Heck, as soon as the first vote that couldn't be saved comes in, the machine should refuse to allow any more voting until the election official rectifies the situation.
And what's with voting machines that require memory configuration, anyway? I'm not sure I would ever buy such a machine if I were making the decision. With the number of volunteers that are responsible for operating these things, they shouldn't be any more complicated to set up than my iPod. And even that is probably too complicated, considering that most the election officials I see haven't exactly grown up with computers in their homes, and a lot of older folks I know have problems enough figuring out how to work my iPod.
Re:What's the point?
on
Internet Hunting
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Hunting is about skill, and patience, and responsibility, and consequences.
Hunting is about handling deadly tools safely.
Would someone please explain that to all the hunters we caught rifle hunting within a couple hundred yards of my house when I was a kid, despite fine mist of NO HUNTING signs that we sprayed across our property?
Or the guy who set up the salt lick on our property?
I'd especially like to have that explained to the guy who came out of the forest (and into our backyard) screaming some gibberish about how dangerous it is to be outside (in my backyard, playing on a swingset) during deer season, all because he had seen some movement and had the gun lined up and ready to fire, his finger only checked because he heard me say something?
There are a lot of guys who romanticize hunting. Which is great, there is truth to the "hunting shows you your place in nature" story. But in my experience, you guys are totally outnumbered. For most folks, hunting seems to simply be about finding things and shooting them. Any food you might get is just a bonus.
That's the only way I can understand why we had so many encounters with hunters firing rifles more or less in our backyard when I was a kid, or when we had so many problems with hunters hunting on my school's wildlife preserve when I was in college, or why I am seeing this story about a remote-control rifle that you can control from the Internet right now.
Ya know, with fuel cost and emissions being what they are, the "think of the poor" argument doesn't hold water for gas taxes and the like, anyway. Not with the greenest cars being the cheapest and all. Hell, if you're willing to buy a Geo Metro you can get a car whose fuel economy rivals some hybrids.
I dream of a glorious future where there is absolutely no difference in the quality of image you can get from a 320x200 cell phone camera and a $bignum 10-megapixel digital camera.
We could use the same technology to implement amazing lossless compression. 3kb files will store HD-quality images! Entire albums will fly across the P2P networks, tucked away in files that wouldn't come close to filling a 5.25" floppy disk, but sound even better than the original master recordings! Nerds will get dotcodes containing DVD-quality movies tattooed into their skulls in protest of the DVD CCA!
On one hand, it's not good for our judicial system if juries come to expect a preponderance of forensic evidence pointing straight toward (or away from) the defendent. Obviously, that doesn't happen often in real life.
As for juries not trusting eye-witnesses, I am not so sure that that is a bad thing. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable for the simple fact that it's painfully easy for laywers and cops to implant or modify memories in the process of normal questioning.
If you're ever going out into the wilderness, bring a PVC pipe with you. If you get lost, you can bury it in the ground, and a Verizon crew will be along shortly to break it.
Re:Not very scientific
on
Killer Ozone?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Although I haven't read the study, they could try and control for this. If there are cities that are more densely populated but less polluted, and those cities are still following the ozone/death curve rather than a density/death curve, the case for ozone harming peoples' health is strengthened.
I would take this a step further and get a laptop-specific backpack simply because it's easier to find laptop bags with scads of pockets. If you get one with enough space for notebooks and such, it should have plenty of room for a second sleeve.
tho in my experience I still end up with a second bag because that second laptop is taking up all the space for notebooks and such.
But I am going to refrain from getting excited until I see some serious work go into the cable structure. I imagine getting one of those to be strong enough and stable enough would be orders of magnitude more difficult than getting somthing to climb it once we do.
If I'm looping through a list, I frequently forget to handle a special case (the first element in the list needs some slightly different caretaking, something like that) the first time around. In that sense, loops are where a lot of my errors lie.
On the other hand, if I've been getting enough sleep, I immediately realize what I did wrong. In that sense, loops aren't a source of problems because fixing fencepost errors and the like doesn't take up much of my time.
All in all, if I had to make a call, I'd say that worrying about how to figure out those sorts of problems is a great example of spending a grand to save a buck. I'm much more interested in figuring out what kinds of languages allow a programmer skilled in that language to get to the finished project the most quickly rather than obsessing over certain kinds of problems.
The project should be shielded from flame wars and unwilling developers because the people it falls to to conduct this study are folks like the faculty at the HCI research group at CMU who are trying to study how we should be programming.
Besides, we shouldn't be working from case studies in corporations, because that would make it darn hard to do any sort of experimental controls. On the other hand, it would be easy at CMU because they have a big stinkin' pile of undergrads that they can force or pay to sit around and program as research participants.
One thing that I have noticed about any debate about what programming facilities will most help programmers to write more bug-free code or spend less time debugging is that the debate is based entirely around anecdote.
I would love to see some numbers on the frequency and nature of bugs in software, and I want to see these numbers broken up by language as well as by appliction domain. I suspect that a comprehensive collection of such statistics doesn't exist, since I haven't seen any empirical data enter into the various debates to which they would apply.
Until someone spends some more time researching this information, I doubt that the development of programmign technology will advance in a fashion any more directed or smooth than science and technology did back in the fourteenth century.
It's funny how making people aware that sex exists and people have it has been decried as obscene, and people say it hurts children.
But on the other hand, it's perfectly fine to skip the part about saying sex exists, and then, from the assumption that everyone knows it does, anyway, proceed to tell them that they are unattractive, under-endowed, smell bad, and are generally worthless people unless they shell out for xxxx.
In other words, outright acknowledging the facts of life is an unimaginable sin, but using them to do deliberate harm to a person's psyche is just the way we do business. (So much so, that apparently we don't have the right to avoid such harm.)
You may laugh, but I knew a guy who was convinced that the future of mass storage was networks. The idea was exactly that - instead of putting stuff on a hard drive, send it to a computer across the network. That computer would just bounce the data back when it got it. When you needed info, you would just wait for the data to come back, then grab it.
The magic of all of this is you are using in-flight packets as storage!
I fell in love with Blender back in my Linux days.
But after I bought a Mac and installed Blender, I discovered that the mouse cursor is very nearly the same color as the background color in the editing windows. After a period of being constantly annoyed at how easy it was to lose the cursor, I ended up giving up.
Which leads me to ask, has the cursor color changed recently?
The computer knowledge & skills required to make an informed decision about what web browser to use are a few steps beyond basic knowledge for operating things safely.
And I think that cars are still mystical things for many people. Scads of folks are still putting premium gasoline in cars that are designed for 87 octane because they think it will give them better performance/fuel economy.
Just do a web search for "fox akre" and you'll find a huge pile of sources.
Basically, Fox TV fired a reporter for threatening to expose them for reporting false information in a story about rBGH. The reporter sued and won, but Fox appealed and the case was overturned.
If you want the original source, you can view the court's opinion at http://www.2dca.org/opinion/February%2014,%202003/ 2D01-529.pdf Unfortunately, the document is not really all that applicable - the case was decided not on whether or not it is okay to lie in the broadcast media, but based on a technicality having to do with whether or not the FCC policy against truth distortion applies to whistleblower laws.
Technicalities aside, the big issue here is that a Fox affiliate got away with silencing a reporter.
As always, you have to consider who is pushing a given side of a given issue.
Hydrogen fuel cells are being pushed by the energy lobby, because hydrogen fuel cells pose no threat to their industries. As long as we're burning obscene amounts of fossil fuels, they're happy.
When I say, "don't lose faith in science and scientists," there are a couple things working here. First, when I say science I'm talking about deliberate and informed application of the scientific method. When I say scientists, I mean the scientific community as a whole and over the long run.
I am not saying that someone should accept that the scientific community or any one scientist is always right. After all, that would run contrary to the basic tenets of science.
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Heck, as soon as the first vote that couldn't be saved comes in, the machine should refuse to allow any more voting until the election official rectifies the situation.
And what's with voting machines that require memory configuration, anyway? I'm not sure I would ever buy such a machine if I were making the decision. With the number of volunteers that are responsible for operating these things, they shouldn't be any more complicated to set up than my iPod. And even that is probably too complicated, considering that most the election officials I see haven't exactly grown up with computers in their homes, and a lot of older folks I know have problems enough figuring out how to work my iPod.
Hunting is about skill, and patience, and responsibility, and consequences.
Hunting is about handling deadly tools safely.
Would someone please explain that to all the hunters we caught rifle hunting within a couple hundred yards of my house when I was a kid, despite fine mist of NO HUNTING signs that we sprayed across our property?
Or the guy who set up the salt lick on our property?
I'd especially like to have that explained to the guy who came out of the forest (and into our backyard) screaming some gibberish about how dangerous it is to be outside (in my backyard, playing on a swingset) during deer season, all because he had seen some movement and had the gun lined up and ready to fire, his finger only checked because he heard me say something?
There are a lot of guys who romanticize hunting. Which is great, there is truth to the "hunting shows you your place in nature" story. But in my experience, you guys are totally outnumbered. For most folks, hunting seems to simply be about finding things and shooting them. Any food you might get is just a bonus.
That's the only way I can understand why we had so many encounters with hunters firing rifles more or less in our backyard when I was a kid, or when we had so many problems with hunters hunting on my school's wildlife preserve when I was in college, or why I am seeing this story about a remote-control rifle that you can control from the Internet right now.
Ya know, with fuel cost and emissions being what they are, the "think of the poor" argument doesn't hold water for gas taxes and the like, anyway. Not with the greenest cars being the cheapest and all. Hell, if you're willing to buy a Geo Metro you can get a car whose fuel economy rivals some hybrids.
I have a friend whose Dad used to work at Big Blue back when it was the biggest and bluest kid on the block.
I couldn't tell you exactly why, but his stories about his time there remind me a lot of an acidhead's stories about bad trips.
This is image compression software, not image enhancement software.
Not losing data is a very different thing from pulling data out of a magic hat.
Bah, who wants more realism in TV and movies?
I want more movie magic in real life!
I dream of a glorious future where there is absolutely no difference in the quality of image you can get from a 320x200 cell phone camera and a $bignum 10-megapixel digital camera.
We could use the same technology to implement amazing lossless compression. 3kb files will store HD-quality images! Entire albums will fly across the P2P networks, tucked away in files that wouldn't come close to filling a 5.25" floppy disk, but sound even better than the original master recordings! Nerds will get dotcodes containing DVD-quality movies tattooed into their skulls in protest of the DVD CCA!
Ah yes, the future is glorious indeed!
Sometimes I wonder if Dilbert has ceased to be parody and has become a cutting-edge industry leader.
It seems like every week I hear about somebody is trying to implement a policy that was the punchline of a Dilbert strip from the previous week.
Thanks, Scott Adams, for ruining my career.
On one hand, it's not good for our judicial system if juries come to expect a preponderance of forensic evidence pointing straight toward (or away from) the defendent. Obviously, that doesn't happen often in real life.
As for juries not trusting eye-witnesses, I am not so sure that that is a bad thing. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable for the simple fact that it's painfully easy for laywers and cops to implant or modify memories in the process of normal questioning.
If you're ever going out into the wilderness, bring a PVC pipe with you. If you get lost, you can bury it in the ground, and a Verizon crew will be along shortly to break it.
Although I haven't read the study, they could try and control for this. If there are cities that are more densely populated but less polluted, and those cities are still following the ozone/death curve rather than a density/death curve, the case for ozone harming peoples' health is strengthened.
I would take this a step further and get a laptop-specific backpack simply because it's easier to find laptop bags with scads of pockets. If you get one with enough space for notebooks and such, it should have plenty of room for a second sleeve.
tho in my experience I still end up with a second bag because that second laptop is taking up all the space for notebooks and such.
Well, it's at least a step toward the lifter.
But I am going to refrain from getting excited until I see some serious work go into the cable structure. I imagine getting one of those to be strong enough and stable enough would be orders of magnitude more difficult than getting somthing to climb it once we do.
If I'm looping through a list, I frequently forget to handle a special case (the first element in the list needs some slightly different caretaking, something like that) the first time around. In that sense, loops are where a lot of my errors lie.
On the other hand, if I've been getting enough sleep, I immediately realize what I did wrong. In that sense, loops aren't a source of problems because fixing fencepost errors and the like doesn't take up much of my time.
All in all, if I had to make a call, I'd say that worrying about how to figure out those sorts of problems is a great example of spending a grand to save a buck. I'm much more interested in figuring out what kinds of languages allow a programmer skilled in that language to get to the finished project the most quickly rather than obsessing over certain kinds of problems.
The project should be shielded from flame wars and unwilling developers because the people it falls to to conduct this study are folks like the faculty at the HCI research group at CMU who are trying to study how we should be programming.
Besides, we shouldn't be working from case studies in corporations, because that would make it darn hard to do any sort of experimental controls. On the other hand, it would be easy at CMU because they have a big stinkin' pile of undergrads that they can force or pay to sit around and program as research participants.
One thing that I have noticed about any debate about what programming facilities will most help programmers to write more bug-free code or spend less time debugging is that the debate is based entirely around anecdote.
I would love to see some numbers on the frequency and nature of bugs in software, and I want to see these numbers broken up by language as well as by appliction domain. I suspect that a comprehensive collection of such statistics doesn't exist, since I haven't seen any empirical data enter into the various debates to which they would apply.
Until someone spends some more time researching this information, I doubt that the development of programmign technology will advance in a fashion any more directed or smooth than science and technology did back in the fourteenth century.
It's funny how making people aware that sex exists and people have it has been decried as obscene, and people say it hurts children.
But on the other hand, it's perfectly fine to skip the part about saying sex exists, and then, from the assumption that everyone knows it does, anyway, proceed to tell them that they are unattractive, under-endowed, smell bad, and are generally worthless people unless they shell out for xxxx.
In other words, outright acknowledging the facts of life is an unimaginable sin, but using them to do deliberate harm to a person's psyche is just the way we do business. (So much so, that apparently we don't have the right to avoid such harm.)
Blender draws its own cursor.
You may laugh, but I knew a guy who was convinced that the future of mass storage was networks. The idea was exactly that - instead of putting stuff on a hard drive, send it to a computer across the network. That computer would just bounce the data back when it got it. When you needed info, you would just wait for the data to come back, then grab it.
The magic of all of this is you are using in-flight packets as storage!
OK, no, I don't get it, either.
I fell in love with Blender back in my Linux days.
But after I bought a Mac and installed Blender, I discovered that the mouse cursor is very nearly the same color as the background color in the editing windows. After a period of being constantly annoyed at how easy it was to lose the cursor, I ended up giving up.
Which leads me to ask, has the cursor color changed recently?
The computer knowledge & skills required to make an informed decision about what web browser to use are a few steps beyond basic knowledge for operating things safely.
And I think that cars are still mystical things for many people. Scads of folks are still putting premium gasoline in cars that are designed for 87 octane because they think it will give them better performance/fuel economy.
At least you'll never suffer from the lack of a good pencil holder.
Just do a web search for "fox akre" and you'll find a huge pile of sources.
/ 2D01-529.pdf Unfortunately, the document is not really all that applicable - the case was decided not on whether or not it is okay to lie in the broadcast media, but based on a technicality having to do with whether or not the FCC policy against truth distortion applies to whistleblower laws.
Basically, Fox TV fired a reporter for threatening to expose them for reporting false information in a story about rBGH. The reporter sued and won, but Fox appealed and the case was overturned.
If you want the original source, you can view the court's opinion at http://www.2dca.org/opinion/February%2014,%202003
Technicalities aside, the big issue here is that a Fox affiliate got away with silencing a reporter.
Two words: Linguistic abmiguity.
As always, you have to consider who is pushing a given side of a given issue.
Hydrogen fuel cells are being pushed by the energy lobby, because hydrogen fuel cells pose no threat to their industries. As long as we're burning obscene amounts of fossil fuels, they're happy.
When I say, "don't lose faith in science and scientists," there are a couple things working here. First, when I say science I'm talking about deliberate and informed application of the scientific method. When I say scientists, I mean the scientific community as a whole and over the long run.
I am not saying that someone should accept that the scientific community or any one scientist is always right. After all, that would run contrary to the basic tenets of science.