Ummm... people? Nerds? People that reason for a living?
ZDNet writes an article about a laptop which seems to indicate that they haven't actually touched or felt it, an article which just might propogate a typo from the original Acer press release, and everyone goes hog-wild about how ridiculous such a creation would be.
Think about it.
Where would the extra weight appear?
Screen? A 17" screen is about 25% larger in surface area than a 15" screen. So perhaps a few extra ounces at most.
Processor? Negligible at most.
Heavy-duty graphics hardware? An ounce or two, perhaps?
DVD burner? Again, ounces difference if that.
We still have about 9 pounds left to explain...
One more data point, and then I'm going to rest my case for a typo: the reported difference in weights with and without battery (14.1 lb vs 15.7 lb) indicates that the battery itself would weigh 1.6 lb. For a battery that lasts 1 hour. My Dell 8200 battery weighs approximately half of that, and I'm assuming there isn't much dead space inside the battery compartment.
Wouldn't it be a bit more reasonable to think that , as others have suggested, people got their pounds and kilograms mixed up, and that the laptop weighs 6.4 lb (as per the "under 7 lb" bullet point)? This would make the battery weigh approximately 0.7 lb, which seems more in line.
I think the biggest fear of electronic voting is that *1* compromised set of machines can be spread across the entire country
Understood. I think we may get lucky, however, given prior history of technology usage by region. In the very same way that different states and even different counties use punch cards vs. lever machines vs. OCR scanners, I suspect that distribution will continue among different e-voting platforms. Diebold is the one catching the most flack right now, but they're not the only game in town. It would likely be difficult if not impossible to implement common attacks across all platforms.
On the verification side, I think that anything that smacks of complexity is going to not be received well. Simple, serialized [non-linear unique IDs, that is] result cards seem easy for people to grasp and work with, and provides what should be an indisputable paper trail. This assumes literacy on the part of the voter, but that's another issue entirely, I suppose.
In the current system, every vote cast leaves a permanent, tangible, undisputable (unless some kind of hole punch is involved, anyway) record.
You apparently don't live in an area where lever voting machines are used. The only physical record of a vote is the bumping of a mechanical counter, sometimes. Yes, they're not being manufactured anymore, but they're still in significant usage across the country. Recount? Check the counter totals at your voting site again, add them up. Get the same number you had the first time. Have a nice day. Evidence of tampering? Perhaps detectable, if one knows where to look. Recourse? Minimal to none.
In this situation, the "said organization" only benefits if the service is successful. It'll only be successful if interference is not a major problem. Knee-jerk anti-corporate thoughts aside, I think we're still squarely in "Rational Land."
A friend of mine got stuck with a similar deal - don't know if it's the same brand device or not. The interesting part is that the dealer asked him about his job, and when he responded that he was in a technical career, the dealer snapped his photo. Turns out they're required to take mugshots of anyone who has a technical background, as they freely admitted the device they put on his car is childishly simple to defeat for someone who knows the first thing about the subject. He took it apart once to look at it, and it was just a 6-pin connector coming into the device, being 3 pairs that needed to be shorted in order to connect all the original ignition wiring. YMMV.
I've been tracking the item for the past 10 minutes while reading this thread. The last two bidders (of 150 total) have been a person whose eBay experince seems to center around trading Playstation games, and someone from Canada who seems to primarily buy nerd-esque items on a regular basis.
It's enough to make one think that there's some bid-jacking going on by people who aren't taking this seriously at all. Perhaps an eBay "Slashdotting" of sorts?:-)
It'll be interesting to see what, if any, cleanup is needed to identify a real buyer after the auction closes...
Case in point: A few weeks ago, I needed a conference speakerphone for the office. Searching for "Conference Phone" returned several US Robotics CS1000 phones, which seemed to meet my needs well. At that point I searched for "CS1000" in item and description, and up popped one titled "USRobotics Conference Link CS1000". Not only would that title not tend to pop up in a more general search, but they had the item [mis]classified under the consumer electronics tree.
Long story short, due to their misclassification, cryptic title, and low opening bid, I walked away with the phone for $10 when all the others were going for $50-100.
So please, don't stop the misspellings and other assorted ways of hiding items deep in the recesses of eBay. I see it as a form of natural consequences for the sellers, and it's helpful to those of us who run on a shoestring.
I grew up with this sort of mindset presented as the normal way of life. My mother self-diagnosed herself with EI, MCS, Lupus, and other assorted disorders which never seemed to be confirmed by traditional medicine. This was always presented by her as proof of the shortcomings of the allopathic community.
We lived out in the middle of the country, in a house made with a purposeful absence of traditional building materials. Non-treated wood, cedar shakes, etc. In spite of this, my mother seemed to grow constantly more sensitive to her environment, and put more and more safeguards in place to attempt to purify it. Ionic air filters were everywhere, including one in the car to attempt to reduce the effects of hydrocarbon emissions. She pursued a macrobiotic diet in order to attempt to balance her body and eliminate toxins taken in through food. Nothing seemed to improve the situation. Strangely(?) enough, as the years went by, both my sister and I both started exhibiting similar sets of symptoms.
12 years later, I have a very strong feeling about what actually happened during that time of our lives. After I moved out, I started presenting a plethora of external insults to my body in the form of poor environmental conditions, a [comparably speaking] junk food diet, and ingestion of various chemical substances. I called it "college.":-) Strangely enough, the longer this went on, the less and less sensitive I became to my environment, to the food I ate, to the air I breathed. Now, as I sit here at my glue-ridden wooden desk in my carpeted office, breathing the air of one of the worst polluted cities in the country, the transformation is complete. I understand perfectly that people in my mother's mindset will say that I have "deadened my senses" to the surrounding toxins. My opinion is that, like any exercise in biodiversity, increased exposure to a variety of envioronmental substances makes one's system more able to cope with foreign invasions. The attempt to sterilize our living environment while growing up simply made us react more strongly to any small variation in that environment.
As an addendum, my mother is still attempting to isolate herself from the known universe. In spite of this, she is still having the same difficulties. Given my experience over the past decade, I really have to wonder if the cure is a substantial portion of the disease.
"Human factor" is vital around airports
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 0
The big planes already have autopilot for mostly straight flight and automated landing systems. Many newer large aircraft can land themselves in zero-visibility weather at properly equiped airports.
Very true. Takeoff, en-route flight and landing can be very cut-and-dried, predictable activities. Two elements that still require outside human intervention are the periods immediately following takeoff and prior to landing. At this point, the pilot is typically in very close communication with the airport's air traffic controllers [or directly with other pilots at smaller airports] in order to be properly sequenced into or out of the airport while maintaining safe levels of proximity to other aircraft.
Given this, how do we replicate the ATC/pilot control loop without the pilot? Giving ATC direct control of the drones doesn't seem practicable - they have enough to do as it is, and I doubt the airports would be willing to take on that level of liability in the event of ATC-induced mishaps. In addition, you then have a remote-control system that can be hijacked. Not cool. The only way to absolutely guarantee control of the airplane staying in "proper" hands from takeoff to landing is to have the flight route preprogrammed and unchangable. That gives rise to an entire host of problems, all of which point to the primary reason that a human pilot still exists in the first place: to make judgement calls when unforeseen events occur.
In short, I don't think non-manned aircraft will ever be accepted in and out of human-traveled airports. Perhaps special, drone-only airfields could be an option for ditribution hubs, but I need another cup of coffee or two to think that one through.
If we used ink, how could we agonize for months over "dangling chads?"
Surely there must be an override...
on
No More Rebooting?
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Don't people WANT to be able to remove power from a system on occasion and start from scratch?
When your favorite Windoze flavor goes south, for example, and a "proper" shutdown is impossible, the power switch is a harsh but effective alternative. What would happen in this scenario when you CAN'T clear memory to get rid of the infinite loop inside a rogue ring 0 driver?
Are we now going to have a "reset" button for our memory devices? Barring that, I suppose one could always keep a small screwdriver and a pinout of the device handy... hehehe
Since everyone has to pay the levy, and not everyone is pirating, the companies might have been compensated but they have not been justly compensated. This whole model is intrinsically unjust.
Imagine a proposed law that said, since shoplifting is common and unstoppable, all customers at every store will be stopped, background-checked, and strip-searched.
A closer analogy might be what actually happens in practice, i.e., each and every customer pays a tariff in the form of increased prices for their goods because of shoplifting losses. It's built into the P&L model for any [realistic] retail business.
The reason the above situation can be handled without a push for legislation is that the losses and subsequent [hidden] tariffs are within the same organization. In the case of the music industry, losses from music piracy [allegedly] affects the RIAA, but income from blank media does not directly go to them. Simply raising the retail price on blank media, therefore, cannot compensate the RIAA the same way raising the shelf prices on goods can compensate a retailer for shoplifting losses.
Slashdot Mirror
That's quite a reduction. Yet another something-for-nothing business model proving unsustainable over time...
Ummm... people? Nerds? People that reason for a living?
ZDNet writes an article about a laptop which seems to indicate that they haven't actually touched or felt it, an article which just might propogate a typo from the original Acer press release, and everyone goes hog-wild about how ridiculous such a creation would be.
Think about it.
Where would the extra weight appear?
Screen? A 17" screen is about 25% larger in surface area than a 15" screen. So perhaps a few extra ounces at most.
Processor? Negligible at most.
Heavy-duty graphics hardware? An ounce or two, perhaps?
DVD burner? Again, ounces difference if that.
We still have about 9 pounds left to explain...
One more data point, and then I'm going to rest my case for a typo: the reported difference in weights with and without battery (14.1 lb vs 15.7 lb) indicates that the battery itself would weigh 1.6 lb. For a battery that lasts 1 hour. My Dell 8200 battery weighs approximately half of that, and I'm assuming there isn't much dead space inside the battery compartment.
Wouldn't it be a bit more reasonable to think that , as others have suggested, people got their pounds and kilograms mixed up, and that the laptop weighs 6.4 lb (as per the "under 7 lb" bullet point)? This would make the battery weigh approximately 0.7 lb, which seems more in line.
On the verification side, I think that anything that smacks of complexity is going to not be received well. Simple, serialized [non-linear unique IDs, that is] result cards seem easy for people to grasp and work with, and provides what should be an indisputable paper trail. This assumes literacy on the part of the voter, but that's another issue entirely, I suppose.
In this situation, the "said organization" only benefits if the service is successful. It'll only be successful if interference is not a major problem. Knee-jerk anti-corporate thoughts aside, I think we're still squarely in "Rational Land."
A friend of mine got stuck with a similar deal - don't know if it's the same brand device or not. The interesting part is that the dealer asked him about his job, and when he responded that he was in a technical career, the dealer snapped his photo. Turns out they're required to take mugshots of anyone who has a technical background, as they freely admitted the device they put on his car is childishly simple to defeat for someone who knows the first thing about the subject. He took it apart once to look at it, and it was just a 6-pin connector coming into the device, being 3 pairs that needed to be shorted in order to connect all the original ignition wiring. YMMV.
I've been tracking the item for the past 10 minutes while reading this thread. The last two bidders (of 150 total) have been a person whose eBay experince seems to center around trading Playstation games, and someone from Canada who seems to primarily buy nerd-esque items on a regular basis.
:-)
It's enough to make one think that there's some bid-jacking going on by people who aren't taking this seriously at all. Perhaps an eBay "Slashdotting" of sorts?
It'll be interesting to see what, if any, cleanup is needed to identify a real buyer after the auction closes...
Just not as much as I might have to otherwise. :-)
Case in point: A few weeks ago, I needed a conference speakerphone for the office. Searching for "Conference Phone" returned several US Robotics CS1000 phones, which seemed to meet my needs well. At that point I searched for "CS1000" in item and description, and up popped one titled "USRobotics Conference Link CS1000". Not only would that title not tend to pop up in a more general search, but they had the item [mis]classified under the consumer electronics tree.
Long story short, due to their misclassification, cryptic title, and low opening bid, I walked away with the phone for $10 when all the others were going for $50-100.
So please, don't stop the misspellings and other assorted ways of hiding items deep in the recesses of eBay. I see it as a form of natural consequences for the sellers, and it's helpful to those of us who run on a shoestring.
I grew up with this sort of mindset presented as the normal way of life. My mother self-diagnosed herself with EI, MCS, Lupus, and other assorted disorders which never seemed to be confirmed by traditional medicine. This was always presented by her as proof of the shortcomings of the allopathic community.
:-) Strangely enough, the longer this went on, the less and less sensitive I became to my environment, to the food I ate, to the air I breathed. Now, as I sit here at my glue-ridden wooden desk in my carpeted office, breathing the air of one of the worst polluted cities in the country, the transformation is complete. I understand perfectly that people in my mother's mindset will say that I have "deadened my senses" to the surrounding toxins. My opinion is that, like any exercise in biodiversity, increased exposure to a variety of envioronmental substances makes one's system more able to cope with foreign invasions. The attempt to sterilize our living environment while growing up simply made us react more strongly to any small variation in that environment.
We lived out in the middle of the country, in a house made with a purposeful absence of traditional building materials. Non-treated wood, cedar shakes, etc. In spite of this, my mother seemed to grow constantly more sensitive to her environment, and put more and more safeguards in place to attempt to purify it. Ionic air filters were everywhere, including one in the car to attempt to reduce the effects of hydrocarbon emissions. She pursued a macrobiotic diet in order to attempt to balance her body and eliminate toxins taken in through food. Nothing seemed to improve the situation. Strangely(?) enough, as the years went by, both my sister and I both started exhibiting similar sets of symptoms.
12 years later, I have a very strong feeling about what actually happened during that time of our lives. After I moved out, I started presenting a plethora of external insults to my body in the form of poor environmental conditions, a [comparably speaking] junk food diet, and ingestion of various chemical substances. I called it "college."
As an addendum, my mother is still attempting to isolate herself from the known universe. In spite of this, she is still having the same difficulties. Given my experience over the past decade, I really have to wonder if the cure is a substantial portion of the disease.
The big planes already have autopilot for mostly straight flight and automated landing systems. Many newer large aircraft can land themselves in zero-visibility weather at properly equiped airports.
Very true. Takeoff, en-route flight and landing can be very cut-and-dried, predictable activities. Two elements that still require outside human intervention are the periods immediately following takeoff and prior to landing. At this point, the pilot is typically in very close communication with the airport's air traffic controllers [or directly with other pilots at smaller airports] in order to be properly sequenced into or out of the airport while maintaining safe levels of proximity to other aircraft.
Given this, how do we replicate the ATC/pilot control loop without the pilot? Giving ATC direct control of the drones doesn't seem practicable - they have enough to do as it is, and I doubt the airports would be willing to take on that level of liability in the event of ATC-induced mishaps. In addition, you then have a remote-control system that can be hijacked. Not cool. The only way to absolutely guarantee control of the airplane staying in "proper" hands from takeoff to landing is to have the flight route preprogrammed and unchangable. That gives rise to an entire host of problems, all of which point to the primary reason that a human pilot still exists in the first place: to make judgement calls when unforeseen events occur.
In short, I don't think non-manned aircraft will ever be accepted in and out of human-traveled airports. Perhaps special, drone-only airfields could be an option for ditribution hubs, but I need another cup of coffee or two to think that one through.
And yes, IAAP.
I see a problem already.
If we used ink, how could we agonize for months over "dangling chads?"
Don't people WANT to be able to remove power from a system on occasion and start from scratch?
When your favorite Windoze flavor goes south, for example, and a "proper" shutdown is impossible, the power switch is a harsh but effective alternative. What would happen in this scenario when you CAN'T clear memory to get rid of the infinite loop inside a rogue ring 0 driver?
Are we now going to have a "reset" button for our memory devices? Barring that, I suppose one could always keep a small screwdriver and a pinout of the device handy... hehehe
The reason the above situation can be handled without a push for legislation is that the losses and subsequent [hidden] tariffs are within the same organization. In the case of the music industry, losses from music piracy [allegedly] affects the RIAA, but income from blank media does not directly go to them. Simply raising the retail price on blank media, therefore, cannot compensate the RIAA the same way raising the shelf prices on goods can compensate a retailer for shoplifting losses.