You make an important point, but misunderstand mine. I'm not knocking the achievement, just pointing out its limits.
You gotta learn to walk before you learn run. You gotta learn to take the first step when learning to walk.
This is "One small step for a civilian, a giant leap for mankind."
This ship was designed to win the prize and nothing else. It wasn't designed to reach orbit because the terms on the prize didn't specify that. All I'm asking is that you be realistic about this, and not expect it to do things it was never intended for.
The sub-orbital, super-atmospheric shot is the logical first step for any family of spacecraft designs - including those for inexpensive reusable craft. There are three steps:
1) Getting out of the atmosphere.
2) Getting to low orbit.
3) Getting anywhere else.
2) gets you halfway to anywhere (in terms of delta-v), and gets you over the really hard part. The second half of the trip can be taken at your leisure, while the first half involves getting through an atmosphere before the one-G field sucks you back.
1) is most of the work of 2) It gets you out of the atmosphere - now all you have to do is get going FAST while you're out there.
Yes, you have to combine 2) with a modification of 1) to get to LEO (unless you went FAR out of the atmosphere with LOTS of fuel and reaction mass to spend). But once you've got a device capable of 1) it's a LOT less than doubling the engineering to upgrade it for 2).
Meanwhile: If the private space race stalls after the X prize is won, look for a Y prize. B-)
That's apart from the naturally rosy estimates of one's one programming/system admin abilities, versus a sober understanding of the full complexity of a project.
Part of the problem with estimating is that it's easy to only think about the time spent on the part you already KNOW how to do, and hard to even imagine the part you DON'T know how to do yet.
(My rule of thumb is to multiply the time I THINK it will take by three - because the part I have to learn on the way and can't visulalize now usually takes up two-thirds of the total project time.)
For example, he says, "Build one to throw away." Amen to that.
But never build TWO to throw away. If you don't learn enough from the first one to make the second one right, you'll never stop looping and deliver a product.
Development is not the letter "O". It's the letter "Q". You can loop a LITTLE, but eventually you have to deliver and move on.
Try to get it right the first time. Get it right the second.
Successful software development is like growing a perfect crystal. You're constantly diddling the additions to get the atoms lined up with no flaws. But once they're right you move on to the next layer. Build it, test it, fix it, test it again, loop till it passes, then LEAVE IT ALONE and MOVE ON.
(If you tested it as you went, the ONLY parts you'll EVER have to go back and change are the ones where you either didn't understand the spec or the spec changed.)
Some years back [...] I noticed a (partially emptied) case of the books in the IT manager's office. ([...] He'd already passed them out to everyone on his team.)
Sounds like a good man to work for.
On the other hand, if anyone in upper management EVER starts enthusing about _Crossing the Chasm_, start your next-job hunt IMMEDIATELY and QUIT as soon as you find a good replacement! Do NOT wait for your stock options to vest (they will soon be worthless) and start unloading the ones that have already vested.
_CtC_'s central message is hidden in a line near the end of one of the last chapters. It is: "Screw the early-hires with the big option plans. Only the founders and management deserve the big bucks. The early hires were necessary at the start, but now are overpaid and a drag on the bottom line. They are compulsive drones who have no power to fight you. This action won't even hurt you NEXT time around, because they are obsessed and will be early hires again at the NEXT company. You MUST do this to make your company stable for the long term."
The net result is that the pointy-haired executives, soon after discovering this book, dump the early hires. (And even if the author HAD been right, they do it too soon.) The early hires are the ones who actually had the skills and knowlege, and applied the hard work, to make the founders' hairbrained scheme WORK. As a result they are the repository of the internal knowlege of HOW it works. By dumping them without extracting this knowlege the execs kill maintainence and follow-on, and thus doom the company - starting in a couple years.
Of course by then they've moved on, so the NEXT set of upper management inherets the collapsing house of cards. But meanwhile the people who actually implemented the product are dispersed, and their stock is worthless.
So as soon as you see this infection taking hold, liquidate, cut your losses, and move on.
I read this in college for software engineering and even on our 4-8 person projects it made sense. In the corporate world, it makes more sense, but no one really listens. The same pressures of time and budget seem to outweigh the lessons learned from Mr. Brooks.
I saw a great explanation of WHY you get less per man on a large project than a small one, and why hierarchical organization seems to be necessary on projects with large numbers of people but can be dispensed with on tiny ones.
Imagine each person as a device with four "ports" (each representing a fraction of his time and/or attention). Each "port" can be used for communicating with one other person or doing one unit of work.
On a one-person project all the ports are used for work. You get four units of work done per day.
On a two-person project each person has one port used for communicating with the other and three for doing work. You get six units of work done per day.
On a three-person (non-hierarchical) project, each person has TWO ports tied up communicating, and TWO for doing work. Again you get six units of work done per day.
On a four-person (non-hirearchical) project, each person has THREE ports tied up in communication, and only ONE left for work. Now you're down to FOUR units of work per day - same as a single hacker in a closet.
On a five-person (non-hierarchical) project, each person has all four ports tied up with communicating. Nothing gets done. B-)
Of course you can to a limited extent increase the number of "ports" by tools to improve communication, or by overtime. And some people are better at switching tasks or communicate quickly, and thus have more "ports". But the same basic idea applies.
You can go beyond a handful of people and retain some productivity by restricting the interpersonal communication paths - to keep people from using up job-time communicating with others when it's not job-related. This tends to lead to specialization, with some people only communicating. That leads to a tree organization, with the "leaves" being people who actually do some work on the code proper, communicating only with one or two neighboring leaves, and others just communicating - and deciding what messages to forward.
And of course this leads to all the classical pathologies of hierarchies: Distortion of messages by multiple hops. Much decision-making must be done in the tree (and often far from the relevant data) to prevent saturating the communication links. "Leaves" are data-starved and must follow the decisions of "non-leaf nodes" or the project becomes disorganized. So the non-leaves become authorities and run the show.
To do large projects without such explicit communication hierarchies controling the workers you need to divide it into modules done by standalone groups, plus assemblies also done by standalone groups. The standalone groups must be redundant (so that at least ONE of the groups doing each particular thing gets it to work adequately.) Then the hierarchy is still there, but in the form of the invisible hand of evolutionary/market forces: Leaf modules are adopted or rejected by the assembly-constructing group constituting the next level up the hierarchy toward the root of the overall project, assemblies are adopted or rejected by larger-assembly groups, and so on. (Of course there can ALSO be more than one root, and users of the resulting product can replace modules or assemblies with others that do the job if they car to do so.) Each group can be flat or hierarchical, according to their own leanings (and the needs of their task).
In crowd control, self defense, and effecting arrests, what you're trying to do is win ITHOUT fighting. What this means in practice is bringing a big enough threat to bear that even the dumbest cop (or mob) realizes you'll win if you use it.
Oops. Meant "crook", not "cop".
(Must have seen too many episodes of "The Shield" to get THOSE two swtiched. B-) )
UV into the eye will dump most of its energy in the lens and cornea. Cataracts minimum at air-ionization levels (Not that it matters: The lightning bolt lands microseconds later, and the eye's structure pipes it straight into the center of the brain.)
You're right, we should stick with current tasers and shoot darts in peoples eyes, followed by the shock.
The trouble with trying to invent a "phaser with a stun setting" is that, when you advertise it as such, the wielders believe you. So they use it in situations when they would never CONSIDER using lethal force.
Unfortunately, evolution does NOT favor systems that are easily incapacitated, leaving the body helpless before an attacker. Thus essentially any level of disruption that can quickly incapacitate a human will be only a small percentage below the force necessary to kill him. Given the variations between individuals, and the variations in how the force is applied in the field, SOME of those "stunned" WILL be killed.
One of the contemplated uses of this hypothetical weapon is crowd control. Given its nature, the obvious way to do that is to use it to "mow them down". Such an attack would be likely to kill some of the people in a crowd of any size large enough to provoke the action - either directly or through suffocation in the resulting pile of bodies.
But "spraying" the crowd would almost certainly mean aiming between shoulder and crotch level. This means that if there are children in the crowd, a significant fraction are likely to be hit in the eyes - with a very high risk of death as a result.
So if some authority decides to use it on a crowd they'd BETTER have the whole crowd in a box before they wake up. Otherwise the damage the crowd was causing before they were shot would be NOTHING compared to what they'd do after they come to and discover the dead kids.
Similar concerns exist for other situations. For instance, consider giving them to a pilot for shooting suspected terrorists: Not only is it more likely to be used on drunks, but a shot at someone standing in the asile is at about the right level to hit the seated passengers in the eyes or heads.
Military and civilian planners are now referring to devices like this as "LESS lethal" rather than "NON lethal" weapons. This is to keep the people in the field aware that, though they're "kinder and gentler" deadly force, they're still deadly force. So they must not be used indiscriminately, but only in situations where killing the person on the receiving end is justified.
Meanwhile, they have another downside: They are LESS intimidating to the people at whom they're pointed. Where the threat from a gun is likely to bring a sudden decision to cease attacking (and either surrender or run), the threat from a "stunner" is more likely to just make the attacker(s) mad(der).
Sun Tsu had it right: In crowd control, self defense, and effecting arrests, what you're trying to do is win WITHOUT fighting. What this means in practice is bringing a big enough threat to bear that even the dumbest cop (or mob) realizes you'll win if you use it. Once that occurs you get your way without having to USE it. Thus the threat of a gun that almost NEVER has to be fired is a LOT better than the use of a sometimes-deadly "stunner" that almost ALWAYS has to be fired.
You would STILL need heavy busbars with 12VAC, for the same reason you would need them with low voltage DC--VOLTAGE DROP.
Also: Heating. It's the CURRENT that heats the wire. The limit on wire size in a wall is keeping the heat down enough that it doesn't set the walls on fire.
Your house is wired with #14 for 15A circuits, #12 for 20A, #10 for 30A.
At 120 volts a puny 15 amp circuit can provide 1650 watts, enough to run a space heater with leftovers for a couple 75 watt bulbs, or all the lights in several rooms. 20A will feed several motorized appliances or your whole computer room. A dual 30A feed easily handles an electric stove and oven, or an electric drier.
At 12 volts a 20A feed would be maxed out by four 60 watt desk lamps or a couple 100 watt ceiling lamps. (Forget the toaster.)
Yes, you'd need bussbar. Every 12V circuit would require TEN TIMES the amount of copper as a 120V circuit to provide the same amount of energy with the same percentage of it heating the walls.
Nobody except liberals consider 'the annual energy costs of the USA'. People do (and should) consider THEIR annual energy costs. [...] The USA is not the Borg, and no country should be.
Bravo.
Pointing out the "central planning" aspect of the press release highlights its futility.
If the central planners had been thinking more clearly, they'd have been lobbying for power-supply efficiency labeling, ala the energy-usage labels on major appliances such as furnaces, water heaters, refrigerators, and the like.
(Disclosure to the individual purchasers of the information necessary to make informed choices, in a standardized format, puts the market forces to work constructively for all concerned. It's an intervention that even minarchists can often find it in their hearts and ideologies to forgive. B-) And a case where even an inadequate standard can be better than none.)
But of course the liberals don't think that way...
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Having already commented elsewhere in this thread, and reviewed your recent postings on other topics (which often bring up insights others have missed), I've decided to mod you "friend" for a while. B-) (Let's debate Godwin's Law some time. IMHO it's all too convenient for neo-NAZIs.)
Some large buildings have very large flouresent ballasts in the basement (or where-ever) because they can more effectively provide that power as a large unit rather than hundreds of small units.
What if the same idea where applied to computers. Right next to the standard wall outlet would be a world standardized jack with six or eight pins for each of the required voltages.
Computer supply voltages are VERY LOW - and trending lower. That means, for a given amount of power, their currents are VERY HIGH. Losses in wiring (for a given size of wire) go up with the SQUARE of the current.
The result is that you'd need to wire such outlets with fat copper bars, rather than "wire", to avoid losing far more in the wiring than you'd gain in the improved power supply in the basement.
Computer requirements (especially voltages) are rapidly changing, the voltages have to be well regulated (meaning you need regulation after the outlet anyhow), and a lose connection interrupting one of the set of voltages can be big trouble. So you're stuck with power supplies in the box.
(Indeed, makers of some high-reliability networking devices, including the company where I work, put a set of power supplies on EACH CARD, rather than depending on a redundant pair in the box to power all the cards.)
Switching supplies can approach 90% efficiency if they are carefully built.
A downside of high efficiency is that the energy lost to heating is a tiny fraction of the energy handled. When certain components start to fail they can increase their losses - and this increases the heating. The higher the overall efficiency, the greater the extra heating is as a percentage of the NORMAL heating.
If this is not taken into account in the design of the supply (and its cooling budget), the supply may be prone to thermal runaway and catastrophic failures as components age.
[wallwarts with the load unplugged] are still converting even though it's more efficient than normal since there is smaller load.
Actually, they're LESS efficient than normal. With no load, ALL the power they consume is wasted - efficience is 0%. B-)
Now the total AMOUNT of waste IS typically lower. But it's not trivial. Even the lowest tech wallwart burns power heating copper in the transformer and making up leakage in the capacitors. If it has a switching regulator it's also burning a bunch of power keeping that alive. And a voltage-flattening/capacitor-discharging resistor actually INCREASES the amount of power wasted in the wart when the load is gone (by eating some of the power that WOULD have gone into the load).
So why waste ANY by leaving the wart plugged in?
You can guesstimate the power by feeling the wart when it's been sitting there with no load for a while. The hotter, the more waste.
The gadget apparently uses a pulsed solid-state UV laser to ionize a channel in the air between the shooter and the target
And what does a UV laser pulse capable of ionizing AIR do when it hits SKIN? Or an EYE? Just burn it? Or cause it to explode?
UV into the eye will dump most of its energy in the lens and cornea. Cataracts minimum at air-ionization levels (Not that it matters: The lightning bolt lands microseconds later, and the eye's structure pipes it straight into the center of the brain.)
Interestingly, at high enough intensities laser pulses like that can be self-focusing
Self focusing requires an energy level SO high that the tiny fraction of the energy dumped into the air heats it enough to reduce its refractive index (i.e. literally blasts the air molecules out of the beam at extreme velocities). That's definitely in the "skin/cornea/lens explodes violently" range.
I am more afraid that MSFT will purposefully allow holes to exist in its OS so that more and more people will buy their AV software. Perhaps that's a bit paranoid but I certainly wouldn't put it past them.
Remember the hidden interface hooks that Microsoft used to make their products run better than their competitors'?
Just think how much Microsoft's anti-virus product would outdo their competitors's offerings if Microsoft inserted secret security holes in the OS and the fixes in their AV at the same time.
Users of Microsoft's AV product would never get bit, while the competitors would have to wait until somebody got worms, develop a signature, and distribute it during the height of the infestatin.
And if THAT isn't enough to swat 'em down, Microsoft's AV division (or a rogue within it) could quietly start releasing exploits into the wild from time to time, to make the competitors look even worse.
The upside (from the Linux/Unix/Apple/etc side) is that eliminating the Micrsoft-related external AV market (either through honest competition OR pereditory tactics like those above) reduces the security level of Microsoft's OS product to about the "apply all the latest patches" level. They've already proven incompetent to keep that level safe without external help. So that could encourage the migration away from their swiss-cheesey products.
And the beauty of this is that the corporate politics of the existance of an AV software product group encourage it to cannibalize the rest of the company in order to show a profit. Microsoft creates their own cace of cancer.
why? oh why? WHY!? Is there enough time to put something in the "from the 'x' dept" underneath the title, but no time to look on the right or SCROLL DOWN! and see the original story?
He probably missed it because the previous story was under "security" and this one under "handhelds".
"The company also promised that it will investigate every substantive claim of innocence it receives. If purchasers provide sufficient evidence demonstrating that they did not use their devices for signal theft, DirecTV will dismiss their cases."
Oh, now I have to provide "sufficient evidence" that I'm not guilty? Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Shouldn't the burden of proof be on their side?
Basically, the bully is going to try to be a little nicer.
Yep, that's what it sounds like.
How about sending this in reply:
Gentlemen:
I received your letter of [date], in which you noted that I had purchased a smartcard programmer which may be capable of modifying your client's smartcards' programming to recieve your client's services without paying for them, and asking me for proof that I was not using it for that purpose.
I can assure you that I am not, and do not intend to, use the programmer for such a purpose.
As to "providing you proof" to that effect, I consider the development projects I have undertaken, or may undertake in the future, to proprietary. Accordingly I do not intend to reveal their nature to uninvolved third parties. I understand that, if your client believes that I am intercepting the premium programming part of his signal without paying, the burden of proof to that effect is on you, not on me.
However, if you wish to assure yourselves that I am not intercepting your programming, here is a counteroffer which your client may find satisfactory:
Upon reciept of reimbursement for the original purchase and instalation price of the satellite receivers and antenna systems (plus shipping costs), I will remove them from service and ship them, along with the associated smartcards, to your client, and terminate my service contract with your client's company. (I will require thirty days notice before the termination of service, so that I might arrange replacement service with Dish Network, my local cable company, or another of your client's competitors.)
I will, of course, retain the smartcard programmer.
Please indicate whether your client wishes to:
a) accept this counteroffer, or
b) drop the issue and waive any future action (absent a showing of evidence of actual signal interception on my part, rather than merely the ABILITY to so intercept.)
I would appreciate a reply within thirty days. I will entertain acceptance of the counteroffer at a later date, but may ask for more than 30 days before service termination in order that vacation scheduling would not be impacted.
Finally: Does your client wish to be offered a similar repurchase option when I eventually terminate my service at some future date (in lieu of my reusing the components of the then-useless receivers and/or antenna system for some other project)?
A brief history: The original N-Gage (combination cell phone & game system) from Nokia had its earpiece mounted along the side of the phone, meaning that you had to hold it sideways to your head to talk on it. It looked a bit like you had a taco up against your head.
Pretty much everyone besides Nokia thought this was pretty silly. The phenomenon known as "Sidetalkin'" soon had a (satirical) cult following, and people around the world got together to share pictures of themselves sidetalkin' on, well, whatever they could find around the house.
There was a hack to get the phone to talk through a speaker on the rear ("backtalkin'") rather than the one on the side.
It appears that the feature has been removed from the new model, which is what the linked site is lamenting.
Here is my question... what ever happen to just backing things up?
Disks got big and cheap. External backup media didn't keep up. Nowdays it's cheaper to keep the backup data on a spare disk than on some other removable medium.
But if you're going to put it on a spare disk, why not just leave the disk spinning and hotwire it into the control software so your data is ALWAYS backed up? That eliminates the separate backup step - along with the reprocessing of post-backup changes in case of hardware failure. (Not to mention reducing the likelyhood of a failed backup process being detected only when a restore is needed.) It also gives you the opportunity for speedups, for instance by doing reads simultaneously on multiple disks.
Once you're weaned from a separate device type for the backup medium, there are a number of ways to go:
- Want a removable snapshot for offline/offsite storage? Set up a Raid 1 (mirror) with a removable disk. Plug in and bring up the disk, and the raid system brings it up-to-date as a clone of the live one. Then take it OFFLINE at your snapshot point and remove it for storage or transport. (You can set up Raid 1 with more than two copies - so you don't lose your live spare by pulling the backup disk.)
- Hotwire archiving snapshots into the fileserver software. (Those snapsonts can be available online simultaneously with the live data for recovery of file-change oopsies, and provide a stable image to be backed up to offline/remote/removable storage at leisure.)
- Some raid levels give you added failure protection and reduced disk count by computing and storing ECC or parity rather than full copies.
First off, did you even read any of the damn press coverage over the election scandal, or are you just parroting the party line?
Why, yes, I DID follow the coverage.
Second, the vote totals were within 200 (GWB on top) when the rererecounting was over. However, there were more than 500 votes that were counted that were later found to be illegal (military absentee) votes.
The military absentee votes were NOT illegal. The State law requires the postmark, but the Federal law overrides State law, requiring the votes to be counted.
It happens that the military sometimes choses not to postmark and sometimes choses to postmark at a common facility in the states considerably after the letter is posted. (This may be for their convenience, for security {to hide troop movements}, or just because it's "the military way.) When the military choses to do this, the State is stuck and must count the votes.
It was obvious who they were voting for, of course. But they were still illegal. All of the Democrats' obvious-but-illegal votes were denied, and 500 illegal-but-obvious Republican votes were counted.
And that's not even to mention the literally thousands of voters who were denied voting rights because of fictitious prison records.
Any voters who were purged due to the felon cleanout were notified in plenty of time to correct the matter.
Incidentally, a considerable number of felons were NOT detected in time to be excluded. And THEY were overwhelmingly registered as Democrats. B-)
Even though it's the second most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen, helium is fairly scarce on earth. The majority that we get comes from extraction from natural gas.
And (at one point) from a set of wells in texas that produced nearly pure Helium. Helium concentration varies from deposit to deposit.
In the period between WW I and WW II, essentially the only sources of bulk helium were wells in the US south, plus a little in Russia. Due to its usefulness in barrage balloons during WW I, the US considered the supply a strategic weapons material and monopolized the US supply (under the administration of the Navy, which was also in charge of the US Zepplin program).
The US would not allow Germany to have any - which is why the Zepplins were hydrogen-filled. (Indeed, that policy was STILL in force during the '60s, which was the last time I looked. I think it got relaxed in the last decade or two.)
After the Hindenberg's flameoff was blamed on Hydrogen, with Helium unavailable, nobody was interested in paying for a flight in a Zepplin when there were perfectly good steamships.
So the industry went down, not JUST from the misattribution of the problem to Hydrogen, but ALSO to the US government's refusal to release Hydrogen for commercial air flight - even to US operators.
Iron oxide, cellulose acetate, and aluminum powder was used for the doping material.
"the total mixture might well serve as a respectable rocket propellant"
Lots of energy but not much outgassing - and that mostly from the cellulose acetate binder. Rotten rocket fuel. But a GREAT source of heat and hot particles.
Iron oxide and aluminum, once you finally get it lit (which is hard), burns to aluminum oxide and quite pure white-hot molten iron.
It has been used for such things as welding railroad rails (and by pranksters for welding trolley cars TO the rails while they're stopped to load/unload passengers). And of course for starting fires in a war setting.
Burning a thermite coating on a hydrogen-filled zepplin, in addition to removing the skin, would result in drops of molten iron falling THROUGH the internal structure, rupturing the gas bags, heating/weakening the structural members, and generally insuring that everything flammible was on fire in extremely short order.
It was a statistical tie. Of course, since this is politks and not science, we have to pretend that the result (that is way more noise than signal) is important.
If the results are close, you're still more likely to be right if you go with the one that shows the higher count than the one that shows the lower.
Further, going with the guy who got a handful MORE votes rather than the one who got a handfull LESS means you're following the rules. This is a constitutional republic, so (unlike some other countries) the rules are all we've got. This makes it very important to stick by them - because if the people running the show can deviate from any one of them with impunity, they can deviate from ANY of them. Then it becomes a rule of men rather than laws, and all bets are off.
The important thing about an election in a republic, though, is that it stabilizes the country. It does this by convincing the loser that they can't win by force what they lost in the ballot box. When the election is close that still holds true, even if the results of the count are wrong. That's because the loser needs a big majority of force to stage a successful civil war or coup (and because a lot of people who might have preferred him will change their minds and fight against him if he tries to overthrow the system.)
So a "best effort" count is adequate - as long as the people running it really do their best to get it right.
(The same would be true if Gore had "won" by a handful of votes)
But the reaction would likely have been different.
First: the press (which is heavily biased towards the D side) would have been cheering the squeaker victory rather than griping about the squeaker loss.
Second: Bush and his people (like Nixon before him) would have been unlikely to challenge the result - or at least to fight so long and bitterly.
The two parties attract people with two different styles of thinking. (This is what makes it so funny when figures on one side accuse those on the other of some wrongdoing that is characteristic of those on the accuser's side but anathema to those on the side of the accused.) Republicans attract the (sometimes pathological) rule-followers, Democrats the rule-benders. I'd expect a Republican to respect the result, not pursure recounts beyond all reason, and try again in a later election.
For those of you not familiar with it: The Nixon/Kennedy election was also very close. Kennedy won that by Illinois. And he won Illinois by less than one vote per precinct in Cook County. Cook County was the center of the regime of Mayor Richard Daily, the head of the most corrupt political machine of the time. It is virtually certain that, absent Daily's machine's vote manipulation Nixon would have won.
But Nixon refused to challenge the result, despite pushes from other prominent Republicans to do so. He claimed concern about the turmoil and damage to the citizens' faith in the country's institutions if he challenged the result - especially if his challenge succeeded. Instead he conceded the election, ran for governor of California, lost that, and retired for a while, then tried again and THIS time he won.
Remember: This is the same Richard Nixon who characterized his own no-holds-barred electoral style as "Ratf*cking", and who was later impeached over his own operatives breaking into the Democratic office in the Watergate hotel in an attempt to obtain information useful for his campaign. (Note also that, unlike Clinton, he RESIGNED after his impeachment, rather than let the country take the damage of going through the impeachment trial. Another example of the same difference in style.)
If I recall correctly Bob Barr did much the same when it appeared his seat was stolen by a mass of votes from illegal immigrants. He fought his loss in court for a short time, but threw in the towel rather than pushing it when the lower court said he didn't have enough evidence to prevail, and couldn't collect more under the laws in force. (And he's STILL out.)
If by some chance, Kerry wins the election, I predict all our critiques and cynacism will end up being used against us, as the mainstream media will suddenly ressurrect the Diebold story and use it as fodder to throw the whole election process into question, and likely land it back on the steps of the supreme court. I know that sounds like a ridulous assertion, but so was what happened last election.
They'll do that regardless of who wins. (If Bush wins they'll also get to rag on the connection between the Diebold CEO.)
And unlike the last election this one doesn't even have to be CLOSE to be claimed to be corrupted.
If you thought Florida in 2000 was a goon show, you ain't seen NOTHING yet.
Slashdot Mirror
You make an important point, but misunderstand mine. I'm not knocking the achievement, just pointing out its limits.
You gotta learn to walk before you learn run. You gotta learn to take the first step when learning to walk.
This is "One small step for a civilian, a giant leap for mankind."
This ship was designed to win the prize and nothing else. It wasn't designed to reach orbit because the terms on the prize didn't specify that. All I'm asking is that you be realistic about this, and not expect it to do things it was never intended for.
The sub-orbital, super-atmospheric shot is the logical first step for any family of spacecraft designs - including those for inexpensive reusable craft. There are three steps:
1) Getting out of the atmosphere.
2) Getting to low orbit.
3) Getting anywhere else.
2) gets you halfway to anywhere (in terms of delta-v), and gets you over the really hard part. The second half of the trip can be taken at your leisure, while the first half involves getting through an atmosphere before the one-G field sucks you back.
1) is most of the work of 2) It gets you out of the atmosphere - now all you have to do is get going FAST while you're out there.
Yes, you have to combine 2) with a modification of 1) to get to LEO (unless you went FAR out of the atmosphere with LOTS of fuel and reaction mass to spend). But once you've got a device capable of 1) it's a LOT less than doubling the engineering to upgrade it for 2).
Meanwhile: If the private space race stalls after the X prize is won, look for a Y prize. B-)
That's apart from the naturally rosy estimates of one's one programming/system admin abilities, versus a sober understanding of the full complexity of a project.
Part of the problem with estimating is that it's easy to only think about the time spent on the part you already KNOW how to do, and hard to even imagine the part you DON'T know how to do yet.
(My rule of thumb is to multiply the time I THINK it will take by three - because the part I have to learn on the way and can't visulalize now usually takes up two-thirds of the total project time.)
For example, he says, "Build one to throw away." Amen to that.
But never build TWO to throw away. If you don't learn enough from the first one to make the second one right, you'll never stop looping and deliver a product.
Development is not the letter "O". It's the letter "Q". You can loop a LITTLE, but eventually you have to deliver and move on.
Try to get it right the first time. Get it right the second.
Successful software development is like growing a perfect crystal. You're constantly diddling the additions to get the atoms lined up with no flaws. But once they're right you move on to the next layer. Build it, test it, fix it, test it again, loop till it passes, then LEAVE IT ALONE and MOVE ON.
(If you tested it as you went, the ONLY parts you'll EVER have to go back and change are the ones where you either didn't understand the spec or the spec changed.)
Since one human year equals seven dog years, couldn't we save time while keeping the team size small by hiring dogs as developers?
Yes.
But the result of such a project would be a real bitch.
Some years back [...] I noticed a (partially emptied) case of the books in the IT manager's office. ([...] He'd already passed them out to everyone on his team.)
Sounds like a good man to work for.
On the other hand, if anyone in upper management EVER starts enthusing about _Crossing the Chasm_, start your next-job hunt IMMEDIATELY and QUIT as soon as you find a good replacement! Do NOT wait for your stock options to vest (they will soon be worthless) and start unloading the ones that have already vested.
_CtC_'s central message is hidden in a line near the end of one of the last chapters. It is: "Screw the early-hires with the big option plans. Only the founders and management deserve the big bucks. The early hires were necessary at the start, but now are overpaid and a drag on the bottom line. They are compulsive drones who have no power to fight you. This action won't even hurt you NEXT time around, because they are obsessed and will be early hires again at the NEXT company. You MUST do this to make your company stable for the long term."
The net result is that the pointy-haired executives, soon after discovering this book, dump the early hires. (And even if the author HAD been right, they do it too soon.) The early hires are the ones who actually had the skills and knowlege, and applied the hard work, to make the founders' hairbrained scheme WORK. As a result they are the repository of the internal knowlege of HOW it works. By dumping them without extracting this knowlege the execs kill maintainence and follow-on, and thus doom the company - starting in a couple years.
Of course by then they've moved on, so the NEXT set of upper management inherets the collapsing house of cards. But meanwhile the people who actually implemented the product are dispersed, and their stock is worthless.
So as soon as you see this infection taking hold, liquidate, cut your losses, and move on.
I read this in college for software engineering and even on our 4-8 person projects it made sense. In the corporate world, it makes more sense, but no one really listens. The same pressures of time and budget seem to outweigh the lessons learned from Mr. Brooks.
I saw a great explanation of WHY you get less per man on a large project than a small one, and why hierarchical organization seems to be necessary on projects with large numbers of people but can be dispensed with on tiny ones.
Imagine each person as a device with four "ports" (each representing a fraction of his time and/or attention). Each "port" can be used for communicating with one other person or doing one unit of work.
On a one-person project all the ports are used for work. You get four units of work done per day.
On a two-person project each person has one port used for communicating with the other and three for doing work. You get six units of work done per day.
On a three-person (non-hierarchical) project, each person has TWO ports tied up communicating, and TWO for doing work. Again you get six units of work done per day.
On a four-person (non-hirearchical) project, each person has THREE ports tied up in communication, and only ONE left for work. Now you're down to FOUR units of work per day - same as a single hacker in a closet.
On a five-person (non-hierarchical) project, each person has all four ports tied up with communicating. Nothing gets done. B-)
Of course you can to a limited extent increase the number of "ports" by tools to improve communication, or by overtime. And some people are better at switching tasks or communicate quickly, and thus have more "ports". But the same basic idea applies.
You can go beyond a handful of people and retain some productivity by restricting the interpersonal communication paths - to keep people from using up job-time communicating with others when it's not job-related. This tends to lead to specialization, with some people only communicating. That leads to a tree organization, with the "leaves" being people who actually do some work on the code proper, communicating only with one or two neighboring leaves, and others just communicating - and deciding what messages to forward.
And of course this leads to all the classical pathologies of hierarchies: Distortion of messages by multiple hops. Much decision-making must be done in the tree (and often far from the relevant data) to prevent saturating the communication links. "Leaves" are data-starved and must follow the decisions of "non-leaf nodes" or the project becomes disorganized. So the non-leaves become authorities and run the show.
To do large projects without such explicit communication hierarchies controling the workers you need to divide it into modules done by standalone groups, plus assemblies also done by standalone groups. The standalone groups must be redundant (so that at least ONE of the groups doing each particular thing gets it to work adequately.) Then the hierarchy is still there, but in the form of the invisible hand of evolutionary/market forces: Leaf modules are adopted or rejected by the assembly-constructing group constituting the next level up the hierarchy toward the root of the overall project, assemblies are adopted or rejected by larger-assembly groups, and so on. (Of course there can ALSO be more than one root, and users of the resulting product can replace modules or assemblies with others that do the job if they car to do so.) Each group can be flat or hierarchical, according to their own leanings (and the needs of their task).
In crowd control, self defense, and effecting arrests, what you're trying to do is win ITHOUT fighting. What this means in practice is bringing a big enough threat to bear that even the dumbest cop (or mob) realizes you'll win if you use it.
Oops. Meant "crook", not "cop".
(Must have seen too many episodes of "The Shield" to get THOSE two swtiched. B-) )
UV into the eye will dump most of its energy in the lens and cornea. Cataracts minimum at air-ionization levels (Not that it matters: The lightning bolt lands microseconds later, and the eye's structure pipes it straight into the center of the brain.)
You're right, we should stick with current tasers and shoot darts in peoples eyes, followed by the shock.
The trouble with trying to invent a "phaser with a stun setting" is that, when you advertise it as such, the wielders believe you. So they use it in situations when they would never CONSIDER using lethal force.
Unfortunately, evolution does NOT favor systems that are easily incapacitated, leaving the body helpless before an attacker. Thus essentially any level of disruption that can quickly incapacitate a human will be only a small percentage below the force necessary to kill him. Given the variations between individuals, and the variations in how the force is applied in the field, SOME of those "stunned" WILL be killed.
One of the contemplated uses of this hypothetical weapon is crowd control. Given its nature, the obvious way to do that is to use it to "mow them down". Such an attack would be likely to kill some of the people in a crowd of any size large enough to provoke the action - either directly or through suffocation in the resulting pile of bodies.
But "spraying" the crowd would almost certainly mean aiming between shoulder and crotch level. This means that if there are children in the crowd, a significant fraction are likely to be hit in the eyes - with a very high risk of death as a result.
So if some authority decides to use it on a crowd they'd BETTER have the whole crowd in a box before they wake up. Otherwise the damage the crowd was causing before they were shot would be NOTHING compared to what they'd do after they come to and discover the dead kids.
Similar concerns exist for other situations. For instance, consider giving them to a pilot for shooting suspected terrorists: Not only is it more likely to be used on drunks, but a shot at someone standing in the asile is at about the right level to hit the seated passengers in the eyes or heads.
Military and civilian planners are now referring to devices like this as "LESS lethal" rather than "NON lethal" weapons. This is to keep the people in the field aware that, though they're "kinder and gentler" deadly force, they're still deadly force. So they must not be used indiscriminately, but only in situations where killing the person on the receiving end is justified.
Meanwhile, they have another downside: They are LESS intimidating to the people at whom they're pointed. Where the threat from a gun is likely to bring a sudden decision to cease attacking (and either surrender or run), the threat from a "stunner" is more likely to just make the attacker(s) mad(der).
Sun Tsu had it right: In crowd control, self defense, and effecting arrests, what you're trying to do is win WITHOUT fighting. What this means in practice is bringing a big enough threat to bear that even the dumbest cop (or mob) realizes you'll win if you use it. Once that occurs you get your way without having to USE it. Thus the threat of a gun that almost NEVER has to be fired is a LOT better than the use of a sometimes-deadly "stunner" that almost ALWAYS has to be fired.
You would STILL need heavy busbars with 12VAC, for the same reason you would need them with low voltage DC--VOLTAGE DROP.
Also: Heating. It's the CURRENT that heats the wire. The limit on wire size in a wall is keeping the heat down enough that it doesn't set the walls on fire.
Your house is wired with #14 for 15A circuits, #12 for 20A, #10 for 30A.
At 120 volts a puny 15 amp circuit can provide 1650 watts, enough to run a space heater with leftovers for a couple 75 watt bulbs, or all the lights in several rooms. 20A will feed several motorized appliances or your whole computer room. A dual 30A feed easily handles an electric stove and oven, or an electric drier.
At 12 volts a 20A feed would be maxed out by four 60 watt desk lamps or a couple 100 watt ceiling lamps. (Forget the toaster.)
Yes, you'd need bussbar. Every 12V circuit would require TEN TIMES the amount of copper as a 120V circuit to provide the same amount of energy with the same percentage of it heating the walls.
That goes for the line cords, too.
Nobody except liberals consider 'the annual energy costs of the USA'. People do (and should) consider THEIR annual energy costs. [...] The USA is not the Borg, and no country should be.
Bravo.
Pointing out the "central planning" aspect of the press release highlights its futility.
If the central planners had been thinking more clearly, they'd have been lobbying for power-supply efficiency labeling, ala the energy-usage labels on major appliances such as furnaces, water heaters, refrigerators, and the like.
(Disclosure to the individual purchasers of the information necessary to make informed choices, in a standardized format, puts the market forces to work constructively for all concerned. It's an intervention that even minarchists can often find it in their hearts and ideologies to forgive. B-) And a case where even an inadequate standard can be better than none.)
But of course the liberals don't think that way...
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Having already commented elsewhere in this thread, and reviewed your recent postings on other topics (which often bring up insights others have missed), I've decided to mod you "friend" for a while. B-) (Let's debate Godwin's Law some time. IMHO it's all too convenient for neo-NAZIs.)
Some large buildings have very large flouresent ballasts in the basement (or where-ever) because they can more effectively provide that power as a large unit rather than hundreds of small units.
What if the same idea where applied to computers. Right next to the standard wall outlet would be a world standardized jack with six or eight pins for each of the required voltages.
Computer supply voltages are VERY LOW - and trending lower. That means, for a given amount of power, their currents are VERY HIGH. Losses in wiring (for a given size of wire) go up with the SQUARE of the current.
The result is that you'd need to wire such outlets with fat copper bars, rather than "wire", to avoid losing far more in the wiring than you'd gain in the improved power supply in the basement.
Computer requirements (especially voltages) are rapidly changing, the voltages have to be well regulated (meaning you need regulation after the outlet anyhow), and a lose connection interrupting one of the set of voltages can be big trouble. So you're stuck with power supplies in the box.
(Indeed, makers of some high-reliability networking devices, including the company where I work, put a set of power supplies on EACH CARD, rather than depending on a redundant pair in the box to power all the cards.)
Switching supplies can approach 90% efficiency if they are carefully built.
A downside of high efficiency is that the energy lost to heating is a tiny fraction of the energy handled. When certain components start to fail they can increase their losses - and this increases the heating. The higher the overall efficiency, the greater the extra heating is as a percentage of the NORMAL heating.
If this is not taken into account in the design of the supply (and its cooling budget), the supply may be prone to thermal runaway and catastrophic failures as components age.
[wallwarts with the load unplugged] are still converting even though it's more efficient than normal since there is smaller load.
Actually, they're LESS efficient than normal. With no load, ALL the power they consume is wasted - efficience is 0%. B-)
Now the total AMOUNT of waste IS typically lower. But it's not trivial. Even the lowest tech wallwart burns power heating copper in the transformer and making up leakage in the capacitors. If it has a switching regulator it's also burning a bunch of power keeping that alive. And a voltage-flattening/capacitor-discharging resistor actually INCREASES the amount of power wasted in the wart when the load is gone (by eating some of the power that WOULD have gone into the load).
So why waste ANY by leaving the wart plugged in?
You can guesstimate the power by feeling the wart when it's been sitting there with no load for a while. The hotter, the more waste.
The gadget apparently uses a pulsed solid-state UV laser to ionize a channel in the air between the shooter and the target
And what does a UV laser pulse capable of ionizing AIR do when it hits SKIN? Or an EYE? Just burn it? Or cause it to explode?
UV into the eye will dump most of its energy in the lens and cornea. Cataracts minimum at air-ionization levels (Not that it matters: The lightning bolt lands microseconds later, and the eye's structure pipes it straight into the center of the brain.)
Interestingly, at high enough intensities laser pulses like that can be self-focusing
Self focusing requires an energy level SO high that the tiny fraction of the energy dumped into the air heats it enough to reduce its refractive index (i.e. literally blasts the air molecules out of the beam at extreme velocities). That's definitely in the "skin/cornea/lens explodes violently" range.
I am more afraid that MSFT will purposefully allow holes to exist in its OS so that more and more people will buy their AV software. Perhaps that's a bit paranoid but I certainly wouldn't put it past them.
Remember the hidden interface hooks that Microsoft used to make their products run better than their competitors'?
Just think how much Microsoft's anti-virus product would outdo their competitors's offerings if Microsoft inserted secret security holes in the OS and the fixes in their AV at the same time.
Users of Microsoft's AV product would never get bit, while the competitors would have to wait until somebody got worms, develop a signature, and distribute it during the height of the infestatin.
And if THAT isn't enough to swat 'em down, Microsoft's AV division (or a rogue within it) could quietly start releasing exploits into the wild from time to time, to make the competitors look even worse.
The upside (from the Linux/Unix/Apple/etc side) is that eliminating the Micrsoft-related external AV market (either through honest competition OR pereditory tactics like those above) reduces the security level of Microsoft's OS product to about the "apply all the latest patches" level. They've already proven incompetent to keep that level safe without external help. So that could encourage the migration away from their swiss-cheesey products.
And the beauty of this is that the corporate politics of the existance of an AV software product group encourage it to cannibalize the rest of the company in order to show a profit. Microsoft creates their own cace of cancer.
why? oh why? WHY!? Is there enough time to put something in the "from the 'x' dept" underneath the title, but no time to look on the right or SCROLL DOWN! and see the original story?
He probably missed it because the previous story was under "security" and this one under "handhelds".
Oh, now I have to provide "sufficient evidence" that I'm not guilty? Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Shouldn't the burden of proof be on their side?
Basically, the bully is going to try to be a little nicer.
Yep, that's what it sounds like.
How about sending this in reply:
Here it comes, SMS spam offering downloadable anti-virus software!
The first email spam I got - 'WAY back when - was an offer selling bulk mailing software and an address list.
"Oh, oh!" thought I. "Here comes the junkmail!"
(THAT was the understatement of the digital age, wasn't it? B-( )
Excerpt:There was a hack to get the phone to talk through a speaker on the rear ("backtalkin'") rather than the one on the side.
It appears that the feature has been removed from the new model, which is what the linked site is lamenting.
Here is my question... what ever happen to just backing things up?
Disks got big and cheap. External backup media didn't keep up. Nowdays it's cheaper to keep the backup data on a spare disk than on some other removable medium.
But if you're going to put it on a spare disk, why not just leave the disk spinning and hotwire it into the control software so your data is ALWAYS backed up? That eliminates the separate backup step - along with the reprocessing of post-backup changes in case of hardware failure. (Not to mention reducing the likelyhood of a failed backup process being detected only when a restore is needed.) It also gives you the opportunity for speedups, for instance by doing reads simultaneously on multiple disks.
Once you're weaned from a separate device type for the backup medium, there are a number of ways to go:
- Want a removable snapshot for offline/offsite storage? Set up a Raid 1 (mirror) with a removable disk. Plug in and bring up the disk, and the raid system brings it up-to-date as a clone of the live one. Then take it OFFLINE at your snapshot point and remove it for storage or transport. (You can set up Raid 1 with more than two copies - so you don't lose your live spare by pulling the backup disk.)
- Hotwire archiving snapshots into the fileserver software. (Those snapsonts can be available online simultaneously with the live data for recovery of file-change oopsies, and provide a stable image to be backed up to offline/remote/removable storage at leisure.)
- Some raid levels give you added failure protection and reduced disk count by computing and storing ECC or parity rather than full copies.
(I could go on.)
First off, did you even read any of the damn press coverage over the election scandal, or are you just parroting the party line?
Why, yes, I DID follow the coverage.
Second, the vote totals were within 200 (GWB on top) when the rererecounting was over. However, there were more than 500 votes that were counted that were later found to be illegal (military absentee) votes.
The military absentee votes were NOT illegal. The State law requires the postmark, but the Federal law overrides State law, requiring the votes to be counted.
It happens that the military sometimes choses not to postmark and sometimes choses to postmark at a common facility in the states considerably after the letter is posted. (This may be for their convenience, for security {to hide troop movements}, or just because it's "the military way.) When the military choses to do this, the State is stuck and must count the votes.
It was obvious who they were voting for, of course. But they were still illegal. All of the Democrats' obvious-but-illegal votes were denied, and 500 illegal-but-obvious Republican votes were counted.
And that's not even to mention the literally thousands of voters who were denied voting rights because of fictitious prison records.
Any voters who were purged due to the felon cleanout were notified in plenty of time to correct the matter.
Incidentally, a considerable number of felons were NOT detected in time to be excluded. And THEY were overwhelmingly registered as Democrats. B-)
Even though it's the second most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen, helium is fairly scarce on earth. The majority that we get comes from extraction from natural gas.
And (at one point) from a set of wells in texas that produced nearly pure Helium. Helium concentration varies from deposit to deposit.
In the period between WW I and WW II, essentially the only sources of bulk helium were wells in the US south, plus a little in Russia. Due to its usefulness in barrage balloons during WW I, the US considered the supply a strategic weapons material and monopolized the US supply (under the administration of the Navy, which was also in charge of the US Zepplin program).
The US would not allow Germany to have any - which is why the Zepplins were hydrogen-filled. (Indeed, that policy was STILL in force during the '60s, which was the last time I looked. I think it got relaxed in the last decade or two.)
After the Hindenberg's flameoff was blamed on Hydrogen, with Helium unavailable, nobody was interested in paying for a flight in a Zepplin when there were perfectly good steamships.
So the industry went down, not JUST from the misattribution of the problem to Hydrogen, but ALSO to the US government's refusal to release Hydrogen for commercial air flight - even to US operators.
Iron oxide, cellulose acetate, and aluminum powder was used for the doping material.
"the total mixture might well serve as a respectable rocket propellant"
Lots of energy but not much outgassing - and that mostly from the cellulose acetate binder. Rotten rocket fuel. But a GREAT source of heat and hot particles.
Iron oxide and aluminum, once you finally get it lit (which is hard), burns to aluminum oxide and quite pure white-hot molten iron.
It has been used for such things as welding railroad rails (and by pranksters for welding trolley cars TO the rails while they're stopped to load/unload passengers). And of course for starting fires in a war setting.
Burning a thermite coating on a hydrogen-filled zepplin, in addition to removing the skin, would result in drops of molten iron falling THROUGH the internal structure, rupturing the gas bags, heating/weakening the structural members, and generally insuring that everything flammible was on fire in extremely short order.
But you've seen the film.
It was a statistical tie. Of course, since this is politks and not science, we have to pretend that the result (that is way more noise than signal) is important.
If the results are close, you're still more likely to be right if you go with the one that shows the higher count than the one that shows the lower.
Further, going with the guy who got a handful MORE votes rather than the one who got a handfull LESS means you're following the rules. This is a constitutional republic, so (unlike some other countries) the rules are all we've got. This makes it very important to stick by them - because if the people running the show can deviate from any one of them with impunity, they can deviate from ANY of them. Then it becomes a rule of men rather than laws, and all bets are off.
The important thing about an election in a republic, though, is that it stabilizes the country. It does this by convincing the loser that they can't win by force what they lost in the ballot box. When the election is close that still holds true, even if the results of the count are wrong. That's because the loser needs a big majority of force to stage a successful civil war or coup (and because a lot of people who might have preferred him will change their minds and fight against him if he tries to overthrow the system.)
So a "best effort" count is adequate - as long as the people running it really do their best to get it right.
(The same would be true if Gore had "won" by a handful of votes)
But the reaction would likely have been different.
First: the press (which is heavily biased towards the D side) would have been cheering the squeaker victory rather than griping about the squeaker loss.
Second: Bush and his people (like Nixon before him) would have been unlikely to challenge the result - or at least to fight so long and bitterly.
The two parties attract people with two different styles of thinking. (This is what makes it so funny when figures on one side accuse those on the other of some wrongdoing that is characteristic of those on the accuser's side but anathema to those on the side of the accused.) Republicans attract the (sometimes pathological) rule-followers, Democrats the rule-benders. I'd expect a Republican to respect the result, not pursure recounts beyond all reason, and try again in a later election.
For those of you not familiar with it: The Nixon/Kennedy election was also very close. Kennedy won that by Illinois. And he won Illinois by less than one vote per precinct in Cook County. Cook County was the center of the regime of Mayor Richard Daily, the head of the most corrupt political machine of the time. It is virtually certain that, absent Daily's machine's vote manipulation Nixon would have won.
But Nixon refused to challenge the result, despite pushes from other prominent Republicans to do so. He claimed concern about the turmoil and damage to the citizens' faith in the country's institutions if he challenged the result - especially if his challenge succeeded. Instead he conceded the election, ran for governor of California, lost that, and retired for a while, then tried again and THIS time he won.
Remember: This is the same Richard Nixon who characterized his own no-holds-barred electoral style as "Ratf*cking", and who was later impeached over his own operatives breaking into the Democratic office in the Watergate hotel in an attempt to obtain information useful for his campaign. (Note also that, unlike Clinton, he RESIGNED after his impeachment, rather than let the country take the damage of going through the impeachment trial. Another example of the same difference in style.)
If I recall correctly Bob Barr did much the same when it appeared his seat was stolen by a mass of votes from illegal immigrants. He fought his loss in court for a short time, but threw in the towel rather than pushing it when the lower court said he didn't have enough evidence to prevail, and couldn't collect more under the laws in force. (And he's STILL out.)
If by some chance, Kerry wins the election, I predict all our critiques and cynacism will end up being used against us, as the mainstream media will suddenly ressurrect the Diebold story and use it as fodder to throw the whole election process into question, and likely land it back on the steps of the supreme court. I know that sounds like a ridulous assertion, but so was what happened last election.
They'll do that regardless of who wins. (If Bush wins they'll also get to rag on the connection between the Diebold CEO.)
And unlike the last election this one doesn't even have to be CLOSE to be claimed to be corrupted.
If you thought Florida in 2000 was a goon show, you ain't seen NOTHING yet.