In this case I'm inclined to apply Occam's razor and pick the simplest explanation given the available facts, which are :
- a plane took off - bits of fuselage were photographed on the lawn of the Pentagon - three other hijacked planes were seen crashing into other places - several eyewitnesses reported seeing a plane
Come up with an alternative explanation if you wish - but you have to make it fit with the above facts. The existing conspiracy theories don't.
As to how we should be treating these people, well, they are POWs. They are not citizens, so they can not be tried as such. But they are soldiers and to say otherwise, is a lie. They should all be in a POW camp with the geneva convention being applied until the end of the war with bin ladin and the rest of the terrorists.
Please correct me if I'm wrong about this aspect of US government, but the only body with the authority to declare war is Congress.
Congress has not declared war, and therefore Gitmo is illegal. Correct ?
Mostly because said switches are included when the main optimisation switches are provided.
Try telling them that on the Gentoo forums.
BTW it's a royal pain in the arse the way the GCC documentation on this matter appears to be somewhat inaccurate; the list of optimizations turned on with each level of -O doesn't seem to be correct, at least on the 3.3.x versions I tried.
You know, a gentooer/oc'er/tuner/tweaker isn't going to be stupid and run gentoo for something important.
I made a mistake by generalizing about Gentoo users, but now I feel OK because you also made a generalization:)
It depends what your definition of "stupid" is. I think investing in an expensive cooling system and causing a potential fire hazard through overclocking fits the definition quite well. The days of the SL98A Celeron 300As are long gone.
There's nothing wrong with using gentoo on workstation/desktop machines; it's very good for this with nice flexibility.
Flexibility I can buy, but I have serious doubts about the sanity of people who think that compiling the code themselves adds anything whatsoever to their user experience.
This kind of attitude could be a reason you're not an employer.
I don't know any employer who would want l33t script kiddies running their critical production boxen, I'm afraid.
A co-worker introduced me to Gentoo late last year and I have to say I am very impressed. It's much faster than the optimizations I was using
How much faster ? How did you measure this ? How can you be sure there were no other variables other than compiler flags ?
You CAN hand compile everything from the ground up!
But why would you want to ?
The only reason to use package managers is if you are new to Linux or just don't want to learn much.
The expert UNIX system administrators with 20+ years experience in the field use package managers on Solaris and Linux machines. Can you explain why you think that is ?
Recompiling software gets you almost nothing. Maybe 10% more performance, at the very maximum.
Nonsense. Recompiling the same code provides a 0% performance improvement, because it produces an identical result. Most packages I have seen on Linux distros are compiled with -O2 or -O3. It is highly unlikely that the various other switches provided by GCC will provide anything significant. The trouble with the debate is that nobody has properly researched this and attempted to gather hard evidence showing the improved performance that is allegedly gained.
A system administrator's job will be on the line if a system crashes due to instability caused by compiling code with different compiler flags than those provided by default by the author or vendor; and in any case the performance improvement will be less than the likely improvement which may be gained by spending a few $K on a faster box with more CPUs. If I were an employer looking for a sysadmin I'd root out the Gentoo fans, the overclockers, the tuners and the tweakers right off.
There are certainly people in favour of the EU who are in favour of trying to make it more like the USA, but the arguments for and against that are very complex indeed - I wouldn't like to say I have a full grasp of all of them.
That said the single currency is a great idea and seems to be working out pretty well. Inflation is now more stable right across Europe than it has been since WW2, AFAIK.
That said, I have mixed opinions on the subject. look at what, eg, Bell Labs achieved during the time when AT&T was so huge. You have to ask yourself - they had this vast money machine in the form of a telephone network, and they could squash anyone who tried to intervene - so why did they feel the need to do so much pioneering research even though there was little chance that they stood to gain directly from it ?
Uhhh....Weimar Germany experienced an even more disastrous depression at THE SAME TIME we did in the US.
That might have been something to do with recovering from a war while everyone recalling the loans they gave you due to the knock-on effects of the depression in the USA.
And really, Roosevelt's make-work bullcrap didn't get us out of the depression, World War 2 did.
I agree with you. But it's not like Roosevelt's changes were undone rapidly - his legacy still lives on.
The European Union (or it's predecessor entity) was originally to do with trying to prevent wars between countries which has spent many centuries fighting, and in that objective it has broadly been successful.
A superstate is unlikely and as noted the present farm subsidy system is unworkable. But debates about similar things occur in the USA too (NAFTA etc).
There's an old aphorism, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." Europe seems kind of stuck in the fish-giving stage.
You can't teach everyone to fish, especially not if they were in an road or workplace accident and had to get their hands amputated. But that said, your portrayal is an exaggeration. European economies are all free market economies, with a degree - some more than others - of state ownership of a limited number of corporations and utilities. I am not sure it is so clear that you can say "socialist-ish economies are doomed to failure". European economies with heavy state involvement have gone up and down for sure since WW2, but have any of them really experienced the kind of serious hit that the USA did during the depression in the 1930s - a depression that was ultimately cleared up (I know this point is disputed) by good old fashioned state intervention ?
State ownership exists in the USA too (Amtrak; Tennessee Valley Authority; etc) but obviously not on the same scale as in somewhere like France (Renault, SNCF etc). But one big difference in the USA was/is that the large corporations were still huge overbearing inefficient monopolies - and from where I'm sitting, it looks like it would have made no difference whether they were state owned or not. In the big cases the government had to step in to break them up (AT&T, Standard Oil.. etc), and it has threatened to do that to many more (Microsoft?). And is there really much difference between having large sections of the economy run by the state, and large sections of the economy given special treatment by the state for lucrative military contracts as is the case in the USA (Boeing, LM etc) ?
Why would you use squashfs rather than tar + bzip2 (or better) ? That's a really daft idea. In any case the data might already be compressed, at least to some extent.
You're stretching. What if the vote counter fell in the shower that morning, and thought red meant Democrat and blue meant Republican? How attenuated do you want to argue?
That one's easy. I'm watching the guy over his shoulder as he counts, and shout "hey! this guy is counting the votes wrong". That is what we do in the UK and Ireland. Because the votes are not counted by a machine, everyone - all the candidates - can have a representative monitoring the count and making a huge fuss if there's dodgy business afoot.
He may slip one or two past the observers (hard but not impossible), but that's not a problem either. If the vote comes down within a hair, we ask for a recount. If the vote is a landslide for another candidate - well, he wouldn't have got *that* many past easily so it's a fair cop. And it's not worth his while anyway - if he's incompetent or trying to fiddle things he won't keep his job for very long.
No system will be perfectly secure. We both know that, and arguing unlikely scenarios detracts from the overall issue, which is trust. Besides, it's simple enough to require that the software run on hardware supplied by the state.
Security is not the issue so much as bugs or improper calibration or use. So you trust the state and the software to be incapable of error. What do you use, a HAL9000 ?
In Northern Ireland a few years ago we had a historic referendum. The government made it clear that it was in favour of a certain result in that referendum. One of the political parties is a bit on the nutty side claimed that the government would try to remove the votes against it from the ballot boxes, thus swinging the vote. Accordingly, the electoral office invited that party to place it's own seals on the ballot boxes. The party accordingly did so, and at the count the following day, that party was able to confirm that all of the seals were in place and that the contents of the boxes had not been adjusted. Tell me how you do that with an electronic vote system ?
I think it was Napoleon who said to never ascribe to malice what could just as easily be incompetence. I think that is particularly true here. The possiblity of deliberate fiddling is distinct, but remote. The far greater possibility is of a whole collection of people not understanding how the system works, how to spot dodgy behaviour, or the system being designed to avoid such scrutiny. Think Chernobyl for an example of this problem when it gets really out of hand. It only needs to happen once for the population to lose all trust in the electoral system.
Specious argument. If you have a larger population, then you have a larger number of staff to count all of the votes so that they are still counted just as quickly. Just like you have a larger number of shopkeepers to run your shops, a larger number of gas stations to fill your cars at, etc.
The USA could quite easily hand-count the results of a presidential election.
On the other hand I do concede that at some of these polls you guys are voting to fill 20 or so different offices. Even so, I'd still say an accurate and accountable count is more important than a quick one.
In Ireland there are only ~4 million people but votes are counted in about the same length of time as in the UK. That said, it is an STV system so there's a bit more work involved.
No one would have the slightest problem with that method. Everyone agrees that is the best method.
No it isn't, people who think that do not understand the issue here, which is that we cannot verify what the computer recorded retrospectively. There is no way to say whether the computer correctly recorded the vote accepted - even if it manages to print this vote out correctly.
Think about it. Why print a record in the first place - because you don't want to trust the machine, right ? So, if you don't trust the machine then why are you using it to begin with, rather than merely using the paper copy ?
I bet if this were the scenario and someone were to go to court over it, it would be found that the fact the paper printout exists constitutes an admission that the electronic machine's counting is not verifiably correct, and the result of any given election counted electronically could therefore be ruled void. How could you argue against that in court ? I suspect that is the real reason why the voting machine companies do not want to print paper records out.
Electronic vote counting cannot work in a way that is compatible with proper, accountable democracy folks. The sooner you guys understand that fact the better.
You could say the essence of Democracy is choosing if we want those systems or not.
A purely philosophical argument. Is democracy choosing whether we want democracy or not ?
Electronic voting does not necessarily dilute democracy any more than hand counting does.
Yes it does, precisely because no-one, other than the experts who are familiar with the machine's operation, can be reasonably sure about what way they votes were counted. Even the experts cannot be sure that the votes were recorded correctly (come up with a way to retrospectively prove that an anonymous elector voted for a particular candidate while maintaining anonymity and you'll be rich for the rest of your life).
There are provisions to make sure hand counting produces accurate results, similar provisions can apply to machines.
Explain to me how I can prove that during the course of a day, votes for a candidate by anonymous voters were correctly recorded. With a paper ballot I've got the sheets of paper, right here in my hand, and everyone can see what was scrawled on them by the voter. With an electronic ballot I've got a recording made by a computer, which due either to tampering, software bugs, data corruption or other electronic failure, may or may not match what the voter actually entered. How can you get around this very serious obstacle ?
Granted, there is always the factor of human error even when machines are doing the counting and there is the occasional faulty machine.
How can the error rate of electronic vote-counting machines ever be measured ? You can measure it in a test scenario, but not in a production scenario.
the board of elections in your local municipality (depending on state, etc) is responsible for choosing the machines and the software. These are either elected officials or are appointed by elected officials, and therefore responsible for representing your interests.
Presumably they're elected in a vote which will be counted by one of the electronic machines they've bought ? What makes you convinced that corruption or (more realistically) incompetence cannot interfere with the result of an election ? Do you think your elected representatives would have the skills to, say, recompile code or get checksums to confirm that the correct load had been installed, and that no tampering had taken place ?
Elections don't just happen, they are overseen by people you put there, directly or indirectly.
You're talking as if elected representatives are infallible and incorruptible. They aren't.
In the UK, if I am a candidate in an election I can watch each vote being counted, right there in the countroom. I don't have to trust a bureaucrat who doesn't know what he is doing to make sure the count is done properly. Because I can see the votes, and they are not hidden in the bowels of a machine or of a computer, I can be personally assured that no attempt has been made to disenfranchise my voters. How can you even begin to provide that guarantee with automated vote counting ?
With a punch card or even a mechanical voting machine, you can see and understand how it works.
I don't get why you guys are coming off with this kind of response KNOWING how in Florida 2000 we all got to see how it did NOT work, and how people got confused or thrown off by their poor understanding of how it DID work. Through what may be deliberate fiddling, or more likely incompetence, the ballot paper in parts of Florida made it potentially unclear to some people who they were voting for, and unclear to those counting the votes who the voter had actually voted for. That is what I call a total farce, and it couldn't have happened if the election had been conducted using a simple sheet of paper with a handwritten X scrawled next to the chosen candidate.
It hardly matters if it is open source. Who will compile it before it is uploaded to the machine ? Who will check that the correct software is loaded ? Who will check the guy doing the checking ?
Automated vote counting of any kind - electronic or mechanical - makes fraud considerably easier, puts a mystery shroud around the counting process and as such is incompatible with democracy. In the UK we count all the votes in our elections within 12 hours including the odd recount. Why are Americans obsessed with diluting their democracy by using machines to do it ?
And how did we manage, despite painful blows to the country's economy (oil delivery shocks from Katrina, etc) have more economic growth and lower unemployment than, say, more socialist-minded places like France or Germany? By reducing the tax burden on the people that take their money and invest it the businesses that hire people and grow the economy.
Your "argument" is misinformed, ignorant, and frankly boring crap. You could start by look at your budget deficit.
Then you could take a look at your taxation levels. The idea that the USA is some sort of tax haven for people is nonsense. The USA taxes it's citizens pretty heavily - the amount of tax is probably not much different from France or Germany. In many places you'll pay taxes to three of four different authorities (federal, state, city tax.. is there county tax in some jurisdictions?). The problem that I think you have with France and Germany is probably the way they spend their money on silly socialist things such as being able to get a heart bypass operation or cancer treatment without being hauled in front of a bankruptcy court, or outdated mumbo-jumbo pinko communist claptrap such as ensuring that a reasonable poverty line is maintained so that people do not become destitute when they are between jobs in a cyclical economy. Instead, the USA spends it's tax money on it's military budget and invading foreign countries. That's their prerogative - you think that the longterm welfare of your people is best funded by spending $120bn on bringing democracy to a middle east sand dune, that is your business - but a lot of people in Europe think it is best served by ensuring that they have the means to acquire education, decent healthcare and living standards that allow them to lead happy and productive lives. I think a lot of people in the USA feel the same way, BTW, but W calls them traitors and ignores them. Fact of life I guess.
Don't take this personally, I'm not anti-USA, it's a great country in many ways. You just have to look at the profile of public spending and taxation in these countries and try to be more objective about it.
Secondly, while I agree that taxing the crap out of rich people just because they're rich is destructive, I do not agree with the "throw more money at the rich people so that they can pay more people to scrub their bathroom floors with toothbrushes" argument. Yes, entrepreneurship must be encouraged, risk-taking must be rewarded, but there is no evidence that your trickle-down economics argument truly works. The state has a role to play - not an overbearing role but a role nonetheless - in ensuring that people lead productive lives. Societies which recognize that there is a time for wealth acquisition as well as a time for leisure and relaxation are just as likely to be happy and successful.
Software to run C code on an FPGA already exists. Here's a book on the subject.
I leafed through this book in a bookstore a while ago. The type of thing they do at the moment is mostly DSP/heavily algorithmic stuff, ie like encryption, compression or checksumming etc.
An OS kernel is mostly shifting data structures around; the algorithms are very clever but also computationally relatively lightweight. In terms of choosing the best way to allocate real estate on a CPU die, an FPGA would not provide the same benefit as much as a CPU hardwired to help the OS as much as possible (eg context switching hardware, high speed caching, multimedia SIMD instructions etc).
The main problem with FPGAs at the moment is that they are expensive relative to hardwired devices. Their main use is still prototyping or research. Once you've designed a really useful device with one and made it stable, you'll want to turn it into a hardwired ASIC if you're producing the hardware in any kind of volume.
Major benefits to matter in a superfluid state include superconductivity, a state where electrons would flow freely with no resistance, thus preserving the most amount of electrical charge during passage and providing the ability to save billions of dollars in 'lost electricity'.
That does, of course, depend on finding a way of cooling the conductor to near absolute zero along it's entire length, using less energy than would be lost during transmission on a normal cable. In other words, it's a pretty ridiculous suggestion
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In this case I'm inclined to apply Occam's razor and pick the simplest explanation given the available facts, which are :
- a plane took off
- bits of fuselage were photographed on the lawn of the Pentagon
- three other hijacked planes were seen crashing into other places
- several eyewitnesses reported seeing a plane
Come up with an alternative explanation if you wish - but you have to make it fit with the above facts. The existing conspiracy theories don't.
You are factually incorrect (Google it; there are pictures showing aircraft parts on the Pentagon lawn) but let's assume your theory has some basis.
What happened to the Flight 93 that left the airport with all the passengers and crew on board ?
As to how we should be treating these people, well, they are POWs. They are not citizens, so they can not be tried as such. But they are soldiers and to say otherwise, is a lie. They should all be in a POW camp with the geneva convention being applied until the end of the war with bin ladin and the rest of the terrorists.
Please correct me if I'm wrong about this aspect of US government, but the only body with the authority to declare war is Congress.
Congress has not declared war, and therefore Gitmo is illegal. Correct ?
Mostly because said switches are included when the main optimisation switches are provided.
Try telling them that on the Gentoo forums.
BTW it's a royal pain in the arse the way the GCC documentation on this matter appears to be somewhat inaccurate; the list of optimizations turned on with each level of -O doesn't seem to be correct, at least on the 3.3.x versions I tried.
You know, a gentooer/oc'er/tuner/tweaker isn't going to be stupid and run gentoo for something important.
:)
I made a mistake by generalizing about Gentoo users, but now I feel OK because you also made a generalization
It depends what your definition of "stupid" is. I think investing in an expensive cooling system and causing a potential fire hazard through overclocking fits the definition quite well. The days of the SL98A Celeron 300As are long gone.
There's nothing wrong with using gentoo on workstation/desktop machines; it's very good for this with nice flexibility.
Flexibility I can buy, but I have serious doubts about the sanity of people who think that compiling the code themselves adds anything whatsoever to their user experience.
This kind of attitude could be a reason you're not an employer.
I don't know any employer who would want l33t script kiddies running their critical production boxen, I'm afraid.
A co-worker introduced me to Gentoo late last year and I have to say I am very impressed. It's much faster than the optimizations I was using
How much faster ? How did you measure this ? How can you be sure there were no other variables other than compiler flags ?
You CAN hand compile everything from the ground up!
But why would you want to ?
The only reason to use package managers is if you are new to Linux or just don't want to learn much.
The expert UNIX system administrators with 20+ years experience in the field use package managers on Solaris and Linux machines. Can you explain why you think that is ?
Recompiling software gets you almost nothing. Maybe 10% more performance, at the very maximum.
Nonsense. Recompiling the same code provides a 0% performance improvement, because it produces an identical result. Most packages I have seen on Linux distros are compiled with -O2 or -O3. It is highly unlikely that the various other switches provided by GCC will provide anything significant. The trouble with the debate is that nobody has properly researched this and attempted to gather hard evidence showing the improved performance that is allegedly gained.
A system administrator's job will be on the line if a system crashes due to instability caused by compiling code with different compiler flags than those provided by default by the author or vendor; and in any case the performance improvement will be less than the likely improvement which may be gained by spending a few $K on a faster box with more CPUs. If I were an employer looking for a sysadmin I'd root out the Gentoo fans, the overclockers, the tuners and the tweakers right off.
There are certainly people in favour of the EU who are in favour of trying to make it more like the USA, but the arguments for and against that are very complex indeed - I wouldn't like to say I have a full grasp of all of them.
That said the single currency is a great idea and seems to be working out pretty well. Inflation is now more stable right across Europe than it has been since WW2, AFAIK.
I agree with that.
That said, I have mixed opinions on the subject. look at what, eg, Bell Labs achieved during the time when AT&T was so huge. You have to ask yourself - they had this vast money machine in the form of a telephone network, and they could squash anyone who tried to intervene - so why did they feel the need to do so much pioneering research even though there was little chance that they stood to gain directly from it ?
Uhhh....Weimar Germany experienced an even more disastrous depression at THE SAME TIME we did in the US.
That might have been something to do with recovering from a war while everyone recalling the loans they gave you due to the knock-on effects of the depression in the USA.
And really, Roosevelt's make-work bullcrap didn't get us out of the depression, World War 2 did.
I agree with you. But it's not like Roosevelt's changes were undone rapidly - his legacy still lives on.
The European Union (or it's predecessor entity) was originally to do with trying to prevent wars between countries which has spent many centuries fighting, and in that objective it has broadly been successful.
A superstate is unlikely and as noted the present farm subsidy system is unworkable. But debates about similar things occur in the USA too (NAFTA etc).
There's an old aphorism, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." Europe seems kind of stuck in the fish-giving stage.
.. etc), and it has threatened to do that to many more (Microsoft?). And is there really much difference between having large sections of the economy run by the state, and large sections of the economy given special treatment by the state for lucrative military contracts as is the case in the USA (Boeing, LM etc) ?
You can't teach everyone to fish, especially not if they were in an road or workplace accident and had to get their hands amputated. But that said, your portrayal is an exaggeration. European economies are all free market economies, with a degree - some more than others - of state ownership of a limited number of corporations and utilities. I am not sure it is so clear that you can say "socialist-ish economies are doomed to failure". European economies with heavy state involvement have gone up and down for sure since WW2, but have any of them really experienced the kind of serious hit that the USA did during the depression in the 1930s - a depression that was ultimately cleared up (I know this point is disputed) by good old fashioned state intervention ?
State ownership exists in the USA too (Amtrak; Tennessee Valley Authority; etc) but obviously not on the same scale as in somewhere like France (Renault, SNCF etc). But one big difference in the USA was/is that the large corporations were still huge overbearing inefficient monopolies - and from where I'm sitting, it looks like it would have made no difference whether they were state owned or not. In the big cases the government had to step in to break them up (AT&T, Standard Oil
Why would you use squashfs rather than tar + bzip2 (or better) ? That's a really daft idea. In any case the data might already be compressed, at least to some extent.
You're stretching. What if the vote counter fell in the shower that morning, and thought red meant Democrat and blue meant Republican? How attenuated do you want to argue?
That one's easy. I'm watching the guy over his shoulder as he counts, and shout "hey! this guy is counting the votes wrong". That is what we do in the UK and Ireland. Because the votes are not counted by a machine, everyone - all the candidates - can have a representative monitoring the count and making a huge fuss if there's dodgy business afoot.
He may slip one or two past the observers (hard but not impossible), but that's not a problem either. If the vote comes down within a hair, we ask for a recount. If the vote is a landslide for another candidate - well, he wouldn't have got *that* many past easily so it's a fair cop. And it's not worth his while anyway - if he's incompetent or trying to fiddle things he won't keep his job for very long.
No system will be perfectly secure. We both know that, and arguing unlikely scenarios detracts from the overall issue, which is trust. Besides, it's simple enough to require that the software run on hardware supplied by the state.
Security is not the issue so much as bugs or improper calibration or use. So you trust the state and the software to be incapable of error. What do you use, a HAL9000 ?
In Northern Ireland a few years ago we had a historic referendum. The government made it clear that it was in favour of a certain result in that referendum. One of the political parties is a bit on the nutty side claimed that the government would try to remove the votes against it from the ballot boxes, thus swinging the vote. Accordingly, the electoral office invited that party to place it's own seals on the ballot boxes. The party accordingly did so, and at the count the following day, that party was able to confirm that all of the seals were in place and that the contents of the boxes had not been adjusted. Tell me how you do that with an electronic vote system ?
I think it was Napoleon who said to never ascribe to malice what could just as easily be incompetence. I think that is particularly true here. The possiblity of deliberate fiddling is distinct, but remote. The far greater possibility is of a whole collection of people not understanding how the system works, how to spot dodgy behaviour, or the system being designed to avoid such scrutiny. Think Chernobyl for an example of this problem when it gets really out of hand. It only needs to happen once for the population to lose all trust in the electoral system.
Specious argument. If you have a larger population, then you have a larger number of staff to count all of the votes so that they are still counted just as quickly. Just like you have a larger number of shopkeepers to run your shops, a larger number of gas stations to fill your cars at, etc.
The USA could quite easily hand-count the results of a presidential election.
On the other hand I do concede that at some of these polls you guys are voting to fill 20 or so different offices. Even so, I'd still say an accurate and accountable count is more important than a quick one.
In Ireland there are only ~4 million people but votes are counted in about the same length of time as in the UK. That said, it is an STV system so there's a bit more work involved.
No one would have the slightest problem with that method. Everyone agrees that is the best method.
No it isn't, people who think that do not understand the issue here, which is that we cannot verify what the computer recorded retrospectively. There is no way to say whether the computer correctly recorded the vote accepted - even if it manages to print this vote out correctly.
Think about it. Why print a record in the first place - because you don't want to trust the machine, right ? So, if you don't trust the machine then why are you using it to begin with, rather than merely using the paper copy ?
I bet if this were the scenario and someone were to go to court over it, it would be found that the fact the paper printout exists constitutes an admission that the electronic machine's counting is not verifiably correct, and the result of any given election counted electronically could therefore be ruled void. How could you argue against that in court ? I suspect that is the real reason why the voting machine companies do not want to print paper records out.
Electronic vote counting cannot work in a way that is compatible with proper, accountable democracy folks. The sooner you guys understand that fact the better.
Indeed. Recall Brian Kernighan's famed Trojan Horse speech.
You could say the essence of Democracy is choosing if we want those systems or not.
A purely philosophical argument. Is democracy choosing whether we want democracy or not ?
Electronic voting does not necessarily dilute democracy any more than hand counting does.
Yes it does, precisely because no-one, other than the experts who are familiar with the machine's operation, can be reasonably sure about what way they votes were counted. Even the experts cannot be sure that the votes were recorded correctly (come up with a way to retrospectively prove that an anonymous elector voted for a particular candidate while maintaining anonymity and you'll be rich for the rest of your life).
There are provisions to make sure hand counting produces accurate results, similar provisions can apply to machines.
Explain to me how I can prove that during the course of a day, votes for a candidate by anonymous voters were correctly recorded. With a paper ballot I've got the sheets of paper, right here in my hand, and everyone can see what was scrawled on them by the voter. With an electronic ballot I've got a recording made by a computer, which due either to tampering, software bugs, data corruption or other electronic failure, may or may not match what the voter actually entered. How can you get around this very serious obstacle ?
Granted, there is always the factor of human error even when machines are doing the counting and there is the occasional faulty machine.
How can the error rate of electronic vote-counting machines ever be measured ? You can measure it in a test scenario, but not in a production scenario.
the board of elections in your local municipality (depending on state, etc) is responsible for choosing the machines and the software. These are either elected officials or are appointed by elected officials, and therefore responsible for representing your interests.
Presumably they're elected in a vote which will be counted by one of the electronic machines they've bought ? What makes you convinced that corruption or (more realistically) incompetence cannot interfere with the result of an election ? Do you think your elected representatives would have the skills to, say, recompile code or get checksums to confirm that the correct load had been installed, and that no tampering had taken place ?
Elections don't just happen, they are overseen by people you put there, directly or indirectly.
You're talking as if elected representatives are infallible and incorruptible. They aren't.
In the UK, if I am a candidate in an election I can watch each vote being counted, right there in the countroom. I don't have to trust a bureaucrat who doesn't know what he is doing to make sure the count is done properly. Because I can see the votes, and they are not hidden in the bowels of a machine or of a computer, I can be personally assured that no attempt has been made to disenfranchise my voters. How can you even begin to provide that guarantee with automated vote counting ?
With a punch card or even a mechanical voting machine, you can see and understand how it works.
I don't get why you guys are coming off with this kind of response KNOWING how in Florida 2000 we all got to see how it did NOT work, and how people got confused or thrown off by their poor understanding of how it DID work. Through what may be deliberate fiddling, or more likely incompetence, the ballot paper in parts of Florida made it potentially unclear to some people who they were voting for, and unclear to those counting the votes who the voter had actually voted for. That is what I call a total farce, and it couldn't have happened if the election had been conducted using a simple sheet of paper with a handwritten X scrawled next to the chosen candidate.
It hardly matters if it is open source. Who will compile it before it is uploaded to the machine ? Who will check that the correct software is loaded ? Who will check the guy doing the checking ?
Automated vote counting of any kind - electronic or mechanical - makes fraud considerably easier, puts a mystery shroud around the counting process and as such is incompatible with democracy. In the UK we count all the votes in our elections within 12 hours including the odd recount. Why are Americans obsessed with diluting their democracy by using machines to do it ?
And how did we manage, despite painful blows to the country's economy (oil delivery shocks from Katrina, etc) have more economic growth and lower unemployment than, say, more socialist-minded places like France or Germany? By reducing the tax burden on the people that take their money and invest it the businesses that hire people and grow the economy.
.. is there county tax in some jurisdictions?). The problem that I think you have with France and Germany is probably the way they spend their money on silly socialist things such as being able to get a heart bypass operation or cancer treatment without being hauled in front of a bankruptcy court, or outdated mumbo-jumbo pinko communist claptrap such as ensuring that a reasonable poverty line is maintained so that people do not become destitute when they are between jobs in a cyclical economy. Instead, the USA spends it's tax money on it's military budget and invading foreign countries. That's their prerogative - you think that the longterm welfare of your people is best funded by spending $120bn on bringing democracy to a middle east sand dune, that is your business - but a lot of people in Europe think it is best served by ensuring that they have the means to acquire education, decent healthcare and living standards that allow them to lead happy and productive lives. I think a lot of people in the USA feel the same way, BTW, but W calls them traitors and ignores them. Fact of life I guess.
Your "argument" is misinformed, ignorant, and frankly boring crap. You could start by look at your budget deficit.
Then you could take a look at your taxation levels. The idea that the USA is some sort of tax haven for people is nonsense. The USA taxes it's citizens pretty heavily - the amount of tax is probably not much different from France or Germany. In many places you'll pay taxes to three of four different authorities (federal, state, city tax
Don't take this personally, I'm not anti-USA, it's a great country in many ways. You just have to look at the profile of public spending and taxation in these countries and try to be more objective about it.
Secondly, while I agree that taxing the crap out of rich people just because they're rich is destructive, I do not agree with the "throw more money at the rich people so that they can pay more people to scrub their bathroom floors with toothbrushes" argument. Yes, entrepreneurship must be encouraged, risk-taking must be rewarded, but there is no evidence that your trickle-down economics argument truly works. The state has a role to play - not an overbearing role but a role nonetheless - in ensuring that people lead productive lives. Societies which recognize that there is a time for wealth acquisition as well as a time for leisure and relaxation are just as likely to be happy and successful.
Enough of the Steve Ballmer impressions already!
am I posting this post from the bathroom ?
.. disturbing.
The thought of someone posting to Slashdot while taking a Donald Trump is
Software to run C code on an FPGA already exists. Here's a book on the subject.
I leafed through this book in a bookstore a while ago. The type of thing they do at the moment is mostly DSP/heavily algorithmic stuff, ie like encryption, compression or checksumming etc.
An OS kernel is mostly shifting data structures around; the algorithms are very clever but also computationally relatively lightweight. In terms of choosing the best way to allocate real estate on a CPU die, an FPGA would not provide the same benefit as much as a CPU hardwired to help the OS as much as possible (eg context switching hardware, high speed caching, multimedia SIMD instructions etc).
The main problem with FPGAs at the moment is that they are expensive relative to hardwired devices. Their main use is still prototyping or research. Once you've designed a really useful device with one and made it stable, you'll want to turn it into a hardwired ASIC if you're producing the hardware in any kind of volume.
Major benefits to matter in a superfluid state include superconductivity, a state where electrons would flow freely with no resistance, thus preserving the most amount of electrical charge during passage and providing the ability to save billions of dollars in 'lost electricity'.
That does, of course, depend on finding a way of cooling the conductor to near absolute zero along it's entire length, using less energy than would be lost during transmission on a normal cable. In other words, it's a pretty ridiculous suggestion