Ok, when I say "voting machine", I mean something with the following properties:
Is a self-contained system that tabulates votes through direct voter input.
the machine prevents voters from choosing mutually exclusive candidates (prevents "overvoting")
The voter manipulates some physical devices on the machine in order to vote
When the voter is finished selecting the candidates he/she wishes to vote for, some final mechanism (usually a lever) locks in the choices selected (and usually draws back the privacy curtain as well).
All selections made by the voter are tallied by the machine itself, and are recorded in some cumulative physical format (like an odometer)
In the traditional format of said machine, the method of transmitting the vote tally from the machine to the election authority is not automatic or necessarily computerized.
I'm looking over the list of frauds and errors with machines that you have provided, and the first thing that comes to mind is that Florida has some serious problems. Secondly type of machine I specify excludes card machines, which are apparently wrought with error and fraud. Problems concerning the transmitting of the vote tally to the election board are not an inherent problem in the machine I have described. Possibilities for tampering with the "odometer" prior to reporting the vote tally are minimized by established proceedures for opening the machine in the presence of duly constituted authorities and representatives from the two major parties.
Anybody can tamper with any voting system, mechanized or not. The challenge is to do these two things (that don't always lend themselves well to each other)
1)Minimize the opportunities for fraud.
2)Maximize the possibilities for determining when fraud has occurred.
Problems with machine failure that leave voters stranded happen at the precinct level. Thus, there ought to be backup paper voting proceedures in the event of such a failure. But, by using simplified hybrid electric/mechanical machines as I have suggested, the failure rate will be greatly reduced while lowering overall cost and minimizing fraud.
Call me crazy, but there's just something very "real" and satisfying about pulling the lever on those old clunky mechanical voting machines.
In all seriousness though, with some hard-wirded electronics (rather than software), it should be pretty easy to construct a virtually fraud-proof voting machine that resembles the old-style ones but isn't as expensive to manufacture or maintain.
I'm not sure the Republic is a good choice for an intro Philosophy class. Actually, what I rather like about the Republic is that it is relatively tidy and understandable... compared to some of the convoluted stuff that other philosophers have constructed. The Republic doesn't require the understanding of too many abstract concepts. If you have some basic understanding of the Forms (And what knowledge Form of the Good would mean) then you're most of the way there.
It just seems like a waste of a semester - an intermediate level class could easily cover that work in less than a month. Your introductory semester could have been used to cover more topics that were more interesting, perhaps prompting one to seek a further study of philosophy.
But you're right about needing context, and about needing professors to talk about it to really understand it.
Yeah, it's actually quite trivial when you consider that oppressive contracts are really what hold cellular customers hostage.
Cell providers should know that people are already bailing out because they're getting screwed. Keeping one's number is merely the proverbial common courtesy reach-around.
Everybody grab a copy of the April 18th Entertainment Weekly (the one with the Matrix 2 cover). Check out Joel Stein's article about the PSA regarding movie pirating soon to be shown in movie theaters. (Shown, ironically, to people who have almost by definition paid to see the flick.)
My favorite line from the article?
"I vowed right then not only to pirate a movie but also to find a way to use the Internet to steal directly from Jack Valenti's home." (In response to some asinine remark by Valenti)
Personally I hate the stuff, but somebody pointed out to me that nowhere on the bottle does it actually say "Mad Dog", just "MD".
And if you have to specify that your "wine" is "grape flavored", that's a pretty bad sign. Also bad is when people differentiate the products by the color and that's just as descriptive as the "flavor".
Well, they can ask, but somebody can always say "no".
If the/. eds say "Hi, we're planning to bombard your site with traffic. Two questions... 1, is this ok, and 2, we can mirror it if you'd like."
The answer very well might be "no, you can't link or mirror." By not asking, they avoid the issue of somebody saying "no", but also cut off the possibility of "yes, but please mirror it."
/. cannot ask to mirror a site for legal reasons, nor can they just go ahead and mirror it.
What is needed is for site authors to pre-emptively allow mirroring. This could be done with some kind of apache mod (as somebody has suggested below) or with a simple statement like "Please mirror this site if you're going to post a link to this site that is likely to generate massive amounts of traffic."
perhaps some sort of web content license that allows for mirroring... Just so that nobody has to ask before either posting to/. or mirroring.
Seriously though, anybody posting a site about dimensions of sci-fi starships must have some knowledge of slashdot and the possibility of getting/.ed.
This is perhaps my favorite feature of ICQ. (Unfortunate that nobody I know uses ICQ anymore). Also handy is the "always visible to user" setting (or whatever they're calling it now) - when you are "invisible" to everybody else, your select few individuals will see that you are online.
My biggest gripe about AIM is that to block a buddy is to not know their status... I like seeing that my parents are online, but knowing that they do not know that I am online. Although, that might have been the downfall of ICQ (in the US at least) - lots of paranoid "invisible" people and nobody genuinely "online".
Except for the service contract lengths of at least a year... sometimes up to two.
As long as it costs me several months' worth of regular service to sever my ties to my cell provider I am pretty much going to stick with that provider. That's where they really screw ya.
I read "Ethics of Star Trek" and I'm not sure that it would help. My read of EoST had more to do with seeing which series (ToS through Voyager), characters, episodes, species, (and eventually the whole *Trek franchise) corresponded with which well-established ethical philosophies.
Though there was a strong case for the basis of characters, species, and episodes, I think the case was very weak for saying that any particular series (or much less the franchise) was based on any one particular philosophy or philosopher.
Anyway, at least one person agrees with me:
(A review from the Amazon link above)
Warning, it is about ethical theory, and not about modern issues (ie. abortion, religion, homosexuality, etc.) If this is what you are looking for, then you will be pleased, but if you're looking for a book about ethics and modern problems (which I probably was) then you may be a bit disappointed.
Second question, which country was the worst payer of their UN contributions?
True, but when the american public found out about this there was some popular support for paying our dues... and iirc we did pay a big chunk of them then.
Just be sure to subtract unpaid parking tickets and other minor crimes committed by "diplomats" in NYC;-)
Ultimately though, computers are going to continue to shrink and converge with such devices as mobile phones. Data transfer and communications are going to be fundamental to such devices.
There will be some degree of convergence, but I don't think anybody has this at all figured out yet. The most practical convergence toys I've seen are the PDA/phones. The contact info and notes that you would want in a phone are there in your pda. Conceptually perfect - one fewer device to lug around. The problem is that unless you are using an earpiece, your pda is now jammed up against your skull, doing you little good while talking to somebody... the precise time when you might want to take or view notes. So far all I've seen are companies randomly converging devices like phone/mp3/camera/what-the-fuck-ever and hoping for something to hit. Yeah, some geeks are going to like some of these devices, but what "convergence" needs is for my dad or my boss to like a device.
Anyway, that's my convergence bit. On a slightly more on-topic note, what about existing cellular networks and 'net connection? Sure, the bandwidth isn't going to be anything near that at the Starbucks/Hotspot, but coverage is built in already. Besides, the most vital mobile killer app is email, which is almost always low bandwidth/text. Is there that much of a market for pulling video off the net while slugging down a cafe-latte? Thus, the popularity of Crackberry, and the proof that cell networks have a role to play.
By no means have I ever been a member of the Holy Church of Greenspan, but he tried to tell people for quite some time that "irrational exuberance" was a problem. It was an inherently impossible situation:
"Hey guys, things are ok, but they're not super-great. Why don't you stop throwing VC at anything remotely connected to the internet, but don't everbody do this all at once or things will be bad."
I am so glad somebody said Brain Candy. Jesus, I was starting to think I was on another planet or something reading down the zillion comments that lack KITH goodness.
Comatoriums - fucking great.
"Are we gonna get the big table in here or do I have to cut down that fucking tree myself?"
"My Empire... is... CRUMBLING!"
Mike Myers' Dr. Evil character owes a lot to KITH, IMO.
I really really liked Stargate (I used to have an SG Tshirt w/ the eye of Ra on the back that mesmerized people sitting behind me in school.), and High Fidelity as well, but they don't stand up too well to repeated viewings.
I think Rocky Horror is way too overrated. It is something everybody should see exactly twice - once to get over the wierdness, and again at some future time to actually watch the movie.
I was always a fan of having one or more local copies and redundant network backups on my roommate's computer. If his computer happened to be off at the time, I settled for a floppy.
I share a land line with my house mates and only one person receives voice on that line - everybody else has cell service as primary phone.
While I do like the relative privacy of a cell number, the fact that I have had to promulgate my cell number as my primary number means that lots of people already have it. Given that my alum assoc is begging me for cash on it already, what would be the downside to having some real life person be able to look me up?
The problem with this is that some webpages seem to think that they own your desktop and pop to the front when they are finished loading, or sometimes before they are done loading - that's even worse!
Tabs allow the user to send the page to load in the background with some reasonable expectation that the page will behave itself and not attempt to assert its dominance over other pages. It gets even worse when you consider that many webpages do this. Loading three pages simultaneously might auto-refocus four or more times. This is unacceptable to me.
Or better yet, pass the virtual collection plate though the Free Software community to buy SCO-Group (and all their IP) and either BSD or GPL everything.
On the other hand, if IBM gets stuck with this, they could end up taking one for the team - IBM would be responsible for the damage caused by SCO IP being in Linux, and thus nobody else would be...?
Some friends of mine and I had an ongoing semi-serious plan to stop dropping bombs in Iraq (this was approx 1998) and start dropping junked cars. I mean, we have a shitload of junked cars in the US - Why not get rid of them in such a way as to do some damage. Ya can't drop one of those things from fiddy-thousand feet and have it not screw a few things up.
The bigger thing was the psychological aspect... "HOLY SHIT - They're dropping Buicks!"
Somebody in-the-know will probably correct me, but I was under the impression that Voyager happened a bit further into the future than TNG... making Janeway's promotion all the stranger since she would have fewer years of experience.
Slashdot Mirror
- Is a self-contained system that tabulates votes through direct voter input.
- the machine prevents voters from choosing mutually exclusive candidates (prevents "overvoting")
- The voter manipulates some physical devices on the machine in order to vote
- When the voter is finished selecting the candidates he/she wishes to vote for, some final mechanism (usually a lever) locks in the choices selected (and usually draws back the privacy curtain as well).
- All selections made by the voter are tallied by the machine itself, and are recorded in some cumulative physical format (like an odometer)
- In the traditional format of said machine, the method of transmitting the vote tally from the machine to the election authority is not automatic or necessarily computerized.
I'm looking over the list of frauds and errors with machines that you have provided, and the first thing that comes to mind is that Florida has some serious problems. Secondly type of machine I specify excludes card machines, which are apparently wrought with error and fraud. Problems concerning the transmitting of the vote tally to the election board are not an inherent problem in the machine I have described. Possibilities for tampering with the "odometer" prior to reporting the vote tally are minimized by established proceedures for opening the machine in the presence of duly constituted authorities and representatives from the two major parties.Anybody can tamper with any voting system, mechanized or not. The challenge is to do these two things (that don't always lend themselves well to each other)
1)Minimize the opportunities for fraud.
2)Maximize the possibilities for determining when fraud has occurred.
Problems with machine failure that leave voters stranded happen at the precinct level. Thus, there ought to be backup paper voting proceedures in the event of such a failure. But, by using simplified hybrid electric/mechanical machines as I have suggested, the failure rate will be greatly reduced while lowering overall cost and minimizing fraud.
In all seriousness though, with some hard-wirded electronics (rather than software), it should be pretty easy to construct a virtually fraud-proof voting machine that resembles the old-style ones but isn't as expensive to manufacture or maintain.
It just seems like a waste of a semester - an intermediate level class could easily cover that work in less than a month. Your introductory semester could have been used to cover more topics that were more interesting, perhaps prompting one to seek a further study of philosophy.
But you're right about needing context, and about needing professors to talk about it to really understand it.
Cell providers should know that people are already bailing out because they're getting screwed. Keeping one's number is merely the proverbial common courtesy reach-around.
My favorite line from the article?
"I vowed right then not only to pirate a movie but also to find a way to use the Internet to steal directly from Jack Valenti's home." (In response to some asinine remark by Valenti)
And then somebody would promptly attempt to get linux running on it.
Personally I hate the stuff, but somebody pointed out to me that nowhere on the bottle does it actually say "Mad Dog", just "MD".
And if you have to specify that your "wine" is "grape flavored", that's a pretty bad sign. Also bad is when people differentiate the products by the color and that's just as descriptive as the "flavor".
(The sick thing is that I'm only half-kidding.)
If the /. eds say "Hi, we're planning to bombard your site with traffic. Two questions... 1, is this ok, and 2, we can mirror it if you'd like."
The answer very well might be "no, you can't link or mirror." By not asking, they avoid the issue of somebody saying "no", but also cut off the possibility of "yes, but please mirror it."
What is needed is for site authors to pre-emptively allow mirroring. This could be done with some kind of apache mod (as somebody has suggested below) or with a simple statement like "Please mirror this site if you're going to post a link to this site that is likely to generate massive amounts of traffic."
perhaps some sort of web content license that allows for mirroring... Just so that nobody has to ask before either posting to /. or mirroring.
Seriously though, anybody posting a site about dimensions of sci-fi starships must have some knowledge of slashdot and the possibility of getting /.ed.
My biggest gripe about AIM is that to block a buddy is to not know their status ... I like seeing that my parents are online, but knowing that they do not know that I am online. Although, that might have been the downfall of ICQ (in the US at least) - lots of paranoid "invisible" people and nobody genuinely "online".
As long as it costs me several months' worth of regular service to sever my ties to my cell provider I am pretty much going to stick with that provider. That's where they really screw ya.
Though there was a strong case for the basis of characters, species, and episodes, I think the case was very weak for saying that any particular series (or much less the franchise) was based on any one particular philosophy or philosopher.
Anyway, at least one person agrees with me:
(A review from the Amazon link above)
Warning, it is about ethical theory, and not about modern issues (ie. abortion, religion, homosexuality, etc.) If this is what you are looking for, then you will be pleased, but if you're looking for a book about ethics and modern problems (which I probably was) then you may be a bit disappointed.
True, but when the american public found out about this there was some popular support for paying our dues... and iirc we did pay a big chunk of them then.
Just be sure to subtract unpaid parking tickets and other minor crimes committed by "diplomats" in NYC ;-)
There will be some degree of convergence, but I don't think anybody has this at all figured out yet. The most practical convergence toys I've seen are the PDA/phones. The contact info and notes that you would want in a phone are there in your pda. Conceptually perfect - one fewer device to lug around. The problem is that unless you are using an earpiece, your pda is now jammed up against your skull, doing you little good while talking to somebody... the precise time when you might want to take or view notes. So far all I've seen are companies randomly converging devices like phone/mp3/camera/what-the-fuck-ever and hoping for something to hit. Yeah, some geeks are going to like some of these devices, but what "convergence" needs is for my dad or my boss to like a device.
Anyway, that's my convergence bit. On a slightly more on-topic note, what about existing cellular networks and 'net connection? Sure, the bandwidth isn't going to be anything near that at the Starbucks/Hotspot, but coverage is built in already. Besides, the most vital mobile killer app is email, which is almost always low bandwidth/text. Is there that much of a market for pulling video off the net while slugging down a cafe-latte? Thus, the popularity of Crackberry, and the proof that cell networks have a role to play.
"Hey guys, things are ok, but they're not super-great. Why don't you stop throwing VC at anything remotely connected to the internet, but don't everbody do this all at once or things will be bad."
Comatoriums - fucking great.
"Are we gonna get the big table in here or do I have to cut down that fucking tree myself?"
"My Empire ... is... CRUMBLING!"
Mike Myers' Dr. Evil character owes a lot to KITH, IMO.
I think Rocky Horror is way too overrated. It is something everybody should see exactly twice - once to get over the wierdness, and again at some future time to actually watch the movie.
It did end up saving my ass at least once.
I share a land line with my house mates and only one person receives voice on that line - everybody else has cell service as primary phone.
While I do like the relative privacy of a cell number, the fact that I have had to promulgate my cell number as my primary number means that lots of people already have it. Given that my alum assoc is begging me for cash on it already, what would be the downside to having some real life person be able to look me up?
IIRC, the Toughbook is the current laptop of choice for the US military.
Tabs allow the user to send the page to load in the background with some reasonable expectation that the page will behave itself and not attempt to assert its dominance over other pages. It gets even worse when you consider that many webpages do this. Loading three pages simultaneously might auto-refocus four or more times. This is unacceptable to me.
On the other hand, if IBM gets stuck with this, they could end up taking one for the team - IBM would be responsible for the damage caused by SCO IP being in Linux, and thus nobody else would be...?
The bigger thing was the psychological aspect...
"HOLY SHIT - They're dropping Buicks!"
Somebody in-the-know will probably correct me, but I was under the impression that Voyager happened a bit further into the future than TNG... making Janeway's promotion all the stranger since she would have fewer years of experience.