Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory - two magnetic plates separated by an insulator. One plate has is a permanent magnet, the other holds the temporary charge.
It's not good enough to allow this sort of thing to happen (especially when a Court overturn an election result) and people should demand clean and fair elections. Would you want to see the [insert hated political party here] win just because some guy couldn't be bothered filing some paperwork?
Goddammit. I can't believe I'm defending an e-voting company. I'm in absolute agreement that new and relevant revisions should be re-certified, but I believe that the penalties in this particular case are harsh. I would make the same argument if Dick Cheney was sentenced to six months in jail for jaywalking, spitting on the sidewalk, or flipping off a school crossing guard as he spit on the sidewalk while jaywalking.
All I can really hope for in this case is that the e-voting company proves their case that the machines are in every relevant way equivalent or better than the earlier revision. And in that case, if the machines are at least equivalent, then IMNSHO a just outcome would be for the e-voting company's liability be equal to all of California's legal costs in the case.
Yes, companies should be liable for fucking up. Intentionally or not. But if it's reasonable to believe that the FU was unintentional, and if in the end the FU was of no consequence, then I can;t see how any corporate entity should be liable for more than the state's costs of the investigation / court case.
I could understand Cal's concern if different IC's were used, or if code was re-flashed. But if the two machines had the same circuit diagram, same components, and code, this penalty seems zealous. I live in California, and it's painful to see bureaucratic zealots nominally on my side, but being far from reasonable. This particular error on the part of the voting machine company appears to be on the level of a failure to file necessary paperwork.
The contract didn't say "penalties only if re-flashed", instead it mentions any modifications needs to eb examined and approved. If you signed that contract you must be an idiot to do this substitution. You have to be strict or else you have more "diebolds". Any and all changes must be examined. All penalties assessed would be based on contract law. Paperwork is how a legalist society is run. It's not like jumping through hoops is new to government contractors.
You play the 'D' card. And having an e-voting executive promise to deliver an election to a particular candidate offends me to no end. However the machines in question, machines for the deaf that print out a ballot to be scanned, do not offend me. Diebold's machines, as do most other e-voting systems do. Still, the DA seems overzealous.
A relevant quote from the article: One condition of that certification, according to her office, was that no "substitution or modification of the voting systems shall be made with respect to any component of the voting systems...
So it appears that what it might come down to is the definition of 'component'. Taken too loosely, a change in the Pantone color of the plastic of a button would clear the hurdle. Taken appropriately, well, 'appropriately' will be something for the courts to decide. It might all come down to something like a quote from a hero of mine: "It depends on what the definition of 'is' is."
I could understand Cal's concern if different IC's were used, or if code was re-flashed. But if the two machines had the same circuit diagram, same components, and code, this penalty seems zealous. I live in California, and it's painful to see bureaucratic zealots nominally on my side, but being far from reasonable. This particular error on the part of the voting machine company appears to be on the level of a failure to file necessary paperwork.
I've been keeping time with my sundial and temple-top observatory the way Ra intended! Damn you kids and your new-fangled timekeeping. ... and by the way, GET OFF MY SAND!!!
mon. I think your favorite non-suspicious option today would be getting a digicam with a raw option, then use the least significant color bit. It's near noise anyway since very few cameras can actually detect 10/12 bits/channel, there's no reference to go by and it's perfectly reasonable to share photos that way.
And use pics taken indoors with a low iso / long exposure setting. The noise inherent in the CMOS or CCD will probably give 4 out of 10 bits of close to uniformly random noise (or whatever biased, but consistent noise the sensor outputs).
Use (embed) each pic only once, then destroy the original so there does not exist a pic that can be used to run a diff.
A 12MP camera can dump a 48MB RAW file. For smaller files, use a crappy mobile phone camera. In any light setting.
Not a chance. Way too subtle, and thinking too many steps ahead to be a creation of the clumsy, heavy hands of the RIAA.
Not that they would be above wasting the resources of innocent third parties via illegal pump and dump emails to try to hamper the efforts of copyright infringers, it's just a bit too clever to be their invention.
More interesting to me than irregular verbs is my son's usage of opposites. He wants me to "plug out" the vacuum cleaner, "buckle out" of his car seat, and-- my favorite-- "shut up" the computer (the opposite, of course, of "shut down").
One can also expand their English vocabulary by working with Indians. Took me a while to figure out WTF 'prepone' meant. As in (say with your best Apu imitation), "We need to prepone the meeting an hour or so." Prepone being the opposite of postpone.
For the opportunists amongst you, this does present an arbitrage opportunity to buy books abroad and resell them in US, though it is my understanding that companies like Amazon and EBAY have provisions against resale of such books.
I have an American friend living in Bangkok, Thailand who does this to pay the rent. Comes out to about $15 an hour, but can be a pain in the ass logistically. We were flatmates for a while, and tens of cases of Brealy and Myers finance books would often fill the hallways. IIRC: US version retail: $160. 'International' version at a Bangkok university's bookstore: $22.
He and his girlfriend used to sneak around the bookstore, afraid that the people working there would boot them. After a while the bookstore folks caught on and said, "Why waste your time coming here - we can have the distributor ship them directly to your apartment."
Sure, having everything spelled correctly and in long form is great for books for pleasure (art) but do we really need it for basic information sharing? Especially if doing so increases the time spent needlessly?
I'm left with a tough choice for the more appropriate response:
1. f u.
2. GTFOML!!!
Ugh. IM speak.
I don't know why, but I value capitalization and complete words / sentences in my reading. Usenet was my first exposure to 'u' substituting for 'you'. It drove me nuts, and it just got worse from there. I blamed AOL. But then WebTV made AOL'ers look like laureates.
Now I'm resigned to the fact that I'll get emails from my girlfriend with 'cuz', 'r u', 'u r' and the rest of their ilk. This from a woman with multiple graduate degrees.
Though I guess I'm getting more tolerant. In 2001 I started to date a woman who used all lowercase in her emails. What made it worse is that she was a high school teacher. And not some sort of professor of e.e. cummings studies. After suffering through no caps for about two months I gave her a present. She read the attached card - I wrote something thoughtful about how good communication was the foundation of a good relationship. She was clearly excited abut the gift - it was well wrapped and in a high end jewelry box. She was more than a bit disappointed when she open the box to find her gift - a shift key.
Overheard in a conversation between an MPAA lobbyist and a US Senator:
That 1.5% statistic is very misleading. According to my client (the MPAA), people's connections have become 12 times faster than dialup, so the real figure is 18%. And as more PC's start to have dual core processors, the MPAA forecasts this number to approach 36%.
Now when you further consider that PC screens have increased from 15" to 24" over the past few years, the figure becomes 92%.
And finally, when the 40% increase in brightness of modern displays is taken into consideration, we see that a whopping 129% of people are downloading movies illegally.
Given this vast recent upswing in piracy rates, we urge you to direct all efforts of the FBI, DHS and CIA towards stopping this national economic threat.
Until they illegalize it. Or, as I understand England has done, simply make it illegal to withhold your keys from government agents.
Even in the scenario where you are required to surrender your keys, encryption is still quite useful in the context of this article / warrantless searches. The authorities would need a warrant to make you surrender your keys, and you would know you were being spied upon.
Hey Joe! - WTF module did you just add? The simulation is slowing to a crawl.
Joe: Yeah, not sure what's going on here, I just recompiled after adding the Slashdot: (Comments Module). I didn't think it would make an appreciable difference, as adding the Slashdot: (Article Reading) made no noticeable difference in performance.
Slashdot Mirror
I was unfamiliar with it, so I looked it up:
Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory - two magnetic plates separated by an insulator. One plate has is a permanent magnet, the other holds the temporary charge.
Fact: On the 1st day, God created MACGYVER. On the 2nd day, God created knives and paperclips. On the 3rd day.. MACGYVER created everything else.
Fact: On the fourth day, MACGYVER was making way too much noise and promptly got his ass kicked by Chuck Norris.
It's not good enough to allow this sort of thing to happen (especially when a Court overturn an election result) and people should demand clean and fair elections. Would you want to see the [insert hated political party here] win just because some guy couldn't be bothered filing some paperwork?
Goddammit. I can't believe I'm defending an e-voting company. I'm in absolute agreement that new and relevant revisions should be re-certified, but I believe that the penalties in this particular case are harsh. I would make the same argument if Dick Cheney was sentenced to six months in jail for jaywalking, spitting on the sidewalk, or flipping off a school crossing guard as he spit on the sidewalk while jaywalking.
All I can really hope for in this case is that the e-voting company proves their case that the machines are in every relevant way equivalent or better than the earlier revision. And in that case, if the machines are at least equivalent, then IMNSHO a just outcome would be for the e-voting company's liability be equal to all of California's legal costs in the case.
Yes, companies should be liable for fucking up. Intentionally or not. But if it's reasonable to believe that the FU was unintentional, and if in the end the FU was of no consequence, then I can;t see how any corporate entity should be liable for more than the state's costs of the investigation / court case.
I could understand Cal's concern if different IC's were used, or if code was re-flashed. But if the two machines had the same circuit diagram, same components, and code, this penalty seems zealous. I live in California, and it's painful to see bureaucratic zealots nominally on my side, but being far from reasonable. This particular error on the part of the voting machine company appears to be on the level of a failure to file necessary paperwork.
...
The contract didn't say "penalties only if re-flashed", instead it mentions any modifications needs to eb examined and approved. If you signed that contract you must be an idiot to do this substitution. You have to be strict or else you have more "diebolds". Any and all changes must be examined. All penalties assessed would be based on contract law. Paperwork is how a legalist society is run. It's not like jumping through hoops is new to government contractors.
You play the 'D' card. And having an e-voting executive promise to deliver an election to a particular candidate offends me to no end. However the machines in question, machines for the deaf that print out a ballot to be scanned, do not offend me. Diebold's machines, as do most other e-voting systems do. Still, the DA seems overzealous.
A relevant quote from the article:
One condition of that certification, according to her office, was that no "substitution or modification of the voting systems shall be made with respect to any component of the voting systems
So it appears that what it might come down to is the definition of 'component'. Taken too loosely, a change in the Pantone color of the plastic of a button would clear the hurdle. Taken appropriately, well, 'appropriately' will be something for the courts to decide. It might all come down to something like a quote from a hero of mine: "It depends on what the definition of 'is' is."
I could understand Cal's concern if different IC's were used, or if code was re-flashed. But if the two machines had the same circuit diagram, same components, and code, this penalty seems zealous. I live in California, and it's painful to see bureaucratic zealots nominally on my side, but being far from reasonable. This particular error on the part of the voting machine company appears to be on the level of a failure to file necessary paperwork.
I've been keeping time with my sundial and temple-top observatory the way Ra intended! Damn you kids and your new-fangled timekeeping.
... and by the way, GET OFF MY SAND!!!
... I'm interested to see how will subsequent rulings will affect the 'unsecured wireless defense'.
mon. I think your favorite non-suspicious option today would be getting a digicam with a raw option, then use the least significant color bit. It's near noise anyway since very few cameras can actually detect 10/12 bits/channel, there's no reference to go by and it's perfectly reasonable to share photos that way.
And use pics taken indoors with a low iso / long exposure setting. The noise inherent in the CMOS or CCD will probably give 4 out of 10 bits of close to uniformly random noise (or whatever biased, but consistent noise the sensor outputs).
Use (embed) each pic only once, then destroy the original so there does not exist a pic that can be used to run a diff.
A 12MP camera can dump a 48MB RAW file. For smaller files, use a crappy mobile phone camera. In any light setting.
I'm going to patent a a quota system for government offices to use to lay off employees. The details of which will be somewhere in box 8 of 13.
So, who thinks the RIAA is behind this?
Not a chance. Way too subtle, and thinking too many steps ahead to be a creation of the clumsy, heavy hands of the RIAA.
Not that they would be above wasting the resources of innocent third parties via illegal pump and dump emails to try to hamper the efforts of copyright infringers, it's just a bit too clever to be their invention.
So working in the office of Dick "Go Fuck Yourself" Cheney must be fanfuckingtastic.
The HR department's email address is gofuckyourself@dickcheney.com. Same address for payroll and the health center too.
More interesting to me than irregular verbs is my son's usage of opposites. He wants me to "plug out" the vacuum cleaner, "buckle out" of his car seat, and-- my favorite-- "shut up" the computer (the opposite, of course, of "shut down").
One can also expand their English vocabulary by working with Indians. Took me a while to figure out WTF 'prepone' meant. As in (say with your best Apu imitation), "We need to prepone the meeting an hour or so." Prepone being the opposite of postpone.
And as predicted 31 years ago (damn I'm old), the IM'ers of the future will use the Decibet:
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/75/75rdecabet.phtml
For the opportunists amongst you, this does present an arbitrage opportunity to buy books abroad and resell them in US, though it is my understanding that companies like Amazon and EBAY have provisions against resale of such books.
I have an American friend living in Bangkok, Thailand who does this to pay the rent. Comes out to about $15 an hour, but can be a pain in the ass logistically. We were flatmates for a while, and tens of cases of Brealy and Myers finance books would often fill the hallways. IIRC: US version retail: $160. 'International' version at a Bangkok university's bookstore: $22.
He and his girlfriend used to sneak around the bookstore, afraid that the people working there would boot them. After a while the bookstore folks caught on and said, "Why waste your time coming here - we can have the distributor ship them directly to your apartment."
Maybe he shouldn't have signed it Lionel Hutch, Esq.
Sure, having everything spelled correctly and in long form is great for books for pleasure (art) but do we really need it for basic information sharing? Especially if doing so increases the time spent needlessly?
I'm left with a tough choice for the more appropriate response:
1. f u.
2. GTFOML!!!
Ugh. IM speak.
I don't know why, but I value capitalization and complete words / sentences in my reading. Usenet was my first exposure to 'u' substituting for 'you'. It drove me nuts, and it just got worse from there. I blamed AOL. But then WebTV made AOL'ers look like laureates.
Now I'm resigned to the fact that I'll get emails from my girlfriend with 'cuz', 'r u', 'u r' and the rest of their ilk. This from a woman with multiple graduate degrees.
Though I guess I'm getting more tolerant. In 2001 I started to date a woman who used all lowercase in her emails. What made it worse is that she was a high school teacher. And not some sort of professor of e.e. cummings studies. After suffering through no caps for about two months I gave her a present. She read the attached card - I wrote something thoughtful about how good communication was the foundation of a good relationship. She was clearly excited abut the gift - it was well wrapped and in a high end jewelry box. She was more than a bit disappointed when she open the box to find her gift - a shift key.
Not sure if it's VTOL, but...
Step one: permanently affix chair to car. Any car will do.
Step two: place conspicuously in Ballmer's office just before an Apple media event.
Step three: there is no step three!
Is Slashdot ready for all these additional telecommuters?
Would Slashdot be Fludotted? (fludotted - ick)
... there was a 21 MOOF!!! salute.
Overheard in a conversation between an MPAA lobbyist and a US Senator:
That 1.5% statistic is very misleading. According to my client (the MPAA), people's connections have become 12 times faster than dialup, so the real figure is 18%. And as more PC's start to have dual core processors, the MPAA forecasts this number to approach 36%.
Now when you further consider that PC screens have increased from 15" to 24" over the past few years, the figure becomes 92%.
And finally, when the 40% increase in brightness of modern displays is taken into consideration, we see that a whopping 129% of people are downloading movies illegally.
Given this vast recent upswing in piracy rates, we urge you to direct all efforts of the FBI, DHS and CIA towards stopping this national economic threat.
Another as of yet unanswered question about Martian rock:
Will it blend?
(Sorry, but I just discovered the videos today, so my view of the universe if somewhat blendocentric)
Encryption. Learn it. Love it. Live it.
Until they illegalize it. Or, as I understand England has done, simply make it illegal to withhold your keys from government agents.
Even in the scenario where you are required to surrender your keys, encryption is still quite useful in the context of this article / warrantless searches. The authorities would need a warrant to make you surrender your keys, and you would know you were being spied upon.
I used to think that history might only place Bush in the top ten of America's greatest presidents,
I suspect that Bush would just barely make it into the top ten presidents of the past fifty years.
Hey Joe! - WTF module did you just add? The simulation is slowing to a crawl.
Joe: Yeah, not sure what's going on here, I just recompiled after adding the Slashdot: (Comments Module). I didn't think it would make an appreciable difference, as adding the Slashdot: (Article Reading) made no noticeable difference in performance.
Unless you enjoy wading through 11 pages of served ads:
7 /printable.html
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,13020