Ah, finally, a story where all those 'imagine a Beowulf cluster of...' comments actually would be ON TOPIC! Naturally that means there won't be that many, other than comments such as this one that is commenting on such comments...a meta-comment about Beowulf clusters. Speaking of which, can you imagine a meta-cluster...oh never mind...
It's like asking computer programmers if they think the Star Wars missle defense system can work any time soon. They will think about the complexities involved, realize how hard it will be to do realisitc testing scenarios, count the millions of lines of code that will be required, and answer unhesitatingly, "No way, dude." They KNOW better. They've been there, done that on critical systems that were way less complicated, and they know that failing to shoot down missles from the sky is several levels of magnitude worse than any type of critical bug they've had to deal with.
Meanwhile the general public thinks, "Wow, cool, the miltary can zap missles!"
So too with evoting. We here at/. are well versed in the issues. We've seen a few mainstream news stories about it recently, but mostly it's been the geeks saying, "Whoa, this is terrible stuff!" The general public thinks, "Hmm...just like an ATM, great," without thinking about the implications of no paper trail, unauthorized tampering, uh, maybe authorized tampering, and various chilling comments from CEOs of evoting companies.
The general public will catch on that Star Wars anti-missle technology doesn't yet work when the first bomb reaches their home. Oops. But the general public won't ever catch on about evoting problems unless the media publicizes it much more than they have been doing. After all, if a bomb gets through a shield, it can ruin your whole day. If an election is bought, it's 50-50 that John or Jane Q. Public wanted that candidate anyway and thinks nothing of it.
Absolutely true. I once had a programming job for a company running a 24x7 operation with offices around the world. Believe me, I got sick of getting midnight phone calls from Singapore because something had gone wrong with the app and users were clamoring for access. Once I left that job, I have never again had that level of forced connectiveness, and brother, you have no idea how relieved I have been ever since.
There are, of course, people who need to be on-call at all times, and I don't argue that point. But I see far too many middle managers tethered to their email 24 hours a day. Sorry PHB, but if you cannot do your job during normal working hours, you are not working efficiently. And yes, I say this as someone who leaves his cell phone back in the office when I go out for lunch, who doesn't even bother bringing it to the movie theater, who doesn't check work email from home in most cases. Guess what? I get my work done just fine, and am plenty responsive when I need to be. I'm not in a 24x7 operation, and nobody's life depends on me, so it's cool.
Either manage your time or your time will manage you.
So what do geeks do on a Friday night? They discuss extending bluetooth ranges in experiments and speculate on all the ways it could be used, both useful and silly. Now if they could just figure out a way to use bluetooth to get dates...
I use a Palm Tungsten T3 to read ebooks, using iSilo software with extra system fonts. Here are my results:
1) VERY SMOOTH scrolling with no blurs, no matter how complicated the diagrams. -- iSilo has this, very smooth indeed.
2) The ability to control the content with just your hands - no keyboard, mouse or touchpad - you should be able to hold it like a book and read it - maybe a tap on the lower right corner to advance to the next page and on the lower left corner to go to the previous page. -- Your choice of mechanism in iSilo. I use the hardware Down button on the T3, and I programmed the other hardware buttons too. So I can go to the next page with one click of my thumb, and go to the previous or next line (scroll one line's worth) with the other buttons.
3) Eliminate the need to sit facing a vertical screen. -- Yup, carry it with you, read it in bed, and the T3 lets you flip the screen to read horizontally, if you prefer.
4) Minimize the dialogs. A book doesn't ask you if you want to save the file. -- How about flipping it closed to have it automatically turn off while remembering where you were in the book? Simple enough?
5) Make the text search work through voice recognition. -- That's not here, I admit. Not sure I would want that while I'm commuting by train, but I grant you this one.
6) Hardly any boot-up time. -- Zero. Flip it open, and there it is ready to continue with the next chapter.
Yes, I found iSilo to be the best reader too. Very nice features, quite readable, and the ability to hide all menus and buttons. I love a screen of nothing but text.
I don't have your encryption problem because I'm focusing on public domain literature, and there's plenty of it and very good stuff too. They can lock down the current bestsellers all they want, but thanks to the volunteers from Project Gutenberg, I will always have free reading material.
Here it comes, another ebook story to be followed by dozens of comments about how good paper books feel in your hand, the smell of paper, blah, blah, blah. Hey, I understand. I like paper books too, and for all the same reasons. Too bad, they're doomed.
I use my Palm Tungsten T3 as an ebook reader, and I love it. Got some extra fonts to use on its 320x480 screen, and by the use of some very readable, but small, fonts I can get 55 characters per line and 40 lines per screen. Check it out at your local bookstore: That's identical to a typical paperback book. That's right, I get one page per screen...just like a book.
Unlike a paper book, I carry around with me dozens of the greatest books in history. I'm reading Shakespeare, Wodehouse, Dickens, Trollope, Tolstoy, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Chekov (insert your favorite Trek joke here), Cervantes, and lots of Sherlock Holmes. Don't like my taste in books? Get yer own. But that's my list and I'm stickin' to it. And there's no way I could carry all those books around with me if they were not in electronic form. But because I have all those books, I can read whatever I'm in the mood for whenever the reading mood hits. Commuting to work, waiting for a movie to start, lounging in bed, whatever. It's there all the time.
I use iSilo to read the books, and I use Many Books to download free (yes, free) books from the Project Gutenberg collection in whatever format you want. I use the iSilo version, but they have plenty of other including plain text or HTML.
What about current books? I get some of those too, but mostly I'm enjoying catching up on the classics of literature. Something that ebooks makes so easy that it impelled me to catch up. As ebook readers improve (and I love the T3 already), this dynamic will only get better. Kids today will grow up thinking of text as something that is supposed to be electronic. Regular books will be around forever, but they will get marginalized as the younger generation embraces the new. As for me, I love ebooks and will try to read in that format as much as I can.
If you are a Republican in charge of the voting process in a heavily Democratic county, you can go "oops, it crashed" and wipe out all the votes. Conversely, if you are a Democrat in charge of the voting process in a heavily Republican county, the "oops" move will work equally as well.
This is not a bug in the process, it's a feature. Create enough opportunities to manipulate the vote without detection, and voila! Instant third-world country!
Voter confidence is the key or lack thereof
on
How To Lose An Election
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Voting officials or voting machine manufacturers who respond to these allegations ususally say those who argue for a voting trail are introducing voter confusion, or underminding confidence in the voting process, or some other Orwellian doubletalk. In fact, what underminds voter confidence is the knowledge that there will be no way to recount votes and verify what happened.
We are talking about electing people to positions of power. If you remove the voting trail, you remove accountability. Power without accountability...saaaay, that's the way to instill voter confidence, huh?
"The right to be extends to authors. If I have published something, I have a right to not have that thing be constantly changed and altered by the world at large."
I'm an author (published several magazine articles, have completed my first book, looking for an agent to represent me now), and I don't agree with your statement. Yes, if I decide to place my novel on the Web, I don't want someone to alter it and claim that this is the original work. But I'm well aware that my book will find its way all over the Net, and will get modified and turned into slash fiction and all sorts of things that would make my mind boggle. And you know what? That's if I'm lucky. I'm I'm unlucky (or untalented), my book will be ignored.
So as long as my book remains in its original form in my possession, I'm cool with fans doing whatever they want with the copies they have in their possession. Just don't pass it off as my work, or try to intercept any profit I might be lucky enough to have coming my way. But in the information world, every work is going to be constantly changed and altered by the world at large. And boy am I glad for that intellectual inspiration. The one thing I would hate to see is a stagnant pool of static ideas.
"On the other hand, we've all heard of anarchy, but most of us aren't familiar with its deeper meanings and history. Siva helps us to understand anarchy as a serious positive political philosophy, something more than merely a reaction to oligarchy."
Nice to see a more nuanced definition of anarchy than we usually get in the mainstream news. For example, with the political conventions almost upon us, and protests scheduled for each, watch how often the mainstream press managed to slip in the word "anarchists" to describe some of the protestors, with the implication that anarchists are only interested in causing destruction.
In fact, here on/., we are all anarchists (well, other than the Microsoft toadies and PR people and the like). We don't want centralized control of information, but rather a free flow of ideas. Whoa, dude, like that makes us like anarchists or something! Relax, doesn't mean you're going to throw a brick through a Starbucks windows. Real anarchists don't do such destructive acts. That's the job of undercover police officers trying to make protestors look bad (I joke, I joke, such a thing could never, ever happen, huh?)
"The inventor of the gadget, Keiji Koga, said: "We are finally able to experience plants and flowers with all five of our natural senses."
You mean I have to eat the plant after it plays music for me?
Success stories? Hey, just grab anyone who switched to Mozilla and you'll have a success story: No more pop-ups, tabbed browsing, hardly anyone targeting your browser for attack. Ah, the sweet smell of success!
OK, OK, I get what they are trying to do, and it's a great idea. Shouldn't be hard to find organizations that have had great success that could fit in a study better than what I said, but what I said is true. It's like a breath of fresh air leaving IE behind whether you are a school, an organization, a corporation, or even an individual.
He's just using classic FUD to drum up business for his dying business model. In fact, open source helps an economy. Oh sure, it doesn't help Microsoft, but that's not the only consideration for a national economy. To make a very extreme example, if a company had become massive and grossly successful by selling cocaine to toddlers, would we say, "Oh, we can't hurt their business model by pointing out the societal downsides of the model. I mean, look at how many jobs they create!" So just because Microsoft creates jobs, it doesn't mean their business model is necessarily right or good. Means and ends and all that.
Open source helps an economy, especially a developing one. It helps people learn about their computers by giving them the tools to understand how to make them operate. It helps them grow tech skills. What, no paying programming jobs any more for them to take? Well sure there will be jobs. There are plenty of businesses that need in-house custom software (often built in conjunction with open source tools or foundations). Those programming skills learned will come in handy. Or perhaps they will join a growing software services company, where knowing how software works will prove most useful.
The Microsoft model is to create an economy where people have to shovel money to them, and individuals don't get to see how their software really works. Yeah, they can get jobs programming yet another VB (sorry, C#...sorry,.NET) report for management. But it's not the only way to go. The open source way leads to an increasingly tech literate population, and creates its own jobs. And oh yes, in this model not all the money gets shoveled back to Redmond. That's why Microsoft is squawking, but that's only natural. Doesn't mean anyone has to listen to Bill, though. After almost three decades of his self-serving words, we know better.
" And what is the appropriate response? If he did excuse himself, what could he have possibly done?"
Exactly what he did do when he finally got up off his chair and did something. Unless you think he did nothing after he left the room too. But he certainly was doing absolutely nothing for those minutes reading about his pet goat.
"Moore spin: Highest levels of government made arrangements to get the Saudis out of the country on 9/13 when no other regularly scheduled flights were in the air."
Your point is well taken, and I like your approach, but you didn't quote Moore accurately to begin with. What he said in the film is that the bin Ladens were flown out of the U.S. "from 9/13", not "on 9/13." In other words, beginning on 9/13, and then continuing in the days that followed, they were flown out of the country. It began at at time when airline flights were under restrictions, and continued after the restrictions were lifted. That is true. No spin there.
How sad for Windows users that they have to resort to this line of reasoning (which I keep hearing when this subject comes up, so it must the standard line of reasoning). While the rest of us non-Windows users use operating systems to facilitate whatever work we happened to be tasked with accomplishing, we also get to have a blast doing it. Poor Windows users are stuck in the corner pretending that fun at work is not important, because it's not an option for them.
Yes, I'm exaggerating. Just like the parent post. But my point is real: You can have fun and be productive at the same time. In fact, the more fun you're having, the more productive you tend to be.
I've used that question when I interview people, and it's illuminating to hear the responses. This gives you a bit of insight to their personality and interests, and if you have them tell you about that book and what they liked about it you begin to get more insight. Remember, the key to having a good boss is finding someone you will get along well with. To do that, you need to know their personality.
Besides, it's always interesting to throw an off-the-wall question at someone and see how they respond.
In my experience, the best interviews become more like long conversations on a wide-ranging number of subjects. When it ceases to be question-answer and more like story-anecdote, you have a great interview going on. That's when you get the measure of the person and their personality.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, finally, a story where all those 'imagine a Beowulf cluster of...' comments actually would be ON TOPIC! Naturally that means there won't be that many, other than comments such as this one that is commenting on such comments...a meta-comment about Beowulf clusters. Speaking of which, can you imagine a meta-cluster...oh never mind...
Meanwhile the general public thinks, "Wow, cool, the miltary can zap missles!"
So too with evoting. We here at /. are well versed in the issues. We've seen a few mainstream news stories about it recently, but mostly it's been the geeks saying, "Whoa, this is terrible stuff!" The general public thinks, "Hmm...just like an ATM, great," without thinking about the implications of no paper trail, unauthorized tampering, uh, maybe authorized tampering, and various chilling comments from CEOs of evoting companies.
The general public will catch on that Star Wars anti-missle technology doesn't yet work when the first bomb reaches their home. Oops. But the general public won't ever catch on about evoting problems unless the media publicizes it much more than they have been doing. After all, if a bomb gets through a shield, it can ruin your whole day. If an election is bought, it's 50-50 that John or Jane Q. Public wanted that candidate anyway and thinks nothing of it.
There are, of course, people who need to be on-call at all times, and I don't argue that point. But I see far too many middle managers tethered to their email 24 hours a day. Sorry PHB, but if you cannot do your job during normal working hours, you are not working efficiently. And yes, I say this as someone who leaves his cell phone back in the office when I go out for lunch, who doesn't even bother bringing it to the movie theater, who doesn't check work email from home in most cases. Guess what? I get my work done just fine, and am plenty responsive when I need to be. I'm not in a 24x7 operation, and nobody's life depends on me, so it's cool.
Either manage your time or your time will manage you.
So what do geeks do on a Friday night? They discuss extending bluetooth ranges in experiments and speculate on all the ways it could be used, both useful and silly. Now if they could just figure out a way to use bluetooth to get dates...
Don't.
1) VERY SMOOTH scrolling with no blurs, no matter how complicated the diagrams. -- iSilo has this, very smooth indeed.
2) The ability to control the content with just your hands - no keyboard, mouse or touchpad - you should be able to hold it like a book and read it - maybe a tap on the lower right corner to advance to the next page and on the lower left corner to go to the previous page. -- Your choice of mechanism in iSilo. I use the hardware Down button on the T3, and I programmed the other hardware buttons too. So I can go to the next page with one click of my thumb, and go to the previous or next line (scroll one line's worth) with the other buttons.
3) Eliminate the need to sit facing a vertical screen. -- Yup, carry it with you, read it in bed, and the T3 lets you flip the screen to read horizontally, if you prefer.
4) Minimize the dialogs. A book doesn't ask you if you want to save the file. -- How about flipping it closed to have it automatically turn off while remembering where you were in the book? Simple enough?
5) Make the text search work through voice recognition. -- That's not here, I admit. Not sure I would want that while I'm commuting by train, but I grant you this one.
6) Hardly any boot-up time. -- Zero. Flip it open, and there it is ready to continue with the next chapter.
I don't have your encryption problem because I'm focusing on public domain literature, and there's plenty of it and very good stuff too. They can lock down the current bestsellers all they want, but thanks to the volunteers from Project Gutenberg, I will always have free reading material.
I use my Palm Tungsten T3 as an ebook reader, and I love it. Got some extra fonts to use on its 320x480 screen, and by the use of some very readable, but small, fonts I can get 55 characters per line and 40 lines per screen. Check it out at your local bookstore: That's identical to a typical paperback book. That's right, I get one page per screen...just like a book. Unlike a paper book, I carry around with me dozens of the greatest books in history. I'm reading Shakespeare, Wodehouse, Dickens, Trollope, Tolstoy, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Chekov (insert your favorite Trek joke here), Cervantes, and lots of Sherlock Holmes. Don't like my taste in books? Get yer own. But that's my list and I'm stickin' to it. And there's no way I could carry all those books around with me if they were not in electronic form. But because I have all those books, I can read whatever I'm in the mood for whenever the reading mood hits. Commuting to work, waiting for a movie to start, lounging in bed, whatever. It's there all the time.
I use iSilo to read the books, and I use Many Books to download free (yes, free) books from the Project Gutenberg collection in whatever format you want. I use the iSilo version, but they have plenty of other including plain text or HTML.
What about current books? I get some of those too, but mostly I'm enjoying catching up on the classics of literature. Something that ebooks makes so easy that it impelled me to catch up. As ebook readers improve (and I love the T3 already), this dynamic will only get better. Kids today will grow up thinking of text as something that is supposed to be electronic. Regular books will be around forever, but they will get marginalized as the younger generation embraces the new. As for me, I love ebooks and will try to read in that format as much as I can.
This is not a bug in the process, it's a feature. Create enough opportunities to manipulate the vote without detection, and voila! Instant third-world country!
Guess the topic got under my mind or something...
We are talking about electing people to positions of power. If you remove the voting trail, you remove accountability. Power without accountability...saaaay, that's the way to instill voter confidence, huh?
I guess you missed his "Mission Accomplished" moment. He's already been known to play military dress up.
Truly nothing to see here, folks. Just empty FUD that has been discredited.
That's cool. We can meet over beers and hash out our respective idealogies some time.
I'm an author (published several magazine articles, have completed my first book, looking for an agent to represent me now), and I don't agree with your statement. Yes, if I decide to place my novel on the Web, I don't want someone to alter it and claim that this is the original work. But I'm well aware that my book will find its way all over the Net, and will get modified and turned into slash fiction and all sorts of things that would make my mind boggle. And you know what? That's if I'm lucky. I'm I'm unlucky (or untalented), my book will be ignored.
So as long as my book remains in its original form in my possession, I'm cool with fans doing whatever they want with the copies they have in their possession. Just don't pass it off as my work, or try to intercept any profit I might be lucky enough to have coming my way. But in the information world, every work is going to be constantly changed and altered by the world at large. And boy am I glad for that intellectual inspiration. The one thing I would hate to see is a stagnant pool of static ideas.
Oh yeah, anyone know of a good agent? :)
Nice to see a more nuanced definition of anarchy than we usually get in the mainstream news. For example, with the political conventions almost upon us, and protests scheduled for each, watch how often the mainstream press managed to slip in the word "anarchists" to describe some of the protestors, with the implication that anarchists are only interested in causing destruction.
In fact, here on /., we are all anarchists (well, other than the Microsoft toadies and PR people and the like). We don't want centralized control of information, but rather a free flow of ideas. Whoa, dude, like that makes us like anarchists or something! Relax, doesn't mean you're going to throw a brick through a Starbucks windows. Real anarchists don't do such destructive acts. That's the job of undercover police officers trying to make protestors look bad (I joke, I joke, such a thing could never, ever happen, huh?)
"The inventor of the gadget, Keiji Koga, said: "We are finally able to experience plants and flowers with all five of our natural senses." You mean I have to eat the plant after it plays music for me?
I didn't, and I cannot thank you enough for that warning! Phew...
OK, OK, I get what they are trying to do, and it's a great idea. Shouldn't be hard to find organizations that have had great success that could fit in a study better than what I said, but what I said is true. It's like a breath of fresh air leaving IE behind whether you are a school, an organization, a corporation, or even an individual.
Open source helps an economy, especially a developing one. It helps people learn about their computers by giving them the tools to understand how to make them operate. It helps them grow tech skills. What, no paying programming jobs any more for them to take? Well sure there will be jobs. There are plenty of businesses that need in-house custom software (often built in conjunction with open source tools or foundations). Those programming skills learned will come in handy. Or perhaps they will join a growing software services company, where knowing how software works will prove most useful.
The Microsoft model is to create an economy where people have to shovel money to them, and individuals don't get to see how their software really works. Yeah, they can get jobs programming yet another VB (sorry, C#...sorry, .NET) report for management. But it's not the only way to go. The open source way leads to an increasingly tech literate population, and creates its own jobs. And oh yes, in this model not all the money gets shoveled back to Redmond. That's why Microsoft is squawking, but that's only natural. Doesn't mean anyone has to listen to Bill, though. After almost three decades of his self-serving words, we know better.
Exactly what he did do when he finally got up off his chair and did something. Unless you think he did nothing after he left the room too. But he certainly was doing absolutely nothing for those minutes reading about his pet goat.
Your point is well taken, and I like your approach, but you didn't quote Moore accurately to begin with. What he said in the film is that the bin Ladens were flown out of the U.S. "from 9/13", not "on 9/13." In other words, beginning on 9/13, and then continuing in the days that followed, they were flown out of the country. It began at at time when airline flights were under restrictions, and continued after the restrictions were lifted. That is true. No spin there.
And with that attitude, you thereby insure they remain average users who don't know what they are doing.
How sad for Windows users that they have to resort to this line of reasoning (which I keep hearing when this subject comes up, so it must the standard line of reasoning). While the rest of us non-Windows users use operating systems to facilitate whatever work we happened to be tasked with accomplishing, we also get to have a blast doing it. Poor Windows users are stuck in the corner pretending that fun at work is not important, because it's not an option for them. Yes, I'm exaggerating. Just like the parent post. But my point is real: You can have fun and be productive at the same time. In fact, the more fun you're having, the more productive you tend to be.
I've used that question when I interview people, and it's illuminating to hear the responses. This gives you a bit of insight to their personality and interests, and if you have them tell you about that book and what they liked about it you begin to get more insight. Remember, the key to having a good boss is finding someone you will get along well with. To do that, you need to know their personality. Besides, it's always interesting to throw an off-the-wall question at someone and see how they respond. In my experience, the best interviews become more like long conversations on a wide-ranging number of subjects. When it ceases to be question-answer and more like story-anecdote, you have a great interview going on. That's when you get the measure of the person and their personality.