I was crossing a crosswalk on a bike with a "walk" signal. A car hit me with the front of the car knocking me to the road. I fell to the side and the car continued on (making a legal right-turn on red). My bike was totaled, but I was fine -- a helmet helped as did the slow speed of both me and the car. The driver hesitated, but didn't stop. People asked if I got the license plate, but I was too busy falling. On reflection, it has always amazed me that a driver could hit someone in broad daylight and simply drive on. Since I was hit by the front of the car and fell on the driver's side, the driver could not have missed seeing that they hit me. It was a sad statement on humanity.
I had an opportunity recently to ask questions of a Microsoft officer who works on strategy and works in Europe. When I described many of the unpleasant aspects of TPM and the like, he said that European privacy laws would prevent the adoption of such policies. I found that to be an interesting viewpoint.
Even if they aren't armed, do you want a pack of 36 600 lb animals with sharp teeth who natually kill sharks and who have been trained by the navy out while you are swimming? Dolphins are not cuddly in nature.
Dolphins are amazing animals with the potential to do harm, but are not naturally agressive to humans. One data point: I was swimming in South Carolina and had a juvenile dolphin curious about me approaching within 20 feet. Momma kept between me and Junior. I did not feel threatened, in fact, I was spell bound. The encounter lasted ten to fifteen minutes.
The article says they could be dangerous "if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts." There is nothing to indicate that there is any evidence that they were armed. Think about it: with a Category 5 hurricane coming their way with days of warning they are going to leave them armed?
If the ID was free and easy to get, would there still be objections? No, it would no longer be an impediment.
Given the relatively small cost to the government to make it free and easy to get (it would be spread across all taxpayers rather than only the poor), it raises the question of why? One answer is that the hidden purpose is to be a poll tax.
I personally believe that it is an poorly conceived law rather than a malicious one, but the effect is the same.
The key issue with red-light cameras is who controls the length of the yellow light being on. If you shorten the yellow light, you can increase violations and hence increase revenue. In many cases, the contract has the private camera company controling the yellow light timing. Revenue rather than safety becomes the deciding factor, and it is outside public control. I have read, but cannot verify, that cameras plus very short yellow lights increases rear-end crashes as people slam on brakes to avoid tickets. If red-light cameras are coming in your community, consider advocating that your community control the yellow-light timing. If the community controls the yellow-light timing, community pressure has a chance to influence the safety vs. revenue debate.
A useful transistor needs gain and many proposed switches do not provide sufficient gain to be used as we now use transistors. I read TFA and found no mention of gain. Having three terminals at least provides the potential of having gain, but nothing is mentioned on its magnitude. Has anyone delved far enough into their work to tease out this item?
I saw one of that size demoed in 1999 by a Korean firm (Samsung?). The one I saw was crude so this one reflects years of development so maybe commercial versions are not so far off.
It says "Firearm-related crime has plummeted since 1993", but when you look at the graph it is labeled "NONFATAL Firearm-related crime has plummeted since 1993" which is something quite different. I could not find a chart about "FATAL firearms-related crime" or combined firearms-related crime. Why was that left out? Is there an agenda? Why does the book "How to lie with statistics" come to mind?
Without the missing facts here is a scenario which could explain that graph: if firearm-related crime became more fatal in that time period, then the nonfatal firearm-related crime would decrease even if firearm-related crime was constant.
Ask the university department responsible for fund raising. They will tell you that the easiest way to track alumni in the USA is with SSN. If you have someone's SSN, it is easy to find their up-to-date address -- critical for fund raising. There are businesses which will provide you with up-to-date addresses, if you give them SSNs. My university does not collect all student SSN so it is severly handicapped in fund raising.
From the arcticle: "The investigation was started last October after it was discovered that computer hackers had gained access to Sumitomo Mitsui bank's computer system in London."... and later: "[Bank Executive] said: "The case is still in the middle of investigation so we cannot comment further. We have undertaken various measures in terms of security and we have not suffered any financial damage."
So the break in goes back to October, yet nothing has been taken in the last five months?
Unfortunately, systems based on entanglement appear to have a theoretical exploitable weakness which the quantum key exchange based on BB84 protocol does not have. See this article from
EE Times.
[BB84]C.H. Bennett and G. Brassard "Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing", Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computers Systems and Signal Processing, Bangalore India, December 1984, pp 175-179.
At a nanotube workshop in 1999 Samsung demoed an early prototype. It was only about 8-inch diagonal and displayed a fixed image, but was still impressive. The basic idea is to have an electron gun for each pixel as nanotubes make nice electron guns. In fact, each pixel had hundreds or thousands (I forget) of nanotubes, probably for ease of manufacture and redundancy.
From the article: "And so far, the Tweel is no lighter than the tire and wheel it replaces." That is not surprising for a prototype. If it is already close in weight (which is not claimed in the article), an optimist would expect development to reduce weight significantly.
I used to be a high-school math teacher (now a college prof in CS).
Few math teachers majored in math. My theory is that few math teachers love math. I taught in a summer program for bright students and a frequent comment I got was "I never before saw anyone excited about math!"
If you don't think that math is fun, exciting, and cool, you will not get students excited about it. Not only does this apply to math classes at higher levels, but also to early elementary levels where math-phobic teachers are common.
In the US teaching is not a high status profession and in most places it is not paid well. Why would one expect to get quality teachers? The fact that many are high quality is amazing to me.
Multiple posters have commented about the role of parents. I could quite accurately predict which kid's parents would show up for parent-teacher meetings.
From comp.risks. Peter Neumann is a respected analyzer of risks.
Some 2004 voting anomalies > Mon, 8 Nov 2004 16:01:13 PST
For those of you interested in following a collection of reported problems more carefully, here are just a few reported anomalies, collected from a variety of sources:
* Palm Beach County logged 88,000 more votes than people who had voted in
the presidential race. (Teresa LePore of 2000 Butterfly Ballot fame is
the County supervisor of elections there.)
* A Franklin County Ohio machine error gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in a
precinct in Gahanna. The correct totals were 365 for Bush, 260 for Kerry.
* In Broward County FL, in balloting for Amendment 4, ES&S software for
tabulating absentee ballots began counting BACKWARDS once a total of
32,767 [2^15 - 1, in a signed 16-bit field] votes had been reached in a
precinct. When this was discovered, the corrected totals for the precinct
went from 166,000 to 240,000, and actually caused the statewide results to
be reversed on this amendment. Apparently the same flaw was detected two
years ago in the same software, and remained uncorrected.
Nick Simicich wondered in a long message to RISKS:
Do you suppose that they "fixed" this by making the 16 bit field
unsigned? Or do you suppose that they counted the numbers separately
using, say, floating point so that they could check the results for
large discrepancies? Or maybe that they checked the before and after to
see that the numbers increased when they added to them...or anything
else that they could do to make this self auditing? Nah...frankly, I'm
scared by the stupidity of this error. This is a problem that needs an
open source solution.
* The failure of the ES&S ranked-choice vote-counting software in the San
Francisco Supervisors' election that I noted in RISKS-23.58 turns out to
have been a hard-coded constant maximum number of voters that was set too
low. The fix was utterly trivial, but wisely required recertification by
the State. [Perhaps the same programmer wrote the Broward software?]
* Bev Harris reported that ``Jeff Fisher, the Democratic candidate for the
U.S. House from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to
show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election
was hacked, but of who hacked it and how... In Baker County, for example,
with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them
Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush.... Dick
Morris [famous consultant to both parties, now with Fox News] wrote "So,
according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry
Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa.... Exit polls
cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I
suspect foul play." '' [See http://www.blackboxvoting.org , *NOT*.com]
* Incidentally, Ralph Barone noted an article on the internal database
structures of the Diebold voting machines, plus how to hack an election
and cover your trail afterwards.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/scoop/S00065.htm
* There were numerous reports of screens "jumping" votes in ES&S and Hart
InterCivic machines, where casting a straight-party subsequently changes
the vote for the President before exiting.
* Also reported were many cases of long lines and long waits only in certain
politically skewed precincts, many legitimate voters who claim they were
disenfranchised, voters who were given special optical scan pens that were
not capable of being tallied, and so on.
Many Web sources provided running lists of reported anomalies, such as
http://www.votersunite.org
http://fairvote.
There is a critical difference between handling money and handling votes (in addition to anonymity already mentioned): money is interchangable, but votes are not.
For example, if I lose a dollar in a transaction, it can be replaced by any other valid dollar. If a vote is lost, "any other" vote is not a valid substitute.
If you are considering the economics of nuclear power, you must consider the Price-Anderson Act. See here for the anti-nuclear take on Price-Anderson. In one sentence, the act has the government covering the bulk of claims in the case of a disaster. That subsidy is large and complicates the calculation of economic cost.
On its impact: "Many nuclear suppliers express the view that without Price-Anderson coverage, they would not participate in the nuclear industry."
from
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, The Price-Anderson Act - Crossing the Bridge to the Next Century: A Report to Congress, October 1998.
Finally, read economic analysis carefully to ensure that it covers the cost of decommissioning a plant and waste storage. On the other hand, competing arguments must cover the cost of pollution.
Constructing a balanced economic argument for any power source is complicated.
Why didn't it win the Darpa Grand Challenge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge? No vehicle in the contest made it more than seven miles. If this vehicle is ready for production, why wasn't it out winning the contest earlier this year?
A very useful tool for cheat checking of programs is MOSS. It is free, sorts out the cheating candidates, and provides a useable interface. Of course, one must check by hand for true cheating vs. false positives.
For all the billions (did I see $85 billion in the article?) for the Department of Homeland Security, there is a measly $10 million devoted to all research. Of that, $5 million goes to "cybersecurity" research. It was no wonder that the cybersecurity chief resigned.
To put the research numbers in perspective, the National Institute of Health regularly sees INCREASES in annual budget in tens of millions of dollars.
At least our peanut crop with its $3.5 million dollar homeland security subsidy (mentioned in the article) indicates that our government has its priorities straight. I can see Osama quivering in his boots!
I'll second that and add another piece of advice: pay your babysitters well (better than others do) and treat them with respect. If possible "adopt", them into your family. You'll find you get and retain the best babysitters.
We did that and they always found time to sit for our kids whereas others couldn't get them. When my daughter got older she ended up sitting for the two families which paid well, but more importantly, treated her with respect. Now in college, she corresponds with both her own babysitter and the kids she babysat for.
Slashdot Mirror
I was crossing a crosswalk on a bike with a "walk" signal. A car hit me with the front of the car knocking me to the road. I fell to the side and the car continued on (making a legal right-turn on red). My bike was totaled, but I was fine -- a helmet helped as did the slow speed of both me and the car. The driver hesitated, but didn't stop. People asked if I got the license plate, but I was too busy falling. On reflection, it has always amazed me that a driver could hit someone in broad daylight and simply drive on. Since I was hit by the front of the car and fell on the driver's side, the driver could not have missed seeing that they hit me. It was a sad statement on humanity.
Old News. TPM has been around for a few years.
The site is https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/home
For a discussion of some concerns check out EFF at http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003804.php
I had an opportunity recently to ask questions of a Microsoft officer who works on strategy and works in Europe. When I described many of the unpleasant aspects of TPM and the like, he said that European privacy laws would prevent the adoption of such policies. I found that to be an interesting viewpoint.
Even if they aren't armed, do you want a pack of 36 600 lb animals with sharp teeth who natually kill sharks and who have been trained by the navy out while you are swimming? Dolphins are not cuddly in nature.
Dolphins are amazing animals with the potential to do harm, but are not naturally agressive to humans. One data point: I was swimming in South Carolina and had a juvenile dolphin curious about me approaching within 20 feet. Momma kept between me and Junior. I did not feel threatened, in fact, I was spell bound. The encounter lasted ten to fifteen minutes.
The article says they could be dangerous "if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts." There is nothing to indicate that there is any evidence that they were armed. Think about it: with a Category 5 hurricane coming their way with days of warning they are going to leave them armed?
Someone is fear mongering.
If the ID was free and easy to get, would there still be objections?
No, it would no longer be an impediment.
Given the relatively small cost to the government to make it free and easy to get (it would be spread across all taxpayers rather than only the poor), it raises the question of why? One answer is that the hidden purpose is to be a poll tax.
I personally believe that it is an poorly conceived law rather than a malicious one, but the effect is the same.
The key issue with red-light cameras is who controls the length of the yellow light being on. If you shorten the yellow light, you can increase violations and hence increase revenue. In many cases, the contract has the private camera company controling the yellow light timing. Revenue rather than safety becomes the deciding factor, and it is outside public control. I have read, but cannot verify, that cameras plus very short yellow lights increases rear-end crashes as people slam on brakes to avoid tickets. If red-light cameras are coming in your community, consider advocating that your community control the yellow-light timing. If the community controls the yellow-light timing, community pressure has a chance to influence the safety vs. revenue debate.
A useful transistor needs gain and many proposed switches do not provide sufficient gain to be used as we now use transistors. I read TFA and found no mention of gain. Having three terminals at least provides the potential of having gain, but nothing is mentioned on its magnitude. Has anyone delved far enough into their work to tease out this item?
Never the less, it is a cool piece of work.
I saw one of that size demoed in 1999 by a Korean firm (Samsung?). The one I saw was crude so this one reflects years of development so maybe commercial versions are not so far off.
It says "Firearm-related crime has plummeted since 1993", but when you look at the graph it is labeled "NONFATAL Firearm-related crime has plummeted since 1993" which is something quite different. I could not find a chart about "FATAL firearms-related crime" or combined firearms-related crime. Why was that left out? Is there an agenda? Why does the book "How to lie with statistics" come to mind?
Without the missing facts here is a scenario which could explain that graph: if firearm-related crime became more fatal in that time period, then the nonfatal firearm-related crime would decrease even if firearm-related crime was constant.
Ask the university department responsible for fund raising. They will tell you that the easiest way to track alumni in the USA is with SSN. If you have someone's SSN, it is easy to find their up-to-date address -- critical for fund raising. There are businesses which will provide you with up-to-date addresses, if you give them SSNs. My university does not collect all student SSN so it is severly handicapped in fund raising.
From the arcticle: ... and later:
"The investigation was started last October after it was discovered that computer hackers had gained access to Sumitomo Mitsui bank's computer system in London."
"[Bank Executive] said: "The case is still in the middle of investigation so we cannot comment further. We have undertaken various measures in terms of security and we have not suffered any financial damage."
So the break in goes back to October, yet nothing has been taken in the last five months?
The whole story has not been told...
[BB84]C.H. Bennett and G. Brassard "Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing", Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computers Systems and Signal Processing, Bangalore India, December 1984, pp 175-179.
At a nanotube workshop in 1999 Samsung demoed an early prototype. It was only about 8-inch diagonal and displayed a fixed image, but was still impressive. The basic idea is to have an electron gun for each pixel as nanotubes make nice electron guns. In fact, each pixel had hundreds or thousands (I forget) of nanotubes, probably for ease of manufacture and redundancy.
From the article: "And so far, the Tweel is no lighter than the tire and wheel it replaces." That is not surprising for a prototype. If it is already close in weight (which is not claimed in the article), an optimist would expect development to reduce weight significantly.
I used to be a high-school math teacher (now a college prof in CS).
Few math teachers majored in math. My theory is that few math teachers love math. I taught in a summer program for bright students and a frequent comment I got was "I never before saw anyone excited about math!"
If you don't think that math is fun, exciting, and cool, you will not get students excited about it. Not only does this apply to math classes at higher levels, but also to early elementary levels where math-phobic teachers are common.
In the US teaching is not a high status profession and in most places it is not paid well. Why would one expect to get quality teachers? The fact that many are high quality is amazing to me.
Multiple posters have commented about the role of parents. I could quite accurately predict which kid's parents would show up for parent-teacher meetings.
From comp.risks. Peter Neumann is a respected analyzer of risks.
.com]
Some 2004 voting anomalies
>
Mon, 8 Nov 2004 16:01:13 PST
For those of you interested in following a collection of reported problems
more carefully, here are just a few reported anomalies, collected from a
variety of sources:
* Palm Beach County logged 88,000 more votes than people who had voted in
the presidential race. (Teresa LePore of 2000 Butterfly Ballot fame is
the County supervisor of elections there.)
* A Franklin County Ohio machine error gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in a
precinct in Gahanna. The correct totals were 365 for Bush, 260 for Kerry.
* In Broward County FL, in balloting for Amendment 4, ES&S software for
tabulating absentee ballots began counting BACKWARDS once a total of
32,767 [2^15 - 1, in a signed 16-bit field] votes had been reached in a
precinct. When this was discovered, the corrected totals for the precinct
went from 166,000 to 240,000, and actually caused the statewide results to
be reversed on this amendment. Apparently the same flaw was detected two
years ago in the same software, and remained uncorrected.
Nick Simicich wondered in a long message to RISKS:
Do you suppose that they "fixed" this by making the 16 bit field
unsigned? Or do you suppose that they counted the numbers separately
using, say, floating point so that they could check the results for
large discrepancies? Or maybe that they checked the before and after to
see that the numbers increased when they added to them...or anything
else that they could do to make this self auditing? Nah...frankly, I'm
scared by the stupidity of this error. This is a problem that needs an
open source solution.
* The failure of the ES&S ranked-choice vote-counting software in the San
Francisco Supervisors' election that I noted in RISKS-23.58 turns out to
have been a hard-coded constant maximum number of voters that was set too
low. The fix was utterly trivial, but wisely required recertification by
the State. [Perhaps the same programmer wrote the Broward software?]
* Bev Harris reported that ``Jeff Fisher, the Democratic candidate for the
U.S. House from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to
show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election
was hacked, but of who hacked it and how... In Baker County, for example,
with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them
Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush.... Dick
Morris [famous consultant to both parties, now with Fox News] wrote "So,
according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry
Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa.... Exit polls
cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I
suspect foul play." '' [See http://www.blackboxvoting.org , *NOT*
* Incidentally, Ralph Barone noted an article on the internal database
structures of the Diebold voting machines, plus how to hack an election
and cover your trail afterwards.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/scoop/S00065.htm
* There were numerous reports of screens "jumping" votes in ES&S and Hart
InterCivic machines, where casting a straight-party subsequently changes
the vote for the President before exiting.
* Also reported were many cases of long lines and long waits only in certain
politically skewed precincts, many legitimate voters who claim they were
disenfranchised, voters who were given special optical scan pens that were
not capable of being tallied, and so on.
Many Web sources provided running lists of reported anomalies, such as
http://www.votersunite.org
http://fairvote.
There is a critical difference between handling money and handling votes (in addition to anonymity already mentioned): money is interchangable, but votes are not.
For example, if I lose a dollar in a transaction, it can be replaced by any other valid dollar. If a vote is lost, "any other" vote is not a valid substitute.
Note, however, that 1 is not a prime. Citation: According to wikipepdia: "The number 1 is neither prime nor composite;"
Check out antiphising.org
On its impact: "Many nuclear suppliers express the view that without Price-Anderson coverage, they would not participate in the nuclear industry." from U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, The Price-Anderson Act - Crossing the Bridge to the Next Century: A Report to Congress, October 1998.
Finally, read economic analysis carefully to ensure that it covers the cost of decommissioning a plant and waste storage. On the other hand, competing arguments must cover the cost of pollution.
Constructing a balanced economic argument for any power source is complicated.
The social implications of any advancement can be interesting.
Why didn't it win the Darpa Grand Challenge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge ?
No vehicle in the contest made it more than seven miles. If this vehicle is ready for production, why wasn't it out winning the contest earlier this year?
A very useful tool for cheat checking of programs is MOSS. It is free, sorts out the cheating candidates, and provides a useable interface. Of course, one must check by hand for true cheating vs. false positives.
For all the billions (did I see $85 billion in the article?) for the Department of Homeland Security, there is a measly $10 million devoted to all research. Of that, $5 million goes to "cybersecurity" research. It was no wonder that the cybersecurity chief resigned.
To put the research numbers in perspective, the National Institute of Health regularly sees INCREASES in annual budget in tens of millions of dollars.
At least our peanut crop with its $3.5 million dollar homeland security subsidy (mentioned in the article) indicates that our government has its priorities straight. I can see Osama quivering in his boots!
I'll second that and add another piece of advice: pay your babysitters well (better than others do) and treat them with respect. If possible "adopt", them into your family. You'll find you get and retain the best babysitters.
We did that and they always found time to sit for our kids whereas others couldn't get them. When my daughter got older she ended up sitting for the two families which paid well, but more importantly, treated her with respect. Now in college, she corresponds with both her own babysitter and the kids she babysat for.