According to the Sun-Sentinel article and a report I heard on NPR, the crashes were related to the database of registered voters, not the voting terminals. This includes the crash described in "Orlando"/Orange county (again, the Sun-Sentinel said it was the registration database).
Perhaps the CTV reporter (as well as the person who submitted the article, as well as most/.ers) immediately assumed the problem was with the voting terminals when they heard "computer crash" and "voting" in the same sentence.
It's certainly possible that there were also touch-screen crashes, but we'll probably have to wait a few hours as we get a consensus from the different news sources.
Hmmm. I'm more of the mind that the courage and integrity to do what's right, even when it's unpopular (and might cost you your job), is a high virtue, and one that is particularly rare among politicians.
You wouldn't like a Christian politician to make decisions based on his religion, because you think that violates sepration of church and state. However, making decisions that conflict with the moral standards he professes would make him a hypocrite. Nobody wants to elect a hypocrite. Therefore, we shouldn't elect any Christians, because they are either violating separation of church and state, or they are hypocrites.
Many Americans are members of religions that have an associated ethical code. If politicians that are members of these religions are going to take positions on issues, what standard should they be using instead of the one they claim is fundamental to the way they live their lives?
So say you get an agnostic or atheist politician. Presumably he has developed his own system of ethics during his life, and will use this to form his decisions. Do you feel more comfortable about the decisions this politician will make simply because you have no way of knowing what the ethical basis for his decisions will be? Is he less of a hypocrite than anyone else, or is he just impossible to pin down because his ethical code is not published?
I don't mind having my illusions dispelled. I'd rather learn something that be proven right. However, somebody's assertion that the government of France must be using the same methods of calculating unemployment as the highest number he can find on the BLS web site is not going to immediately dispell them. But, I figured it was worth looking in to how different countries calculate unemployment.
I started looking for French statistics, and the documentation describing their methods is in French (which I don't speak), but one of the numbers reference an ILO definition of unemployment. The ILO is a UN organization, so I went to the ILO labor statistics web site to find more, hoping that they would provide unemployment statistics for multiple countries using the same methodology.
It appears that by the ILO standard, someone must have taken a specific action to find employment within the last four weeks to be considered unemployed. While this doesn't include "discouraged workers" and it could be argued that this doesn't accurately represent the true unemployment rate of a country, it is useful for comparing one country to another (which is what we're doing in this discussion).
Looking at the 2002 numbers (the last year they had complete data for the countries listed), we have:
5.1% United Kingdom
5.8% United States
8.7% Germany
8.9% France
Germany and France appear to have gone up significantly (to around 10%) in 2003, but the United States apparently did not supply data to the ILO for that year.
At any rate, if I have illusions about the comparative unemployment rate between the United States and western European countries, apparently the United Nations suffers from the same illusions.
Re:We WANT high labor costs! It's a Good Thing!
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1
Look, the highest standards of living in the world are in the social demcracies of Europe, and they have HIGH labor costs--they have minimum wages levels of like $12/hour.
They also have much higher unemployment than we do - many western european countries have unemployment on the order of 8-10%. We'd be crapping our pants if we had that over here.
Didn't they tigten up H1B visas during the last couple of years? Why? Because with the reduction in the number of jobs, there is no longer a justification to import as much labor. The government responded. Many businesses screamed about this, but they did it anyway.
As far as investment income, dont' forget that when people invest their money, they have already earned the principle (probably as wages) and been taxed on it. Lower capital gains taxes have been around for a long time, and they encourage long term investing rather than speculation. Lowering dividend taxes to the same level as capital gains taxes encourages more conservative investing, and longer term investing. Or are you dying for another tech bubble?
It's interesting that you bring up "Bush's Brain". Isn't James Moore good buddies with Bill Burkett? Oh yeah, and didn't Burkett have a run-in with Karl Rove during the Texas governor race? You'd think they'd be wise to Karl Rove's shenanigans, so how would Karl Rove channel documents through Bill Burkett?
People do not want to be informed -- they want to feel informed.
I wonder if this is partly related to the trend in education to teach facts (which is very easy to test) rather than teach logic and reasoning based on those facts. Since people grow up in that environment, knowing new facts makes them feel smarter. Why should they all of a sudden, in adulthood, begin analyzing facts and determining which ones are relevant? Why should they start putting key facts together and coming up with insightful ideas?
Not only are the media catering to a population that has this limitation: they have it themselves. That's why you get all these talking heads spouting different sets of facts, trying to refute each others' facts, and getting nowhere. They aren't any more capable of putting together a coherent argument based on the information available to them than the majority of their audience.
Whoever said "information is transformation" was full of crap. Information is just raw materials. And all the media wants to (or is able to) give us are these raw materials in a very unrefined state.
People talk about "being informed" like it is an admirable feat. If enlightenment is a journey, being informed is getting packed. It's necessary, but not sufficient.
Re:Before the comments start...
on
Mock World Vote
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· Score: 1
but you can't possibly think that you can scare the entire world into not attacking us.
given Verizon's victories, why would Comcast play DMCA ball for MGM?
Keep in mind, Comcast is also trying to sell you premium cable channels and video on demand. Any MGM movies obtained through p2p is potentially revenue lost to Comcast as well. I don't believe this would be a factor with Verizon, since they're not doing the cable thing.
No, about 14% describe themselves as "non-religious" (according to that site). This includes people who are deists, pantheists, etc. There are more like a quarter of a billion atheists, and most of those are from Communist (or former Communist) countries due to anti-religious policies. This is all according to the site you linked to. So the average for actual agnostics and atheists in countries where religion wasn't outlawed by Communism is generally far less than 14%.
In other words, do you claim that Microsoft Windows XP and later aren't buggy? The Windows XP logo lacks a border
I didn't intend to make such a claim. I run Linux almost exclusively, and was going from my fuzzy memory (I wasn't even 100% sure of the colors of the panes). Jeez, man, I was just trying to crack a joke. Relax!
He further predicts -- ugh! -- that software will not be written but visually designed.
Just like programmable logic! Errr, wait. It seems like (visual) schematic capture is what gets used if you don't have a real FPGA designer, so somebody has to wear a new hat that doesn't know (textual) languages like VHDL or Verilog. I don't know anyone who knows VHDL or Verilog that would want to do a design in schematic capture.
So if the same thing will apply, people who don't know how to program will use graphical programming, and people who do will write real code. Graphical programming won't be the only (or best) way to go, it will just be more approachable.
Maybe we'll be lucky and soon this will be an easy way to separate the wheat (real computer scientists and software engineers) from the chaff ("coders" who want the easiest way to make a few bucks).
On NPR this morning they interviewed the director of "Shattered Glass", a movie about a reporter who completely fabricated many stories. They looked very closely at "All the President's Men" when they made the movie. I am putting both of these movies on my Netflix list and will watch them on the same day if I can. It will be interesting to juxtapose Woodward and Bernstein with today's reporters who want to be Woodward and Bernstein but with out all that pesky work.
Because in this case, politicians were actually able to make the mental leap necessary to understand the analogy "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?"
And does this come out of the MS advertising budget? Any advertising against our competitors is good PR? There is no way MS could re-coup anything from this other than FUD points. Where's the incentive to profit?
It probably doesn't come out of any budget. Microsoft has more than $50B in cash and investments. If they're "investing" that money via Baystar, it's just part of what any company does with their cash. If the whole thing tanked, it would show up on their balance sheet as income (loss) from investments. Since they're making a couple billion a year in investments, this deal would hardly make a dent.
Yeah, that's kind of like doing a study about home security, where half of the houses lock the front door and half leave them wide open. "Now, discounting all the cases where the burglar walked in through the front door, we found that houses with locked doors had far more burglaries where the burglar entered through the window." Why would anyone break in the window when the front door is wide open?
I remember touring JPL a long time ago (maybe 15 years) and they showed us some of the redundant stuff they had there. Except the way they explained it, it wasn't so they had a second one to send if the first one failed. Rather, they had a system to troubleshoot on at home in case something happened to the one out in space. If it was a recoverable failure, they could send in Gary Sinise with a roll of duct tape and figure out what order to turn everything on.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the CTV reporter (as well as the person who submitted the article, as well as most /.ers) immediately assumed the problem was with the voting terminals when they heard "computer crash" and "voting" in the same sentence.
It's certainly possible that there were also touch-screen crashes, but we'll probably have to wait a few hours as we get a consensus from the different news sources.
You wouldn't like a Christian politician to make decisions based on his religion, because you think that violates sepration of church and state. However, making decisions that conflict with the moral standards he professes would make him a hypocrite. Nobody wants to elect a hypocrite. Therefore, we shouldn't elect any Christians, because they are either violating separation of church and state, or they are hypocrites.
Many Americans are members of religions that have an associated ethical code. If politicians that are members of these religions are going to take positions on issues, what standard should they be using instead of the one they claim is fundamental to the way they live their lives?
So say you get an agnostic or atheist politician. Presumably he has developed his own system of ethics during his life, and will use this to form his decisions. Do you feel more comfortable about the decisions this politician will make simply because you have no way of knowing what the ethical basis for his decisions will be? Is he less of a hypocrite than anyone else, or is he just impossible to pin down because his ethical code is not published?
I started looking for French statistics, and the documentation describing their methods is in French (which I don't speak), but one of the numbers reference an ILO definition of unemployment. The ILO is a UN organization, so I went to the ILO labor statistics web site to find more, hoping that they would provide unemployment statistics for multiple countries using the same methodology.
It appears that by the ILO standard, someone must have taken a specific action to find employment within the last four weeks to be considered unemployed. While this doesn't include "discouraged workers" and it could be argued that this doesn't accurately represent the true unemployment rate of a country, it is useful for comparing one country to another (which is what we're doing in this discussion).
Looking at the 2002 numbers (the last year they had complete data for the countries listed), we have:
5.1% United Kingdom
5.8% United States
8.7% Germany
8.9% France
Germany and France appear to have gone up significantly (to around 10%) in 2003, but the United States apparently did not supply data to the ILO for that year.
At any rate, if I have illusions about the comparative unemployment rate between the United States and western European countries, apparently the United Nations suffers from the same illusions.
They also have much higher unemployment than we do - many western european countries have unemployment on the order of 8-10%. We'd be crapping our pants if we had that over here.
As far as investment income, dont' forget that when people invest their money, they have already earned the principle (probably as wages) and been taxed on it. Lower capital gains taxes have been around for a long time, and they encourage long term investing rather than speculation. Lowering dividend taxes to the same level as capital gains taxes encourages more conservative investing, and longer term investing. Or are you dying for another tech bubble?
It's interesting that you bring up "Bush's Brain". Isn't James Moore good buddies with Bill Burkett? Oh yeah, and didn't Burkett have a run-in with Karl Rove during the Texas governor race? You'd think they'd be wise to Karl Rove's shenanigans, so how would Karl Rove channel documents through Bill Burkett?
I wonder if this is partly related to the trend in education to teach facts (which is very easy to test) rather than teach logic and reasoning based on those facts. Since people grow up in that environment, knowing new facts makes them feel smarter. Why should they all of a sudden, in adulthood, begin analyzing facts and determining which ones are relevant? Why should they start putting key facts together and coming up with insightful ideas?
Not only are the media catering to a population that has this limitation: they have it themselves. That's why you get all these talking heads spouting different sets of facts, trying to refute each others' facts, and getting nowhere. They aren't any more capable of putting together a coherent argument based on the information available to them than the majority of their audience.
Whoever said "information is transformation" was full of crap. Information is just raw materials. And all the media wants to (or is able to) give us are these raw materials in a very unrefined state.
People talk about "being informed" like it is an admirable feat. If enlightenment is a journey, being informed is getting packed. It's necessary, but not sufficient.
Wasn't that what the Cold War was all about?
Yeah, but it's 100% of one vote.
Keep in mind, Comcast is also trying to sell you premium cable channels and video on demand. Any MGM movies obtained through p2p is potentially revenue lost to Comcast as well. I don't believe this would be a factor with Verizon, since they're not doing the cable thing.
I didn't intend to make such a claim. I run Linux almost exclusively, and was going from my fuzzy memory (I wasn't even 100% sure of the colors of the panes). Jeez, man, I was just trying to crack a joke. Relax!
Yeah, it has red, blue, green, and yellow wavy squares in a 2x2 pattern with a black border.
You should have embezzled money from him. I mean, after that, is a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison really a deterrent?
Just like programmable logic! Errr, wait. It seems like (visual) schematic capture is what gets used if you don't have a real FPGA designer, so somebody has to wear a new hat that doesn't know (textual) languages like VHDL or Verilog. I don't know anyone who knows VHDL or Verilog that would want to do a design in schematic capture.
So if the same thing will apply, people who don't know how to program will use graphical programming, and people who do will write real code. Graphical programming won't be the only (or best) way to go, it will just be more approachable.
Maybe we'll be lucky and soon this will be an easy way to separate the wheat (real computer scientists and software engineers) from the chaff ("coders" who want the easiest way to make a few bucks).
It probably doesn't come out of any budget. Microsoft has more than $50B in cash and investments. If they're "investing" that money via Baystar, it's just part of what any company does with their cash. If the whole thing tanked, it would show up on their balance sheet as income (loss) from investments. Since they're making a couple billion a year in investments, this deal would hardly make a dent.