As these advances find their way into an increasing variety of devices, the petascale computer will shrink from a dinosaur to a teleputer - the successor to today's handhelds - in your ear or in your signal path.
Technological prognostications are almost always wrong in two directions.
1) The ability of current tech to scale up indefinitely is always eventually proven false. For six decades new aircraft designed increased their average crusing speed from about 100 mph in 1920 to 700 mph in the 70's. Then they stopped getting faster, and have been at just under 600 mph ever since. The jump to 700 mph in the '70's was with the introduction of the Concord, which also gave the average crusing speed a huge variance. No one knows what the "speed of sound" for computing will be, and as always it will be a matter of economics rather than pure technological possibility, but what we do know is that it is out there somewhere, and eventually we will hit it, although possibly not for some decades yet.
2) The uses to which tech is put, the directions and consequences of the speed and size improvements that do happen, are always almost completely wrong, as are the costs. As Asimov once said, the challenge is not to predict the automobile but the parking problem. Lots of people predicted some of the social consequences of the 'Net, but I don't think anyone predicted spam. These sorts of things may create limits that come into play earlier than other economic limits (and not incidently, create major opportunities for companies with solutions able to overcome them.)
As near as I can tell, the "parking problem" of the brave new world of ubiquitous interconnected computing, is the identity issue. Computers deal with proxies for everything. Unlike human beings, they are a realization of Plato's Cave, dealing only with the numerical shadows of reality. And one shadow can be made to look very much like another.
Recent fMRI developmental studies indicate that "smarter" people (usually as measured by grades, IIRC) tend to have thinner cortexes. The handwaving explanation is that we are better organized, internally if not externally--my desk at the moment includes a stack of unlabelled blank CDs, a dead monitor, a rock, sheafs of loose paper going back almost a year, and a cat.
Seriously, we managed to "defeat" a 3rd world army that had been under economic sanctions for years.
And you did a crappy job of that. Rumsfeld is on record as saying he expected the Iraqi army to stand and fight, so they could be destroyed. But they went and did the damned ungentlemanly thing of "melting away into the country" (to use Rumsfeld's own description) instead, and went on to form the backbone of the insurgency.
This is right up there with the British navy's plan to wipe out the (much smaller) German navy in a close fleet action during WWI. The damned ungentlemanly Germans refused to co-operate in coming to join a battle that they knew perfectly well they would lose!
Can you imagine the downright un-American attitude the Iraqi army must have had to fail to co-operate with Rumsfeld's fantasies?
So since we already dimension Oil rigs and equipment for mammoth storms, freak waves and gas explosions (happening at the same time for your pleasure), I would guess it wouldn't be a problem to build one of these...technical at least. Economical I don't know
Oil platforms are mostly designed to either a) stand still or b) float freely. Either of these is technically much simpler than a system designed to stand mostly still but have really big moving parts. If you look at the diagram accompanying the article there it looks like the whole thing is supported by a couple of peirs through a "spherical roller bearing" sealed with a "spherical freedom seal". So basically the whole thing is one big moving part, no doubt subject to some pretty exciting modes of failure.
One of the ongoing issues with wave power systems (and for that matter oil rigs) is dealing with extreme wave heights, and this does not give one a great feeling about that.
Also, the system appears to depend on a very high maintenance cycle: fill the core with 100 C water once a month, which is used to heat the salt water under vacuum to boil it. So it's not like these things can be just left alone to do their thing.
Finally, I can't see any through-fittings for salt water intake or brine/freshwater outlet in the figures, but I bet the fresh water coupling is pretty challenging too.
Overall, it's an interesting idea, but there are clearly lots of technical challenges still ahead.
they don't have to let you ever see a court room.. they can hold you without trial or charges for aslong as they fucking want.. the judicial branch can't do shit because that law isn't hitting the court room
On my reading of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, as signed into law by the president, this is only a true statement if the "you" in question is not an American. The original versions suspended habeas corpus for everyone, but some senators balked, although applying the law only to aliens makes it no less unconstitutional. The American constitution says "Congress shall make no law suspending habeas corpus" and does not have any footnotes about "except for foreigners and Americans we don't like."
But for now "you" are safe if you're an American. I'm not, so I won't be setting foot in the U.S. while this act is in force. It is just too dangerous. And I would strongly encourage all foreigners, especially those with strong technical knowledge, to leave the United States as soon as convenient. There probably isn't a huge rush, but prudence dictates a shift to someplace that does not have tens of thousands of people just like you illegally incarcerated in secret prisons around the world.
Unless of course you believe that the government, being an orginization made up of perfectly ordinary and completely falible humans, never makes mistakes.
Remember FL in 2000? Paper ballots... are those punched ALL the way through or not?
Some A are B does not imply all A are B. There are many good books on elementary logic that can help you out if you do not understand this.
What you are pointing out is that it is possible to have badly-implemented paper-based voting systems.
What you need to prove is that it is possible to have electronic systems that are not subject to absolutely trivial tampering.
Personally, I'd like to see a touch-screen voting system that prints a completed ballot after the user has made their selection and that the voter then looks at to verify, and then walks over to a reader which reads the ballot and records the result. Election law should specify the standard form of the ballot, and should mandate that different companies make the touch-screen system and the ballot reading system used at each polling station. Both the touch-screen system and the ballot counting system would maintain independent totals, and of course the paper ballot would be preserved for hand recounts, which would take place automatically if the touch-screen system and the ballot reading system differed by more than one vote.
The first purpose of electronic voting systems should be the use of technology to introduce more redundancy into the system to create more tamper-proof ballots. Any use of an electronic vote-counter that does not have a paper trail means that simply flipping a few bits can change the outcome of an election, and it is all happening inside a single black box where no one can see or verify what is happening. That's not democracy.
Microsoft has all kinds of SW patents in its portfolio. MS will sue all the other distros than Novell's for patent infringement, driving everyone to SuSE.
The third defense is the GPL v3, which is looking kinda prescient right now.
On the other hand, it would be fun to fork the suse distro, which is certainly permitted under GPL v2, and wait for MS to go after it. If they do, Novell is guilty of a simple and straightforward GPL v2 violation, and suse becomes a dead letter.
science says life should be plentiful and easy and populating the stars ought to be possible at significant fractions of the speed of light, so where is the life that is doing so?
Capabilities that are easy to evolve do so many times. The eye, wings, fins... all of these have evolved again and again and again. They have evolved independently in different orders--the wings of birds have nothing to do with the wings of bats or bugs, the fins of cetaceans have nothing to do with the fins of fishes.
In contrast to this, the kind of intelligence that can build spaceships has evolved exactly once, and it appears to have been something of an accident, even by evolutionary standards. Anatomically modern humans existed a hundred thousand years ago (and therefore probably much earlier than than that, because the odds of the earliest evidence being contemporaneous with the earliest individuals is staggeringly small.) But forty thousand years ago the complexity of tools took a sharp jump, coupled with evidence of rapidly increasing cultural and technological complexity.
We know evolution is an elaborative process, and that organisms make use of systems evolved under one set of pressures to adapt to different pressures. So it is plausible that our brains were evolved to solve simple problems of living in a tool-using group in a harsh and unstable climate, and quite by accident it happens that any brain that is sufficient to solve those problems is also sufficient to build spacecraft, in the same way that any bird's beak that is dexterous enough to glean bugs off bark is also dexterous enough to use a bit of bent wire to do any of the things that birds now use bits of bent wire for.
If this is the case, then it is plausible that spaceship-building intelligence is fantasitically rare, in contrast to Fermi's assumption that life pretty much always leads to intelligence.
now hippies, greenies, and environmental scientists are also going to take away our freedoms by reducing greenhouse emissions, raising vehicle fuel efficiency, and sequestering carbon!?
The spectre raised in the article that action on global warming will lead to world government is trivially false. For example, despite active opposition at the federal level, many U.S. states have an excellent record on green house gas emissions, and more are falling into line. This proves that many small political entities can actually be more capable of dealing with this issue than one big, slow-moving and corrupt one.
People who make the huge and unjustified leap from "this problem exists" to "this is the One True Solution to this problem and I must force everyone to adopt it at gunpoint" are just nuts. As any engineer knows, problems constrain but do not determine solutions. Values determine solutions.
He has invested millions into alternative and green energy on several different initiatives plus reauthorized initiatives started under previous administrations.
And he has spent (not invested) tens or hundreds of billions on a wasteful and stupid war, rather than investing (not spending) those same tens or hundreds of billions in serious alternative energy research, including advanced nukes, actually clean (i.e. fully sequestered) coal, algal biodeisel, solar, wind, tide, etc.
The difference in spending on war vs investment in America's energy future is so many orders of magnitude that pointing out the millions he has invested in alternative energy is like a doctor pointing out that he has cured a cancer patient's hangnail.
Admittedly, on the flip side, "global warming is going to kill the cute cuddly polar bears" is about the least honest, to say nothing of least relevant, argument one can make in this arena. Polar bears have been around for 250,000 years or more. 250,000 years is the oldest current age estimate of the species, and there are excellent statistical arguments to suggest that our first-pass age estimates are always gross under-estimates, as evidenced by the routine discovery of fossil forms that double the earliest age estimate for a species.
So it is certain that polar bears have experienced far greater climate fluxuaions in the past, not least of which would be the past ice age, in which there was no open water in the Arctic. But polar bears are absolutely dependent on open water for their current way of life, which involves hunting seals. Yet somehow polar bears survived and adapted, including adaptation to the catastrophic changes of the Young Dryas, which were far more violent that anything projected by current climate models for the foreseeable future.
So I say, let the polar bears take care of themselves. I'm not worried about the polar bears. I'm worried about modern industrial civilization, which is a hell of lot more sensitive to changes in global climate than any biological system on Earth.
Remember, it only has to do with living long enough to have lots of babies. After that, you don't really matter to evolution.
That is probably not true for humans.
Humans are creatures of culture: accumulated, collectively held knowledge. The people who transmit culture are elders--in modern society, grandparents. They remember how they raised you, and when you have kids they provide guidance that effectively transmits traditions, habits and beliefs across generations. You, on the other hand, don't remember how you were raised, certainly not at a very early age.
This may explain why humans live twice as long as they "should". One way of normalizing lifespan across species is to measure it in heartbeats. All mammals except humans live about one billion heartbeats. The range is around 0.7 to 1.1 billion. Humans live over two billion heartbeats, far outside the range of all other mammals. One plausible reason for this is that human groups that had more elders were more effectively able to accumulate knowledge across generations, and therefore were more successful. Not everyone would have to survive into old age to make this effective, but everyone would have to have the capacity to survive into old age to make it likely that a few members of each generation would.
Ergo, until mouse model results are proven in humans--which so far as I know CR etc has not been--they are interesting, but not nearly so promising as one might naively think. We may already be so heavily optimized for long life that the simple tricks that work well for other species are considerably less effective for us.
Who created the stuff that participated in the Big Bang?
Probably, no one. But as I scientist, I get to ask that question and engage in a serious search for answers that will undergo critical theoretical and emperical testing.
That's the difference between science and religion. Christians believe in god based on no creditable evidence, and asking "who created god" is heresy--to ask that question puts you outside of the limited, narrow bounds of religion. Scientists believe based on plenty of strong evidence that there was a point in the past when the universe was extremely hot and dense, and has been expanding and cooling ever since (the Hot Big Bang). And asking "what caused the Big Bang" is still well within the broad bounds of science.
Do you see the difference? Or has your religion crippled your mind to the extent that this is incomprehensible to you?
Science does not have all the answers. It has all the questions, and the honest answer that science gives to the questions at it's ever-expanding boundaries is: "We don't know." That state of being is the beginning of new scientific progress. Religious people want science to have all the answers. Scientists knoow that no one has all the answers. But we at least have the courage to face the unknown and ask the questions.
I work in the casino industry. We have thousands of touch screens and I couldn't disagree with you more. Touch screens suck. Period. There is not a single less reliable piece of equipment in this building. And they don't even have any moving parts.
Touch screens are also used for computer assisted surgery and many other medical applications. I have designed touch screen apps for major CAS vendors, and can say unequivocally that touchscreen technology is reliable enough that I would have no compunction about going under the knife with a touchscreen app being used by the surgeon to plan and guide the surgery.
In a retail industry that caters exclusively to stupid people, like casino gambling, the machines you are using are probably the low end of the scale.
The question is: is voting more like surgery, or casino gambling?
Voting is only like casino gambling if what the voter does is irrelevant to the outcome, which is the essence of casino gambling (casino gambling does not involve games of chance--if you play long enough you are absolutely certain to lose.)
So why would anyone use low-quality touch-screens for voting machines?
The only reason I can see is if they hold voters in complete contempt.
The truth is, these machines are just poorly designed and implemented, irrespective of who made them or the makers' political affiliation.
JUST poorly designed and implemented?
So that's ok then, is it?
As near as I can tell, rabid partisanship has reached the point in the U.S. where no issue matters unless it is a partisan issue. This would explain all the utterly moronic responses to this article that suggest "this is no big deal because it's JUST gross incompetence on the part of the machine manufacturer. After all, it's not like this is something REALLY IMPORTANT like Republicans versus Democrats!"
Except that to anyone who hasn't been lobotomized by party loyalty, nothing is more important than a reliable, trusted electoral system.
And the terrifying thing is that there does not seem to be anyone like that left in the United States.
Only an application developed with an absolutely staggering degree of incompetence and ignorance of basic touchscreen design constraints would be subject to anything like the issues described here. This is particularly true given that, unlike the medical applications of touchscreens, virtually 100% of the screen real estate in e-voting applications is available for BUTTONS. A 1 cm apparent shift on a touchscreen is a HUGE miscalibration, and any resonable e-voting design should have buttons that are on the order of 10 cm on a side to accomodate the full range of voter motor control and perceptual limitations.
Far worse than the gross incompetence of the second raters who designed these machines, is the complacency so clearly evident in the responses seen here.
Basically people are saying, "Yeah, touchscreens are lousy technology and we have to expect this kind of problem with them and that's ok."
Why, exactly is that ok? Because voting doesn't matter? Is it just some kind of bizzare ritual to you people, passively engaged in, like voting in the old Soviet Union?
Even if this is just an example of criminally poor software design, all that it proves is that no jurisdiction should ever use electronic voting because it is demonstrably impossible for the losers who are implementing it to get even the most rudimentary aspects of user interface design adequately robust.
And the American people should be up in arms, perhaps literally, rather than making excuses for the liars and cheats who are leading them into oblivion.
Factory Farming Keeps Humans and Animals Apart
on
Timely Book On Bird Flu
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· Score: 2, Interesting
modern industrialized agricultural methods, including factory farming, antibiotics misuse, and the use of animal refuse as a food source (!) for chickens and other livestock, have led to a staggering increase in the number of 'zoonotic' diseases that can leap from animals to people, and make a bird flu pandemic likely
Which claim raises the question: why is it that flu pandemics always originate in the Far East, where none of these things are prevalent?
The conventional wisdom is that in the Orient there is far more routine contact between human beings and food animals, and far less emphasis on maintaining a relatively hygenic environment in the places where such contact occurs. Part of this is cultural (some food animals in China are typically sold to consumerss while still alive) and part of it is economic (factory farming is capital intensive, and agriculture has tended to lag other industries in industrialization. The transfer of viruses between humans and animals made possible by this routine contact is what produces cross-species pandemics.
On the other hand, factory farming keeps animals pretty much completely isolated from humans (and the outdoors, freedom to move, wild grasses, and everything else.)
So while I'm no fan of all aspects of modern factory farming, I have very little doubt that it is at least partly responsible for the relative scarcity of flu pandemics that originate in the West.
The article itself is just fud, and the person submitting it is not an environmentalist, but rather just another religious kook who has wandered into the wrong movement.
Three pages of images for China, 10+ pages for the rest of the world.
So I guess it looks censored because it is censored, and the only question that remains is: why do news organizations allowed themselves to be co-opted by the Big Lie so easily?
If the government of China announces that 2+2=5, would that be reported too? I guess in a way it is news, that a major world power is governed by a bunch of lying bastards, and that they get away with it because they will torture, kill or incarcerate anyone who points out that 2+2=4.
The curious thing about news coverage is that it is not now and never has been about telling the truth. It has always been about reporting a mixture of what people want to hear (sex and scandal) and what the powerful want people to believe (lies and misdirection.)
The 'Net is a huge threat to the powers that be because it allows ordinary people to find out for themselves what is going on. The effects of this are only begining to be felt. It will take a generation or more to really make a difference. But at the end of the day we can be sure it will.
For example, if you were to design a new carburator, there's an excellent chance that software would be a key component in its preferred embodiment. If so, does this disallow a patent?
No, of course not. Why would you possibly think that it would?
Simply because a component of an invention is not patentable is no bar to the patentability of the invention. Virtually every invention ever patented includes unpatentable components, like nuts and bolts.
So I am completely baffled by your question. Why are you wondering if software ought to be treated differently from every other unpatentable component of a patentable invention?
That is an interesting chart. I see that during Clinton's years, the debt went up about 50% ($4T to $6T). During Bush's years (so far) it has gone up about 33% ($6T yo $8T).
Thanks for that fascinating glimpse into the partisan mind.
It must be difficult, being unable to make value-judgments without first ascertaining which party is responsible for the action you are judging.
You know, you might be interested in knowing that some of us try to make judgments based on the facts of what was done rather than who was doing doing it. It's so much less primitive that way.
The quickest way to get the system changed is to create a scandal by actually stealing an election. I would suggest making a Libertarian, Green, or other 3rd party win the govenor's race. That should make it pretty obvious.
Statistical analysis has already demonstrated fraud in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. There is no doubt whatsoever that significant voting irregularities took place, and that they had the effect of giving the election to Bush rather than his opponent in both cases. There were also, it is worth noting, some anomalies that favoured Democrats, although not by so wide a margin (perhaps they were just playing their cards more closely, or didn't need as big shifts to win in those races.)
I sincerely hope that some American hero stands up and hacks the upcoming elections in a big way. They will get jailed for some kind of crime, but someone has to stand up and fight, and not say, "Oh, but my career would suffer if I was willing to sacrifice myself for the good of my country." But I have no illusions that such a successful hack would have any immediate effect. It will take many hacks over many elections to convince the idiots who think that election fraud is simply a stick to beat Republicans with, or who dismiss all evidence of fraud as impossible because "they" would never allow such a thing.
We know Diebold machines can be hacked very easily. We know that they have been hacked in past elections, based on analysis of exit poll anomalies. We know that there is a great deal at stake in the American elections in the next two years.
If America deserves to survive, there will be at least one person somewhere who is even now implementing a plan that will result in 100% of the votes cast in their county going to third-party candidates. In practical terms it must be third-party, because otherwise the vast majority of voters who cast their ballot for the favoured candidate would simply shrug, spit, and say, "I don't see no problem with that." Nothing short of a third-party landslide victory will put a dent in the partisan complacency of mainstream voters, and even then the lying bastards in power will claim that this was a special-case problem that they know for sure didn't affect any other races. And the complacent sheeple will believe them.
If no one is willing to take the risk of throwing egregiously throwing the vote in their county then America does not deserve to survive as a functioning democratic republic, and it will not.
Embedded languages certainly have their place--I've used perl as an embedded language in the past and am likely to use python in the future. But using rare languages is problematic--it requires that whoever maintains your code in future is familiar with the same languages you are, and it requires that debuggers support calls across rare language boundaries.
And while large languages do get bloated, they also get refactored, and from a community perspective we are far better off with people putting time into those refactoring efforts rather than wasting it developing little languages that aren't notably superior to existing toolkits.
I looked at it many years ago, but it was just Not There in terms of the functionality I wanted. wxWidgets (wxWindows, in those days) wasn't ready for prime time either, which is why I went with Qt. I'm happy with wxWidgets as it stands today, and have enough invested in it to not want to change again.
Slashdot Mirror
As these advances find their way into an increasing variety of devices, the petascale computer will shrink from a dinosaur to a teleputer - the successor to today's handhelds - in your ear or in your signal path.
Technological prognostications are almost always wrong in two directions.
1) The ability of current tech to scale up indefinitely is always eventually proven false. For six decades new aircraft designed increased their average crusing speed from about 100 mph in 1920 to 700 mph in the 70's. Then they stopped getting faster, and have been at just under 600 mph ever since. The jump to 700 mph in the '70's was with the introduction of the Concord, which also gave the average crusing speed a huge variance. No one knows what the "speed of sound" for computing will be, and as always it will be a matter of economics rather than pure technological possibility, but what we do know is that it is out there somewhere, and eventually we will hit it, although possibly not for some decades yet.
2) The uses to which tech is put, the directions and consequences of the speed and size improvements that do happen, are always almost completely wrong, as are the costs. As Asimov once said, the challenge is not to predict the automobile but the parking problem. Lots of people predicted some of the social consequences of the 'Net, but I don't think anyone predicted spam. These sorts of things may create limits that come into play earlier than other economic limits (and not incidently, create major opportunities for companies with solutions able to overcome them.)
As near as I can tell, the "parking problem" of the brave new world of ubiquitous interconnected computing, is the identity issue. Computers deal with proxies for everything. Unlike human beings, they are a realization of Plato's Cave, dealing only with the numerical shadows of reality. And one shadow can be made to look very much like another.
If somebody is even asking the question whether it is "still worth it", one assumes that they are not in it for love.
Then they ought not to be in it at all.
What does bigger brain really mean anyway?
Nothing.
Recent fMRI developmental studies indicate that "smarter" people (usually as measured by grades, IIRC) tend to have thinner cortexes. The handwaving explanation is that we are better organized, internally if not externally--my desk at the moment includes a stack of unlabelled blank CDs, a dead monitor, a rock, sheafs of loose paper going back almost a year, and a cat.
Seriously, we managed to "defeat" a 3rd world army that had been under economic sanctions for years.
And you did a crappy job of that. Rumsfeld is on record as saying he expected the Iraqi army to stand and fight, so they could be destroyed. But they went and did the damned ungentlemanly thing of "melting away into the country" (to use Rumsfeld's own description) instead, and went on to form the backbone of the insurgency.
This is right up there with the British navy's plan to wipe out the (much smaller) German navy in a close fleet action during WWI. The damned ungentlemanly Germans refused to co-operate in coming to join a battle that they knew perfectly well they would lose!
Can you imagine the downright un-American attitude the Iraqi army must have had to fail to co-operate with Rumsfeld's fantasies?
So since we already dimension Oil rigs and equipment for mammoth storms, freak waves and gas explosions (happening at the same time for your pleasure), I would guess it wouldn't be a problem to build one of these...technical at least. Economical I don't know
Oil platforms are mostly designed to either a) stand still or b) float freely. Either of these is technically much simpler than a system designed to stand mostly still but have really big moving parts. If you look at the diagram accompanying the article there it looks like the whole thing is supported by a couple of peirs through a "spherical roller bearing" sealed with a "spherical freedom seal". So basically the whole thing is one big moving part, no doubt subject to some pretty exciting modes of failure.
One of the ongoing issues with wave power systems (and for that matter oil rigs) is dealing with extreme wave heights, and this does not give one a great feeling about that.
Also, the system appears to depend on a very high maintenance cycle: fill the core with 100 C water once a month, which is used to heat the salt water under vacuum to boil it. So it's not like these things can be just left alone to do their thing.
Finally, I can't see any through-fittings for salt water intake or brine/freshwater outlet in the figures, but I bet the fresh water coupling is pretty challenging too.
Overall, it's an interesting idea, but there are clearly lots of technical challenges still ahead.
they don't have to let you ever see a court room.. they can hold you without trial or charges for aslong as they fucking want.. the judicial branch can't do shit because that law isn't hitting the court room
On my reading of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, as signed into law by the president, this is only a true statement if the "you" in question is not an American. The original versions suspended habeas corpus for everyone, but some senators balked, although applying the law only to aliens makes it no less unconstitutional. The American constitution says "Congress shall make no law suspending habeas corpus" and does not have any footnotes about "except for foreigners and Americans we don't like."
But for now "you" are safe if you're an American. I'm not, so I won't be setting foot in the U.S. while this act is in force. It is just too dangerous. And I would strongly encourage all foreigners, especially those with strong technical knowledge, to leave the United States as soon as convenient. There probably isn't a huge rush, but prudence dictates a shift to someplace that does not have tens of thousands of people just like you illegally incarcerated in secret prisons around the world.
Unless of course you believe that the government, being an orginization made up of perfectly ordinary and completely falible humans, never makes mistakes.
Paper ballots have the exact same problem.
Right! And word processors have exactly the same problems as paper and pencil.
Remember FL in 2000? Paper ballots... are those punched ALL the way through or not?
Some A are B does not imply all A are B. There are many good books on elementary logic that can help you out if you do not understand this.
What you are pointing out is that it is possible to have badly-implemented paper-based voting systems.
What you need to prove is that it is possible to have electronic systems that are not subject to absolutely trivial tampering.
Personally, I'd like to see a touch-screen voting system that prints a completed ballot after the user has made their selection and that the voter then looks at to verify, and then walks over to a reader which reads the ballot and records the result. Election law should specify the standard form of the ballot, and should mandate that different companies make the touch-screen system and the ballot reading system used at each polling station. Both the touch-screen system and the ballot counting system would maintain independent totals, and of course the paper ballot would be preserved for hand recounts, which would take place automatically if the touch-screen system and the ballot reading system differed by more than one vote.
The first purpose of electronic voting systems should be the use of technology to introduce more redundancy into the system to create more tamper-proof ballots. Any use of an electronic vote-counter that does not have a paper trail means that simply flipping a few bits can change the outcome of an election, and it is all happening inside a single black box where no one can see or verify what is happening. That's not democracy.
Microsoft has all kinds of SW patents in its portfolio. MS will sue all the other distros than Novell's for patent infringement, driving everyone to SuSE.
The third defense is the GPL v3, which is looking kinda prescient right now.
On the other hand, it would be fun to fork the suse distro, which is certainly permitted under GPL v2, and wait for MS to go after it. If they do, Novell is guilty of a simple and straightforward GPL v2 violation, and suse becomes a dead letter.
Which still doesn't explain however, that we don't see "mid-species" forms all over the place
What part of "transitional" do you not understand?
science says life should be plentiful and easy and populating the stars ought to be possible at significant fractions of the speed of light, so where is the life that is doing so?
Capabilities that are easy to evolve do so many times. The eye, wings, fins... all of these have evolved again and again and again. They have evolved independently in different orders--the wings of birds have nothing to do with the wings of bats or bugs, the fins of cetaceans have nothing to do with the fins of fishes.
In contrast to this, the kind of intelligence that can build spaceships has evolved exactly once, and it appears to have been something of an accident, even by evolutionary standards. Anatomically modern humans existed a hundred thousand years ago (and therefore probably much earlier than than that, because the odds of the earliest evidence being contemporaneous with the earliest individuals is staggeringly small.) But forty thousand years ago the complexity of tools took a sharp jump, coupled with evidence of rapidly increasing cultural and technological complexity.
We know evolution is an elaborative process, and that organisms make use of systems evolved under one set of pressures to adapt to different pressures. So it is plausible that our brains were evolved to solve simple problems of living in a tool-using group in a harsh and unstable climate, and quite by accident it happens that any brain that is sufficient to solve those problems is also sufficient to build spacecraft, in the same way that any bird's beak that is dexterous enough to glean bugs off bark is also dexterous enough to use a bit of bent wire to do any of the things that birds now use bits of bent wire for.
If this is the case, then it is plausible that spaceship-building intelligence is fantasitically rare, in contrast to Fermi's assumption that life pretty much always leads to intelligence.
now hippies, greenies, and environmental scientists are also going to take away our freedoms by reducing greenhouse emissions, raising vehicle fuel efficiency, and sequestering carbon!?
The spectre raised in the article that action on global warming will lead to world government is trivially false. For example, despite active opposition at the federal level, many U.S. states have an excellent record on green house gas emissions, and more are falling into line. This proves that many small political entities can actually be more capable of dealing with this issue than one big, slow-moving and corrupt one.
People who make the huge and unjustified leap from "this problem exists" to "this is the One True Solution to this problem and I must force everyone to adopt it at gunpoint" are just nuts. As any engineer knows, problems constrain but do not determine solutions. Values determine solutions.
He has invested millions into alternative and green energy on several different initiatives plus reauthorized initiatives started under previous administrations.
And he has spent (not invested) tens or hundreds of billions on a wasteful and stupid war, rather than investing (not spending) those same tens or hundreds of billions in serious alternative energy research, including advanced nukes, actually clean (i.e. fully sequestered) coal, algal biodeisel, solar, wind, tide, etc.
The difference in spending on war vs investment in America's energy future is so many orders of magnitude that pointing out the millions he has invested in alternative energy is like a doctor pointing out that he has cured a cancer patient's hangnail.
Admittedly, on the flip side, "global warming is going to kill the cute cuddly polar bears" is about the least honest, to say nothing of least relevant, argument one can make in this arena. Polar bears have been around for 250,000 years or more. 250,000 years is the oldest current age estimate of the species, and there are excellent statistical arguments to suggest that our first-pass age estimates are always gross under-estimates, as evidenced by the routine discovery of fossil forms that double the earliest age estimate for a species.
So it is certain that polar bears have experienced far greater climate fluxuaions in the past, not least of which would be the past ice age, in which there was no open water in the Arctic. But polar bears are absolutely dependent on open water for their current way of life, which involves hunting seals. Yet somehow polar bears survived and adapted, including adaptation to the catastrophic changes of the Young Dryas, which were far more violent that anything projected by current climate models for the foreseeable future.
So I say, let the polar bears take care of themselves. I'm not worried about the polar bears. I'm worried about modern industrial civilization, which is a hell of lot more sensitive to changes in global climate than any biological system on Earth.
Remember, it only has to do with living long enough to have lots of babies. After that, you don't really matter to evolution.
That is probably not true for humans.
Humans are creatures of culture: accumulated, collectively held knowledge. The people who transmit culture are elders--in modern society, grandparents. They remember how they raised you, and when you have kids they provide guidance that effectively transmits traditions, habits and beliefs across generations. You, on the other hand, don't remember how you were raised, certainly not at a very early age.
This may explain why humans live twice as long as they "should". One way of normalizing lifespan across species is to measure it in heartbeats. All mammals except humans live about one billion heartbeats. The range is around 0.7 to 1.1 billion. Humans live over two billion heartbeats, far outside the range of all other mammals. One plausible reason for this is that human groups that had more elders were more effectively able to accumulate knowledge across generations, and therefore were more successful. Not everyone would have to survive into old age to make this effective, but everyone would have to have the capacity to survive into old age to make it likely that a few members of each generation would.
Ergo, until mouse model results are proven in humans--which so far as I know CR etc has not been--they are interesting, but not nearly so promising as one might naively think. We may already be so heavily optimized for long life that the simple tricks that work well for other species are considerably less effective for us.
Who created the stuff that participated in the Big Bang?
Probably, no one. But as I scientist, I get to ask that question and engage in a serious search for answers that will undergo critical theoretical and emperical testing.
That's the difference between science and religion. Christians believe in god based on no creditable evidence, and asking "who created god" is heresy--to ask that question puts you outside of the limited, narrow bounds of religion. Scientists believe based on plenty of strong evidence that there was a point in the past when the universe was extremely hot and dense, and has been expanding and cooling ever since (the Hot Big Bang). And asking "what caused the Big Bang" is still well within the broad bounds of science.
Do you see the difference? Or has your religion crippled your mind to the extent that this is incomprehensible to you?
Science does not have all the answers. It has all the questions, and the honest answer that science gives to the questions at it's ever-expanding boundaries is: "We don't know." That state of being is the beginning of new scientific progress. Religious people want science to have all the answers. Scientists knoow that no one has all the answers. But we at least have the courage to face the unknown and ask the questions.
I work in the casino industry. We have thousands of touch screens and I couldn't disagree with you more. Touch screens suck. Period. There is not a single less reliable piece of equipment in this building. And they don't even have any moving parts.
Touch screens are also used for computer assisted surgery and many other medical applications. I have designed touch screen apps for major CAS vendors, and can say unequivocally that touchscreen technology is reliable enough that I would have no compunction about going under the knife with a touchscreen app being used by the surgeon to plan and guide the surgery.
In a retail industry that caters exclusively to stupid people, like casino gambling, the machines you are using are probably the low end of the scale.
The question is: is voting more like surgery, or casino gambling?
Voting is only like casino gambling if what the voter does is irrelevant to the outcome, which is the essence of casino gambling (casino gambling does not involve games of chance--if you play long enough you are absolutely certain to lose.)
So why would anyone use low-quality touch-screens for voting machines?
The only reason I can see is if they hold voters in complete contempt.
The truth is, these machines are just poorly designed and implemented, irrespective of who made them or the makers' political affiliation.
JUST poorly designed and implemented?
So that's ok then, is it?
As near as I can tell, rabid partisanship has reached the point in the U.S. where no issue matters unless it is a partisan issue. This would explain all the utterly moronic responses to this article that suggest "this is no big deal because it's JUST gross incompetence on the part of the machine manufacturer. After all, it's not like this is something REALLY IMPORTANT like Republicans versus Democrats!"
Except that to anyone who hasn't been lobotomized by party loyalty, nothing is more important than a reliable, trusted electoral system.
And the terrifying thing is that there does not seem to be anyone like that left in the United States.
Touch screens are used routinely in computer assisted surgery, control of fluoroscopy systems and any number of other mission-critical applications.
Only an application developed with an absolutely staggering degree of incompetence and ignorance of basic touchscreen design constraints would be subject to anything like the issues described here. This is particularly true given that, unlike the medical applications of touchscreens, virtually 100% of the screen real estate in e-voting applications is available for BUTTONS. A 1 cm apparent shift on a touchscreen is a HUGE miscalibration, and any resonable e-voting design should have buttons that are on the order of 10 cm on a side to accomodate the full range of voter motor control and perceptual limitations.
Far worse than the gross incompetence of the second raters who designed these machines, is the complacency so clearly evident in the responses seen here.
Basically people are saying, "Yeah, touchscreens are lousy technology and we have to expect this kind of problem with them and that's ok."
Why, exactly is that ok? Because voting doesn't matter? Is it just some kind of bizzare ritual to you people, passively engaged in, like voting in the old Soviet Union?
Even if this is just an example of criminally poor software design, all that it proves is that no jurisdiction should ever use electronic voting because it is demonstrably impossible for the losers who are implementing it to get even the most rudimentary aspects of user interface design adequately robust.
And the American people should be up in arms, perhaps literally, rather than making excuses for the liars and cheats who are leading them into oblivion.
modern industrialized agricultural methods, including factory farming, antibiotics misuse, and the use of animal refuse as a food source (!) for chickens and other livestock, have led to a staggering increase in the number of 'zoonotic' diseases that can leap from animals to people, and make a bird flu pandemic likely
Which claim raises the question: why is it that flu pandemics always originate in the Far East, where none of these things are prevalent?
The conventional wisdom is that in the Orient there is far more routine contact between human beings and food animals, and far less emphasis on maintaining a relatively hygenic environment in the places where such contact occurs. Part of this is cultural (some food animals in China are typically sold to consumerss while still alive) and part of it is economic (factory farming is capital intensive, and agriculture has tended to lag other industries in industrialization. The transfer of viruses between humans and animals made possible by this routine contact is what produces cross-species pandemics.
On the other hand, factory farming keeps animals pretty much completely isolated from humans (and the outdoors, freedom to move, wild grasses, and everything else.)
So while I'm no fan of all aspects of modern factory farming, I have very little doubt that it is at least partly responsible for the relative scarcity of flu pandemics that originate in the West.
The article itself is just fud, and the person submitting it is not an environmentalist, but rather just another religious kook who has wandered into the wrong movement.
Three pages of images for China, 10+ pages for the rest of the world.
So I guess it looks censored because it is censored, and the only question that remains is: why do news organizations allowed themselves to be co-opted by the Big Lie so easily?
If the government of China announces that 2+2=5, would that be reported too? I guess in a way it is news, that a major world power is governed by a bunch of lying bastards, and that they get away with it because they will torture, kill or incarcerate anyone who points out that 2+2=4.
The curious thing about news coverage is that it is not now and never has been about telling the truth. It has always been about reporting a mixture of what people want to hear (sex and scandal) and what the powerful want people to believe (lies and misdirection.)
The 'Net is a huge threat to the powers that be because it allows ordinary people to find out for themselves what is going on. The effects of this are only begining to be felt. It will take a generation or more to really make a difference. But at the end of the day we can be sure it will.
For example, if you were to design a new carburator, there's an excellent chance that software would be a key component in its preferred embodiment. If so, does this disallow a patent?
No, of course not. Why would you possibly think that it would?
Simply because a component of an invention is not patentable is no bar to the patentability of the invention. Virtually every invention ever patented includes unpatentable components, like nuts and bolts.
So I am completely baffled by your question. Why are you wondering if software ought to be treated differently from every other unpatentable component of a patentable invention?
That is an interesting chart. I see that during Clinton's years, the debt went up about 50% ($4T to $6T). During Bush's years (so far) it has gone up about 33% ($6T yo $8T).
Thanks for that fascinating glimpse into the partisan mind.
It must be difficult, being unable to make value-judgments without first ascertaining which party is responsible for the action you are judging.
You know, you might be interested in knowing that some of us try to make judgments based on the facts of what was done rather than who was doing doing it. It's so much less primitive that way.
The quickest way to get the system changed is to create a scandal by actually stealing an election. I would suggest making a Libertarian, Green, or other 3rd party win the govenor's race. That should make it pretty obvious.
Statistical analysis has already demonstrated fraud in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. There is no doubt whatsoever that significant voting irregularities took place, and that they had the effect of giving the election to Bush rather than his opponent in both cases. There were also, it is worth noting, some anomalies that favoured Democrats, although not by so wide a margin (perhaps they were just playing their cards more closely, or didn't need as big shifts to win in those races.)
I sincerely hope that some American hero stands up and hacks the upcoming elections in a big way. They will get jailed for some kind of crime, but someone has to stand up and fight, and not say, "Oh, but my career would suffer if I was willing to sacrifice myself for the good of my country." But I have no illusions that such a successful hack would have any immediate effect. It will take many hacks over many elections to convince the idiots who think that election fraud is simply a stick to beat Republicans with, or who dismiss all evidence of fraud as impossible because "they" would never allow such a thing.
We know Diebold machines can be hacked very easily. We know that they have been hacked in past elections, based on analysis of exit poll anomalies. We know that there is a great deal at stake in the American elections in the next two years.
If America deserves to survive, there will be at least one person somewhere who is even now implementing a plan that will result in 100% of the votes cast in their county going to third-party candidates. In practical terms it must be third-party, because otherwise the vast majority of voters who cast their ballot for the favoured candidate would simply shrug, spit, and say, "I don't see no problem with that." Nothing short of a third-party landslide victory will put a dent in the partisan complacency of mainstream voters, and even then the lying bastards in power will claim that this was a special-case problem that they know for sure didn't affect any other races. And the complacent sheeple will believe them.
If no one is willing to take the risk of throwing egregiously throwing the vote in their county then America does not deserve to survive as a functioning democratic republic, and it will not.
Embedded languages certainly have their place--I've used perl as an embedded language in the past and am likely to use python in the future. But using rare languages is problematic--it requires that whoever maintains your code in future is familiar with the same languages you are, and it requires that debuggers support calls across rare language boundaries.
And while large languages do get bloated, they also get refactored, and from a community perspective we are far better off with people putting time into those refactoring efforts rather than wasting it developing little languages that aren't notably superior to existing toolkits.
Have you looked into FLTK?
I looked at it many years ago, but it was just Not There in terms of the functionality I wanted. wxWidgets (wxWindows, in those days) wasn't ready for prime time either, which is why I went with Qt. I'm happy with wxWidgets as it stands today, and have enough invested in it to not want to change again.