the outgoing message is brief, it has long since played before the telemarketer comes along and they keep saying "Hello? Hello?" in to dead air.
At work we get lots of calls for the company we used to be, which hasn't existed for ten years now. I tell them, bluntly, that if their database is that far out of date we have nothing to talk about.
...laura
Kaguya did its thing, then they crashed it to avoid creating more space junk. It took some seriously cool pictures and movies.
...laura
A company I used to work for were in the process of developing some new products when I started. They were very good with lasers, since an early product of theirs was a storage device that stored a terabyte of data on optical media. At the time (early 1990s) the market for storing such vast quantities of data was limited. Worse, the main customers were three-letter agencies who had security concerns about buying from a non-U.S. company, so they sold the product line to a U.S. company and went on to other things.
They proceeded to develop some good stuff, but also developed some real crap, and supported it all miserably. Along the way they fucked me over badly. They were subsequently bought out and asset-stripped. I'm still here. They're not. Serves the bastards right... :-)
...laura
Every plane has to have the maps and approaches for every airport on their route. But it's more than that. They also need all of the maps for every airport near their route, in case they have to do an emergency landing...
This sounds like instrument approach stuff. On every cross-country flight I've done I've taken my charts and airport sketches with frequencies and stuff (e.g. circuit patterns and altitudes). If I need to divert somewhere, I pull out the Canada Flight Supplement and look up what I need.
...laura
Every now and then I'll download and play with one of the "alternative" OSs. The box I'm typing this on (a Mac running Lion) has VMware installs of Haiku, Syllable (what AtheOS evolved in to), Minix, and several flavours of Linux. What next? MVS under Hercules, perhaps?
Technically, Minix is the most interesting. Haiku is the prettiest.
...laura
I'm currently getting mountains of spam exhorting me to remodel my home, buy a new patio deck, buy business cards, even find a new apartment. Stuff that looks like junk mail I'd get on paper, except that it's cluttering up my email. Lots comes from some filth calling themselves Eclipse Media Online, who hope I enjoyed receiving their garbage. Yeah, right.
I actually do like getting email from companies I do business with, everybody from Mouser to Sephora. Emails from Barefoot Tess tend to be hard on my bank account. :-)
...laura
I was amused to read in the article how the record companies are increasingly dependent on older releases, since newer releases are distributed through different means that don't involve them. This begs the usual question, who guaranteed that a particular business model would be a valid one forever? I wasn't aware of any such guarantees.
They also invoke ILLEGAL DOWNLOADING as part of the reason for their decline in sales. Gasp. Eek. Yikes. No evidence, of course, but they know it's happening. For sure. Yup.
The fact that many of the new releases are crap doesn't seem to enter in to it...
...laura
My first Linux box was a 486/66 that originally came with 4 MB of RAM, but I upgraded it to 32 MB. It compiled kernel 2.0.36 in a couple of hours. I started my thesis work on it, but got a used Pentium motherboard along the way and finished it on a Pentium 233MMX. Which I still have.
...laura