In terms of deterrence discouraging criminal behaviour, you are the norm, but if you think about this:
If only 5% of the population isn't deterred by punnishment, that's 300Million*5% = 15million people who ignore the law.
As for lotteries: I'd guess that well under half the population actually buys the things, but the reason why the numbers don't seem that small, is that I (and you, and most of the other people you know) don't usually go waltzing into work saying
"I went out today and
didn't buy lottery tickets! I'm going to put that money into a pot to pay for my next vacation in Hawaii!
You do, on the other hand hear the converse, just about every day, in TV and radio ads, so when the rare live person says it, it sounds so very familiar.
Yes, you can mess with the paper ballots, but that would leave you with one count in the computer, and an entirely different count in the ballot box, which would raise a huge red flag and initiate a big investigtion. People who like to stuff ballot boxes don't usually like to see things like that happen -- It makes exposure and identification that much more likely.
Grace Hopper was at the University of Alberta, in the early 80'. At a reception for her, she was talking to a friend of mine (who shall remain unnamed), and commented that there were a number of people at the University who had done a lot of work on the early days of Cobol, and wondered why there was so little (almost no) mention of it in the department.
"Maybe they're ashamed of it!" quipped my friend, in reply.
Another (better informed) friend quickly pulled him aside and explained that Grace had been one of the prime movers in the design of Cobol.
News sources like the Washington Post have to be accurate because the purport to be accurate.
Wonkette waves the review that calls her "A foulmouthed, inaccurate, opinionated little vixen."
I had a friend who used to love the saying "Anybody who takes me seriously deserves to."
Similarly, anybody who takes wonkette's mouthings as 100% deserves what they get. That isn't to say that what she says is 100% inaccurate, but you do have to consider the bossibility of inaccuracy in what she's saying. Nothing wrong with that as long as you're reasonably forewarned, and in this case, you appear to be.
For anybody who is online lots, Broadband is a good idea. For me, at least, The combined cost of a second line and a reasonable dialup plan is about the same price as my ADSL connection. It's not even vaguely worth going to dialup.
If, on the other hand, I was like my friends who only check their email every couple of days, there'd be no value to going to DSL... I can wait an extra 3 minutes for all of that spam.
As a general rule, I'd say that if you don't go online enough to make getting a second line worthwhile, there's a low probability that you could reasonably justify a broadband connection (and vice-versa). People who are wealthy enough that they wouldn't even pause to think about the $20/month but want their spam and porn right now the 3 days a week that they are online are an exception.
Some people can find better things to do with the extra money (like paying for theatre tickets).
You seem confused about the difference between a technological practical joke and larceny. One is funny (at least for the perpetrator) and might, at most, classify as mischeif.
The other could qualify under theft, forgery and/or a a boatload of the new cyber-crime felonies.
And stealing from a library, for chrissakes! You should apply for a job at SCO!
I'm guessing that their next discovery is going to be thatthe neurons that do most of the processing of this short-term memory are near (probably surrounding or distributed among) the cache memory neurons.
It's only a 'renewable resource' if it's being renewed by nature faster than we're consuming it... This is true with neither oil nor trees. The difference is that trees regrow fast enough that you can see some progress.
At the rate things are going, however, we're likely to run out of both at about the same time.
With trees, there's also the factor that forests are a good deal more than just trees, and trees do more than just stand there (like oil generally does). Problem is that nobody ever managed to put a price on oxygen manufacturing, pollution abatement, flood/drought/weather moderation or many of the other things that forests do.
My first thought was "not as trivial to teach to kids", but there's actually a use to cat, tinfoile, nukem: It implicitly teaches kids to keep both cats and tinfoil away from the microwave.
BTW: symbol for cat: Cats' ears... same as scissors.
WUSB might be intended for peripherals, but I can see some Linux hacker implementing TCP over WUSB within a couple of weeks of the hardware being generally available. (I mean, why not?? It's faster!)
At first it looked like Sun was killing off the future of Sparc and laying off much of the sparc development team. In reality all they seem to be doing is killing off some dead-end development paths. The 3300 layoffs remark is revisiting old news -- a red herring, even.
Ultra-Sparc is alive and well! If anything, Sun seems to be freeing up some engineers to work on the more promising future versions. As long as these extra hands and eyes don't slow things down (now, who's law is that?), this will probably be a good thing.
The phone companies fit 24 voice channels onto a (1.5megabit) T1. That still leaves 98megabits for your security camera...
If you compress it, you can fit a ~VHS quality signal in 1 megabit (color or black&white?)
250Kbit is about the highest quality MP3's that I've seen, so if you throw in a handfull of those and your security cameras, you've still got 80-90 megabits left over for 'regular' networking.
80megabits is about 10megabytes/second sustained... That's not much worse you'll get (real life) from many single local disks. If you've got some older drives in your system (like I have), then this may even be better than your local disks.
Generally speaking, if you're looking to stream audio and Video, then 100Megabit should be fine. If you want to do NFS kernel compiles on a regular basis, then get Gigabit (and a good RAID controller).
But what if you actually want to copy that video? How long do you wait while hundreds of megs or gigs of data transfer?
$ units 1second/100megabit minutes/4gigabyte<br> * 5.3333333
6 minutes to transfer a 4GB CD (after adding overhead) seems just fine to me. If you're really expecting to get better than that, you'll need RAID on both ends of the pipe.
About the only reason I can see for wanting to go gigabit in a house is if your whole family is doing remote video editing, and you've got a nice, 10-spindle RAID box to do the file serving.
Cowardly (refused to go to Vietnam), and lying (Iraq) I can understand, but 'traitor'?? (Unless you believe the rumors that he ordered surveilence of Bin Laden's 'friends' cut back because his Saudi relatives were complaining).
As for our current leader: consider the fact that Martin was 'elected' only by people who paid to join the Liberal party, and some of the people who 'paid' to join still may not know that they're members (One dollar, one vote?).
I don't like Bush, either, but there's no need for ad-hominim attacks... There's lots of good reasons to critizie him.
As for him 'reading a book to a bunch of kids', that's not such a bad thing. I mean, it's not like he helped plan the 9/11 attacks (did he?). My worry is that it may be his actual reading level.
Population and population density don't really matter. The counting is done in parallel... 10 times as many voters -> 10 times as many counters.
Somebody else pointed out that India (900 people/km^2) uses the same system, so the US is nicely bracketed by that criteria (smaller, denser and higher population, so the US is bracketed on all 3 counts).
You are now free to criticize the method on it's merits.
I have no problems with Vancouver's computer-counted voting system because it has a human-readable paper trail.
Here in Vancouver, BC (Canada, again) our civic elections are reasonably complicated. It is a true multi-party system with independants allowed. We normally vote for 7 parks board trustees, 9 school board trustees, 12 city councillors (=~trustees), 1 mayor and a handfull of referendum questions..
Thing to note here is that for the 7, 9 and 12 seat positions, each voter gets to cast (up to) 7 9 and 12 votes out of all the candidates. Each of the parties (there are usually 3 or 4 parties running) usually fields a full set of candidates, and there are often independants, so it's not at all uncommon to be voting for 12 out of 50-60 (4*12+N) alderman candidates (as an example). It's not uncommon to also have between half a dozen (and up to 20) mayoral candidates. Then there are the referendums.
Voting is currently done on OCR... They are originally counted by computer, but if there are any questions, it's always possible to recount the paper ballots by hand (and it is done, from time to time). It's pretty easy to audit the computer results by picking a random polling station or two and comparing the computer reported count to the manual count. The system could easily handle a single-transferable vote system (like in Ireland) and have the machine counted results out before morning.
Much like in federal and provincial elections, candidates and/or parties can have scritineers at the ballot locations to ensure that everything goes as it should.
Because the system has a human-readable paper trail, I've never had any real quams about letting computers do the initial count. The technology is trivial (by today's standards) and well understood. None of this whiz-bang
"oops -- we have 3 times as many votes as voters, but we
think we know what went wrong, so let's just divide by 3 and call it all even OK?"
Slashdot Mirror
In terms of deterrence discouraging criminal behaviour, you are the norm, but if you think about this:
If only 5% of the population isn't deterred by punnishment, that's 300Million*5% = 15million people who ignore the law.
As for lotteries: I'd guess that well under half the population actually buys the things, but the reason why the numbers don't seem that small, is that I (and you, and most of the other people you know) don't usually go waltzing into work saying
You do, on the other hand hear the converse, just about every day, in TV and radio ads, so when the rare live person says it, it sounds so very familiar.Click here</A>
Who needs laws? Just classify them as cyber terrorists, and ship them to Guantanamo.
By definition: If there's money in this world, that they don't control, then they're 'short'.
Yes, you can mess with the paper ballots, but that would leave you with one count in the computer, and an entirely different count in the ballot box, which would raise a huge red flag and initiate a big investigtion. People who like to stuff ballot boxes don't usually like to see things like that happen -- It makes exposure and identification that much more likely.
"Maybe they're ashamed of it!" quipped my friend, in reply.
Another (better informed) friend quickly pulled him aside and explained that Grace had been one of the prime movers in the design of Cobol.
I'm waiting for the MPAA and MP3.COM to sue these 'pirates' for making independant musicians' music available to themselves.
Wonkette waves the review that calls her "A foulmouthed, inaccurate, opinionated little vixen."
I had a friend who used to love the saying "Anybody who takes me seriously deserves to."
Similarly, anybody who takes wonkette's mouthings as 100% deserves what they get. That isn't to say that what she says is 100% inaccurate, but you do have to consider the bossibility of inaccuracy in what she's saying. Nothing wrong with that as long as you're reasonably forewarned, and in this case, you appear to be.
If, on the other hand, I was like my friends who only check their email every couple of days, there'd be no value to going to DSL... I can wait an extra 3 minutes for all of that spam.
As a general rule, I'd say that if you don't go online enough to make getting a second line worthwhile, there's a low probability that you could reasonably justify a broadband connection (and vice-versa). People who are wealthy enough that they wouldn't even pause to think about the $20/month but want their spam and porn right now the 3 days a week that they are online are an exception.
Some people can find better things to do with the extra money (like paying for theatre tickets).
The other could qualify under theft, forgery and/or a a boatload of the new cyber-crime felonies.
And stealing from a library, for chrissakes! You should apply for a job at SCO!
As usual, check the Groklaw story for the gritty details, including the contract (and commentary).
but I can give you her measurements....
I'm guessing that their next discovery is going to be thatthe neurons that do most of the processing of this short-term memory are near (probably surrounding or distributed among) the cache memory neurons.
At the rate things are going, however, we're likely to run out of both at about the same time.
With trees, there's also the factor that forests are a good deal more than just trees, and trees do more than just stand there (like oil generally does). Problem is that nobody ever managed to put a price on oxygen manufacturing, pollution abatement, flood/drought/weather moderation or many of the other things that forests do.
BTW: symbol for cat: Cats' ears... same as scissors.
No point in asking why you had 75+ copies of Gigli, is there? (much less why you chose to shred them).
Somebody who modded it up (forgot and) posted a reply to this article. This would result in the moderation being undone.
WUSB might be intended for peripherals, but I can see some Linux hacker implementing TCP over WUSB within a couple of weeks of the hardware being generally available. (I mean, why not?? It's faster!)
I can't wait for the first person who tries to photocopy one and then wonders why it doesn't work.
... But, it was a color photocopier!
sigh.
Ultra-Sparc is alive and well! If anything, Sun seems to be freeing up some engineers to work on the more promising future versions. As long as these extra hands and eyes don't slow things down (now, who's law is that?), this will probably be a good thing.
If you compress it, you can fit a ~VHS quality signal in 1 megabit (color or black&white?)
250Kbit is about the highest quality MP3's that I've seen, so if you throw in a handfull of those and your security cameras, you've still got 80-90 megabits left over for 'regular' networking.
80megabits is about 10megabytes/second sustained... That's not much worse you'll get (real life) from many single local disks. If you've got some older drives in your system (like I have), then this may even be better than your local disks.
Generally speaking, if you're looking to stream audio and Video, then 100Megabit should be fine. If you want to do NFS kernel compiles on a regular basis, then get Gigabit (and a good RAID controller).
6 minutes to transfer a 4GB CD (after adding overhead) seems just fine to me. If you're really expecting to get better than that, you'll need RAID on both ends of the pipe.
About the only reason I can see for wanting to go gigabit in a house is if your whole family is doing remote video editing, and you've got a nice, 10-spindle RAID box to do the file serving.
As for our current leader: consider the fact that Martin was 'elected' only by people who paid to join the Liberal party, and some of the people who 'paid' to join still may not know that they're members (One dollar, one vote?).
I don't like Bush, either, but there's no need for ad-hominim attacks... There's lots of good reasons to critizie him.
As for him 'reading a book to a bunch of kids', that's not such a bad thing. I mean, it's not like he helped plan the 9/11 attacks (did he?). My worry is that it may be his actual reading level.
Somebody else pointed out that India (900 people/km^2) uses the same system, so the US is nicely bracketed by that criteria (smaller, denser and higher population, so the US is bracketed on all 3 counts).
You are now free to criticize the method on it's merits.
Here in Vancouver, BC (Canada, again) our civic elections are reasonably complicated. It is a true multi-party system with independants allowed. We normally vote for 7 parks board trustees, 9 school board trustees, 12 city councillors (=~trustees), 1 mayor and a handfull of referendum questions.. Thing to note here is that for the 7, 9 and 12 seat positions, each voter gets to cast (up to) 7 9 and 12 votes out of all the candidates. Each of the parties (there are usually 3 or 4 parties running) usually fields a full set of candidates, and there are often independants, so it's not at all uncommon to be voting for 12 out of 50-60 (4*12+N) alderman candidates (as an example). It's not uncommon to also have between half a dozen (and up to 20) mayoral candidates. Then there are the referendums.
Voting is currently done on OCR... They are originally counted by computer, but if there are any questions, it's always possible to recount the paper ballots by hand (and it is done, from time to time). It's pretty easy to audit the computer results by picking a random polling station or two and comparing the computer reported count to the manual count. The system could easily handle a single-transferable vote system (like in Ireland) and have the machine counted results out before morning.
Much like in federal and provincial elections, candidates and/or parties can have scritineers at the ballot locations to ensure that everything goes as it should.
Because the system has a human-readable paper trail, I've never had any real quams about letting computers do the initial count. The technology is trivial (by today's standards) and well understood. None of this whiz-bang
bullshit.