Your post has been pretty well addressed already, but what the heck. No, I wouldn't certify those things. Car companies don't certify that a car will get any mileage without fail, let alone 100K, with or without tampering. They offer a warranty, which would be akin to Diebold saying, "we promise the machines are accurate, and if it turns out they're not we'll... " I don't even know what to put in there. If your car breaks under warranty, the dealer fixes it. If an election gets broken, what is to be done? As for the servers, same deal. AFAIK hardware makers (and certainly software makers) don't make any certification about whether the machine will work or for how long, they will only promise to fix it if it breaks (under warranty).
We don't expect manufacturers to guarantee their hardware won't break, we only expect them to fix it if it breaks when new. The problem with voting machines is the consequences of broken equipment (whether broken through chance, incompetence, malice, or other). The consequences cannot easily be put right by the manufacturer as they can with something like a car. So we need a way to be very sure (there's never 100%, but very sure) that the machines are OK, and Diebold hasn't offered, and I would think never will offer, any such means.
But the firmware moves data around to compensate for that. Write leveling, I think it's called. I really don't know how its durability compares to hard disk or optical, but don't discount it just because of fatigue. Besides, if you're talking about long term storage, then write fatigue wouldn't even be an issue. For write once, maybe flash would be even more reliable than optical. More reliable than tape even? I have no idea. And if you're not talking about long term storage, then chances are you'll get a new bigger flash drive before failures start impacting your data anyway. The firmware can also detect problems and mark bits as unusable IIRC. The problem with flash storage is not its durability, but its price.
I don't know about hologrammatic storage specifically, but it would seem to be the opposite. If you break apart a hologram, each piece will have the whole image. So maybe if one bit fails, you don't lose any data at all.
Researchers at Carnegie-Mellon disagree. The research was funded in part by airlines, which have a financial interest in banning cell phone calls, but will be (was?) published in IEEE Spectrum, which is well respected and I think peer reviewed. Draw your own conclusions.
I, on the other hand, get almost no spam. So if I lost even one desired email message in exchange for removing all my spam, I would not be a happy camper. Everybody has different priorities.:-)
Can someone explain to me what an electrical field is? I know about magnetic fields, I know about electric current (and its relationship to magnetic fields), I know about static charge. But what the devil is an electrical field, if such a thing exists?
There are some problems with this argument. First, you say that because it already costs 2.5 cents per message, then any tax would have to be higher than that to reduce spam. This may not be true. Let's say you add a half cent per message, so now it's 3 cents per. Now the spam campaign costs 20% more, so to remain profitable at the same level, it has to return 20% more revenue. How to do that? I don't know, but some possibilities would be to make more effort to send to people who might respond, thus reducing the amount of spam. The second problem is with the other media. You're pretending (or assuming) that the rate of return on those media is the same as it is with spam, but with much higher costs. Clearly this is not true - if radio, print, and TV ads were no more effective than spam, nobody would pay nearly what they do for them, or they would be going out of business.
The problem isn't that consumers don't have perfect access to all information, but that in this case consumers don't have any access at all to some highly relevant information. Surely you can agree that that presents a problem that the market would at best have difficulty solving.
First, it doesn't cost the junk mailers 39 cents. By sending in bulk, and presorting the mail so the post office doesn't have to do it, they get lower rates. I don't know how much lower, but I'm guessing a lot lower. Second, it's about rate of return. Spam is essentially free to send today, so if the spammer can get one $100 sale for 10 million messages, that's a good deal for them. Make it so each message costs a tenth of a penny, and that ten million messages now costs them ten thousand dollars (if I did my arithetic right). Now they stop sending messages, because they can't even approach ten thousand dollars return by sending ten million messages. The problem is that so far there is really no practical way to make senders pay per email.
So I have to come up with a million bucks before I can start sending email? That would certainly solve the spam problem, because nobody would use email anymore.
The point is that even with air superiority in WWII it took hundreds and hundreds of bombs to destroy a target that, with modern weapons, can be taken out with a single sortie by a single plane. In one case the air force (army of course at the time) flew many many bomber sorties trying to hit a Japanese power plant, and by the end of the war they still hadn't taken it out. Getting to the target and dropping the bombs was not the problem, they just hadn't hit it yet. I couldn't find the reference to that specific incident, though. Anyway, this point would be true even if the target were just a big X in the Nevada desert - the enemy's capability doesn't really matter.
"If a cd with an Xvid has more quality and equal features to a DVD (even menu's thanks to new Divx releases) then why did we upgrade in the first place? I have no idea and I doubt most/.ers do either."
Does Target carry Xvid CDs? Does Netflix? Blockbuster? WalMart? Anybody? Most people want to go to a store and buy (or rent) a movie, or order it over the internet. They don't want to download it (and you know the MPAA is going to sue you if you do) and then burn it onto a CD.
Now if I've got this all wrong and all those people really do carry Xvid, then please set me straight.
I think you should probably choose contemporary events for your comparisons. For example, a resident of NYC on 9/11, or a resident of Baghdad in 2003. I would still pick the former.
I think the problem is the people they're killing are civilians. If terrorists were only capable of fighting our military, that would be one thing. The public is much less willing to accept regular civilian casualties from terrorism. I'm not sure exactly what you're going for here, but the message seems to be "it's OK, they aren't killing very many of us." I think most people (at least in the US) would not agree that that is OK.
"One aircraft dropping two precision-guided bombs sufficed to destroy a power-generation station's transformer yards. During the Second World War, in contrast, the Eighth Air Force found it took two full combat wings, a force of 108 B-17 bombers (flying in six combat boxes of 18 aircraft each), dropping a total of 648 bombs (six 1,100-pound bombs per aircraft) to guarantee a 96-percent chance of getting just two hits (the minimum necessary to disable a power-generating plant measuring 400 by 500 feet). Thus, by the time of the Gulf War, a single strike airplane carrying two smart bombs could function as effectively as 108 World War II B-17 bombers carrying 648 bombs and crewed by 1,080 airmen. Further, using the number of bomber sorties in the Second World War required to disable just two power stations, the coalition disabled the transformer capacity of every targeted power-generation facility in Iraq."
"I get the Vista betas through MSDN, and honestly, I just cannot see how they couldn't have achieved where they got to now by evolving from Windows XP SP 2 and 2003 in a far shorter timescale and then building other products and components on top of it when it got finalised."
I could be wrong about this, but it seems like they decided ahead of time to base the OS on.NET. Then when that failed, it was far too late from a marketing perspective to switch back to an old OS that's just updated. MS can't afford to switch from "totally new from the ground up!" to "minor revision of a five-year-old OS!" but they can afford to switch to "totally new from the ground up and not based on.NET!" even if it does hurt.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post has been pretty well addressed already, but what the heck. No, I wouldn't certify those things. Car companies don't certify that a car will get any mileage without fail, let alone 100K, with or without tampering. They offer a warranty, which would be akin to Diebold saying, "we promise the machines are accurate, and if it turns out they're not we'll... " I don't even know what to put in there. If your car breaks under warranty, the dealer fixes it. If an election gets broken, what is to be done? As for the servers, same deal. AFAIK hardware makers (and certainly software makers) don't make any certification about whether the machine will work or for how long, they will only promise to fix it if it breaks (under warranty). We don't expect manufacturers to guarantee their hardware won't break, we only expect them to fix it if it breaks when new. The problem with voting machines is the consequences of broken equipment (whether broken through chance, incompetence, malice, or other). The consequences cannot easily be put right by the manufacturer as they can with something like a car. So we need a way to be very sure (there's never 100%, but very sure) that the machines are OK, and Diebold hasn't offered, and I would think never will offer, any such means.
But the firmware moves data around to compensate for that. Write leveling, I think it's called. I really don't know how its durability compares to hard disk or optical, but don't discount it just because of fatigue. Besides, if you're talking about long term storage, then write fatigue wouldn't even be an issue. For write once, maybe flash would be even more reliable than optical. More reliable than tape even? I have no idea. And if you're not talking about long term storage, then chances are you'll get a new bigger flash drive before failures start impacting your data anyway. The firmware can also detect problems and mark bits as unusable IIRC. The problem with flash storage is not its durability, but its price.
I don't know about hologrammatic storage specifically, but it would seem to be the opposite. If you break apart a hologram, each piece will have the whole image. So maybe if one bit fails, you don't lose any data at all.
Researchers at Carnegie-Mellon disagree. The research was funded in part by airlines, which have a financial interest in banning cell phone calls, but will be (was?) published in IEEE Spectrum, which is well respected and I think peer reviewed. Draw your own conclusions.
I, on the other hand, get almost no spam. So if I lost even one desired email message in exchange for removing all my spam, I would not be a happy camper. Everybody has different priorities. :-)
"if he's not spoken to his friend yet, he can't have been given any subconcious cues."
Well, that's certainly not true. There's plenty of nonverbal communication that can happen.
Can someone explain to me what an electrical field is? I know about magnetic fields, I know about electric current (and its relationship to magnetic fields), I know about static charge. But what the devil is an electrical field, if such a thing exists?
There are some problems with this argument. First, you say that because it already costs 2.5 cents per message, then any tax would have to be higher than that to reduce spam. This may not be true. Let's say you add a half cent per message, so now it's 3 cents per. Now the spam campaign costs 20% more, so to remain profitable at the same level, it has to return 20% more revenue. How to do that? I don't know, but some possibilities would be to make more effort to send to people who might respond, thus reducing the amount of spam. The second problem is with the other media. You're pretending (or assuming) that the rate of return on those media is the same as it is with spam, but with much higher costs. Clearly this is not true - if radio, print, and TV ads were no more effective than spam, nobody would pay nearly what they do for them, or they would be going out of business.
The problem isn't that consumers don't have perfect access to all information, but that in this case consumers don't have any access at all to some highly relevant information. Surely you can agree that that presents a problem that the market would at best have difficulty solving.
First, it doesn't cost the junk mailers 39 cents. By sending in bulk, and presorting the mail so the post office doesn't have to do it, they get lower rates. I don't know how much lower, but I'm guessing a lot lower. Second, it's about rate of return. Spam is essentially free to send today, so if the spammer can get one $100 sale for 10 million messages, that's a good deal for them. Make it so each message costs a tenth of a penny, and that ten million messages now costs them ten thousand dollars (if I did my arithetic right). Now they stop sending messages, because they can't even approach ten thousand dollars return by sending ten million messages. The problem is that so far there is really no practical way to make senders pay per email.
So I have to come up with a million bucks before I can start sending email? That would certainly solve the spam problem, because nobody would use email anymore.
Someone went overboard with the thesaurus. For those without one, it means insecure or insecurity."
No, that's not what it means.
The point is that even with air superiority in WWII it took hundreds and hundreds of bombs to destroy a target that, with modern weapons, can be taken out with a single sortie by a single plane. In one case the air force (army of course at the time) flew many many bomber sorties trying to hit a Japanese power plant, and by the end of the war they still hadn't taken it out. Getting to the target and dropping the bombs was not the problem, they just hadn't hit it yet. I couldn't find the reference to that specific incident, though. Anyway, this point would be true even if the target were just a big X in the Nevada desert - the enemy's capability doesn't really matter.
"we're not going to be invading anyone else for a long time."
;-)
I see you're an optimist.
"Since US TV tends to be completely clueless about the rest of the world,"
:-)
I don't think you need to add that rest of the world part.
Nice theory. Let us know how that goes.
"If a cd with an Xvid has more quality and equal features to a DVD (even menu's thanks to new Divx releases) then why did we upgrade in the first place? I have no idea and I doubt most /.ers do either."
Does Target carry Xvid CDs? Does Netflix? Blockbuster? WalMart? Anybody? Most people want to go to a store and buy (or rent) a movie, or order it over the internet. They don't want to download it (and you know the MPAA is going to sue you if you do) and then burn it onto a CD.
Now if I've got this all wrong and all those people really do carry Xvid, then please set me straight.
"I would bet my car stereo is better than 99.99% of those on the road :)"
Sounds like you guys are in agreement.
I think you should probably choose contemporary events for your comparisons. For example, a resident of NYC on 9/11, or a resident of Baghdad in 2003. I would still pick the former.
I think the problem is the people they're killing are civilians. If terrorists were only capable of fighting our military, that would be one thing. The public is much less willing to accept regular civilian casualties from terrorism. I'm not sure exactly what you're going for here, but the message seems to be "it's OK, they aren't killing very many of us." I think most people (at least in the US) would not agree that that is OK.
"One aircraft dropping two precision-guided bombs sufficed to destroy
p ort/1999/air-power-v2-5.pdf
a power-generation station's transformer yards. During the Second
World War, in contrast, the Eighth Air Force found it took two full
combat wings, a force of 108 B-17 bombers (flying in six combat
boxes of 18 aircraft each), dropping a total of 648 bombs (six
1,100-pound bombs per aircraft) to guarantee a 96-percent chance of
getting just two hits (the minimum necessary to disable a
power-generating plant measuring 400 by 500 feet). Thus, by the time
of the Gulf War, a single strike airplane carrying two smart bombs
could function as effectively as 108 World War II B-17 bombers
carrying 648 bombs and crewed by 1,080 airmen. Further, using the
number of bomber sorties in the Second World War required to
disable just two power stations, the coalition disabled the transformer
capacity of every targeted power-generation facility in Iraq."
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/re
Can you back up your claim that supercritical water has *no* friction? Or did you mean very little friction?
Oh, like this kind of lair?
"I get the Vista betas through MSDN, and honestly, I just cannot see how they couldn't have achieved where they got to now by evolving from Windows XP SP 2 and 2003 in a far shorter timescale and then building other products and components on top of it when it got finalised."
.NET. Then when that failed, it was far too late from a marketing perspective to switch back to an old OS that's just updated. MS can't afford to switch from "totally new from the ground up!" to "minor revision of a five-year-old OS!" but they can afford to switch to "totally new from the ground up and not based on .NET!" even if it does hurt.
I could be wrong about this, but it seems like they decided ahead of time to base the OS on
Ah yes, you're right. Nobody is running Unix anymore.