Except if you do that, your old keyboard doesn't have passthru USB, so you end up using 2 of the available 4 USB slots for your keyboard and mouse. And that's if you're lucky enough to have USB keyboard and mouse. A lot of PCs still come with PS/2 mice and keyboards. I realize they have adapters, but it still says a lot about the differences between the PC and Apple world.
But they have brought down their iPod line so that everyone could afford it. You can get an iPod for as cheap as $49. And even get a real iPod with the full interface that plays video and everything, for just $150. They haven't ruined their reputation by offering low end models. What they've actually done is make their high end models look all the more appealing. While still giving those with no desire to spend $350 on an MP3 player the ability to buy one of their products. I really believe they need to do the same with their computers.
Most people don't really do much with their computers anyway. Read a couple emails, browse a couple webpages. Write up a couple documents. Maybe some personal finance. Most people don't do HiDef video editing, or even run games. I know I don't. I'm perfectly happy with the speed of my $500 laptop running Mandriva (Vista is another story). Most people don't need, or even want a $1000 machine. It's the same reason the Shuffle and the Nano sell so much better than the 160 GB iPod or the iPod Touch. You would think that Apple would have learned from their iPod product line, that some people just want low cost devices that meet their very modest needs.
That's what I was trying to point out. My parent post said the voting population of the US was much higher than Canada, So I responded with the fact that it also means they have more people to count.
Is it really that cheap? Sure it's kind of cheap, but nowhere close to the $200 they originally stated. Also for not much more you can get a full sized laptop with much more power. The Asus EEE is nicely priced, but it's only good as a secondary laptop, and it's still nice to have a full sized laptop in most situations.
The problem is that you don't want voting to be traceable. You want it to specifically not be traceable. You shouldn't be able to tell who voted for who. After things are said and done with, I shouldn't even be able to prove who I voted for (so I can't prove it to someone else who was coercing me). What you need is a system that you can verify with a high degree of certainty, that once you cast your vote, that it will be counted properly, and that the same will happen for all other votes cast. The only way to do this is with physical pieces of paper. Because you can be sure that once you put it in the ballot box, that it doesn't leave (you can have people watching the box). And that once the box is opened for counting, that they are counted correctly. You can do this by having people observe the opening and counting process to ensure that things are done right. With electronic voting, votes can leave the ballot box without anybody noticing (deleting records), and votes can be added without anybody noticing (adding records).
I really don't understand the US need to have votes counted so quickly. You vote in November. The president gets sworn in in January. Lots of time for counting.
I don't understand how hanging chads ever became so much of a problem. If I was voting in a place that punched holes in pieces of paper, and my ballot didn't end up properly punched, I'd ask for a replacement, and do it again until it looked right. How did so many people turn in invalid looking ballots that it made such a problem in counting?
All for the low low price of only $1000 per voter. Seriously. Paper is cheap, and has served us well for many years. How much is too much for something that only does as good as paper. For the cost of electronic voting machines to be worth it, it has to be many times more reliable and accountable than paper. What is the true cost of purchasing, operating, and maintaining voting machines that we can guarantee are significantly better than paper. And even then, is going from 99.9% accuracy on the vote to 99.99% accuracy on the vote really worth spending billions of dollars on voting machines?
We count votes by hand here in Canada, and I haven't noticed any speed problems. It's so fast they created a law so that the results from the east coast couldn't be released until the polls on the west coast closed, because they thought releasing the results influence the west coast results. It shouldn't be hard to find enough volunteers to get the counting done within a couple of hours for each polling station. Maybe you have too many people going to each polling station. There's only 352 votes per polling station, so counting that many ballots shouldn't take too long.
You may be able to make a machine that it's possible to verify the votes for, but how do you make a machine that nobody could tamper with. You could probably replace the entire internals of most voting machines without anybody noticing.
Those are some good examples. Although they pale in comparison to some of the more prolific relics of the old world. Was it a question of technology, or is there another reason that there seems to be a lack of permanent monuments from ancient tribes of north America.
Well, you could always ship the information to another machine, and have them access it from there. You could easily do it so that it's only a couple minutes behind real time. If they really think they need the information that badly, they will pay for the cost of the extra machine. If the really can't wait for the CSV files to come in at night, then it must be pretty important for them to have the data right now, or it must be really difficult for them to manager their own copy based on the CSV files. Shipping it to another machine would allow them to do stupid queries without compromising the performance of the main system.
I find that used laptops sell for extremely high prices, and that anybody who buys one is an idiot. You can go to walmart and get the $500 weekly special, and it will blow most used laptops out of the water, and will usually cost less. And the battery will be new. Most used laptops have a battery that's halfway to death. People assume that it must be cheaper, because it's used, but if you compare prices, you can get a pretty good laptop for really cheap. I bought an Acer 3680 for $500. Installed Mandriva. And it works great.
s. Instead they set up the National Lottery to directly tax poor and stupid people with a remit to help good causes such as this one.
I don't get why people think that only stupid people play the lottery. I think of it as a form of extremely high risk investment. Sure, most people are going to lose money, especially over the long run. But if you win, the payouts are huge. It's not a good idea to invest every single dollar you have in trying to win the Lottery, because in the end, you'll still likely be left with nothing. However, putting $20 a month into the lottery, over a 20 year period, would only amount to $4800 invested, and even with a 10% rate of return would only end up being $14,000. However, if you win, you could end up with millions. If you're going for the sure thing, then not playing the lottery is the best choice. But for a relatively small investment, you could end up with a huge sum of money. No other form of investment even comes close to offering that kind of rate of return.
Well, England was unified as a country in the year 927, and had people on it long before that. Stonehenge was built in 2000 BC. It has quite a few historical sites to uphold, considering it's history. The US on the other hand doesn't have much history to protect. They only have what's been around in the last 300 years or so . Before that, it was mostly the Natives. And they didn't build anything that lasted through history. Actually it seems quite weird to me that the North American Native population didn't build anything that's still around today. All the other ancient cultures seemed to have built something (mayan temples, egyptian pyramids, great wall of china, Easter Island, etc.). Seems to me that that North American natives are the only ones who didn't create any big monumments. And maybe the Australian Natives. Please feel free to point out any monuments I may be missing.
Well, could you encode a link properly and post it on slashdot? Would it get through the filters? I imagine quite a few people are trying the "print table of links" feature on this very page, simply because nobody has ever used it.
And for IE the defaults allow special permissions to your entire intranet. By default all the permissions should be low. There's no reason to grant higher permissions to the entire intranet. If you need something like that set up at your organization, you should have to enable it per server, or per domain.
How important is it though really? I mean, we're all a bunch of geeks, and we've all read Cryptonomicon, so we all know what Bletchley Park is. But do you think most people know or even care about it? I say, take the artifacts that are salvagable, and put them in some other museum. Canada has a Museum of War, I'm sure the UK has something similar. Putting them there, or somewhere with more traffic, would probably allow many more people to find out about the role played by cryptographers in the war. A lot more so than trying to save something that so few people visit that they can't afford to keep it open.
Why would you want special permissions on stuff in your intranet? Couldn't any disgruntled employee set up a webserver on their computer, send out a mass email, telling people to visit the url. and infect a large portion of the computers in the office? If you want special permissions for intranet servers, install your own CA, and let the browser run stuff only signed by that CA.
Even if you did know about the feature, I'm not sure of it's usefulness. Saveing a spreadsheet of links might be useful, but printing them out? Most URLSs are pretty hard to type back in, and wouldn't be all that useful on paper. Look at the url I'm no right now.
Why you would want that printed out on a piece of paper is beyond me. It might possibly somewhat work on a PDF printer, but even then, it's use is limited.
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I have a USB2 keyboard, which runs at a full 420 Mb/s. Unfortunately, all that speed, and it still can't register 20 keypresses at once.
Except if you do that, your old keyboard doesn't have passthru USB, so you end up using 2 of the available 4 USB slots for your keyboard and mouse. And that's if you're lucky enough to have USB keyboard and mouse. A lot of PCs still come with PS/2 mice and keyboards. I realize they have adapters, but it still says a lot about the differences between the PC and Apple world.
But they have brought down their iPod line so that everyone could afford it. You can get an iPod for as cheap as $49. And even get a real iPod with the full interface that plays video and everything, for just $150. They haven't ruined their reputation by offering low end models. What they've actually done is make their high end models look all the more appealing. While still giving those with no desire to spend $350 on an MP3 player the ability to buy one of their products. I really believe they need to do the same with their computers.
Most people don't really do much with their computers anyway. Read a couple emails, browse a couple webpages. Write up a couple documents. Maybe some personal finance. Most people don't do HiDef video editing, or even run games. I know I don't. I'm perfectly happy with the speed of my $500 laptop running Mandriva (Vista is another story). Most people don't need, or even want a $1000 machine. It's the same reason the Shuffle and the Nano sell so much better than the 160 GB iPod or the iPod Touch. You would think that Apple would have learned from their iPod product line, that some people just want low cost devices that meet their very modest needs.
That's what I was trying to point out. My parent post said the voting population of the US was much higher than Canada, So I responded with the fact that it also means they have more people to count.
Is it really that cheap? Sure it's kind of cheap, but nowhere close to the $200 they originally stated. Also for not much more you can get a full sized laptop with much more power. The Asus EEE is nicely priced, but it's only good as a secondary laptop, and it's still nice to have a full sized laptop in most situations.
The problem is that you don't want voting to be traceable. You want it to specifically not be traceable. You shouldn't be able to tell who voted for who. After things are said and done with, I shouldn't even be able to prove who I voted for (so I can't prove it to someone else who was coercing me). What you need is a system that you can verify with a high degree of certainty, that once you cast your vote, that it will be counted properly, and that the same will happen for all other votes cast. The only way to do this is with physical pieces of paper. Because you can be sure that once you put it in the ballot box, that it doesn't leave (you can have people watching the box). And that once the box is opened for counting, that they are counted correctly. You can do this by having people observe the opening and counting process to ensure that things are done right. With electronic voting, votes can leave the ballot box without anybody noticing (deleting records), and votes can be added without anybody noticing (adding records).
The counting population of Canada is a fraction of the counting population of the USA.
Is it the Chad?
I really don't understand the US need to have votes counted so quickly. You vote in November. The president gets sworn in in January. Lots of time for counting.
I don't understand how hanging chads ever became so much of a problem. If I was voting in a place that punched holes in pieces of paper, and my ballot didn't end up properly punched, I'd ask for a replacement, and do it again until it looked right. How did so many people turn in invalid looking ballots that it made such a problem in counting?
All for the low low price of only $1000 per voter. Seriously. Paper is cheap, and has served us well for many years. How much is too much for something that only does as good as paper. For the cost of electronic voting machines to be worth it, it has to be many times more reliable and accountable than paper. What is the true cost of purchasing, operating, and maintaining voting machines that we can guarantee are significantly better than paper. And even then, is going from 99.9% accuracy on the vote to 99.99% accuracy on the vote really worth spending billions of dollars on voting machines?
We count votes by hand here in Canada, and I haven't noticed any speed problems. It's so fast they created a law so that the results from the east coast couldn't be released until the polls on the west coast closed, because they thought releasing the results influence the west coast results. It shouldn't be hard to find enough volunteers to get the counting done within a couple of hours for each polling station. Maybe you have too many people going to each polling station. There's only 352 votes per polling station, so counting that many ballots shouldn't take too long.
You may be able to make a machine that it's possible to verify the votes for, but how do you make a machine that nobody could tamper with. You could probably replace the entire internals of most voting machines without anybody noticing.
Those are some good examples. Although they pale in comparison to some of the more prolific relics of the old world. Was it a question of technology, or is there another reason that there seems to be a lack of permanent monuments from ancient tribes of north America.
Well, you could always ship the information to another machine, and have them access it from there. You could easily do it so that it's only a couple minutes behind real time. If they really think they need the information that badly, they will pay for the cost of the extra machine. If the really can't wait for the CSV files to come in at night, then it must be pretty important for them to have the data right now, or it must be really difficult for them to manager their own copy based on the CSV files. Shipping it to another machine would allow them to do stupid queries without compromising the performance of the main system.
I find that used laptops sell for extremely high prices, and that anybody who buys one is an idiot. You can go to walmart and get the $500 weekly special, and it will blow most used laptops out of the water, and will usually cost less. And the battery will be new. Most used laptops have a battery that's halfway to death. People assume that it must be cheaper, because it's used, but if you compare prices, you can get a pretty good laptop for really cheap. I bought an Acer 3680 for $500. Installed Mandriva. And it works great.
Yeah, but these old computers get pretty low cpu cycles per watt. I remember running Folding on my old P2, and it would take days to finish a job.
Well, England was unified as a country in the year 927, and had people on it long before that. Stonehenge was built in 2000 BC. It has quite a few historical sites to uphold, considering it's history. The US on the other hand doesn't have much history to protect. They only have what's been around in the last 300 years or so . Before that, it was mostly the Natives. And they didn't build anything that lasted through history. Actually it seems quite weird to me that the North American Native population didn't build anything that's still around today. All the other ancient cultures seemed to have built something (mayan temples, egyptian pyramids, great wall of china, Easter Island, etc.). Seems to me that that North American natives are the only ones who didn't create any big monumments. And maybe the Australian Natives. Please feel free to point out any monuments I may be missing.
Well, could you encode a link properly and post it on slashdot? Would it get through the filters? I imagine quite a few people are trying the "print table of links" feature on this very page, simply because nobody has ever used it.
And for IE the defaults allow special permissions to your entire intranet. By default all the permissions should be low. There's no reason to grant higher permissions to the entire intranet. If you need something like that set up at your organization, you should have to enable it per server, or per domain.
How important is it though really? I mean, we're all a bunch of geeks, and we've all read Cryptonomicon, so we all know what Bletchley Park is. But do you think most people know or even care about it? I say, take the artifacts that are salvagable, and put them in some other museum. Canada has a Museum of War, I'm sure the UK has something similar. Putting them there, or somewhere with more traffic, would probably allow many more people to find out about the role played by cryptographers in the war. A lot more so than trying to save something that so few people visit that they can't afford to keep it open.
Why would you want special permissions on stuff in your intranet? Couldn't any disgruntled employee set up a webserver on their computer, send out a mass email, telling people to visit the url. and infect a large portion of the computers in the office? If you want special permissions for intranet servers, install your own CA, and let the browser run stuff only signed by that CA.
Even if you did know about the feature, I'm not sure of it's usefulness. Saveing a spreadsheet of links might be useful, but printing them out? Most URLSs are pretty hard to type back in, and wouldn't be all that useful on paper. Look at the url I'm no right now.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=555236&op=Reply&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&pid=23432544
Why you would want that printed out on a piece of paper is beyond me. It might possibly somewhat work on a PDF printer, but even then, it's use is limited.