Not at all. I am a college student in Washington DC where I study, eat, drink, and breath politics. There are some means of corruption that are beyond even politicians, however. What if the fake flash card were discovered after the voting? This is not nearly sneaky enough. Personally it seems like engineers testing the machine forgot to remove the testing interface.
In 2000 the problem came because the candidates were so close in votes. Although it was a huge mess, it is hardly a sign that the United States is becoming an dictatorship. The success of the 2004 election shows that the voting system is not broken. I still believe that the proven 90 year old technology of lever voting works best, I do not foresee Diebold attempting to steal votes.
I just think that they need to learn what the heck they're doing. I get the feeling that they are rushing these devices to market without the proper years of testing. Lever machines on the other hand have had over 80 years to get it right. This is the latest fraud report I could dig up specific to lever machines.
Oh, and I have read that quote many times before. Some rich guy telling his buddies that he wants to help his party is different from vote rigging. Think about it; would you have made that statement if you were trying to commit fraud? If I had his job and were trying to defraud voters I would have donated $2000 (maximum donation) to Kerry and joined MoveOn.org. When you read this, remember the GP. I do not think electronic voting is the best option but I do not believe that there is a massive conspiracy out there to get us.
I am pleasently surprised that my Toshiba integrated wireless card works out of the box, but I do not want to change the encryption settings that my whole family uses because it doesn't have an easy GUI WPA dialog. Anyway, I wish that I had the time to learn Linux now days.
"you neglect to account for the possible neccesity of such a vehicle, perhaps this many has a large family and a boat which he frequently tows?"
Towing your family? That, good sir, is utterly barbaric! Won't someone please think of the children?!? With an SUV that big, there should never arise an occassion where it becomes necesary to tow your family behind you! I am outraged!
How do all of the other devices made by this company still work? They are not just a voting technology firm, after all.
I attribute most of these errors to poor design, not anything intentional. Personally I like the old fashioned lever machines my district uses. It is very hard to hack those, I hear. Unlike computers and paper cards, you never hear bad things spoken about lever voting machines.
I agree. Sound is commonly overlooked in these productions. In real productions, there is a camera man and a sound guy. Even on Dirty Jobs, there is a man with a microphone chasing the host through slimy sewers and such. I think if these volunteer producers were to learn more about sound they would be able to fix most of their problems. I had the chance to record in Gary Frey's studio in Chicagoland and realized that not all sound studios have to be professionally built with six figure budgets. You can use items from around the house to dampen sound. Make sure that there are no parallel surfaces and buy a nice mic. Some film makers would spend $2000 on a camera but would never think of buying a $100+ mic.
I think this way of thinking became firmly planted with the creation of Linux live CDs. I can order a free Ubuntu CD and drop it in my Toshiba laptop to play with this OS. I consider myself a geek, but prefer to spend my geek time coding Java rather than learned obtuse Linux commands. Another possible cause of this shift in mindframe is the fact that Linux suddenly had the opportunity to earn some more market share instead of holding steady in its obscure niche. Companies took advantage of this and made it more approachable.
I do not think that being able to use the command line to connect to an excrypted wireless network is a requirement for being a geek (it doesn't hurt, though). There are loads of people who are savvy with computers but who do not want to learn loads of commands in order to test Linux. For the record I was very impressed with Ubuntu.
Americans reading this story and thread need to remember that the laws are different in different countries. Because something happens in London does not always mean that it would fly in the States.
Still, Sky Captain's graphics bothered me a lot less than Star Wars Episode 3. Maybe it is the fact that green screen movies are more consistent. Having an actor dressed as a robot standing next to a computer generated robot designed to look like him just irritates me.
Every time I call Verizon to report a DSL outage, their on-hold music is suddenly interupted with a recorded message telling me that I can save a lot of time by reporting this outage on their website. [smacks forehead]
This has the most potential of any story I've read on/. in a while. Like many geeks, I was terribley disapointed by the three prequels. One of my bigger complaints is the heavy handed use of digital effects. Considering this film's budget, I doubt that that will be a problem.
I think this thread needs some data. I would like to see more cites from experts in the field regarding your statements. It is worth reading my comment here that I just posted.
My NAZI comment was directed at your slippery slope argument. There have been unethical experiements in the past, but they hardly bring us to being NAZIs. Milgram's Obedience was specifically designed to model NAZI behavior, but it did not take us down a slippery slope. There is a reason that Godwin's Law exists, after all.
What alternative do you propose? If you read the data, 11 patients of what will ultimately become the 600 patient study group have already refused to be a part of the study in the hospital. When they are able, patients are explained everything and given a choice. People who want to be excluded can pick up free bracelets. Thousands of these bracelets have been distributed.
You fail to realize that this is a clinical trial both in the hospital and in the field. It is a randomized sample between different treatments. The FDA has not yet officially approved the drug for use in more than a few hundred patients. They have not yet officially said that it works better than than saline, either. This is a test to see if all of the data gathered over the past years that says PolyHeme works for trauma patients is true in the field. Thus far it has been. When field trials start accumulating bad results they are quickly cancelled.
Considering the fact that they have already tested this on healthy adults and consenting hospital patients during the first two phases of clinical trials, what do you propose they do in order to determine efficacy in the hospital setting? Shock needs to be treated in the Golden Hour and that is when Polyheme works the best. Stopping Polyheme treatment until the patient is alert and oriented (assuming he doesn't die anyway even with "real" blood or end up in a coma) or waiting for next of kin to show up will prevent data gathering during this golden hour. What has been done in the past is approving a substance at this point and using it in the field without real life scenarios. The three possibilities are FDA rejection, FDA approval without these trials, or waiting to see the outcome of the trials then deciding on approval.
Imagine hospitals never running out of blood. That would be truly amazing. When it passes its trials this product will revolutionize emergency medicine. Every one of these news items shows why we need this in our hospitals now. Currently 20% of trauma patients die from their injuries. By carrying this on Advanced Life Support units they can reduce that horrible mortality.
On an aside, I am surprised that politicians are not speaking out in favor of Polyheme. It could help lower the murder rate. Maybe it's just because I'm in the Philly area and it has a horrible murder rate, but improved EMS keeps more people alive and makes the statistics look better.
I am actually an EMT. I am also a college student studying public policy and Emergency Health Services. I personally do not like doctors all that much, but I realize that our emergency medical system is based around their expert opinions.
The distinction that I am drawing is that PolyHeme is in Phase III clinical trials, whereas the aforementioned drug failed much much earlier. PolyHeme has already been shown to be safe; now they need to know if it is effective.
My point in indicating the difference in country is that FDA regulations have no bearing whatsoever in England. If you notice, that drug never made it across the pond for testing.
Straight from the FDA, here is the difference in the three stages of clinical trials: Most clinical trials are designated as phase I, II, or III, based on the type of questions that study is seeking to answer:
In Phase I clinical trials, researchers test a new drug or treatment in a small group of people (20-80) for the first time to evaluate its safety, determine a safe dosage range, and identify side effects.
In Phase II clinical trials, the study drug or treatment is given to a larger group of people (100-300) to see if it is effective and to further evaluate its safety.
In Phase III studies, the study drug or treatment is given to large groups of people (1,000-3,000) to confirm its effectiveness, monitor side effects, compare it to commonly used treatments, and collect information that will allow the drug or treatment to be used safely.
The alternative to this study would be to run a larger test on the exact same groups they used for the past two trials: healthy consenting adults. The drug would pass the test again and would be utilized by thousands of medics across the country without ever having been tested in real trauma patients in a real trauma enviroment. Instead of 600 people being put at risk, everyone in America would face that same risk that you mention. Historically there have been EMS practices applied without being tested and it sometimes takes years to figure it out.
Here is a great quote from another emergency worker at the EMT City forums about this issue: What are we left with without doing studies this way? Guesswork. Guesswork that brought us high-dose epi, isoproteronol, MAST trousers, and other debunked practices since nobody tested them on the population they were designed to help before cutting them loose on the street. Widespread use of unproven science will result in far more harm to far more people than a study population.
From TFA: Some significant caveats mean that not everyone is so keen on the technology. For a start, it's a specification from Coraid, not an industry standard. Its networking abilities are limited. And its detractors include storage heavyweights such as Hewlett-Packard and Network Appliance.
So will this ever develop into a real standard or will it remain the sole domain of one company? I do not know if I want to invest time and money into it if the latter is true. From a comp sci point of view this is a great approach to networked storage. It uses what people already have to make storage reletively cheap. I am going to wait to see where this technology goes. Maybe it will blossom and become a serious contender.
What does it cost to clean up after a meth lab explodes and destroys a city block? More importantly, what is the value of a human life? Addiction destroys the lives of its users and those close to them. I know a guy serving many years in prison for what happened when a drug deal went bad. Now his life and the life of the deceased party are both gone because of drugs. I was never close to him but I know that he had great potential.
You all seem to be forgetting the fact that ephedra was practically banned a few years back, so getting it is much harder than it used to be.
That is the problem. WEP has a great gui, but WPA apparently takes some digging. WPA is easier to use on most of my electronic devices, and I wish it were that way on Ubuntu. It would be nice to use Linux for general web browsing in order to avoid spyware and such.
Is it just me or does Ubuntu not support WPA? Hell, even my Palm Lifedrive supports that!
Anyway, I am glad that people are realizing that this business model can work. Many current companies seem to be kept afloat through high prices and huge amounts of advirtising on every surface possible. Think of the money they could make if the back of every install CD package had a color ad for Bawls. Ubuntu deserves a big tip of the hat.
You're missing the point: these projets are taking funding away from America's amateurjets in a vital time.
In all seriousness, however, $100 million really is not an impossible budget shortfall, considering how overbudget the projet already is. Maybe NASA decided that they needed to trim some of their budgets to gain a little more support. I believe that it is better to devote resources to building the thing now. The half-assed research that we can conduct will pale in comparison to what we will be able to do after completion. Other countries are free to experiement there, and I say let them use it now.
These space station supply missions are not like tubes, after all, they are like trucks! That is unless KG eventually finishes his tube transportation system. (Whoo-hoo, two layer allusion!)
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. I am a college student in Washington DC where I study, eat, drink, and breath politics. There are some means of corruption that are beyond even politicians, however. What if the fake flash card were discovered after the voting? This is not nearly sneaky enough. Personally it seems like engineers testing the machine forgot to remove the testing interface.
The real question: how long can I browse /. from work before my bosses figure out!
In 2000 the problem came because the candidates were so close in votes. Although it was a huge mess, it is hardly a sign that the United States is becoming an dictatorship. The success of the 2004 election shows that the voting system is not broken. I still believe that the proven 90 year old technology of lever voting works best, I do not foresee Diebold attempting to steal votes.
Oh, and I have read that quote many times before. Some rich guy telling his buddies that he wants to help his party is different from vote rigging. Think about it; would you have made that statement if you were trying to commit fraud? If I had his job and were trying to defraud voters I would have donated $2000 (maximum donation) to Kerry and joined MoveOn.org. When you read this, remember the GP. I do not think electronic voting is the best option but I do not believe that there is a massive conspiracy out there to get us.
I am pleasently surprised that my Toshiba integrated wireless card works out of the box, but I do not want to change the encryption settings that my whole family uses because it doesn't have an easy GUI WPA dialog. Anyway, I wish that I had the time to learn Linux now days.
Towing your family? That, good sir, is utterly barbaric! Won't someone please think of the children?!? With an SUV that big, there should never arise an occassion where it becomes necesary to tow your family behind you! I am outraged!
Face it, these are never going away.
I attribute most of these errors to poor design, not anything intentional. Personally I like the old fashioned lever machines my district uses. It is very hard to hack those, I hear. Unlike computers and paper cards, you never hear bad things spoken about lever voting machines.
I agree. Sound is commonly overlooked in these productions. In real productions, there is a camera man and a sound guy. Even on Dirty Jobs, there is a man with a microphone chasing the host through slimy sewers and such. I think if these volunteer producers were to learn more about sound they would be able to fix most of their problems. I had the chance to record in Gary Frey's studio in Chicagoland and realized that not all sound studios have to be professionally built with six figure budgets. You can use items from around the house to dampen sound. Make sure that there are no parallel surfaces and buy a nice mic. Some film makers would spend $2000 on a camera but would never think of buying a $100+ mic.
No one wants to serve 10-15 for serving 10-15 in your mother.
I do not think that being able to use the command line to connect to an excrypted wireless network is a requirement for being a geek (it doesn't hurt, though). There are loads of people who are savvy with computers but who do not want to learn loads of commands in order to test Linux. For the record I was very impressed with Ubuntu.
Americans reading this story and thread need to remember that the laws are different in different countries. Because something happens in London does not always mean that it would fly in the States.
Found it!
Still, Sky Captain's graphics bothered me a lot less than Star Wars Episode 3. Maybe it is the fact that green screen movies are more consistent. Having an actor dressed as a robot standing next to a computer generated robot designed to look like him just irritates me.
Every time I call Verizon to report a DSL outage, their on-hold music is suddenly interupted with a recorded message telling me that I can save a lot of time by reporting this outage on their website. [smacks forehead]
This has the most potential of any story I've read on /. in a while. Like many geeks, I was terribley disapointed by the three prequels. One of my bigger complaints is the heavy handed use of digital effects. Considering this film's budget, I doubt that that will be a problem.
My NAZI comment was directed at your slippery slope argument. There have been unethical experiements in the past, but they hardly bring us to being NAZIs. Milgram's Obedience was specifically designed to model NAZI behavior, but it did not take us down a slippery slope. There is a reason that Godwin's Law exists, after all.
What alternative do you propose? If you read the data, 11 patients of what will ultimately become the 600 patient study group have already refused to be a part of the study in the hospital. When they are able, patients are explained everything and given a choice. People who want to be excluded can pick up free bracelets. Thousands of these bracelets have been distributed.
You fail to realize that this is a clinical trial both in the hospital and in the field. It is a randomized sample between different treatments. The FDA has not yet officially approved the drug for use in more than a few hundred patients. They have not yet officially said that it works better than than saline, either. This is a test to see if all of the data gathered over the past years that says PolyHeme works for trauma patients is true in the field. Thus far it has been. When field trials start accumulating bad results they are quickly cancelled.
Considering the fact that they have already tested this on healthy adults and consenting hospital patients during the first two phases of clinical trials, what do you propose they do in order to determine efficacy in the hospital setting? Shock needs to be treated in the Golden Hour and that is when Polyheme works the best. Stopping Polyheme treatment until the patient is alert and oriented (assuming he doesn't die anyway even with "real" blood or end up in a coma) or waiting for next of kin to show up will prevent data gathering during this golden hour. What has been done in the past is approving a substance at this point and using it in the field without real life scenarios. The three possibilities are FDA rejection, FDA approval without these trials, or waiting to see the outcome of the trials then deciding on approval.
Imagine hospitals never running out of blood. That would be truly amazing. When it passes its trials this product will revolutionize emergency medicine. Every one of these news items shows why we need this in our hospitals now. Currently 20% of trauma patients die from their injuries. By carrying this on Advanced Life Support units they can reduce that horrible mortality.
On an aside, I am surprised that politicians are not speaking out in favor of Polyheme. It could help lower the murder rate. Maybe it's just because I'm in the Philly area and it has a horrible murder rate, but improved EMS keeps more people alive and makes the statistics look better.
The distinction that I am drawing is that PolyHeme is in Phase III clinical trials, whereas the aforementioned drug failed much much earlier. PolyHeme has already been shown to be safe; now they need to know if it is effective.
My point in indicating the difference in country is that FDA regulations have no bearing whatsoever in England. If you notice, that drug never made it across the pond for testing.
Straight from the FDA, here is the difference in the three stages of clinical trials:
Most clinical trials are designated as phase I, II, or III, based on the type of questions that study is seeking to answer:
The alternative to this study would be to run a larger test on the exact same groups they used for the past two trials: healthy consenting adults. The drug would pass the test again and would be utilized by thousands of medics across the country without ever having been tested in real trauma patients in a real trauma enviroment. Instead of 600 people being put at risk, everyone in America would face that same risk that you mention. Historically there have been EMS practices applied without being tested and it sometimes takes years to figure it out.
Here is a great quote from another emergency worker at the EMT City forums about this issue: What are we left with without doing studies this way? Guesswork. Guesswork that brought us high-dose epi, isoproteronol, MAST trousers, and other debunked practices since nobody tested them on the population they were designed to help before cutting them loose on the street. Widespread use of unproven science will result in far more harm to far more people than a study population.
Some significant caveats mean that not everyone is so keen on the technology. For a start, it's a specification from Coraid, not an industry standard. Its networking abilities are limited. And its detractors include storage heavyweights such as Hewlett-Packard and Network Appliance.
So will this ever develop into a real standard or will it remain the sole domain of one company? I do not know if I want to invest time and money into it if the latter is true. From a comp sci point of view this is a great approach to networked storage. It uses what people already have to make storage reletively cheap. I am going to wait to see where this technology goes. Maybe it will blossom and become a serious contender.
You all seem to be forgetting the fact that ephedra was practically banned a few years back, so getting it is much harder than it used to be.
That is the problem. WEP has a great gui, but WPA apparently takes some digging. WPA is easier to use on most of my electronic devices, and I wish it were that way on Ubuntu. It would be nice to use Linux for general web browsing in order to avoid spyware and such.
Anyway, I am glad that people are realizing that this business model can work. Many current companies seem to be kept afloat through high prices and huge amounts of advirtising on every surface possible. Think of the money they could make if the back of every install CD package had a color ad for Bawls. Ubuntu deserves a big tip of the hat.
In all seriousness, however, $100 million really is not an impossible budget shortfall, considering how overbudget the projet already is. Maybe NASA decided that they needed to trim some of their budgets to gain a little more support. I believe that it is better to devote resources to building the thing now. The half-assed research that we can conduct will pale in comparison to what we will be able to do after completion. Other countries are free to experiement there, and I say let them use it now.
These space station supply missions are not like tubes, after all, they are like trucks! That is unless KG eventually finishes his tube transportation system. (Whoo-hoo, two layer allusion!)
Before you know it I am going to start getting approached by high schoolers asking if I could buy them some glue.
I'll take mine iced... oh wait.