Unfortunately, there's very good reason to believe it isn't secure or reliable, at least in the sense of actually recording the will of the voters.
Here's a link to a site where one can download a book (in Portuguese) entitled Burla Eletrônica ("Electronic Scam"). The book contains am objective and yet scathing analysis of the (lack of) security and reliability in the machines used in every Brazilian election since 2000. It's really scary. The government has ignored calls to make the machines more secure. It is left as an exercise for the reader to guess why...
I have said before that I believe Brazil's democracy is much healthier than that of the USA, and I believe this is due to the true multi-party nature of the political system here (as compared to the effectively two-party system in the USA). But the dependence on these "electronic ballot boxes" ("urnas eletrônicas"), with no serious scrutiny being given to them, and with the government trying to sweep signs of trouble under the rug, makes me worry for Brazil's young and vibrant democracy (I say "young" because the first free elections after the military coup of 1964 were held just under 20 years ago).
A point that should hit home for/.ers is that these machines, like their Diebold counterparts, do not leave a paper trail, and make recounts impossible. The subtitle of Burla Eletrônica on the download page is "A máquina que faz seu voto sumir" ("The machine that makes your vote disappear"). It's not clear to me if the big question mark is to punctuate that subtitle or to stress the questionability of these machines.
I can't see anything wrong with this system if a person can verify their own vote was cast for the candidate they wanted.
Right on.
That's why I'm a fan of Hannah Pingree, a Representative in the Maine State Legislature, and the sponsor of LD1759, "An Act To Ensure the Accurate Counting of Votes," now the law in Maine. The Act prohibits networking the voting machines, and requires that they print a paper ballot that the voter inspects and places in a ballot box. It originally required the machines' software to be open source, but that part got lost in the negotiations with the Maine state Attorney General. Still, it's a pretty nice piece of legislation.
Some have responded and said that MS doesn't hide its acquisitions, and that MS acquiring other companies (or, I assume, in the case of SQL Server, simply stealing the source code from another company and not buying the company) is OK. Others have said that F/OSS applications often copy existing ones (true). I don't want to get deep into those arguments. But the original point in the parent post is a good one: Microsoft claims it is an innovator, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a single real (positive) innovation from MS.
A company can provide value to customers without innovating at all, but MS calls every legal action against it a "threat to innovation," and claims that it is an innovator. Therefore, the parent post's point about all of MS's apps being copies of others' apps (or acquired and modified versions of others' apps) is relevant and interesting.
all marketing people are evil. Perhaps we should enact the death penalty for marketing droids?
Sigh...
Marketing is not the same as advertising. In fact, the most important functions of marketing are not from the company to the customer, but the other way around. A good marketing department listens to the market or the customer, determines what the market or customer needs, and helps orient production within the company to produce products that meet some identified need.
I am in the process of starting a company that will be heavily dependent on its marketing department. I expect the top marketing exec in the company (in Brazil, I think it's more appropriate to use the title of Director than VP) to be the second-most influential person in the company after the "big boss" (probably with the title of Director-President), who is writing this post. Some special things in our business model will allow us to do some marketing things in innovative ways. But you wanna know something? I think advertising might not end up under marketing. To me it seems that advertising, as communication from the company to the market/customer, belongs more with sales than with marketing.
I think of it this way: Sales is responsible for communicating from the company to the market in order to sell the product or service, and Marketing is responsible for the communication in the other direction, from the market to the company.
In any case, wherever advertising ends up falling in the company I'm starting, it certainly won't be the main activity for the marketing department.
Marketing people are not all evil. Competent marketing people can help companies provide the products and services customers want or need. That's not only not evil, it's good!
On the other hand, many advertising people are evil, and seek to mislead the customer. But a good marketing department can obviate the need for deceptive advertising, because a company with a good marketing department doesn't need to deceive the customer- it really is making what the customer wants or needs and simply needs to communicate that in its advertising.
By the way, I guess I should mention that my background is technical - I have a PhD in physics and had a career doing technical things (and the technical part of sales) in IT companies. So I'm not a "marketing droid" defending his profession. I'm just a person who has studied some marketing on his own time and understood how a well-run marketing department can benefit not just a company, but also that company's customers.
Read the PDF, it is surprisingly clearly written and demonstrates that judges do sometimes understand technology!
Yes...
My favorite part is this:
Further, as we have observed, we live in a quicksilver technological environment with courts ill-suited to fix the flow of internet innovation. The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets, and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through well established distribution mechanisms. Yet, history has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player.Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.
This is amazing. A court has correctly recognized that:
1) all the whining about "loss of jobs" and "loss of revenue" is just the way capitalism works - they didn't use the traditional/. example of automobiles taking revenue and jobs from many in the horse-drawn buggy industry, but the point is made; and
2) all the wailing and gnashing of teeth by "copyright holders" in the past (like with the player piano and the VCR) turned out to be incorrect. Remember when the Betamax was going to put studios out of business? Now recorded versions of films are a huge part of studio revenues.
It's really refreshing to see a court get it right.
As for the complaint (seen in several posts in this thread) that the decision leaves the door open for Congress to legislate this away, well, sorry... that's how the US system works. The legislative branch makes laws and the judicial branch can't keep it from doing so. Of course, banning this software will work only within US borders. Subjugated nations like Australia (I am not trolling; I am only saying this because of the DMCA-ish provisions imposed on Australia as part of recent trade agreements) may follow suit, but I doubt the whole world will...
The pride of UnitedStatesian citizens about their country being the "Land of the Free" may start to cause problems for the legislators in the pockets of organizations like the MPAA and RIAA as people start to notice they have less freedoms than people in other countries. Well, I can hope, right?
No kidding. Lots of red flags in this article. Besides the graphic problems described by the parent post (and "COLOSSAL" in big letters on the drive in the linked cheesy graphic in the PhysOrg article) and Colossal's oh-so-cheesy animated gif-filled site, there are pseudoscience-y claims:
"Michael invented and patented the world's first and only concept for non-contact UV photon induced electric field poling of ferroelectric non-linear photonic bandgap crystals"
"He was invited to present this fascinating discovery to the National Science Foundation in February 2004." Puh-leeze. The "science" part sounds like something from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the NSF bit sounds like something out of a cheesy Hollywood script.
And when we get right down to it, how reliable a source is PhysOrg? This, for example, doesn't strike me as the kind of news one would find on a really serious physics site...
The beginning of that letter looks like a 419 e-mail.
Dear [Your Name],
IF YOU OPENED A PAYPAL ACCOUNT BETWEEN OCTOBER 1999 AND JANUARY 2004, YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO A PAYMENT FROM A CLASS ACTION SETTLEMENT.
PLEASE READ THIS NOTICE CAREFULLY.
I just imagined it continuing a bit differently...
My name is Joe Smith. I work for the United States District Court, San Jose division. A major legal settlement has left the sum of US$9.2M (NINE MILLION TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND US DOLLARS) in an account belonging to a company here. Since I work for the court, I cannot legally access this money.
If you simply fill in your PayPal information on this page, I can begin the process of transferring the money out of the "dead" account to your PayPal account. I think it is fair to leave 30% of the amount for covering administrative fees, taxes, and any other expenses that may accrue. For your help in transferring this money, you will receive 0.0054 percent of the money in the "dead account"
A friend of mine is a Jazz musician who is not affiliated with ASCAP or BMI. Since ASCAP and BMI "meter-maids" were out in full force in the San Francisco Bay Area, many establishments there started playing my friend's CDs because it was one of the few decent options available that wouldn't lead to paying extortion money. Other musicians started to get kinda upset with my friend because his CDs seemed to be getting played EVERYWHERE for a while.
Seems like a valid solution to me.
And of course, it also seems perfectly valid for others to set up Portuguese-only, French-only, or whatever-only communities.
I belong to some English-only communities, and to some Portuguese-only communities.
Those are the only two languages in which I am capable of contributing. I guess I could probably follow discussions in Spanish or French, and I could probably get the gist of what was being said in Italian, but I am not capable of responding in any of these languages, so I only look at communities in English and Portuguese.
It doesn't bother me if there are communities that speak any of the multitude of languages I don't speak. I don't get why some people from the country where I was born (USA) think everyone should speak their language in every community and discussion on Orkut.
I'd like to point out that even if Brazilians were forced to have all their discussions in English, many of them would still be "Greek" to most Americans. For example, I belong to a community called "São Paulo odeia Paulo Maluf" ("São Paulo hates Paulo Maluf"). It's a place to talk about one of the politicians running for Mayor of São Paulo, and there are some pretty entertaining discussions going on there now. While most Brazilians know who Maluf is, and everyone in São Paulo has an opinion about him, most Americans haven't got the faintest idea of who he is (and I suspect they don't care, except that he's of Middle Eastern descent). So why on Earth should discussions in that community be in any language other than Portuguese?!
--Mark
It belongs more than several olympic "sports"
on
Is Math A Sport?
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Math belongs in the olympics more than gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics, figure skating, water ballet. and diving do. At least it's objective! The winner doesn't depend on the whims and prejudices of human judges.
I don't deny that the people compete in those events are amazingly talented, as are good ballerinas and painters. I sure hope we don't get olympic ballet or olympic painting events, though.
Any event where you get points for "artistic impression" and/or that depend completely on subjective criteria have no business being in the olympic games.
Yes, a soccer ref or linesman can mistakenly say a player was offside, or call a nonexistent foul. Yes, a baseball ump can miss a ball/strike call. But if that human error could be eliminated from the events with existing technology. The events I listed in the first sentence of this post all depend completely on subjective criteria. This leads to jokes about judges from rival nations giving bad scores. In the USA in the early 1980s, when everyone would agree that something was great, they'd give it a "ten" and often, some wag would pipe up with "2.3 from the Russian judge."
My point is that the very presence of events based on subjective criteria is a joke.
Math, despite not requiring physical skill (one of Bernard Suits's criteria for what makes something a sport, mentioned in TFA), is at least objective. One either gets the right answer or does not. One either proves something or does not. One either solves a problem in less time than one's opponent or does not. To me, that alone makes it more suitable for the olympics than any of the "sports" I listed in the first sentence.
The idiots in charge of the olympic broadcasts in the USA do not agree with me. Yes, I admit I'm still pissed off from the 1996 olympics, when they didn't show the men's basketball games because of f***ing women's gymnastic events. They didn't show USA-Argentina, which I would have loved to see, if only to discover how Argentina could stay within a few points of the second "Dream Team" until halftime.
Then, as if it hadn't been enough to show every trial from every competitor in every individual women's gymnastic event, and every trial from every competitor in every event in the individual all-around competition, and every (etc.) from the team all-around competition, they didn't show the women's soccer final (just the goals right after commercial breaks) because they felt it would be better to show a frickin' women's gymnastics unscored exhibition event than the women's soccer gold medal match. Sheesh!
Robert Duncan III, a technologist at Bacone College, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, switched to Firefox recently, attracted by the software's wide variety of plug-ins and new features, as well as the fact that Mozilla is less integrated with the computer's operating system than is Internet Explorer.
"Since Mozilla is completely isolated from the operating system, I know that if the browser gets completely hijacked and obliterated that the program is not going to completely destroy everything I've got on disk," he said.
If this argument takes hold and people use it as a reason to switch to other browsers, it will be very interesting to see if the folks in Redmond hold to their "party line" about the impossibility of separating the Internet Exploder from the Operating System...
Nurse: Computer, where is Captain Kirk?
Majel Roddenberry's voice, extra-nasal: Captain Kirk is not in the nursing home. Nurse: Can you locate him? Computer: Processing
(pause) Computer: Captain Kirk has been located by the Personal Emergency Response System of the Hilton corporation. He is in a corridor with a camera crew from Priceline. He is approaching Captain Spock's room.
A post below the article (yes, I RTFA! Please don't exile me from/.! And yes, I'm admitting I read this suggested by another person elsewhere. Please, please don't exile me!) makes an even better suggestion that could conceivably save more lives: cyclists and motocyclists could use a similar garment as extra turn signals and brake lights, helping other motorists see them.
I thought that was pretty cool.
It seems to me you wouldn't need a shirt to display medical data. You could use the same sensors and have a small display that doesn't restrict your clothing choices so much, like an active MedicAlert bracelet. A standard LCD display would work for that.
Do you think a criminal is going to be that concerned that they can't use a legal gun? It's not as if these laws appear to have much effect on black market gun supply...
We're getting pretty far from the original topic now, but isn't that all the more reason not to keep guns (and therefore self-defense and any kind of deterrence) out of the hands of law-abiding citizens?
As the old NRA saying goes, if guns are illegal, then only criminals will have guns...
In Switzerland, the presence of guns in every household (guns were issued to and taken home by everyone who performed the mandatory military service) did not lead to higher crime rates - it in fact led to very low rates. Similarly, when Kennesaw, Georgia passed a VERY liberal (in the sense of "liberty") gun law, crime rates went down.
I don't think that's enough evidence to say guns reduce crime, but it is enough to say guns don't cause or increase crime. So the authoritarians' argument to take guns out of the hands of people ("they might use them to commit crimes") is... well, shot to Hell.
Here's an honest question - why, in the self-proclaimed land of the free, is there such insane lawmaking? Don't Americans mind??
Sad but true: most don't, because they don't want to be bothered to analyze these things themselves. They prefer to just accept what they're told, and UnitedStatesian politicians learned a long time ago to claim that every law they make protects freedom. The inherent oxymoron is the elephant in the living room that no major media outlets ever mention, even in an extremely egregious case like when politicians claim that the USA PATRIOT Act was enacted to protect UnitedStatesians' freedom. Anyone who has even a basic understanding of what the USA PATRIOT Act does realizes that it effectively nullifies the Bill of Rights and a number of other rights UnitedStatesians had before the USA PATRIOT Act was made law.
I am not saying all UnitedStatesians are this lazy; a good chunk of the readers of/., for example, do analyze these things and get all worked up about them, as I do. My father is not a geek (he was, though- an electrical engineer), and not any kind of "leftist" (or even a Democrat, which passes for "Left" in the USA, but would be considered Center-Right in just about any other country in the world), but he has been paying attention and seeking out more info, and he's really mad now. Dad is a nearly-72 year old self-described "lifelong Republican," but he is so upset about, in his words, "what those motherf***ers have done to my country" that he will not only vote for a Democrat in the upcoming US presidential election, but for a particularly unlikeable one. Dad sees that as the only way to save the country he loves from the authoritarian excesses (and economic mismanagement... and ignorance of how to use the military properly... and failures of diplomacy... and etc. etc.) of the current Republican-controlled government.
So as I said, not all Americans are lazy like that, but most would prefer to look the other way while stuff like the USA PATRIOT Act gets passed, and while politicians like Hatch propose ridiculous crap like this latest insult to our intelligence, then listen to campaign ads and sound bites in which politicians tell them their freedoms are being protected by all the things they missed while they were watching NASCAR races, NFL games, and the "Sex and the City" and "Friends" finales.
This is just like so-called open container laws. It is already illegal to drive drunk. But, the very act of having an open bottle of booze in my car is illegal. Why? By itself, there is nothing wrong with it. The only problem is when I, as a drive, start drinking from it. But then I'm breaking an already existing law!!!
This has been my argument against gun control laws for years. Why do we "need" gun control laws, I ask.
"Because people might commit crimes with guns," apologists for unchecked government power tell me.
So then I ask: if the bad things people might do with guns are crimes, aren't there, by definition, already laws against them? Why do you then need another law making guns illegal too?
Hilbert may have been referring to the importance of the Riemann Conjecture, and not the difficulty of proving it.
Really, folks, this is a big deal if it's true. It just doesn't get the attention Fermat's Last Theorem did because it's harder to understand what it means and why it's important.
After all, most people don't even know what complex numbers are, much less complex functions. The zeta function, then, is already beyond the understanding of most people, not because they're incapable, but because they're not interested. But the implications of the Riemann Conjecture are far-reaching indeed, affecting things like quantum mechanics and statistical physics.
Well thank goodness we're in an election season! Just as oil hits all-time record high prices (over $41 a barrel!), suddenly we have a way to alleviate this situation.
George W. Bush and John Kerry together, plus all the House members and about a third of the Senators ought to be able to create enough "bull-energy" to save us from rising petroleum prices!
Donald "I know where over a third of the WMDs are located" Rumsfeld alone ought to be able to power most of the Eastern seaboard. Fox News will probably see its main source of revenues move from advertising to selling energy to the utility companies. Ahhhh... finally some good news!
Woo hoo!
The Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker comedy Top Secret! did a life-size Pac-Man gag in 1984 (in addition to parodying Elvis movies, spy movies, war movies, and The Blue Lagoon).
When Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer) arrives in East Germany, a map of the area around the train station is shown on the screen. The train chugs in, with a dotted line showing where our hero is, just like in the travel scenes in the Indiana Jones movies. We hear sound effects to let us know what's going on as Nick leaves in a car, with the dotted line following his position. A bunch of other vehicles fill up all the streets on the map with similar dots, and then our round yellow friend appears and starts eating the dots.
The point is that there must be a "paper trail" to permit recounts, or you'll get situations like Florida 2000, where Al Gore's vote total went DOWN by just over 16,000 when the votes from Volusia County were added, and there's no way to do a recount because there's no paper trail in the Diebold machines used in Volusia County.
Separate scanning machines could be used to read the paper ballots and count the votes, and I wouldn't have a problem with it, as long as the paper ballots are available for recount, and as long as there's a random testing program built in-- in 1% or a couple of percent of districts chosen at random at the last moment, a parallel manual count is done and the results compared to the electronic count. If there's a difference of more than some small pre-defined percentage, or if the root mean square percent difference is larger than the percent difference between the top two candidates, all the ballots for that race are then hand-counted, with the counting done with representatives of the top vote-getting candidates' parties or campaigns observing.
All of this is to avoid somebody (a voting company, supporters of a candidate, or people wanting to disrupt the democratic process for whatever reason) invisibly modifying the vote count and subverting the will of the voters. This is something very easy to do with insecure, inaccurate, and completely un-auditable machines like the ones Diebold makes.
Maine, with Hannah Pingree's really nice piece of legislation, and California, with Thursday's unanimous vote to block Diebold machines in a few California counties (with a vote on 10 more counties coming), have taken important steps to protect their voters' rights from potential tampering.
Given all the security concerns of a single machine like Diebold's or Sequoia's, and given the many additional security concerns of having them networked, and given the danger of easily-hidden fraud or even of inadvertent errors in counting machines, it's just too risky to use no-paper machines and network them "just because we can." It may be blasphemy to say this around here, but more technology is not necessarily always better. In this case, using more technology (e.g., Diebold memory sticks instead of paper ballots, networking machines, etc.) introduces more possibilities for votes to be counted incorrectly.
It's worth mentioning that a computer with a printer with a recently replaced toner or ink cartidge can produce a less-ambiguous ballot than a person with a pencil. That said, I'd be perfectly happy with using pencils to mark paper ballots, but Diebold, Sequoia, and politicians presumably salivating over the fraud opportunities have led the push for electronic voting machines. They use the problems from the 2000 presidential election as justification, but the fact is that electronic voting machines (that, as the parent post would have them do, record no paper trail and are subject to massive error and easy fraud) were part of the problem in Florida in 2000, not to mention in every other election where they've been used since.
A great (awful?) example is the 2002 election in the US state of Georgia, where all the polls-- media-sponsored polls, polls from independent pollsters, Republican and Democratic internal tracking polls, and even the exit polls on the day of the election-- said the Democrats would win the Georgia gubernatorial and Senate elections. Unauthorized patches were applied to the Diebold machines in Georgia after the machines had been certified by Georgia election officials, and by some "miracle," the Republicans won.
I want to be clear about one thing: I have cited an example where the Dem candidate had votes subtracted and one where two Repub candidates scored victories that even surprised their own pollsters and strategists, but I do not want to suggest that voting machine-based fraud is a Repub thing. In
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a link to a site where one can download a book (in Portuguese) entitled Burla Eletrônica ("Electronic Scam"). The book contains am objective and yet scathing analysis of the (lack of) security and reliability in the machines used in every Brazilian election since 2000. It's really scary. The government has ignored calls to make the machines more secure. It is left as an exercise for the reader to guess why...
I have said before that I believe Brazil's democracy is much healthier than that of the USA, and I believe this is due to the true multi-party nature of the political system here (as compared to the effectively two-party system in the USA). But the dependence on these "electronic ballot boxes" ("urnas eletrônicas"), with no serious scrutiny being given to them, and with the government trying to sweep signs of trouble under the rug, makes me worry for Brazil's young and vibrant democracy (I say "young" because the first free elections after the military coup of 1964 were held just under 20 years ago).
A point that should hit home for
--Mark
That's why I'm a fan of Hannah Pingree, a Representative in the Maine State Legislature, and the sponsor of LD1759, "An Act To Ensure the Accurate Counting of Votes," now the law in Maine. The Act prohibits networking the voting machines, and requires that they print a paper ballot that the voter inspects and places in a ballot box. It originally required the machines' software to be open source, but that part got lost in the negotiations with the Maine state Attorney General. Still, it's a pretty nice piece of legislation.
--Mark
--Mark
MS Excel -> Lotus 1-2-3 -> Visicalc
Some have responded and said that MS doesn't hide its acquisitions, and that MS acquiring other companies (or, I assume, in the case of SQL Server, simply stealing the source code from another company and not buying the company) is OK. Others have said that F/OSS applications often copy existing ones (true). I don't want to get deep into those arguments. But the original point in the parent post is a good one: Microsoft claims it is an innovator, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a single real (positive) innovation from MS.
A company can provide value to customers without innovating at all, but MS calls every legal action against it a "threat to innovation," and claims that it is an innovator. Therefore, the parent post's point about all of MS's apps being copies of others' apps (or acquired and modified versions of others' apps) is relevant and interesting.
--Mark
Marketing is not the same as advertising. In fact, the most important functions of marketing are not from the company to the customer, but the other way around. A good marketing department listens to the market or the customer, determines what the market or customer needs, and helps orient production within the company to produce products that meet some identified need.
I am in the process of starting a company that will be heavily dependent on its marketing department. I expect the top marketing exec in the company (in Brazil, I think it's more appropriate to use the title of Director than VP) to be the second-most influential person in the company after the "big boss" (probably with the title of Director-President), who is writing this post. Some special things in our business model will allow us to do some marketing things in innovative ways. But you wanna know something? I think advertising might not end up under marketing. To me it seems that advertising, as communication from the company to the market/customer, belongs more with sales than with marketing.
I think of it this way: Sales is responsible for communicating from the company to the market in order to sell the product or service, and Marketing is responsible for the communication in the other direction, from the market to the company.
In any case, wherever advertising ends up falling in the company I'm starting, it certainly won't be the main activity for the marketing department.
Marketing people are not all evil. Competent marketing people can help companies provide the products and services customers want or need. That's not only not evil, it's good!
On the other hand, many advertising people are evil, and seek to mislead the customer. But a good marketing department can obviate the need for deceptive advertising, because a company with a good marketing department doesn't need to deceive the customer- it really is making what the customer wants or needs and simply needs to communicate that in its advertising.
By the way, I guess I should mention that my background is technical - I have a PhD in physics and had a career doing technical things (and the technical part of sales) in IT companies. So I'm not a "marketing droid" defending his profession. I'm just a person who has studied some marketing on his own time and understood how a well-run marketing department can benefit not just a company, but also that company's customers.
--Mark
My favorite part is this: This is amazing. A court has correctly recognized that:
1) all the whining about "loss of jobs" and "loss of revenue" is just the way capitalism works - they didn't use the traditional
2) all the wailing and gnashing of teeth by "copyright holders" in the past (like with the player piano and the VCR) turned out to be incorrect. Remember when the Betamax was going to put studios out of business? Now recorded versions of films are a huge part of studio revenues.
It's really refreshing to see a court get it right.
As for the complaint (seen in several posts in this thread) that the decision leaves the door open for Congress to legislate this away, well, sorry... that's how the US system works. The legislative branch makes laws and the judicial branch can't keep it from doing so. Of course, banning this software will work only within US borders. Subjugated nations like Australia (I am not trolling; I am only saying this because of the DMCA-ish provisions imposed on Australia as part of recent trade agreements) may follow suit, but I doubt the whole world will...
The pride of UnitedStatesian citizens about their country being the "Land of the Free" may start to cause problems for the legislators in the pockets of organizations like the MPAA and RIAA as people start to notice they have less freedoms than people in other countries. Well, I can hope, right?
--Mark
No kidding. Lots of red flags in this article.
Besides the graphic problems described by the parent post (and "COLOSSAL" in big letters on the drive in the linked cheesy graphic in the PhysOrg article) and Colossal's oh-so-cheesy animated gif-filled site, there are pseudoscience-y claims:
"Michael invented and patented the world's first and only concept for non-contact UV photon induced electric field poling of ferroelectric non-linear photonic bandgap crystals"
"He was invited to present this fascinating discovery to the National Science Foundation in February 2004."
Puh-leeze. The "science" part sounds like something from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the NSF bit sounds like something out of a cheesy Hollywood script.
And when we get right down to it, how reliable a source is PhysOrg? This, for example, doesn't strike me as the kind of news one would find on a really serious physics site...
--Mark
I just imagined it continuing a bit differently...
And so on...
--Mark
--Mark
A friend of mine is a Jazz musician who is not affiliated with ASCAP or BMI. Since ASCAP and BMI "meter-maids" were out in full force in the San Francisco Bay Area, many establishments there started playing my friend's CDs because it was one of the few decent options available that wouldn't lead to paying extortion money. Other musicians started to get kinda upset with my friend because his CDs seemed to be getting played EVERYWHERE for a while.
This just in:
Her vocabulary has now increased! She now has 4 (more) words for you:
I - LOVE - THIS - ZOO!
--Mark
Seems like a valid solution to me.
And of course, it also seems perfectly valid for others to set up Portuguese-only, French-only, or whatever-only communities.
I belong to some English-only communities, and to some Portuguese-only communities.
Those are the only two languages in which I am capable of contributing. I guess I could probably follow discussions in Spanish or French, and I could probably get the gist of what was being said in Italian, but I am not capable of responding in any of these languages, so I only look at communities in English and Portuguese.
It doesn't bother me if there are communities that speak any of the multitude of languages I don't speak. I don't get why some people from the country where I was born (USA) think everyone should speak their language in every community and discussion on Orkut.
I'd like to point out that even if Brazilians were forced to have all their discussions in English, many of them would still be "Greek" to most Americans. For example, I belong to a community called "São Paulo odeia Paulo Maluf" ("São Paulo hates Paulo Maluf"). It's a place to talk about one of the politicians running for Mayor of São Paulo, and there are some pretty entertaining discussions going on there now. While most Brazilians know who Maluf is, and everyone in São Paulo has an opinion about him, most Americans haven't got the faintest idea of who he is (and I suspect they don't care, except that he's of Middle Eastern descent). So why on Earth should discussions in that community be in any language other than Portuguese?!
--Mark
Math belongs in the olympics more than gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics, figure skating, water ballet. and diving do. At least it's objective! The winner doesn't depend on the whims and prejudices of human judges.
I don't deny that the people compete in those events are amazingly talented, as are good ballerinas and painters. I sure hope we don't get olympic ballet or olympic painting events, though.
Any event where you get points for "artistic impression" and/or that depend completely on subjective criteria have no business being in the olympic games.
Yes, a soccer ref or linesman can mistakenly say a player was offside, or call a nonexistent foul. Yes, a baseball ump can miss a ball/strike call. But if that human error could be eliminated from the events with existing technology. The events I listed in the first sentence of this post all depend completely on subjective criteria. This leads to jokes about judges from rival nations giving bad scores. In the USA in the early 1980s, when everyone would agree that something was great, they'd give it a "ten" and often, some wag would pipe up with "2.3 from the Russian judge."
My point is that the very presence of events based on subjective criteria is a joke.
Math, despite not requiring physical skill (one of Bernard Suits's criteria for what makes something a sport, mentioned in TFA), is at least objective. One either gets the right answer or does not. One either proves something or does not. One either solves a problem in less time than one's opponent or does not. To me, that alone makes it more suitable for the olympics than any of the "sports" I listed in the first sentence.
The idiots in charge of the olympic broadcasts in the USA do not agree with me. Yes, I admit I'm still pissed off from the 1996 olympics, when they didn't show the men's basketball games because of f***ing women's gymnastic events. They didn't show USA-Argentina, which I would have loved to see, if only to discover how Argentina could stay within a few points of the second "Dream Team" until halftime.
Then, as if it hadn't been enough to show every trial from every competitor in every individual women's gymnastic event, and every trial from every competitor in every event in the individual all-around competition, and every (etc.) from the team all-around competition, they didn't show the women's soccer final (just the goals right after commercial breaks) because they felt it would be better to show a frickin' women's gymnastics unscored exhibition event than the women's soccer gold medal match. Sheesh!
--Mark
When I read the description of the error in the article, I had to wonder if proto-H4x0rs were involved. Here's the description:
When I saw this, I immediately thought "buffer overrun. Damn script kiddies!"
--Mark
If this argument takes hold and people use it as a reason to switch to other browsers, it will be very interesting to see if the folks in Redmond hold to their "party line" about the impossibility of separating the Internet Exploder from the Operating System...
--Mark
Nurse: Computer, where is Captain Kirk?
Majel Roddenberry's voice, extra-nasal: Captain Kirk is not in the nursing home.
Nurse: Can you locate him?
Computer: Processing
(pause)
Computer: Captain Kirk has been located by the Personal Emergency Response System of the Hilton corporation. He is in a corridor with a camera crew from Priceline. He is approaching Captain Spock's room.
A post below the article (yes, I RTFA! Please don't exile me from /.! And yes, I'm admitting I read this suggested by another person elsewhere. Please, please don't exile me!) makes an even better suggestion that could conceivably save more lives: cyclists and motocyclists could use a similar garment as extra turn signals and brake lights, helping other motorists see them.
I thought that was pretty cool.
It seems to me you wouldn't need a shirt to display medical data. You could use the same sensors and have a small display that doesn't restrict your clothing choices so much, like an active MedicAlert bracelet. A standard LCD display would work for that.
--Mark
We're getting pretty far from the original topic now, but isn't that all the more reason not to keep guns (and therefore self-defense and any kind of deterrence) out of the hands of law-abiding citizens?
As the old NRA saying goes, if guns are illegal, then only criminals will have guns...
In Switzerland, the presence of guns in every household (guns were issued to and taken home by everyone who performed the mandatory military service) did not lead to higher crime rates - it in fact led to very low rates. Similarly, when Kennesaw, Georgia passed a VERY liberal (in the sense of "liberty") gun law, crime rates went down.
I don't think that's enough evidence to say guns reduce crime, but it is enough to say guns don't cause or increase crime. So the authoritarians' argument to take guns out of the hands of people ("they might use them to commit crimes") is... well, shot to Hell.
--Mark
Sad but true: most don't, because they don't want to be bothered to analyze these things themselves. They prefer to just accept what they're told, and UnitedStatesian politicians learned a long time ago to claim that every law they make protects freedom. The inherent oxymoron is the elephant in the living room that no major media outlets ever mention, even in an extremely egregious case like when politicians claim that the USA PATRIOT Act was enacted to protect UnitedStatesians' freedom. Anyone who has even a basic understanding of what the USA PATRIOT Act does realizes that it effectively nullifies the Bill of Rights and a number of other rights UnitedStatesians had before the USA PATRIOT Act was made law.
I am not saying all UnitedStatesians are this lazy; a good chunk of the readers of
So as I said, not all Americans are lazy like that, but most would prefer to look the other way while stuff like the USA PATRIOT Act gets passed, and while politicians like Hatch propose ridiculous crap like this latest insult to our intelligence, then listen to campaign ads and sound bites in which politicians tell them their freedoms are being protected by all the things they missed while they were watching NASCAR races, NFL games, and the "Sex and the City" and "Friends" finales.
--Mark
This has been my argument against gun control laws for years. Why do we "need" gun control laws, I ask.
"Because people might commit crimes with guns," apologists for unchecked government power tell me.
So then I ask: if the bad things people might do with guns are crimes, aren't there, by definition, already laws against them? Why do you then need another law making guns illegal too?
--Mark
Hilbert may have been referring to the importance of the Riemann Conjecture, and not the difficulty of proving it.
Really, folks, this is a big deal if it's true. It just doesn't get the attention Fermat's Last Theorem did because it's harder to understand what it means and why it's important.
After all, most people don't even know what complex numbers are, much less complex functions. The zeta function, then, is already beyond the understanding of most people, not because they're incapable, but because they're not interested. But the implications of the Riemann Conjecture are far-reaching indeed, affecting things like quantum mechanics and statistical physics.
--Mark
Well thank goodness we're in an election season! Just as oil hits all-time record high prices (over $41 a barrel!), suddenly we have a way to alleviate this situation.
George W. Bush and John Kerry together, plus all the House members and about a third of the Senators ought to be able to create enough "bull-energy" to save us from rising petroleum prices!
Donald "I know where over a third of the WMDs are located" Rumsfeld alone ought to be able to power most of the Eastern seaboard. Fox News will probably see its main source of revenues move from advertising to selling energy to the utility companies. Ahhhh... finally some good news!
Woo hoo!
--Mark
--Mark
The Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker comedy Top Secret! did a life-size Pac-Man gag in 1984 (in addition to parodying Elvis movies, spy movies, war movies, and The Blue Lagoon).
When Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer) arrives in East Germany, a map of the area around the train station is shown on the screen. The train chugs in, with a dotted line showing where our hero is, just like in the travel scenes in the Indiana Jones movies. We hear sound effects to let us know what's going on as Nick leaves in a car, with the dotted line following his position. A bunch of other vehicles fill up all the streets on the map with similar dots, and then our round yellow friend appears and starts eating the dots.
--Mark
The point is that there must be a "paper trail" to permit recounts, or you'll get situations like Florida 2000, where Al Gore's vote total went DOWN by just over 16,000 when the votes from Volusia County were added, and there's no way to do a recount because there's no paper trail in the Diebold machines used in Volusia County.
Separate scanning machines could be used to read the paper ballots and count the votes, and I wouldn't have a problem with it, as long as the paper ballots are available for recount, and as long as there's a random testing program built in-- in 1% or a couple of percent of districts chosen at random at the last moment, a parallel manual count is done and the results compared to the electronic count. If there's a difference of more than some small pre-defined percentage, or if the root mean square percent difference is larger than the percent difference between the top two candidates, all the ballots for that race are then hand-counted, with the counting done with representatives of the top vote-getting candidates' parties or campaigns observing.
All of this is to avoid somebody (a voting company, supporters of a candidate, or people wanting to disrupt the democratic process for whatever reason) invisibly modifying the vote count and subverting the will of the voters. This is something very easy to do with insecure, inaccurate, and completely un-auditable machines like the ones Diebold makes.
Maine, with Hannah Pingree's really nice piece of legislation, and California, with Thursday's unanimous vote to block Diebold machines in a few California counties (with a vote on 10 more counties coming), have taken important steps to protect their voters' rights from potential tampering.
Given all the security concerns of a single machine like Diebold's or Sequoia's, and given the many additional security concerns of having them networked, and given the danger of easily-hidden fraud or even of inadvertent errors in counting machines, it's just too risky to use no-paper machines and network them "just because we can." It may be blasphemy to say this around here, but more technology is not necessarily always better. In this case, using more technology (e.g., Diebold memory sticks instead of paper ballots, networking machines, etc.) introduces more possibilities for votes to be counted incorrectly.
It's worth mentioning that a computer with a printer with a recently replaced toner or ink cartidge can produce a less-ambiguous ballot than a person with a pencil. That said, I'd be perfectly happy with using pencils to mark paper ballots, but Diebold, Sequoia, and politicians presumably salivating over the fraud opportunities have led the push for electronic voting machines. They use the problems from the 2000 presidential election as justification, but the fact is that electronic voting machines (that, as the parent post would have them do, record no paper trail and are subject to massive error and easy fraud) were part of the problem in Florida in 2000, not to mention in every other election where they've been used since.
A great (awful?) example is the 2002 election in the US state of Georgia, where all the polls-- media-sponsored polls, polls from independent pollsters, Republican and Democratic internal tracking polls, and even the exit polls on the day of the election-- said the Democrats would win the Georgia gubernatorial and Senate elections. Unauthorized patches were applied to the Diebold machines in Georgia after the machines had been certified by Georgia election officials, and by some "miracle," the Republicans won.
I want to be clear about one thing: I have cited an example where the Dem candidate had votes subtracted and one where two Repub candidates scored victories that even surprised their own pollsters and strategists, but I do not want to suggest that voting machine-based fraud is a Repub thing. In