the halting problem can be solved in a real computer
No, it can not. Write a program which will loop until any key is pressed. When will it halt? No program can determine the answer in advance.
The grandparent post has a good point about the technical impossibility of always correctly decompiling a computed branch address. However, in practice, those don't appear. I know of only one compiler that ever did anything like that. These days, if you have a switch statement with cases of enough chars to make it worth the construct, dispatch tables are used instead.
Potassium is a common dietary supplement in areas where people have to do hard physical labor under the heat of the sun, and potassium sources such as bananas are difficult to come by.
I really like the new TivoCop Recorders they issued us, but I swear mine thinks I'm racist or somthing
Do you know the code to program in the remote to keep all those failure-to-use-turn-signals that I never pull over ending up on the duty sergant's blooper reel the next day?
News articles, especially those about government, are always subject to fair use exemptions. Have people forgotten that?
I want to preface this with my views that typical future poling stations will be comprised of a touch screen with a printer, and an optical scan machine, which can scan the ballots produced by the printer. That way, the people who can't mark the ballot can use touch screen, and everyone else can do what Cambridge, Mass. does with InstantRunoffVoting (IRV) and also be able to use the mail.
May 15, 2003
To Register Doubts, Press Here By SAM LUBELL
FTER the 2000 presidential election, with its disputes over the balloting in Florida and its hanging chad, the federal government moved swiftly to revamp the country's largely paper-based and mechanical voting systems. More than $1 billion has been appropriated for buying electronic voting systems, including optical scanners and touch-screen machines, that eliminate ballots written or punched on paper or tallied by mechanical equipment.
The new systems have already brought what proponents of electronic voting say is a new reliability and efficiency to the process.
"There's no guesswork as far as who you voted for," said Mark Radke, director of voting industry for Diebold Election Systems, which makes the AccuVote-TS, a $3,000 touch-screen machine. Mr. Radke said the unit, which presents voters with choices on an electronic monitor, quickened the voting and counting process and reduced the number of "undervotes," ballots that are not counted because they are unreadable or otherwise defective.
But not everyone likes the switch to electronic balloting. Some of the loudest opposition, in fact, is coming from computer experts who say the new technology could prove more troublesome than its predecessors. They warn of equipment malfunction, unchecked tampering and the lack of secure proof for each vote.
A group of more than 100 technologists, led by David Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford University, has called for tighter security measures on electronic voting apparatus and a "voter-verifiable audit trail," meaning a permanent record of each vote that can be checked for accuracy even after the election. (The group's "resolution on electronic voting" is at verify.stanford.edu/evote.html.)
Without such a trail, Dr. Dill warned, if a machine is tampered with or malfunctions, "then the votes in question are corrupted and you have no option but to hold another election or accept bad results." Thus the only reliable backup, the group contends, is for the machines to print out paper ballots after each vote, which can be hand-counted if necessary.
Dr. Dill and his counterparts, who in- clude computer science experts in academia and Silicon Valley, also assert that unlike more mechanical machines, electronic systems cannot be opened up to the public for verification. And the only people who know what is encoded on them are computer experts. "I think it's unreasonable for the public to be asked to accept the security of these machines on blind faith," he said. "There's no question the technology is open to tampering."
Members of the group also assert that electronic voting machines have experienced breakdowns in some elections. "We're concerned," said Rebecca Mercuri, formerly a professor of computer science at Bryn Mawr and now the president of Notable Software, a consulting firm. "These machines are showing huge defects."
For their part, election officials and voting machine vendors dispute any notion that the systems have major problems, and caution that the public should not overreact.
Penelope Bonsall, director of the Federal Election Commission's Office of Election Administration, which helps set guidelines for the voting process, said that the possibility of vote tampering has always exi
IBM could pay billions for the UNIX IP, RedHat would have to scrape together the pennies from all the desks in the place to accumulate $29.95+tax for it.
Point well taken. Who do you think would get the 2nd highest bid if UNIX(tm) went to the auction block? Sun? HP?
Maybe Microsoft, now a dividend stock, would bid to re-brand Interix. I'll bet Gates never gave up the dream that had been Xenix, but I bet he'd be too stingy to bid for the historical mark.
there's some dead-on, no quibbling, not even kidding evidence of code-lifting.
Yes, there is some but only to support an old executable format that few people use anymore. As a proportion of the IP involved in a typical distro, it's tiny, and the percentage of linux users who could be construed as activly infringing is probably less than 1%.
If SCO wants to win this, they are going to have to show malice or intent to defraud, too, which is not very likely. However, they do have a pretty good chance of maybe getting a few million from IBM if they can reasonably support an economic loss.
I predict settlement in five to seven months, $5 million from IBM, and maybe a $2 million follow-up suit against the likes of RedHat which will turn out to be much more difficult, bankrupting SCO, putting the UNIX trademark under control of a Chapter 11 court review, where it will probably be auctioned. The winning bidder will be IBM, barely outbidding RedHat.
Explain to me why emergency rooms collapse when the states offer free health care to illegal immigrants
That is not what I said. Countries that provide universal medical care have lower overall health care costs than those countries where otherwise treatable maladies don't receive treatment until they exhibit acute traumatic symptoms resulting in E.R. visits.
Why should we burden ourselves with... notions of the rest of the world? We're not the world's last remaining superpower for nothing....
You have answered your own question. We are the world's last remaining superpower for the hundreds of billions of dollars that we pour into wasteful defense programs while cutting education and health care.
California is the most distressed state in the country because its inane government spends too much and taxes its citizens (with highly progressive taxes
Per capita, the California deficit is above average but not as bad as many places. If you think California has progressive taxation then you haven't been paying attention.
I agree with your dislike of sales taxes, which are regressive.
I don't suppose you've even lifted a finger to communicate this sentiment to your grocer, who is free to buy from farm conglomerates who have sworn off illegal labor?
I'm not sure if it's productive to discuss this issue with someone who doesn't understand the relation between farm labor and skin cancer.
As a business makes more money (i.e., they grow and evolve), they are taxed more heavily, thus making it less rewarding to make more income.
That statement also shows a lack of understanding of progressive taxation, which encourages less monopolization. The redundancy provides fault-tolerance, making the economy more robust. Please take an economics class on taxation.
They're coming here for some reason, and not Sweden.
You think Sweden doesn't have a problem with immigration? At least they know how to put them to work without risking a collapse of emergency rooms.
So let me get this straight, you want the U.S. to tax less than every other industrialized nation? Is that because you see the current leadership as so stupid that we need to ratchet reverse brain-drain to the maximum levels and replace all our IT jobs with H1-B positions?
I didn't realize Illegal Immigrants were allowed to become members of a Union. They shouldn't be able to.
What, you don't mind skin-cancer prone laborers from the third world putting food on your table but when it comes to freedom of association, so much for the first amendment?
That $50 per year that the average U.S. consumer saves on produce must mean a lot to you.
Better to have a little money & no insurance than no money and no insurance.
Apologists for undocumented labor such as hesiod disgust me.
Undocumented immigrants and their children work because they are the victims of poverty. By working without the opportunity for health care and education, they perpetuate their poverty cycle.
I thought the crash came because people realized that the stocks they were holding were useless. So are you saying that Enron was honest and those dot coms were making real profits and some how Bush gaining Gore magically made them disappear
if Gore had won, there's no way he couldn've kept the bubble from bursting
At the risk of arguing over the unknowable, I respectfully disagree. The level of investment in tech stocks was the cause of their high prices, and plenty had gone bankrupt or were bought before 2000, with no effect on the sustained levels of investment. Although, you are right about Enron. There is nothing anyone could have done to save Enron. Those Texan energy firms are shady.
Progressive taxes are a drag on small business and productivity.
Wrong. The same amount of tax on a progressive scale helps small businesses compared to the same amount of tax on a more regressive scale. Moreover, progressive taxation helps improve productivity, consumer confidence, and consumer spending by puting more money in the pockets of working people. It seems that dlm3, like many U.S. citizens, has no idea what the word "progressive" means. Hint: it does not mean "increasing" unless you have one of the the largest incomes.
In the US, we can't keep 'em out - they'll even cross miles of desert, risking their lives to get here. We must have something people want, don't you think?
Yes, we have illegal farm labor, a situation under which about five million undocumented Californian men, women, and children, are smuggled in to work without health insurance with the tacit complicity of their agribusiness employers, along with many millions more like them nationwide.
Income taxes are no better. They confiscate earnings without being as noticeable by the taxpayer....
Surely you jest. Name one taxpayer who doesn't know how much income tax they paid.
the only answer is to reduce taxes and cut spending
California is not the most liberal left-wing state in the nation except perhaps on a few specific issues. California has adopted a regressive sales tax regime, has outlawed gay marriage, has a smaller tax margin than at least two New England states, and was controlled by a Republican governor, Pete Wilson, for most of the 1990s.
Sweden has twice the taxes of the U.S. as a fraction of GDP, but they are far better when it comes to sustaining human life. Swedish companies like Ericson, Ikea, and Volvo are above average in their peer groups, so don't believe anyone who tells you that progressive taxes are bad for business.
When Davis came into office we had the biggest surplus in all of Californian history. At the end of his first term we now have the biggest deficit in our history. Were did all that money go?
Perhaps you remember back in the summer of 2000, when Bush began to approach Gore in national polls, how the stock markets reacted? Working families (80+% of the population) quickly lost around a trillion dollars in retirement and college tuition savings, as insurance companies and institutions lost investment portfolio wealth. Who do you think those losses were passed on to?
9/11 was not even barely the cause. The crash was in the Summer of 2000, when Bush spent enough on ads to poll even with Gore.
Now, three years later, we have the biggest deficit in history, and that's before factoring in the added cost of all the military pensions and healthcare that weren't facing us before the hawks decided that stopping with Afganistan wasn't enough. Every other wartime we've had a tax increase, but Bush seems content to pass the buck to the kids. Of course, if we did get a tax increase it would probably be regressive. But we're not getting a tax increase, we're getting bigger deficits, with the burden squarely on the backs of the working families. Come a year from November, I hope they notice.
Slashdot Mirror
The term is Greatest Common Denominator, but the merit of the metaphor stands.
No, it can not. Write a program which will loop until any key is pressed. When will it halt? No program can determine the answer in advance.
The grandparent post has a good point about the technical impossibility of always correctly decompiling a computed branch address. However, in practice, those don't appear. I know of only one compiler that ever did anything like that. These days, if you have a switch statement with cases of enough chars to make it worth the construct, dispatch tables are used instead.
It's local if you're headed in that direction. Alpha Centari, Barnard's, and Wolf 359 are all on the same side.
Also, for gravity assist, it's not the size of the mass that matters so much as its relative motion.
Solstation has a nice 3-D star map Java applet.
Even if it doesn't have liquid water, gasious oxygen, or solid land, then it can still focus as the fulcrum of our local jump point.
Potassium is a common dietary supplement in areas where people have to do hard physical labor under the heat of the sun, and potassium sources such as bananas are difficult to come by.
Calcium and Magnesium are more complicated, but much more important.
Eliminating the penny just makes sense.
Do you know the code to program in the remote to keep all those failure-to-use-turn-signals that I never pull over ending up on the duty sergant's blooper reel the next day?
News articles, especially those about government, are always subject to fair use exemptions. Have people forgotten that?
I want to preface this with my views that typical future poling stations will be comprised of a touch screen with a printer, and an optical scan machine, which can scan the ballots produced by the printer. That way, the people who can't mark the ballot can use touch screen, and everyone else can do what Cambridge, Mass. does with Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) and also be able to use the mail.
May 15, 2003
To Register Doubts, Press Here
By SAM LUBELL
FTER the 2000 presidential election, with its disputes over the balloting in Florida and its hanging chad, the federal government moved swiftly to revamp the country's largely paper-based and mechanical voting systems. More than $1 billion has been appropriated for buying electronic voting systems, including optical scanners and touch-screen machines, that eliminate ballots written or punched on paper or tallied by mechanical equipment.
The new systems have already brought what proponents of electronic voting say is a new reliability and efficiency to the process.
"There's no guesswork as far as who you voted for," said Mark Radke, director of voting industry for Diebold Election Systems, which makes the AccuVote-TS, a $3,000 touch-screen machine. Mr. Radke said the unit, which presents voters with choices on an electronic monitor, quickened the voting and counting process and reduced the number of "undervotes," ballots that are not counted because they are unreadable or otherwise defective.
But not everyone likes the switch to electronic balloting. Some of the loudest opposition, in fact, is coming from computer experts who say the new technology could prove more troublesome than its predecessors. They warn of equipment malfunction, unchecked tampering and the lack of secure proof for each vote.
A group of more than 100 technologists, led by David Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford University, has called for tighter security measures on electronic voting apparatus and a "voter-verifiable audit trail," meaning a permanent record of each vote that can be checked for accuracy even after the election. (The group's "resolution on electronic voting" is at verify.stanford.edu/evote.html.)
Without such a trail, Dr. Dill warned, if a machine is tampered with or malfunctions, "then the votes in question are corrupted and you have no option but to hold another election or accept bad results." Thus the only reliable backup, the group contends, is for the machines to print out paper ballots after each vote, which can be hand-counted if necessary.
Dr. Dill and his counterparts, who in- clude computer science experts in academia and Silicon Valley, also assert that unlike more mechanical machines, electronic systems cannot be opened up to the public for verification. And the only people who know what is encoded on them are computer experts. "I think it's unreasonable for the public to be asked to accept the security of these machines on blind faith," he said. "There's no question the technology is open to tampering."
Members of the group also assert that electronic voting machines have experienced breakdowns in some elections. "We're concerned," said Rebecca Mercuri, formerly a professor of computer science at Bryn Mawr and now the president of Notable Software, a consulting firm. "These machines are showing huge defects."
For their part, election officials and voting machine vendors dispute any notion that the systems have major problems, and caution that the public should not overreact.
Penelope Bonsall, director of the Federal Election Commission's Office of Election Administration, which helps set guidelines for the voting process, said that the possibility of vote tampering has always exi
Point well taken. Who do you think would get the 2nd highest bid if UNIX(tm) went to the auction block? Sun? HP?
Maybe Microsoft, now a dividend stock, would bid to re-brand Interix. I'll bet Gates never gave up the dream that had been Xenix, but I bet he'd be too stingy to bid for the historical mark.
Yes, there is some but only to support an old executable format that few people use anymore. As a proportion of the IP involved in a typical distro, it's tiny, and the percentage of linux users who could be construed as activly infringing is probably less than 1%.
If SCO wants to win this, they are going to have to show malice or intent to defraud, too, which is not very likely. However, they do have a pretty good chance of maybe getting a few million from IBM if they can reasonably support an economic loss.
I predict settlement in five to seven months, $5 million from IBM, and maybe a $2 million follow-up suit against the likes of RedHat which will turn out to be much more difficult, bankrupting SCO, putting the UNIX trademark under control of a Chapter 11 court review, where it will probably be auctioned. The winning bidder will be IBM, barely outbidding RedHat.
Friedman is a paid apologist for the oligarch lobby. dlm3 obviously listens to what he says about Keynes but not what he writes about Keynes's theses. If you are already comfortable with Friedman's style, and you want to get closer to reality, I recommend Galbraith.
That is not what I said. Countries that provide universal medical care have lower overall health care costs than those countries where otherwise treatable maladies don't receive treatment until they exhibit acute traumatic symptoms resulting in E.R. visits.
You have answered your own question. We are the world's last remaining superpower for the hundreds of billions of dollars that we pour into wasteful defense programs while cutting education and health care.
Per capita, the California deficit is above average but not as bad as many places. If you think California has progressive taxation then you haven't been paying attention.
I agree with your dislike of sales taxes, which are regressive.
I don't suppose you've even lifted a finger to communicate this sentiment to your grocer, who is free to buy from farm conglomerates who have sworn off illegal labor?
I'm not sure if it's productive to discuss this issue with someone who doesn't understand the relation between farm labor and skin cancer.
That statement also shows a lack of understanding of progressive taxation, which encourages less monopolization. The redundancy provides fault-tolerance, making the economy more robust. Please take an economics class on taxation.
You think Sweden doesn't have a problem with immigration? At least they know how to put them to work without risking a collapse of emergency rooms.
So let me get this straight, you want the U.S. to tax less than every other industrialized nation? Is that because you see the current leadership as so stupid that we need to ratchet reverse brain-drain to the maximum levels and replace all our IT jobs with H1-B positions?
Yes, but can you Lojack the Democrats?
What, you don't mind skin-cancer prone laborers from the third world putting food on your table but when it comes to freedom of association, so much for the first amendment?
That $50 per year that the average U.S. consumer saves on produce must mean a lot to you.
Then you haven't been listening to them.
Apologists for undocumented labor such as hesiod disgust me. Undocumented immigrants and their children work because they are the victims of poverty. By working without the opportunity for health care and education, they perpetuate their poverty cycle.
If by "debunked," you mean "opposed by rhetoric without regard for the truth."
Nice try, but the cusp actually spans most of the election season. 2000's crash wasn't a one-day thing like 1987's.
No, the tech stock collapse started in mid-2000, when people realized that the level of tech investment the Clinton-Gore administration had been systaining was likely going to be refocused away from IT. The Enron collapse came about a year later.
At the risk of arguing over the unknowable, I respectfully disagree. The level of investment in tech stocks was the cause of their high prices, and plenty had gone bankrupt or were bought before 2000, with no effect on the sustained levels of investment. Although, you are right about Enron. There is nothing anyone could have done to save Enron. Those Texan energy firms are shady.
On the contrary, the sustained altitude record is already held by a craft which has recently been fitted with a fuel-cell based energy storage system in preparation for this Summer's overhight 50,000 ft. flight.
If I were a betting man, my money would be on wind power and fuel cell storage systems.
Wrong. The same amount of tax on a progressive scale helps small businesses compared to the same amount of tax on a more regressive scale. Moreover, progressive taxation helps improve productivity, consumer confidence, and consumer spending by puting more money in the pockets of working people. It seems that dlm3, like many U.S. citizens, has no idea what the word "progressive" means. Hint: it does not mean "increasing" unless you have one of the the largest incomes.
Yes, we have illegal farm labor, a situation under which about five million undocumented Californian men, women, and children, are smuggled in to work without health insurance with the tacit complicity of their agribusiness employers, along with many millions more like them nationwide.
Surely you jest. Name one taxpayer who doesn't know how much income tax they paid.
Are you kidding? Do you want the U.S. to be more like Mexico?
California is not the most liberal left-wing state in the nation except perhaps on a few specific issues. California has adopted a regressive sales tax regime, has outlawed gay marriage, has a smaller tax margin than at least two New England states, and was controlled by a Republican governor, Pete Wilson, for most of the 1990s.
If by "well" you mean "without regard to the truth" -- for proof please see [Google cache of] www.fair.org/media-outlets/limbaugh.html
FAIR.org seems to be down today.
Answer: The progressive taxes. In other words, don't do what California did in the 1990s.
Sweden has twice the taxes of the U.S. as a fraction of GDP, but they are far better when it comes to sustaining human life. Swedish companies like Ericson, Ikea, and Volvo are above average in their peer groups, so don't believe anyone who tells you that progressive taxes are bad for business.
Perhaps you remember back in the summer of 2000, when Bush began to approach Gore in national polls, how the stock markets reacted? Working families (80+% of the population) quickly lost around a trillion dollars in retirement and college tuition savings, as insurance companies and institutions lost investment portfolio wealth. Who do you think those losses were passed on to?
9/11 was not even barely the cause. The crash was in the Summer of 2000, when Bush spent enough on ads to poll even with Gore.
Now, three years later, we have the biggest deficit in history, and that's before factoring in the added cost of all the military pensions and healthcare that weren't facing us before the hawks decided that stopping with Afganistan wasn't enough. Every other wartime we've had a tax increase, but Bush seems content to pass the buck to the kids. Of course, if we did get a tax increase it would probably be regressive. But we're not getting a tax increase, we're getting bigger deficits, with the burden squarely on the backs of the working families. Come a year from November, I hope they notice.