He suggests using the American Liberty Currency as an alternative currency that is backed by gold and silver. I think this is an excellent idea.
It's an excellent idea...for people who like the idea of a fully-backed currency...as long as there aren't too many such people.
In another Slashdot thread a month or two ago, someone proposed using physical pure-gold currency in all transactions. The problem is, there isn't enough gold.
The current price of gold is about four hundred dollars per ounce, giving the value of all the gold in the world as about 1.2 trillion dollars. In other words, you'd have to put half of all the world's gold into Fort Knox to fully back all the greenbacks in the U.S. To be fair, trying to acquire enough gold to back all U.S. currency would play merry hell with the value of gold, and the dollar, so the numbers above are very approximate. We'll leave aside the damage caused by the economic dislocations of shifting so much capital about....
For silver, the comparable figures are 40 billion total ounces mined in the last two millennia, at $6.50 an ounce--total value: $260 billion. There isn't enough silver to back greenbacks, period. Also, silver is used commercially for a lot of things (photography, jewellery and other decoration, electronics...) and is currently being consumed faster than it is mined. Once again, trying to pull billions of ounces of the stuff out of circulation to back a currency would be an economic disaster.
Adopting a fully-backed currency may seem appealing, but it is a practical impossibility for the United States--there just isn't $600 billion worth of anything out there that could be readily relocated to Fort Knox.
Try to get some useful health information from a doctor like diet and exercise, and not something that comes from a prescription. My usual contact with a doctor is stop smoking and take these pills.
Well--yeah. The best medical advice a doctor can give to a person without acute illness, with the most dramatic benefit for prognosis, is to stop smoking.
The best diet advice to a reasonably healthy individual is along the lines of, "Eat a balanced diet, don't overdo it on any one thing. Have enough fruits and vegetables. Not too much fat. Stay away from any diet you've seen on television, and don't take any diet pills." If you have special dietary needs, then your physician may refer you to a specialist (dietitian/nutritionist, allergist, etc.)
Regarding exercise: "Get some. Not too much--if you find you're in much pain because of it, then you should probably ease off. It's like the food--everything in moderation. Try walking or biking to work, if it's not too far; otherwise, go for a brisk walk in the evening a few times a week."
There you go: Quit smoking. Eat your veggies. Have modest desserts. Get off your ass at least a few times per week. That's all the medical advice you really need regarding lifestyle, unless you have a specific medical condition. You already knew that stuff, didn't you? Your doctor doesn't need to tell it to you again if you haven't yet been listening.
Usually the pills are something that I ask for because I already know what is wrong with me, however, I just cant get my prescriptions filled without talking and paying one of these bozos.
Well, yeah. The reason you need a prescription is because regulators (usually with good reason) feel that it isn't in the public's interested to self-medicate with a given drug. Either there are public health issues (if you can self-prescribe antibiotics, we breed more resistant bacteria); or there is an appreciable incidence of side effects, perhaps associated with chronic use; or the therapeutic range (drug dose that high enough to be useful but low enough not to be toxic) is narrow, and may need to be adjusted if the patient experiences a change in weight, diet, metabolism, or other condition.
In some cases, common symptoms may mask a serious illness, so it's a good idea to have a once-over from a physician before renewing the prescription. (Just in case this time the heartburn and sluggishness are due to a heart attack and not indigestion.)
The 2000 election was not a screwup, it was a coin toss. Neither candidate won a majority of the popular vote in either the nation or in Florida. In fact, in both the differences were statistically insignificant.
The threshold for a judicial recount in a Canadian federal election is 0.1% of the votes cast. The popular vote difference in the 2000 U.S. Presidential election was about 0.5%--five times what the Canadians think they can measure accurately.
Counting is difficult--as Florida shows, it's not an exact science--but it's not that difficult.
Add to that, the US is a sovereign nation. Europe can monitor the elections all they want, they still can't do shit about it.
Perhaps they're hoping to shame sloppy election officials into doing it right. More cynically, perhaps they're planning to be available to provide expert testmony in Bush v. Kerry. Just because Tony Blair or Jacques Chirac don't intend to bomb Washington and implement regime change if they don't like the President--it doesn't mean that foreign observers can't have an effect on the election.
Using popular vote in the United States isn't as easy as you think it would be. In a country with 150 million votes cast (assuming 1/2 vote) how close would the vote have to be before you're doing a full recount? 1%? Do you think the election would be decided by 1.5 million votes?
In Canadian federal elections, there is a mandatory recount (supervised by judges) in any riding (electoral district) when the margin is closer than 0.1%. That would be about a hundred thousand vote margin in a U.S. election.
The tightest U.S. election (measured by popular votes) was in 1880, where Garfield won the popular count by less than 2000 votes--at the time, a 0.02% margin. This was the only time a U.S. Presidential election had a popular vote margin that close. (Granted, sometimes the Presidency went to the candidate with fewer votes--see G.W. Bush--but the margin was always larger than 0.1%.) In other words, situations where a full recount would be necessary would seem to be quite rare.
Within any riding in Canada, any voter may also request a judicial recount of that riding--upon payment of a nominal fee ($250) and the filing of an affidavit that they believe errors were made in the count. (Improperly tallied results, improperly rejected ballots, etc.) It cuts way down on frivolous recount requests, and the system seems to work pretty well overall. Perhaps it could be adapted for U.S. use without too much pain.
The big problem is implementing a voting system that creates a paper trail and makes recounts even possible--something that doesn't currently exist in the U.S.
How many Slashdotters are posting indignant messages about Google's "evil" ways from a computer containing no components manufactured in China? Anybody have a home that contains no China-sourced products? By buying products assembled in China, aren't we directly propping up the dictatorial regime there?
China represents what, a sixth of the world's people? It's tough to avoid doing business with them in some way. Google's "Don't be evil" mantra is commendable, but what does it mean? If most Americans are willing to tacitly accept doing business with the Chinese regime and still consider ourselves to be "good" people, is it appropriate to hold Google to a higher standard than we hold ourselves?
Another question, for the scientists and engineers in the crowd--how many of you use Google to answer work-related questions on at least a weekly basis? Daily? More than once per day?
Google is profoundly useful for things besides fomenting political unrest. I dare say that cutting off China's access to Google would constitute a small but significant blow to them economically and scientifically. Is it "evil" to help researchers and engineers do their work, just because those individuals are located in a repressive country? Is it "evil" to not help them?
How many people have looked up medical information through Google?
Is it "evil" to cut off that source of health information to a billion Chinese people because we don't like their government?
And if you expect me to tell you how this discovery will modify our lives, you're going to be disappointed. I've not a slightest idea about it, even if I find fascinating that scientists always find new ways to break rules and shake our certitudes.
What I see:
I am a chemist that has discovered a class of mixtures with a very interesting and heretofor unobserved property. I have published information on how to prepare these mixtures--in a way, it is a solution looking for a problem. I expect that given a small group of engineers, a dozen or so different applications could be hashed out over their morning coffee. I am disappointed--but not surprised--that a Slashdot reader couldn't be bothered to use his imagination to come up with an application, preferring to instead complain that no ideas were spoon-fed in the brief PhysicsWeb note.
The city has, for whatever reason, obtained some information. They can either keep that information secret from the people who have _already_ paid for it. Or they can _share_ that information with _anyone_ who wants it.
You forgot an option:
Or the City can sell the information to the private company that wants to use it to make money.
The City then recovers some of the cost of acquiring the images, which means that all of us who contributed to that cost aren't just subsidizing one guy's business idea. Wouldn't it be neat if the City's aerial imagery program were revenue neutral, so that it doesn't have to come out of our taxes at all?
Prior to the internet, you could buy the maps and aerial photographs for a fee, which was a bit high, I always thought, but reasonable considering the trouble and costs associated with the physical reproduction of the media.
Now in this age of the Internet and blank DVD's priced well under $1 (even our lame Cdn $), providing that "public data" far more cheaply (and allowing copying) should be allowed.
On the other hand, for aerial photographs and satellite imagery, it may be that the cost of acquiring the images is a significant fraction of the cost that you pay for them. In other words, though collection of the imagery is partially subsidized by the government, there is at least some cost recovery from the people who actually make use of the pictures. It makes sense for the government to be contributing to this funding, because the government does make extensive use of aerial and satellite imagery--but giving away the images for free amounts to a government subsidy of any business that makes use of them.
What history class did you sit through? It took about 60 days for the pilgrims to get to America. Imagine 102 people on a 90 foot boat with no shower facilities, rampant seasickness, scurvy and dysentery, and the only toilet facilities being the open sea. And when they get to where they're going, they have to start by building their friggin' houses so they don't freeze to death.
The pilgrims were wusses.
They had lots of people to talk to, so even if there were an asshole or two on there wouldn't be murder. They only had to sail for a couple of months--going to Mars takes a couple of years. They could afford to piss away water and nutrients over the side of the ship--the Mars mission will have to recycle. Yeah, scurvy's rough, but anoxia is rougher--those lazy pilgrims could breathe anytime they wanted to, and have all the fresh air they could inhale...all of it for free.
They had to build houses when they arrived? Oh--boo hoo. The New World was covered in thousands of square miles of old growth top quality virgin timber: houses waiting to happen. What have you got on Mars? Sand. Oh, and some rock. The pilgrims were afraid of freezing? They didn't have to get up in the morning and shovel solid carbon dioxide off the front walk.
The pilgrims could plant crops right there in the ground. Won't work on Mars--the soil has no accessible nutrients in it, plus it's probably viciously oxidizing, oh, and you'll have to dome over everything because the atmosphere is too thin and the entire surface is bathed in ultraviolet.
Just to give people a pilgrim-level chance (of survival; forget level of comfort) on Mars is going to cost you a lot. We have to be able to offer a would-be astronaut some hope of suriviving the trip--the pilgrims had that much. It's not the creature comforts that we're waiting on--it's the food, fuel, and air.
I believe a system which could eliminate spoiled ballots altogether has some merit.
Some people deliberately choose to spoil a ballot as some sort of protest vote. I'm willing to let them have it.
Well, I've had four Candadians (I'm assuming) explain to me what those simple rules are and have gotten three different answers.
Perhaps, but it's a false dichotomy. The answers have been essentially the same with respect to content. If you're interested, the full Elections Act is here. Particularly salient in this discussion are Parts 12 ("Counting Votes") and 9 ("Voting"). Rejecting a ballot is governed mostly by Section 284 of the Act:
284. (1) In examining the ballots, the deputy returning officer shall reject one
(a) that has not been supplied by him or her;
(b) that has not been marked in a circle at the right of the candidates' names;
(c) that is void by virtue of section 76;
(d) that has been marked in more than one circle at the right of the candidates' names; or
(e) on which there is any writing or mark by which the elector could be identified.
Section 524(1)(b) of the Act allows any elector (not just candidates) to contest the results of any election on the grounds that "...there were irregularities, fraud or corrupt or illegal practices that affected the result of the election." Section 283(1) requires that the counting of votes be conducted by the Poll Clerk and Deputy Returning Officer (who are each drawn from lists supplied by two different political parties) plus at least two other electors (voters) or candidates' representatives.
What if the X goes outside the circle? How far is it allowed to go?
What if it doesn't fill the circle?
Who decides whether or not it's valid? Can they be bought?
How about if they can't see or can't read? Should they be allowed to vote?
The ballots are black with white block type and a good-sized white circle next to each name. Very clear instructions are provided to mark an X in the circle next to the name of the candidate for whom you wish to vote. Check marks are also acceptable, if I remember correctly. (I counted ballots a few years ago; I don't remember the precise rules.) Two or three hundred ballots went past my nose, nobody had trouble with the 'X' concept.
If the X extends outside of the circle, it's still valid, unless it enters another circle. It doesn't have to fill the circle; it just has to be an X or a check mark of any size.
The blind are allowed to vote. Templates are provided, printed in Braille, with holes that line up with the circles on the ballot. In areas where other languages (beyond English and French) are spoken, translations of instructions and candidates' names are posted and readily available. The infirm or people with specific handicaps that prevent them from marking their own ballot may be accompanied by an assistant of their choice. (The assistant must swear an oath and sign a declaration, if I remember correctly; I believe there is a limit on the number of people one person may assist, as well.)
The handling and counting of ballots at the polling place are both handled by a pair of individuals. The two parties who received the most votes in the previous election in that area provide lists of acceptable officials to Elections Canada, who assigns one from each list to each polling station. (In other words, in the U.S. it would be one Democrat and one Republican per poll). Observers (called scrutineers) may be sent by any candidate to monitor the voting and counting process. In practice, there are very few challenged ballots, though there does exist an appeal process. Judge-supervised recounts are mandatory when the margin of victory is smaller than a certain number of votes; recounts may also be requested by candidates.
So tampering with a vote is absolutely intolerable but throwing them away is okay. You don't see the contradiction?
Look, if someone can't understand the concept of "make an X next to the correct candidate; one X only", then I'm hard pressed to come up with a voting system that would be able to accurately gauge that voter's intent. It's as voter-verifiable as it gets. The only ballots that I've seen rejected have been deliberately spoiled by the voter by marking X in all of the circles or scribbling across the entire ballot.
Their solution: A dual-method system. First, the person fills out a card with their choices. Then they put the card into a slot which reads it, so they get a chance to review their choices. If they want to make changes, the old ballot is stamped with "Void" and shredded, and a new one pops out, ready to use. If they accept the choices, the ballot is placed in a bin *and* recorded electronically.
Close, but not quite. You never destroy the paper ballot. You can mark it 'VOID' or 'SPOILED', but it must be kept. Otherwise you get into difficulties with audits.
I agree about the benefit of human- and machine-readable ballots. One design I quite like has a broken arrow next to each candidate's name:
- -> Smith - -> Jones - -> Quayle
To vote, just fill in the gap in the arrow. You can visually confirm you voted for whom you think you voted. You can feed it to the machine as soon as you've filled out the ballot and it will beep at you if it can't read it. It's easy to count manually as a spot check on the machine.
I've seen them used in some municipal elections in Canada; I presume that they are also used elsewhere. Meanwhile, for our federal and provincial elections, we just mark an X on a paper ballot and count by hand. Works pretty well, though one could substitute the above human/mechanical system with a minimum of difficulty.
I'm also not sure where the savings are for mechanical systems. They require electricity and sometimes phone lines; the setup and takedown are more complicated. Any trustworthy system requires paper backups anyway. Verifying that the 'counter' is really at zero at the start of the day is much easier with a cardboard box, too.
think it does have a paper trail and I've never heard of any vulnerabilities for it, and we have no hanging chads. Completely electronic.
You think it has a paper trail, but you're confident it has no vulnerabilities?
Oh. Well, that's okay then.
After you push the button for Jones, how do you know that the system recorded a vote for Jones? What if the screen says Jones, but (inadvertently or deliberately) incremented the count for Smith, instead?
A real paper trail is one that you can see when you cast your vote. It just has to print 'one vote for Jones' on it, then spit it out. You put that printed record into a sealed ballot box before you leave the polling place. (Otherwise, other people could verify your vote and eliminate the benefits of a secret ballot). Then you've got a real paper trail. If you don't trust the machine count, you count the paper ballots.
A 'paper trail' where the printer spits out whatever number the computer tells it at the end of the day has no verification value whatsoever.
Stem cell research, genetic manipulation, and abortion are all part of the same argument.
Stem cell research, genetic manipulation, and abortion can be presented--usually for the purposes of political grandstanding--as being part of the same argument.
In practice, there's actually very little overlap between them.
For years now we've been hearing that increased production volumes and market competition would drive down prices (oh, like the compact disc market?).
It should be noted that the compact disc market is decidedly different. (Music) CDs are not commodities--their value depends in part on which music is on them. For any given album, there is a single, monopoly supplier. If Sony or BMG will sell CDs to stores for $14 apiece, then there won't be any (new) CDs for sale for less than that amount. (Loss leaders and other quirks of the market notwithstanding.)
Looking at the music CD market in general, it's pretty much an oligopoly--a small number of players can control the price of most of the albums sold. Once again, prices won't fall in such a situation, because there isn't sufficient competition.
LCD monitors, on the other hand, can become a commodity. Aside from potential patent encumbrances, all the major electronics manufacturers are free to produce them, so the price should continue to fall. (Then again, building a manufacturing facility is a big overhead cost, which represents a significant barrier to entry in the market...)
Private companies don't need governments to take care of their security for them. A space elevator will not be a very tempting target to attack externally. You can only hit the very, very, very bottom, and if you break it, you just lower a replacement for the bottom 0.01% that broke off.
Yes, but the very, very bottom is the most sensitive part of the whole thing. That's where your cable is skinniest, and since it's the only piece that's in the atmosphere it might well be the most finicky bit to build. (Go ahead--try to catch a 40,000 km long cable dropped from space, while the teeny tiny end is blowing about in the atmosphere.)
The whole cable will also be under significant tension; otherwise you wouldn't be able to lift anything on it. (Your crawler would just drag the station at the top down, instead.) Cut the cable near the base, and the rest of the elevator starts heading for a higher orbit.
Releasing that tension would probably also make a mess of the rest of the cable. Think--you have a cable that's under five or ten tons of tension. Suddenly sever one end. There will be an immediate and rapid contraction starting at the cut end, and propagating up the cable. I can see all kinds of nasty harmonics being set up; it's an engineering nightmare, and it might result in damage--if not outright failure--at points far distant from the base.
Likewise with courtroom technology - When lawyers and jurors are over-used to the presence of touch screens and video equipment, what will they do when called to a courtroom in rural South Dakota that has barely the budget to keep the furnace running?
Juries are usually drawn from members of the local population. And how often have you served on a jury in your lifetime--once? Twice? Never? Juries are coming at this fairly fresh. Their expectations of what to expect in court are distorted by television and movies anyway, but they manage to get by. I'm pretty sure they could manage not to say, "Well damn--I can't make a judgement because I had to look at the defendant directly instead of on a little TV screen."
The legal profession is also very sensibly conservative with respect to new technology. You can bet that there will be paper copies of every important document in a trial ready and waiting for the foreseeable future.
It is likely that the screens will eventually get used to show graphics to support the prosecution's case: "I put it to you that Joe Sixpack took a knife and stabbed Fed six times" becomes an dramatised computer generated video showing a person, recognisably Joe, taking a knife and stabbing Fred - all with nice sound effects etc.
And this is where judges hear and agree to a defense motion for mistrial or dismissal because the prosecution is deliberately presenting inflammatory speculation as evidence. Judges will often prevent prosecutors from showing the jury pictures of a murder victim--unless the pictures have some sort of evidentiary value--because the only purpose of showing such pictures is usually to get the jury mad enough to convict on an otherwise weak case.
Expect the use of such 'evidence' to be overturned on appeal, if nothing else. Case law will rapidly establish the acceptable bounds on the use of such presentation tools.
Actually a rotary phone does not use timing what so ever. The turning of the dial creates a current that is sent up the line. 4 pulses sent for the number 4 and so on. Grabbing the dial and forcing it back to the starting place still sends the correct amount of digits. If you notice when you force a dial on a rotary phone you can only force it so much. The resistance that exist for the whatever mechanics make the current do not allow you to turn it back as fast as you can.
I am sorry but your story is more myth than fact.
I would actually be inclined to give the grandparent the benefit of the doubt for his story. Sure, 'modern' rotary dial phones are good at mechanically limiting how fast the dial returns to its starting position, but I wouldn't be surprised if there existed older phones that weren't quite as resistant to the described abuses. Even though it would generate the appropriate number of pulses on the line, it's possible that more closely-spaced pulses would come too fast for the telphone company's equipment to handle.
Remember, the switches were electromechanical beasts--Strowger switches--that could only tick through digits so quickly. Some neat pictures here, and an explanatory note here. So slightly erratic spacing of pulses is well-tolerated--the switch still advanced one digit per pulse. Pulses too close together will fail, because the mechanical components of the switch won't keep up.
Modern switches convert the current pulses to digital signals, which obviously can be parsed and routed at effectively unlimited speeds (compared to the rate at which they can be dialled).
I wouldn't be surprised if the person in the story had actually physically damaged the phone components through forcing the dial that way, too.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an excellent idea...for people who like the idea of a fully-backed currency...as long as there aren't too many such people.
In another Slashdot thread a month or two ago, someone proposed using physical pure-gold currency in all transactions. The problem is, there isn't enough gold.
Very roughly, the total amount of gold ever mined is on the order of three billion troy ounces.
The total amount of U.S. currency in circulation is on the order of six hundred billion dollars.
The current price of gold is about four hundred dollars per ounce, giving the value of all the gold in the world as about 1.2 trillion dollars. In other words, you'd have to put half of all the world's gold into Fort Knox to fully back all the greenbacks in the U.S. To be fair, trying to acquire enough gold to back all U.S. currency would play merry hell with the value of gold, and the dollar, so the numbers above are very approximate. We'll leave aside the damage caused by the economic dislocations of shifting so much capital about....
For silver, the comparable figures are 40 billion total ounces mined in the last two millennia, at $6.50 an ounce--total value: $260 billion. There isn't enough silver to back greenbacks, period. Also, silver is used commercially for a lot of things (photography, jewellery and other decoration, electronics...) and is currently being consumed faster than it is mined. Once again, trying to pull billions of ounces of the stuff out of circulation to back a currency would be an economic disaster.
Adopting a fully-backed currency may seem appealing, but it is a practical impossibility for the United States--there just isn't $600 billion worth of anything out there that could be readily relocated to Fort Knox.
Then again, twenty years ago, your English teacher never thought that "bullet point" would show up as a verb.
"Verbing weirds language." -Bill Watterson
Well--yeah. The best medical advice a doctor can give to a person without acute illness, with the most dramatic benefit for prognosis, is to stop smoking.
The best diet advice to a reasonably healthy individual is along the lines of, "Eat a balanced diet, don't overdo it on any one thing. Have enough fruits and vegetables. Not too much fat. Stay away from any diet you've seen on television, and don't take any diet pills." If you have special dietary needs, then your physician may refer you to a specialist (dietitian/nutritionist, allergist, etc.)
Regarding exercise: "Get some. Not too much--if you find you're in much pain because of it, then you should probably ease off. It's like the food--everything in moderation. Try walking or biking to work, if it's not too far; otherwise, go for a brisk walk in the evening a few times a week."
There you go: Quit smoking. Eat your veggies. Have modest desserts. Get off your ass at least a few times per week. That's all the medical advice you really need regarding lifestyle, unless you have a specific medical condition. You already knew that stuff, didn't you? Your doctor doesn't need to tell it to you again if you haven't yet been listening.
Usually the pills are something that I ask for because I already know what is wrong with me, however, I just cant get my prescriptions filled without talking and paying one of these bozos.
Well, yeah. The reason you need a prescription is because regulators (usually with good reason) feel that it isn't in the public's interested to self-medicate with a given drug. Either there are public health issues (if you can self-prescribe antibiotics, we breed more resistant bacteria); or there is an appreciable incidence of side effects, perhaps associated with chronic use; or the therapeutic range (drug dose that high enough to be useful but low enough not to be toxic) is narrow, and may need to be adjusted if the patient experiences a change in weight, diet, metabolism, or other condition.
In some cases, common symptoms may mask a serious illness, so it's a good idea to have a once-over from a physician before renewing the prescription. (Just in case this time the heartburn and sluggishness are due to a heart attack and not indigestion.)
You forgot one: until our troops actually fire their weapons, the nuclear waste will be in a holster next to certain sensitive parts of the anatomy.
We wouldn't want our troops shooting blanks *ahem*, now would we?
Appropriate that geeks will be able to go where no geek has gone before aboard the Virgin Space Ship Enterprise....
The threshold for a judicial recount in a Canadian federal election is 0.1% of the votes cast. The popular vote difference in the 2000 U.S. Presidential election was about 0.5%--five times what the Canadians think they can measure accurately.
Counting is difficult--as Florida shows, it's not an exact science--but it's not that difficult.
Add to that, the US is a sovereign nation. Europe can monitor the elections all they want, they still can't do shit about it.
Perhaps they're hoping to shame sloppy election officials into doing it right. More cynically, perhaps they're planning to be available to provide expert testmony in Bush v. Kerry. Just because Tony Blair or Jacques Chirac don't intend to bomb Washington and implement regime change if they don't like the President--it doesn't mean that foreign observers can't have an effect on the election.
In Canadian federal elections, there is a mandatory recount (supervised by judges) in any riding (electoral district) when the margin is closer than 0.1%. That would be about a hundred thousand vote margin in a U.S. election.
The tightest U.S. election (measured by popular votes) was in 1880, where Garfield won the popular count by less than 2000 votes--at the time, a 0.02% margin. This was the only time a U.S. Presidential election had a popular vote margin that close. (Granted, sometimes the Presidency went to the candidate with fewer votes--see G.W. Bush--but the margin was always larger than 0.1%.) In other words, situations where a full recount would be necessary would seem to be quite rare.
Within any riding in Canada, any voter may also request a judicial recount of that riding--upon payment of a nominal fee ($250) and the filing of an affidavit that they believe errors were made in the count. (Improperly tallied results, improperly rejected ballots, etc.) It cuts way down on frivolous recount requests, and the system seems to work pretty well overall. Perhaps it could be adapted for U.S. use without too much pain.
The big problem is implementing a voting system that creates a paper trail and makes recounts even possible--something that doesn't currently exist in the U.S.
It allows you to place the always-popular Harry Potter Sim.
China represents what, a sixth of the world's people? It's tough to avoid doing business with them in some way. Google's "Don't be evil" mantra is commendable, but what does it mean? If most Americans are willing to tacitly accept doing business with the Chinese regime and still consider ourselves to be "good" people, is it appropriate to hold Google to a higher standard than we hold ourselves?
Another question, for the scientists and engineers in the crowd--how many of you use Google to answer work-related questions on at least a weekly basis? Daily? More than once per day?
Google is profoundly useful for things besides fomenting political unrest. I dare say that cutting off China's access to Google would constitute a small but significant blow to them economically and scientifically. Is it "evil" to help researchers and engineers do their work, just because those individuals are located in a repressive country? Is it "evil" to not help them?
How many people have looked up medical information through Google?
Is it "evil" to cut off that source of health information to a billion Chinese people because we don't like their government?
Food for thought.
And if you expect me to tell you how this discovery will modify our lives, you're going to be disappointed. I've not a slightest idea about it, even if I find fascinating that scientists always find new ways to break rules and shake our certitudes.
What I see:
I am a chemist that has discovered a class of mixtures with a very interesting and heretofor unobserved property. I have published information on how to prepare these mixtures--in a way, it is a solution looking for a problem. I expect that given a small group of engineers, a dozen or so different applications could be hashed out over their morning coffee. I am disappointed--but not surprised--that a Slashdot reader couldn't be bothered to use his imagination to come up with an application, preferring to instead complain that no ideas were spoon-fed in the brief PhysicsWeb note.
You forgot an option:
Or the City can sell the information to the private company that wants to use it to make money.
The City then recovers some of the cost of acquiring the images, which means that all of us who contributed to that cost aren't just subsidizing one guy's business idea. Wouldn't it be neat if the City's aerial imagery program were revenue neutral, so that it doesn't have to come out of our taxes at all?
Now in this age of the Internet and blank DVD's priced well under $1 (even our lame Cdn $), providing that "public data" far more cheaply (and allowing copying) should be allowed.
On the other hand, for aerial photographs and satellite imagery, it may be that the cost of acquiring the images is a significant fraction of the cost that you pay for them. In other words, though collection of the imagery is partially subsidized by the government, there is at least some cost recovery from the people who actually make use of the pictures. It makes sense for the government to be contributing to this funding, because the government does make extensive use of aerial and satellite imagery--but giving away the images for free amounts to a government subsidy of any business that makes use of them.
Indeed, it's much safer to speed in dense fog...
The pilgrims were wusses.
They had lots of people to talk to, so even if there were an asshole or two on there wouldn't be murder. They only had to sail for a couple of months--going to Mars takes a couple of years. They could afford to piss away water and nutrients over the side of the ship--the Mars mission will have to recycle. Yeah, scurvy's rough, but anoxia is rougher--those lazy pilgrims could breathe anytime they wanted to, and have all the fresh air they could inhale...all of it for free.
They had to build houses when they arrived? Oh--boo hoo. The New World was covered in thousands of square miles of old growth top quality virgin timber: houses waiting to happen. What have you got on Mars? Sand. Oh, and some rock. The pilgrims were afraid of freezing? They didn't have to get up in the morning and shovel solid carbon dioxide off the front walk.
The pilgrims could plant crops right there in the ground. Won't work on Mars--the soil has no accessible nutrients in it, plus it's probably viciously oxidizing, oh, and you'll have to dome over everything because the atmosphere is too thin and the entire surface is bathed in ultraviolet.
Just to give people a pilgrim-level chance (of survival; forget level of comfort) on Mars is going to cost you a lot. We have to be able to offer a would-be astronaut some hope of suriviving the trip--the pilgrims had that much. It's not the creature comforts that we're waiting on--it's the food, fuel, and air.
Some people deliberately choose to spoil a ballot as some sort of protest vote. I'm willing to let them have it.
Well, I've had four Candadians (I'm assuming) explain to me what those simple rules are and have gotten three different answers.
Perhaps, but it's a false dichotomy. The answers have been essentially the same with respect to content. If you're interested, the full Elections Act is here. Particularly salient in this discussion are Parts 12 ("Counting Votes") and 9 ("Voting"). Rejecting a ballot is governed mostly by Section 284 of the Act:
Section 524(1)(b) of the Act allows any elector (not just candidates) to contest the results of any election on the grounds that "...there were irregularities, fraud or corrupt or illegal practices that affected the result of the election." Section 283(1) requires that the counting of votes be conducted by the Poll Clerk and Deputy Returning Officer (who are each drawn from lists supplied by two different political parties) plus at least two other electors (voters) or candidates' representatives.Cheers.
What if it doesn't fill the circle?
Who decides whether or not it's valid? Can they be bought?
How about if they can't see or can't read? Should they be allowed to vote?
The ballots are black with white block type and a good-sized white circle next to each name. Very clear instructions are provided to mark an X in the circle next to the name of the candidate for whom you wish to vote. Check marks are also acceptable, if I remember correctly. (I counted ballots a few years ago; I don't remember the precise rules.) Two or three hundred ballots went past my nose, nobody had trouble with the 'X' concept.
If the X extends outside of the circle, it's still valid, unless it enters another circle. It doesn't have to fill the circle; it just has to be an X or a check mark of any size.
The blind are allowed to vote. Templates are provided, printed in Braille, with holes that line up with the circles on the ballot. In areas where other languages (beyond English and French) are spoken, translations of instructions and candidates' names are posted and readily available. The infirm or people with specific handicaps that prevent them from marking their own ballot may be accompanied by an assistant of their choice. (The assistant must swear an oath and sign a declaration, if I remember correctly; I believe there is a limit on the number of people one person may assist, as well.)
The handling and counting of ballots at the polling place are both handled by a pair of individuals. The two parties who received the most votes in the previous election in that area provide lists of acceptable officials to Elections Canada, who assigns one from each list to each polling station. (In other words, in the U.S. it would be one Democrat and one Republican per poll). Observers (called scrutineers) may be sent by any candidate to monitor the voting and counting process. In practice, there are very few challenged ballots, though there does exist an appeal process. Judge-supervised recounts are mandatory when the margin of victory is smaller than a certain number of votes; recounts may also be requested by candidates.
So tampering with a vote is absolutely intolerable but throwing them away is okay. You don't see the contradiction?
Look, if someone can't understand the concept of "make an X next to the correct candidate; one X only", then I'm hard pressed to come up with a voting system that would be able to accurately gauge that voter's intent. It's as voter-verifiable as it gets. The only ballots that I've seen rejected have been deliberately spoiled by the voter by marking X in all of the circles or scribbling across the entire ballot.
Close, but not quite. You never destroy the paper ballot. You can mark it 'VOID' or 'SPOILED', but it must be kept. Otherwise you get into difficulties with audits.
I agree about the benefit of human- and machine-readable ballots. One design I quite like has a broken arrow next to each candidate's name:
To vote, just fill in the gap in the arrow. You can visually confirm you voted for whom you think you voted. You can feed it to the machine as soon as you've filled out the ballot and it will beep at you if it can't read it. It's easy to count manually as a spot check on the machine.I've seen them used in some municipal elections in Canada; I presume that they are also used elsewhere. Meanwhile, for our federal and provincial elections, we just mark an X on a paper ballot and count by hand. Works pretty well, though one could substitute the above human/mechanical system with a minimum of difficulty.
I'm also not sure where the savings are for mechanical systems. They require electricity and sometimes phone lines; the setup and takedown are more complicated. Any trustworthy system requires paper backups anyway. Verifying that the 'counter' is really at zero at the start of the day is much easier with a cardboard box, too.
You think it has a paper trail, but you're confident it has no vulnerabilities?
Oh. Well, that's okay then.
After you push the button for Jones, how do you know that the system recorded a vote for Jones? What if the screen says Jones, but (inadvertently or deliberately) incremented the count for Smith, instead?
A real paper trail is one that you can see when you cast your vote. It just has to print 'one vote for Jones' on it, then spit it out. You put that printed record into a sealed ballot box before you leave the polling place. (Otherwise, other people could verify your vote and eliminate the benefits of a secret ballot). Then you've got a real paper trail. If you don't trust the machine count, you count the paper ballots.
A 'paper trail' where the printer spits out whatever number the computer tells it at the end of the day has no verification value whatsoever.
Stem cell research, genetic manipulation, and abortion can be presented--usually for the purposes of political grandstanding--as being part of the same argument.
In practice, there's actually very little overlap between them.
Including the President and Vice President. Great example for the kids....
It should be noted that the compact disc market is decidedly different. (Music) CDs are not commodities--their value depends in part on which music is on them. For any given album, there is a single, monopoly supplier. If Sony or BMG will sell CDs to stores for $14 apiece, then there won't be any (new) CDs for sale for less than that amount. (Loss leaders and other quirks of the market notwithstanding.)
Looking at the music CD market in general, it's pretty much an oligopoly--a small number of players can control the price of most of the albums sold. Once again, prices won't fall in such a situation, because there isn't sufficient competition.
LCD monitors, on the other hand, can become a commodity. Aside from potential patent encumbrances, all the major electronics manufacturers are free to produce them, so the price should continue to fall. (Then again, building a manufacturing facility is a big overhead cost, which represents a significant barrier to entry in the market...)
Yes, but the very, very bottom is the most sensitive part of the whole thing. That's where your cable is skinniest, and since it's the only piece that's in the atmosphere it might well be the most finicky bit to build. (Go ahead--try to catch a 40,000 km long cable dropped from space, while the teeny tiny end is blowing about in the atmosphere.)
The whole cable will also be under significant tension; otherwise you wouldn't be able to lift anything on it. (Your crawler would just drag the station at the top down, instead.) Cut the cable near the base, and the rest of the elevator starts heading for a higher orbit.
Releasing that tension would probably also make a mess of the rest of the cable. Think--you have a cable that's under five or ten tons of tension. Suddenly sever one end. There will be an immediate and rapid contraction starting at the cut end, and propagating up the cable. I can see all kinds of nasty harmonics being set up; it's an engineering nightmare, and it might result in damage--if not outright failure--at points far distant from the base.
Juries are usually drawn from members of the local population. And how often have you served on a jury in your lifetime--once? Twice? Never? Juries are coming at this fairly fresh. Their expectations of what to expect in court are distorted by television and movies anyway, but they manage to get by. I'm pretty sure they could manage not to say, "Well damn--I can't make a judgement because I had to look at the defendant directly instead of on a little TV screen."
The legal profession is also very sensibly conservative with respect to new technology. You can bet that there will be paper copies of every important document in a trial ready and waiting for the foreseeable future.
And this is where judges hear and agree to a defense motion for mistrial or dismissal because the prosecution is deliberately presenting inflammatory speculation as evidence. Judges will often prevent prosecutors from showing the jury pictures of a murder victim--unless the pictures have some sort of evidentiary value--because the only purpose of showing such pictures is usually to get the jury mad enough to convict on an otherwise weak case.
Expect the use of such 'evidence' to be overturned on appeal, if nothing else. Case law will rapidly establish the acceptable bounds on the use of such presentation tools.
I am sorry but your story is more myth than fact.
I would actually be inclined to give the grandparent the benefit of the doubt for his story. Sure, 'modern' rotary dial phones are good at mechanically limiting how fast the dial returns to its starting position, but I wouldn't be surprised if there existed older phones that weren't quite as resistant to the described abuses. Even though it would generate the appropriate number of pulses on the line, it's possible that more closely-spaced pulses would come too fast for the telphone company's equipment to handle.
Remember, the switches were electromechanical beasts--Strowger switches--that could only tick through digits so quickly. Some neat pictures here, and an explanatory note here. So slightly erratic spacing of pulses is well-tolerated--the switch still advanced one digit per pulse. Pulses too close together will fail, because the mechanical components of the switch won't keep up.
Modern switches convert the current pulses to digital signals, which obviously can be parsed and routed at effectively unlimited speeds (compared to the rate at which they can be dialled).
I wouldn't be surprised if the person in the story had actually physically damaged the phone components through forcing the dial that way, too.