This might be bit degratory, but I've heard that in England they toss midgets (some sort of bar game) and surely the information content of a midget is much more than 200MB. So the Brits have transfered information in their drunken stupor for centuries faster than these dudes.
If anybody shorter than me (5'11") is offended by midget tossing, blame the Brits not me.
You are correct in being sceptical about the prospects of Kurdistan. The arab world has quite little intrest in the Kurds in general. Iraq will be hostile as Iran and NATO member Turkey will certainly oppose it.
If the Kurds in northern Iraq get their independence it would actually give them something to lose, which would not be an incentive to continue terror activities. The Kurds are counting on good will of Americans as allies to be on their side on this issue, but like I told my friend, if history is our guide the odds are against them.
Turkey though would gain little by squashing Kurd independence. Actually it would change the future oli wealthy Kurds into disgruntled continual terror threat. Kurds can't get land from either Iran or Turkey and they shouldn't try, because that would definetly end in defeat, but against Iraq they actually now have an upper hand since they are US side, but for how long it will remain this way is impossible to predict.
To stand a chance Kurd need to establish a nation quickly that they can muster enough good will and support to buy arms, build an economy to support its army and perhaps win Turkeys trust by building oil pipe line through it (don't know if this is feasible just came to mind)
Re:Voting machines are not inherently buggie
on
Buggy Voting Machines
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think buy it that the testing cannot be done in near actual conditions. Just have the American Idol voting done on these tabulators. And what's best, you'll have to make sure you get the results right or the public will be outraged.
Voting machines are not inherently buggie
on
Buggy Voting Machines
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think this is just silly argument. Just because a system is used for voting can't make it inherently buggier. The problem is more that there isn't an established standart to which the machines are held. There should be a law put into effect that first defines what is expected from the voting machines, second there should be possiblity of independent review of these machines expressed in that law. Perhaps the touch screens of the voting machines could have socket to which a recorder could be attached so that separate count could be made with competitors machine.
My Kurdish friend, who actually fought Saddam back in the eighties, and now lives here in Finland, told me that the Turkish policy towards Kurds is that they don't really exist as a ethnic group. I think the Kurd situation is the most important reason not to let Turkey into EU. I think one reason Turkey wasn't delighted about the removal of Mr. Hussein was that they didn't want to have independent Kurdishtan in the north of Iraq. Kurds like Palestinians got the short end of the deal when British Empire divied up the remains of the Ottoman empire in the begining of last century and because of this both are people without their own nation.
I hope, that if something good comes out of the War in Iraq it is that the Kurds get an independent state.
First article paradoxically claimed that software complexities are making things difficult, but ofcourse as anybody who has written code knows, if you want to make things easy for user you need to write more code. Lets say you want to delete a file:
rm foo
vs. today
point a mouse to a file open a menu select delete or alternatively press del or alternatively drag file to the trash can.
Code for rm could be implemented in C with handfull of lines. Todays alternatives take thousands of lines of code, but to an end user the second alternative is simple. User doesn't have to know what the commands are, just toss the file away, as you would with solid objects.
So there we have it, simple problem becomes complex from implementation point of view. I once had a customer who joked when I delivered them a new system that calculated the price and basic layout of the systems they were manufacturing, that inspite the fact that now it took less than tenth of the time to do the calculations, that we could still improve it so it would do the calculations when he pressed a button while thinking of something else.
It should also be noted that what was impossible few years ago is now possible, because of improvement to hardware. This adds to the layers of complexity, because implementers can actually use modular approach instead of optimizing at lowest possible level.
There could be a trash can in front of the voting place where most people would toss their tickets anyway so you could pick one that suited your abusive associates.
But I think your problems are already pretty severe if you have to worry about somebody breaking your teeth. I hope that portion of the electorate that would fall under this category is insignificant enough not to sway elections one way or the other. Employers demanding tickets could be thwarted off by some sort of privacy laws. Of course in a society with oppressive regiment this wouldn't work, because there could be an armed militia checking tickets of those who have voted, but I think in most stable western democracies it should work.
What if you could take a ticket with a hash with you that records how you voted and results would be published online. Then you could look up your vote using your ticket and see if it still records the correct vote if not maybe you could complain or something...
Ballot stuffing should then be prevented by mechanically counting the voters with a different system.
Now how to authenticate that the ticket is not fraud...
No no, Nokia is the second largest city in Finland formerly known as Espoo (my fair home town). There used to be a town called Nokia in Finland and some say it still exists, but like Santas village - nobody knows where it lays.
Please keep buying Nokia phones and you help keep our city tax rate down.
As for corruption. You can hardly buy a cup of coffee in Finland for your client without getting the local equivalent of IRS breathing down your neck.
I hope you have insurance that covers catastrophic illnesses like cancer or heart problems so you don't lose your house due to medical bills.
I'm currently living in Europe and I have private insurance here too, but because of the national health care it only costs me about $300 / year, while in states our family of 2 adults and 3 kids had insurance through my wifes job university that cost as $400 / month.
I installed SP2 on my laptop (Dells Precision M60) and
my Widcomm bluetooth driver doesn't do dialup anymore.
I think the Microsoft overrode some of the stuff in it.
Other bluetooth stuff still works though. Could be a problem
with Nokias modem drivers also.
Had to disable the firewall, but since I'm always behind
a hardware one I think this is ok. But everytime I start
windows it's complaining about my computer not being safe
and thats a bit annoying. Haven looked up how to disable that.
Explorers popup blocking is nice though sometimes it doesn't
work and I don't know why. Maybe it's a deal with Microsoft
with some advertisers or something.
On my wish list. I would like the option of having Windows
as administrator password before allowing any installation
of extensions for explorer. Darn kids keep downloading stuff
from different game sites and I can't keep up with them,
but don't have a heart to deny playing completely.
Currently European Union has more citizens (~400M) than United States (~280M), but US I think has younger population. Europeans aren't having enough immigration or kids.
European Unions economy is a bit bigger than US economy, but US has still more GDP per capita. US spends larger portion of its GDP on Defence (or Offence I guess now days), also Europeans have longer vacations and shorter work weeks that eat up the GDP a bit. Quality of life for citizens is hard to measure.
Europe doesn't have unity on what it should be: lose pack of nations concentrating on economic issues or more of a federation counter balancing United States.
All Europeans have health care of some sort. 40 million US citizens don't
EU citizens have higher life expectancy than US citizens despite US spending more on health care per capita
EU kids score better in math and science than US kids
EU economy has been growing slower than US economy
I'm don't think US is a failing empire, but unless the emphasis in US politics changes from gay rights, abortion, religion vs. science and god in pledge I think it will run into trouble. Also the huge military emphasis and spending is a taxing even to a rich nation like US.
Also Europe has its problems and it's not a Utopia, so please don't take this comparison that way.
This crazy I idea came to me too when I was reading some war novel by Tom Clancy, which had plot written around communication delay.
Neutrinos travel near speed of light so if one could transmit and receive them the time for signal to travel from one side of the earth to the other would be reduced to less than third of what it would take for it to travel the shortest path on surface of earth. Compared to satellite it would much less since trip around the earth would have to be bounce quite ways into space.
To do the math for a round trip ping:
earths girth/speed of light = 12756km / 299 792 km/s * 2= 0.08s
So for the round trip ping would use about tenth of a second for travel
I currently get from Finland to Australia (at least I think I'm pinging australia) a ping of about 0.377 seconds.
Of course what we know about neutrinos it propably isn't possible to build a transmitter or receiver that could be used for any kind of communication
When russians heard about the original starwars proposal of lasers shooting down missiles they claimed that by making the surface reflective and making the missiles rotate should be enough protection against an attack.
I think that even if this is being sold as a deterrant against nuclear attacks, but propably if it ever works, which still is a long ways off, it will be used against low tech missiles akin to scuds.
Down side (or upside if you have opposing view) of such weapons is that US will have a lower hurdle to invade rogue nations such as North Korea, which even though in theory is desirable, will cause unpredictable consequences in the long run.
I've come to this conclusion while watching the Iraq conflict develop. I thought at the time that removal of Saddam would make it worth it, but now faced with years of uncertainty and violence and hostilty towards United States it is hard to justify.
I guess I start to qualify as an old timer, but there is always a generation before us.
We had few years ago a software in the works, which had been estimated bit too optimistically when it came to time and money. One old timer who had done coding in his time from the buyers side suggested as a remedy for next time to write all the code first into a notebook before writing it to the computer, because thats how it was done in their days. Even when we pointed out that the project consisted over sixty thousand lines of code he couldn't be convinced othervice.
Unfortunately only thing we can really hope for is that eventually scientific community will come to some sort of consensus about things.
Scientific process is inherently sceptical of new findings, but I hope the review process has improved since 19th centry. We all benefit from the scientific consensus.
When you read your physics book you are starting with the accepted consensus of ideas. Some of them might be disputed, but usually marginal ideas are not allowed to confuse students in their early steps into any subject if they were books would have too many ifs and buts that the general discourse would be muddled and the main princibles would be lost. When a student get further along it is possible to introduce more detailed information and the alternate theories can be easier digested and evaluated. If you watch science at work you'll notice that the incremental progress is the norm. People spend endless hours testing and refining others ideas trying to find flaws in them so that their own ideas and theories could be introduced into the model.
Revolution in science is rare occurence and even then is based on the previous observations, experiments and theories.
Journalism has hard time with science, because of its inherent tedious slowness. Even when something exciting breaks it is usually someones unverified idea of something new. Only with time that idea might take hold or not. Sometimes ideas that are wrong take hold until somebody comes out with an experiment that will refute the previous findings, but that is to be expected and this is the only way to go about advancing science.
When evaluating "scientific articles" on global warming, water on mars, breast cancer from abortion,intelligent design it is important to see what the source of this information is and is it based on research or is it just an idea that somebody is putting forth. Only when that idea has been reviewed by scientific community can you start considering it a theory. Global warming for example is one of those theories that I wish didn't have the backing of scientific community, but it is hard to find credible alternate theories. There has been a lot of science refining the process, with which earths climate maintains "green house"-effect. These views don't necessarily agree on the whole process, but often explain small portion of it: how carbon dioxide is absorbed, effect of methane from live stock etc. From opposing side we usually get grand ideas covering the whole issue of global warming from the stand point of disputing it.
Of course unless theories match observations they have no value. This is the culling effect of theories. If we believe that omnipotent will is directing things (like gravity, diversity of species) we cannot have this culling effect, because it is impossible to have any universal laws of nature and then we can claim that the whole process of science is pointless. Also other way of reacing same conclusions is to point out the political motives of a scientific work and challence it on those grounds instead of using doing research and proving it unfounded that way. Science isn't a philosophical discussion of ideas e.g. is an eye too complex to have evolved by natural selection vs. intelligent design? Instead it is a quest to issue explained answers to questions, which can be proven or refuted e.g. "eye was formed from xxx. These are methods used this is the data from experiments and this is how we came to this conclusion". Then one can go and challenge that question on those premises.
I'm all for local government, but it seems to me that both parties are all for local rule on issues important to them. Ironically the example you used about the drinking age and highway taxes was signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1984 (remember this because thats when I first moved to United States) MADD Celebration of this. I agree that this kind of coupling is plain silly and steps heavily onto state rights.
But the truth still is that the "red" states benefit from federal dollars being spent there and I'm sure they have gotten used to it. I don't think many of the sparsely populated states would even have highways if the federal money wasn't spent to maintain them. Although they propably would establish tolls to compensate on second thought.
But aren't the "red" states net recipients of federal tax dollars and "blue" states with exception of New Hampshire net payers.
This will be one reason that Bush will have hard time reducing the spending in congress. All those votes that rural republicans got need to be repaid with pork barrel spending.
I first heard about these in 1996 when we were importing to Finland some VR equipment. I guess back then they were university lab stuff since generating good VR was pretty hard stuff to do, but the laser idea was already available.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean programar... programer... well anyways I write code.
If anybody shorter than me (5'11") is offended by midget tossing, blame the Brits not me.
Though, on the second thought, this problem doesn't involve robots.
If the Kurds in northern Iraq get their independence it would actually give them something to lose, which would not be an incentive to continue terror activities. The Kurds are counting on good will of Americans as allies to be on their side on this issue, but like I told my friend, if history is our guide the odds are against them.
Turkey though would gain little by squashing Kurd independence. Actually it would change the future oli wealthy Kurds into disgruntled continual terror threat. Kurds can't get land from either Iran or Turkey and they shouldn't try, because that would definetly end in defeat, but against Iraq they actually now have an upper hand since they are US side, but for how long it will remain this way is impossible to predict.
To stand a chance Kurd need to establish a nation quickly that they can muster enough good will and support to buy arms, build an economy to support its army and perhaps win Turkeys trust by building oil pipe line through it (don't know if this is feasible just came to mind)
I don't think buy it that the testing cannot be done in near actual conditions. Just have the American Idol voting done on these tabulators. And what's best, you'll have to make sure you get the results right or the public will be outraged.
I think this is just silly argument. Just because a system is used for voting can't make it inherently buggier. The problem is more that there isn't an established standart to which the machines are held. There should be a law put into effect that first defines what is expected from the voting machines, second there should be possiblity of independent review of these machines expressed in that law. Perhaps the touch screens of the voting machines could have socket to which a recorder could be attached so that separate count could be made with competitors machine.
I don't think it is time for Turkey to join EU.
My Kurdish friend, who actually fought Saddam back in the eighties, and now lives here in Finland, told me that the Turkish policy towards Kurds is that they don't really exist as a ethnic group. I think the Kurd situation is the most important reason not to let Turkey into EU. I think one reason Turkey wasn't delighted about the removal of Mr. Hussein was that they didn't want to have independent Kurdishtan in the north of Iraq. Kurds like Palestinians got the short end of the deal when British Empire divied up the remains of the Ottoman empire in the begining of last century and because of this both are people without their own nation.
I hope, that if something good comes out of the War in Iraq it is that the Kurds get an independent state.
Code for rm could be implemented in C with handfull of lines. Todays alternatives take thousands of lines of code, but to an end user the second alternative is simple. User doesn't have to know what the commands are, just toss the file away, as you would with solid objects.
So there we have it, simple problem becomes complex from implementation point of view. I once had a customer who joked when I delivered them a new system that calculated the price and basic layout of the systems they were manufacturing, that inspite the fact that now it took less than tenth of the time to do the calculations, that we could still improve it so it would do the calculations when he pressed a button while thinking of something else.
It should also be noted that what was impossible few years ago is now possible, because of improvement to hardware. This adds to the layers of complexity, because implementers can actually use modular approach instead of optimizing at lowest possible level.
But I think your problems are already pretty severe if you have to worry about somebody breaking your teeth. I hope that portion of the electorate that would fall under this category is insignificant enough not to sway elections one way or the other. Employers demanding tickets could be thwarted off by some sort of privacy laws. Of course in a society with oppressive regiment this wouldn't work, because there could be an armed militia checking tickets of those who have voted, but I think in most stable western democracies it should work.
Ballot stuffing should then be prevented by mechanically counting the voters with a different system.
Now how to authenticate that the ticket is not fraud...
Please keep buying Nokia phones and you help keep our city tax rate down.
As for corruption. You can hardly buy a cup of coffee in Finland for your client without getting the local equivalent of IRS breathing down your neck.
Could also mention this to kids when they ask why is it that trigonometry is important.
I'm currently living in Europe and I have private insurance here too, but because of the national health care it only costs me about $300 / year, while in states our family of 2 adults and 3 kids had insurance through my wifes job university that cost as $400 / month.
What's your excuse?
(just kidding incase you read this from a proxy)
Had to disable the firewall, but since I'm always behind a hardware one I think this is ok. But everytime I start windows it's complaining about my computer not being safe and thats a bit annoying. Haven looked up how to disable that.
Explorers popup blocking is nice though sometimes it doesn't work and I don't know why. Maybe it's a deal with Microsoft with some advertisers or something.
On my wish list. I would like the option of having Windows as administrator password before allowing any installation of extensions for explorer. Darn kids keep downloading stuff from different game sites and I can't keep up with them, but don't have a heart to deny playing completely.
- Currently European Union has more citizens (~400M) than United States (~280M), but US I think has younger population. Europeans aren't having enough immigration or kids.
- European Unions economy is a bit bigger than US economy, but US has still more GDP per capita. US spends larger portion of its GDP on Defence (or Offence I guess now days), also Europeans have longer vacations and shorter work weeks that eat up the GDP a bit. Quality of life for citizens is hard to measure.
- Europe doesn't have unity on what it should be: lose pack of nations concentrating on economic issues or more of a federation counter balancing United States.
- All Europeans have health care of some sort. 40 million US citizens don't
- EU citizens have higher life expectancy than US citizens despite US spending more on health care per capita
- EU kids score better in math and science than US kids
- EU economy has been growing slower than US economy
I'm don't think US is a failing empire, but unless the emphasis in US politics changes from gay rights, abortion, religion vs. science and god in pledge I think it will run into trouble. Also the huge military emphasis and spending is a taxing even to a rich nation like US.Also Europe has its problems and it's not a Utopia, so please don't take this comparison that way.
Neutrinos travel near speed of light so if one could transmit and receive them the time for signal to travel from one side of the earth to the other would be reduced to less than third of what it would take for it to travel the shortest path on surface of earth. Compared to satellite it would much less since trip around the earth would have to be bounce quite ways into space.
To do the math for a round trip ping:
earths girth/speed of light = 12756km / 299 792 km/s * 2= 0.08s
So for the round trip ping would use about tenth of a second for travel
I currently get from Finland to Australia (at least I think I'm pinging australia) a ping of about 0.377 seconds.
Of course what we know about neutrinos it propably isn't possible to build a transmitter or receiver that could be used for any kind of communication
I think that even if this is being sold as a deterrant against nuclear attacks, but propably if it ever works, which still is a long ways off, it will be used against low tech missiles akin to scuds.
Down side (or upside if you have opposing view) of such weapons is that US will have a lower hurdle to invade rogue nations such as North Korea, which even though in theory is desirable, will cause unpredictable consequences in the long run.
I've come to this conclusion while watching the Iraq conflict develop. I thought at the time that removal of Saddam would make it worth it, but now faced with years of uncertainty and violence and hostilty towards United States it is hard to justify.
We had few years ago a software in the works, which had been estimated bit too optimistically when it came to time and money. One old timer who had done coding in his time from the buyers side suggested as a remedy for next time to write all the code first into a notebook before writing it to the computer, because thats how it was done in their days. Even when we pointed out that the project consisted over sixty thousand lines of code he couldn't be convinced othervice.
Scientific process is inherently sceptical of new findings, but I hope the review process has improved since 19th centry. We all benefit from the scientific consensus.
When you read your physics book you are starting with the accepted consensus of ideas. Some of them might be disputed, but usually marginal ideas are not allowed to confuse students in their early steps into any subject if they were books would have too many ifs and buts that the general discourse would be muddled and the main princibles would be lost. When a student get further along it is possible to introduce more detailed information and the alternate theories can be easier digested and evaluated. If you watch science at work you'll notice that the incremental progress is the norm. People spend endless hours testing and refining others ideas trying to find flaws in them so that their own ideas and theories could be introduced into the model.
Revolution in science is rare occurence and even then is based on the previous observations, experiments and theories.
Journalism has hard time with science, because of its inherent tedious slowness. Even when something exciting breaks it is usually someones unverified idea of something new. Only with time that idea might take hold or not. Sometimes ideas that are wrong take hold until somebody comes out with an experiment that will refute the previous findings, but that is to be expected and this is the only way to go about advancing science.
When evaluating "scientific articles" on global warming, water on mars, breast cancer from abortion,intelligent design it is important to see what the source of this information is and is it based on research or is it just an idea that somebody is putting forth. Only when that idea has been reviewed by scientific community can you start considering it a theory. Global warming for example is one of those theories that I wish didn't have the backing of scientific community, but it is hard to find credible alternate theories. There has been a lot of science refining the process, with which earths climate maintains "green house"-effect. These views don't necessarily agree on the whole process, but often explain small portion of it: how carbon dioxide is absorbed, effect of methane from live stock etc. From opposing side we usually get grand ideas covering the whole issue of global warming from the stand point of disputing it.
Of course unless theories match observations they have no value. This is the culling effect of theories. If we believe that omnipotent will is directing things (like gravity, diversity of species) we cannot have this culling effect, because it is impossible to have any universal laws of nature and then we can claim that the whole process of science is pointless. Also other way of reacing same conclusions is to point out the political motives of a scientific work and challence it on those grounds instead of using doing research and proving it unfounded that way. Science isn't a philosophical discussion of ideas e.g. is an eye too complex to have evolved by natural selection vs. intelligent design? Instead it is a quest to issue explained answers to questions, which can be proven or refuted e.g. "eye was formed from xxx. These are methods used this is the data from experiments and this is how we came to this conclusion". Then one can go and challenge that question on those premises.
This post became way too long...
Funny thing is that on international CNN broadcasts his show is actually on once in a while although late at night.
But the truth still is that the "red" states benefit from federal dollars being spent there and I'm sure they have gotten used to it. I don't think many of the sparsely populated states would even have highways if the federal money wasn't spent to maintain them. Although they propably would establish tolls to compensate on second thought.
This will be one reason that Bush will have hard time reducing the spending in congress. All those votes that rural republicans got need to be repaid with pork barrel spending.
Here is one explanation. The Virtual Retinal Display - A Retinal Scanning Imaging System
Dr. Thomas A. Furness III