If I were competing for space on the freeways on an equal basis, it wouldn't be so bad.
Here in Denver, there's really only one way to go north-south if you're commuting very far.
You have to share I-25 with the SUVs, the delivery trucks, and the long-haul truckers.
Every year, I feel more like I'm taking my life in my hands when I take my Civic out there.
When the guy (or idiot blond woman on her cell phone trying to drive 10 MPH faster than the traffic this past week) runs over me with their SUV, I'm going to get hurt a lot worse than they are.
Time to think hard about how to make telecommuting work, or how to live and work someplace much smaller.
...it's actually more fuel efficient to run the air conditioner than to open the window of your car if you drive faster than 70 km/h (43.5 mph).
I bought a new Honda Civic last year (not the hybrid).
One of the selling points is the new air conditioning system that is claimed to only require about 1 HP to operate.
In previous Hondas,
when driving up into the mountains here,
you could feel the loss of drive power when
the air conditioner compressor kicked in.
No such effect with the new system.
I'm impressed.
However, the treaty of Rome and subsequent enabling treaties which empower the EU compeitition ministry to do this also gives them one other important power which they have so far not used; the right to set aside and void contracts.
Isn't it also within their power to simply bar MS from doing business in the EU?
No local sales,
no one allowed to import the products from outside?
Given the size of the MS market in Europe and the howls of outrage that would occur when businesses and consumers have to begin switching to other software,
that's a game of chicken that I'd pay to see.
I was going to say exactly the opposite thing.
Once there's some testimony --
and the computer companies are certainly going to insist that they get a chance to air their views in public --
that the only ways the FCC can handle this is to either (a) outlaw copying outright, which takes away constituents' ability to continue time-shifting, or (b) micromanage all kinds of different technologies like hard disks and software decoders in order to ensure that the flags are honored,
I figure that Congress is going to want nothing to do with it.
I'm a little confused. I don't see anything wrong with the definition above ! I beleive its more complete and doesn't seem to be pushing any creationism around!
If the change is made,
the next round of legal challenges --
and there will be a next round --
will be focused on the word "continuing".
The argument will be that,
since all the scientists agree that science is a continuing process,
then any theory must be considered incomplete,
so alternatives should be included.
The creationists don't care --
at least at this point --
about theories such as "mass distorts space-time in a way that we interpret as gravity",
so won't care if alternate theories of gravity are presented or not.
They care very much about biology, and some aspects of evolution in particular.
They are fighting a losing battle.
Note that they are no longer trying to get an alternative like "the universe was created 4000 years ago, in its entirety, including the complete fossil record" inserted into cosmology texts.
Note that they are no longer trying to get concepts like the role of DNA and gene-linked diseases excluded from the curriculum.
They are trying to get statements to the effect that the jump from "dead" chemicals to life consisting of billions of cells tied together by an immensely complex set of protein chemistry is so unlikely that random chance is not an adequate explanation.
Part of me wants to just toss them that bone.
Yes,
it is true that we do not currently understand in any detail the mechanisms by which something as complex as a bacterium could arise.
Maybe something, which also arose through mechanisms we do not understand, designed and implemented bacteria and turned them lose a few billion years ago.
And having mentioned that, in passing, we can then go on and spend our time teaching theories that have enabled us to do useful things -- like understand how resistant bacteria have emerged, how we might treat conditions caused by bad coding in the DNA, how species and ecologies react to stress, etc.
But I fear that if we give in on the one point, they will be back to demand that work stop on all those other things as well.
They should force Microsoft to use the.odf format that KOffice and OpenOffice now use as default...
==========
Yes, except the first thing MS would do in response is start adding proprietary extensions
The US court system dealt with this one fairly easily when the Bell System was broken up back in the 1980s.
The local companies were required to publish full specifications of all network interfaces (I worked at Bellcore at the time, where that work was actually done).
Any changes to an interface, or the addition of a new interface, or discontinuing an old interface, was required to be published six months in advance of the change actually being used in a product.
The court made it clear that if there were any violations, the senior officers of the company that did it, as well as the responsible individuals, would do jail time.
All new employees received training on the court imposed rules within ten days of hiring on, and everyone got annual refresher training.
It's amazing how well you can capture the attention of a room full of engineers when you start with, "Failure to comply with the rules we're going to describe constitutes criminal contempt of court, and YOU PERSONALLY will go to jail if that happens."
TTBOMK, those particular rules were never broken.
I don't see why Microsoft should have to turn over their source code without any kind of compensation.
There have been entire magazines whose editorial policy was to publish articles describing how the various MS implemenations of APIs and protocols deviated from the official external MS documentation.
Perhaps MS has cleaned up their internal situation over the past few years, but various insiders have been quoted in the past saying things that suggest that even MS considers the source code the only reliable documentation for how some of the protocols "work".
IIRC, there was a recent case where an insider admitted that the Samba team's documentation of some aspects of the SMB protocol was more accurate than anything MS had internally.
Walmart sells a stripped down HDTV box for $189, and slightly better models can be had (elsewhere) for $200.
Of course, when the FCC was setting the initial schedule for converting US broadcast television from analog to digital,
representatives of the consumer electronics companies assured everyone that by this point in time,
digital tuners and decoders would be so cheap that every new TV would come equipped with one and the stand-alone boxes would be priced well under $50.
Now those same companies are, for the most part, fighting tooth and nail to delay having to put digital tuners into smaller sets,
and as you point out,
the cheapest stand-alone tuner/decoders are priced at several times what was "promised".
MS have broken the law. Either they open up the API to competitors or they go (all of them) to jail.
I believe in this case, they either conform to the ruling or they are no longer allowed to sell the products in the EU (nor can someone import it from another country).
MS gets roughly one-third of their revenue from EU sales.
I would certainly like to see the EU authorities announce such a ban, starting in 90 days or so.
MS, watching their stock price tank as the market considers that revenue loss, would cave in a minute.
And I thought Saudi Arabia was a very rich country. Silly me.
Yep.
Saudi per-capita income is now about $8K per year, compared to about $35K per year in the US and Japan.
This is down from about $25K in 1980, and is probably the most drastic peacetime decline ever suffered by a country.
I've lost the article, but the Economist forecasts that, due mostly to their very high population growth (about 40% of their population is under age 15), by 2025 Saudi Arabia will be a poor country again.
At some point, probably in less than 15 years, I expect to see the royal family abandon the country en masse.
The oil revenues aren't going to be enough to keep most of the population out of poverty.
It'll be no fun living in the armed camp necessary to protect yourself from the mob.
Far better to abandon what's left and live off the wealth you've already transfered to the developed countries.
At least the first reference shows A+ as a descendent from APL.
Not surprising for a finance language, as APL's vector orientation makes it easy to express a variety of financial functions.
I started using APL in 1975 or thereabouts -- had a full symbolic debugging capability, which beat the hell out of PL/I's hex dumps.
I still use an antique APL interpreter on Linux as my usual calculator -- God, do I feel old.
One possible explanation is that Google is looking for something to do with their current $55B stock valuation.
Other than making the founders incredibly wealthy, the high stock price by itself isn't particularly useful to the company.
But it can be used as collateral for loans to acquire assets that could be useful both now and in the future.
Given the massive storage and computing resources that Google already manages, I suspect that they can manage their own fiber network for very little incremental expense (I'm less sure about the physical care of the fiber -- who fixes your dark fiber when someone cuts it?).
As they attempt to provide more and more services, they may simply want more control over the underlying transport.
...who's going to slide tackle something with a solid exoskeleton which will presumably weigh significantly more than the average person?
I'll be impressed (really!) if they can do it and meet a reasonable set of restrictions to make it a "fair" competition.
Self-contained,
bipedal,
height between 170 and 190 cm,
total weight on the field under 100 kg,
no fuel intake during a period,
some reasonable restrictions on anatomy
(eg, no trick arms for throw-ins, 360-degree rotating heads, or knees/hips that work both ways),
restricted field of vision.
Basically, no custom-designed soccer robots (aside from software) --
you have to fit it inside the normal size, shape and density parameters of a human.
Unfortunately, unless I get nanobots that can clean out my arteries, kill any cancer cells I happen to develop, and take care of whatever build-up causes the assorted dementias, I'm probably too old to see the first team that makes a serious run at it...
Indeed.
Without taking sides, there is some possibility that a paper that argued, let's assume convincingly, that either global warming was not occurring, or that some factor other than human activity was clearly driving it, simply could not get published in the peer-reviewed literature.
The fact that everyone "knows" something does not necessarily make it true.
OTOH, most of the time that's actually the way to bet.
It seems like a simple concept that even beginning programmers could do a decent job of creating.
One thing to remember is that the local government has to build data structures that describe the ballot and how things are to be counted.
Some of the errors that have been reported are errors at that level -- the local data structures contained errors that were not caught during local test procedures.
Due to varioius overlapping special districts, my local precinct had 26 different ballots.
IIRC, Orange County, California had over 5,000 different ballots, each of which had to be available in five different languages.
Many county clerks' offices (or whichever local official has charge of voting arrangements) are still funded at the same level as when ballots were paper-and-pencil and much simpler.
Effectively, a critical part of the "programming" IS being done by beginners, and some of those beginners have NO formal training in programming.
Or at least set yourself up as a limited liability company.
Details vary from state to state, but the idea is to give individuals and partnerships the same liability and financial protections as incorporating, but with less hassle.
Here in Colorado the whole process can be done through the Secretary of State's Web site.
15 minutes and 99 cents on a credit card.
Opening a small business checking account was much more time consuming (mostly while they did superficial things to verify I wasn't a terrorist setting up a money laundering operation).
There are advantages to full incorporation if you're planning to grow into a several person outfit.
Economists have looked at this subject for years, using some high-powered statistical techniques, and reached the same conclusion.
It is more interesting to look at the reasons that, at least in developed countries, raising the minimum wage has little effect.
One reason appears to be that very few workers actually earn the federal minimum wage -- in the US the estimate is around 3%.
Increasing the federal minimum wage would result in a small number of workers receiving an increase and many more workers being paid "close" to the minimum wage.
The percentage is much larger for teenaged workers.
Economists have found weak correlation between the federal minimum wage level and teenaged unemployment.
No studies that I am aware of have shown any sort of "spike" in unemployment following a hike in the minimum wage.
Now, explain to me how a touchscreen provides anything "far easier" (and more accurate) than that?
On the system used in my county, I got a summary screen that listed my choices in large, easy-to-read type -- President:Kerry, Amendment 3A:Yes, and so forth.
When we used punch cards, I had to flip through the ballot pages, find that Kerry was number 37, and check the punch card to see that the tab for number 37 (now missing because I'd punched it, and tabs labeled in five- or six-point type) was punched.
Could I check my ballot both ways?
Yes.
Was one of them easier to check?
I personally found, based on experience with both, the touch screen review page to be MUCH easier than checking the punch card.
YMMV.
I KNOW that there are people who vote who, even with their glasses on, cannot read the numbers on the tabs on the punch cards.
Yes, I worry about the opportunities for fraud with the electronic system.
I'm not convinced that the processes in place do enough to detect and defeat such fraud.
But I do believe that the touch screen made the process of voting easier, and that it will reduce the number of human errors made in the process of filling out the ballot.
Why is my voice meaningless simply due to some silly boundary drawn on a map? Can anybody give me a good reason why we don't use the popular vote...
Relax, your side is gaining ground.
Electors used to make up their own minds about who to vote for.
Electors used to be chosen by state legislatures, another layer of indirection that has been eliminated.
Slowly but surely, power is being transfered from the states to the federal government.
Under the current system, though, a minority of 17 states can block an amendment to the Constitution.
The Founders recognized the need to provide a great deal of protection against tyrannies of the majority.
Changing to direct popular vote for President reduces one of the protections that the rural states have.
What would you offer to the 17 most-rural states in exchange for giving up their current disproportionately large voice in the EC?
Anyway, we learned 4 years ago (and are learning this time too) that the vote is not accurate. It is error prone and sometimes subjective.
Which is quite frustrating.
I spent 25 years working for large telephone companies, and the state governments hold the phone companies to MUCH higher standards in billing accuracy than they hold themselves in elections.
The most common allowed error rate was one billing error per million records.
That standard applied to ballots in the last election would have meant something like 110 ballots with some sort of error.
Of course, there would be far more than that number of ballots that contained "errors" since a disturbing number of people mismark their ballots and do not catch their own mistakes.
In general, I'm a fan of touchscreen ballots because they make it easier for the voters to check and correct their vots -- far easier than those darned punch cards.
I have a friend that does consulting work for states on voting processes, including electronic ones.
She tells me that most states have repeated "zero check" steps in their procedure for moving the voting machines from warehouse to precinct.
At each step, the totals are read out and recorded, and the machines are cleared if the tally was not zero.
The information can be used to identify several different types of attempted fraud.
For what it's worth, she worries a lot more about dishonest election judges and officials than she does about electronic or other ballot fraud.
Maybe not. We can always learn from The Netherlands and build dikes. Then we can all learn what it's like to live in a polder.
Good luck with that.
Here's a little mental exercise.
Downtown New Orleans (to pick an example) is a few feet below sea level.
Assume the ocean level rises by the worst-case 200 feet, and that you need another 30 feet to account for hurricane storm surge and waves.
Next time you have the chance, look up at the top of a 23-story building.
You're talking about a dike that tall.
Hundreds and hundreds of miles of a dike that tall to defend New Orleans.
Relocate the city -- it's cheaper.
4: WHY exactly is global warming bad? Wont it give more landmass (eg, melts permafrost siberia) and lessen the "nice tropical -120F on antartica?
If all of the icecaps melt, the result is to raise the global ocean level about 200 feet.
IIRC, over 80% of the world's population lives in places that are less than 200 feet above sea level.
At current rates it will take a few hundred years for this to occur,
but the implication is that a large part of the human race and much of its wealth (in the form of cities and associated means of production) will have to be relocated.
I can easily envision the 95% who live in the 12 states (in this example) passing federal laws that do a variety of things
==========
That's what the Senate and the Supreme court is supposed to help protect - abuse of the minority. There are plenty of checks in place currently, and realistically te president isn't really one of them, so why worry about the electoral college for presidential voting?
The Supreme Court really has no role in protecting minorities -- other than saying that a particular law violates the protections built into the Constitution.
Further, suppose (since this is all hypothetical) that the 12 states in this example now control the House and the Presidency.
You are right that the Senate can block bills from becoming law, but suppose a regulatory agency (and we've certainly got enough of those) establishes a regulation that takes all of Colorado's water and awards it to California (an example someone else used), and the President uses the forces at his disposal to enforce the regulation.
Colorado goes to court and the Supremes rule that the action is unconstitutional.
What happens?
The President ignores them.
This has been at least threatened before -- Jackson famously said, "John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can."
The check on this is that the President is supposed to be impeached.
But in this example, the 12 states who have set out to loot the other 38 control the House, so no articles of impeachment are passed.
With the Electoral College, this President will certainly not get elected the next time since the small states will band together.
Without the College, those small states have no voice in selecting the President.
Granted, at this point the whole system has fallen apart.
The Founders' writings certainly indicate that they were aware that such situations were theoretically possible.
The Declaration of Independence becomes relevant: "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another... That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
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Here in Denver, there's really only one way to go north-south if you're commuting very far. You have to share I-25 with the SUVs, the delivery trucks, and the long-haul truckers. Every year, I feel more like I'm taking my life in my hands when I take my Civic out there. When the guy (or idiot blond woman on her cell phone trying to drive 10 MPH faster than the traffic this past week) runs over me with their SUV, I'm going to get hurt a lot worse than they are.
Time to think hard about how to make telecommuting work, or how to live and work someplace much smaller.
I forget whose quote it is, but "Money is the best aphrodisiac; but flowers are almost as good."
I bought a new Honda Civic last year (not the hybrid). One of the selling points is the new air conditioning system that is claimed to only require about 1 HP to operate. In previous Hondas, when driving up into the mountains here, you could feel the loss of drive power when the air conditioner compressor kicked in. No such effect with the new system. I'm impressed.
Isn't it also within their power to simply bar MS from doing business in the EU? No local sales, no one allowed to import the products from outside? Given the size of the MS market in Europe and the howls of outrage that would occur when businesses and consumers have to begin switching to other software, that's a game of chicken that I'd pay to see.
I was going to say exactly the opposite thing. Once there's some testimony -- and the computer companies are certainly going to insist that they get a chance to air their views in public -- that the only ways the FCC can handle this is to either (a) outlaw copying outright, which takes away constituents' ability to continue time-shifting, or (b) micromanage all kinds of different technologies like hard disks and software decoders in order to ensure that the flags are honored, I figure that Congress is going to want nothing to do with it.
If the change is made, the next round of legal challenges -- and there will be a next round -- will be focused on the word "continuing". The argument will be that, since all the scientists agree that science is a continuing process, then any theory must be considered incomplete, so alternatives should be included. The creationists don't care -- at least at this point -- about theories such as "mass distorts space-time in a way that we interpret as gravity", so won't care if alternate theories of gravity are presented or not. They care very much about biology, and some aspects of evolution in particular.
They are fighting a losing battle. Note that they are no longer trying to get an alternative like "the universe was created 4000 years ago, in its entirety, including the complete fossil record" inserted into cosmology texts. Note that they are no longer trying to get concepts like the role of DNA and gene-linked diseases excluded from the curriculum. They are trying to get statements to the effect that the jump from "dead" chemicals to life consisting of billions of cells tied together by an immensely complex set of protein chemistry is so unlikely that random chance is not an adequate explanation.
Part of me wants to just toss them that bone. Yes, it is true that we do not currently understand in any detail the mechanisms by which something as complex as a bacterium could arise. Maybe something, which also arose through mechanisms we do not understand, designed and implemented bacteria and turned them lose a few billion years ago. And having mentioned that, in passing, we can then go on and spend our time teaching theories that have enabled us to do useful things -- like understand how resistant bacteria have emerged, how we might treat conditions caused by bad coding in the DNA, how species and ecologies react to stress, etc. But I fear that if we give in on the one point, they will be back to demand that work stop on all those other things as well.
The US court system dealt with this one fairly easily when the Bell System was broken up back in the 1980s. The local companies were required to publish full specifications of all network interfaces (I worked at Bellcore at the time, where that work was actually done). Any changes to an interface, or the addition of a new interface, or discontinuing an old interface, was required to be published six months in advance of the change actually being used in a product. The court made it clear that if there were any violations, the senior officers of the company that did it, as well as the responsible individuals, would do jail time.
All new employees received training on the court imposed rules within ten days of hiring on, and everyone got annual refresher training. It's amazing how well you can capture the attention of a room full of engineers when you start with, "Failure to comply with the rules we're going to describe constitutes criminal contempt of court, and YOU PERSONALLY will go to jail if that happens." TTBOMK, those particular rules were never broken.
There have been entire magazines whose editorial policy was to publish articles describing how the various MS implemenations of APIs and protocols deviated from the official external MS documentation. Perhaps MS has cleaned up their internal situation over the past few years, but various insiders have been quoted in the past saying things that suggest that even MS considers the source code the only reliable documentation for how some of the protocols "work". IIRC, there was a recent case where an insider admitted that the Samba team's documentation of some aspects of the SMB protocol was more accurate than anything MS had internally.
Of course, when the FCC was setting the initial schedule for converting US broadcast television from analog to digital, representatives of the consumer electronics companies assured everyone that by this point in time, digital tuners and decoders would be so cheap that every new TV would come equipped with one and the stand-alone boxes would be priced well under $50. Now those same companies are, for the most part, fighting tooth and nail to delay having to put digital tuners into smaller sets, and as you point out, the cheapest stand-alone tuner/decoders are priced at several times what was "promised".
At some point, probably in less than 15 years, I expect to see the royal family abandon the country en masse. The oil revenues aren't going to be enough to keep most of the population out of poverty. It'll be no fun living in the armed camp necessary to protect yourself from the mob. Far better to abandon what's left and live off the wealth you've already transfered to the developed countries.
At least the first reference shows A+ as a descendent from APL. Not surprising for a finance language, as APL's vector orientation makes it easy to express a variety of financial functions. I started using APL in 1975 or thereabouts -- had a full symbolic debugging capability, which beat the hell out of PL/I's hex dumps. I still use an antique APL interpreter on Linux as my usual calculator -- God, do I feel old.
One possible explanation is that Google is looking for something to do with their current $55B stock valuation. Other than making the founders incredibly wealthy, the high stock price by itself isn't particularly useful to the company. But it can be used as collateral for loans to acquire assets that could be useful both now and in the future. Given the massive storage and computing resources that Google already manages, I suspect that they can manage their own fiber network for very little incremental expense (I'm less sure about the physical care of the fiber -- who fixes your dark fiber when someone cuts it?). As they attempt to provide more and more services, they may simply want more control over the underlying transport.
I'll be impressed (really!) if they can do it and meet a reasonable set of restrictions to make it a "fair" competition. Self-contained, bipedal, height between 170 and 190 cm, total weight on the field under 100 kg, no fuel intake during a period, some reasonable restrictions on anatomy (eg, no trick arms for throw-ins, 360-degree rotating heads, or knees/hips that work both ways), restricted field of vision. Basically, no custom-designed soccer robots (aside from software) -- you have to fit it inside the normal size, shape and density parameters of a human.
Unfortunately, unless I get nanobots that can clean out my arteries, kill any cancer cells I happen to develop, and take care of whatever build-up causes the assorted dementias, I'm probably too old to see the first team that makes a serious run at it...
Indeed. Without taking sides, there is some possibility that a paper that argued, let's assume convincingly, that either global warming was not occurring, or that some factor other than human activity was clearly driving it, simply could not get published in the peer-reviewed literature. The fact that everyone "knows" something does not necessarily make it true. OTOH, most of the time that's actually the way to bet.
One thing to remember is that the local government has to build data structures that describe the ballot and how things are to be counted. Some of the errors that have been reported are errors at that level -- the local data structures contained errors that were not caught during local test procedures. Due to varioius overlapping special districts, my local precinct had 26 different ballots. IIRC, Orange County, California had over 5,000 different ballots, each of which had to be available in five different languages. Many county clerks' offices (or whichever local official has charge of voting arrangements) are still funded at the same level as when ballots were paper-and-pencil and much simpler. Effectively, a critical part of the "programming" IS being done by beginners, and some of those beginners have NO formal training in programming.
There are advantages to full incorporation if you're planning to grow into a several person outfit.
One reason appears to be that very few workers actually earn the federal minimum wage -- in the US the estimate is around 3%. Increasing the federal minimum wage would result in a small number of workers receiving an increase and many more workers being paid "close" to the minimum wage. The percentage is much larger for teenaged workers. Economists have found weak correlation between the federal minimum wage level and teenaged unemployment. No studies that I am aware of have shown any sort of "spike" in unemployment following a hike in the minimum wage.
On the system used in my county, I got a summary screen that listed my choices in large, easy-to-read type -- President:Kerry, Amendment 3A:Yes, and so forth. When we used punch cards, I had to flip through the ballot pages, find that Kerry was number 37, and check the punch card to see that the tab for number 37 (now missing because I'd punched it, and tabs labeled in five- or six-point type) was punched. Could I check my ballot both ways? Yes. Was one of them easier to check? I personally found, based on experience with both, the touch screen review page to be MUCH easier than checking the punch card. YMMV. I KNOW that there are people who vote who, even with their glasses on, cannot read the numbers on the tabs on the punch cards.
Yes, I worry about the opportunities for fraud with the electronic system. I'm not convinced that the processes in place do enough to detect and defeat such fraud. But I do believe that the touch screen made the process of voting easier, and that it will reduce the number of human errors made in the process of filling out the ballot.
Relax, your side is gaining ground. Electors used to make up their own minds about who to vote for. Electors used to be chosen by state legislatures, another layer of indirection that has been eliminated. Slowly but surely, power is being transfered from the states to the federal government. Under the current system, though, a minority of 17 states can block an amendment to the Constitution.
The Founders recognized the need to provide a great deal of protection against tyrannies of the majority. Changing to direct popular vote for President reduces one of the protections that the rural states have. What would you offer to the 17 most-rural states in exchange for giving up their current disproportionately large voice in the EC?
Which is quite frustrating. I spent 25 years working for large telephone companies, and the state governments hold the phone companies to MUCH higher standards in billing accuracy than they hold themselves in elections. The most common allowed error rate was one billing error per million records. That standard applied to ballots in the last election would have meant something like 110 ballots with some sort of error. Of course, there would be far more than that number of ballots that contained "errors" since a disturbing number of people mismark their ballots and do not catch their own mistakes. In general, I'm a fan of touchscreen ballots because they make it easier for the voters to check and correct their vots -- far easier than those darned punch cards.
I have a friend that does consulting work for states on voting processes, including electronic ones. She tells me that most states have repeated "zero check" steps in their procedure for moving the voting machines from warehouse to precinct. At each step, the totals are read out and recorded, and the machines are cleared if the tally was not zero. The information can be used to identify several different types of attempted fraud. For what it's worth, she worries a lot more about dishonest election judges and officials than she does about electronic or other ballot fraud.
Good luck with that. Here's a little mental exercise. Downtown New Orleans (to pick an example) is a few feet below sea level. Assume the ocean level rises by the worst-case 200 feet, and that you need another 30 feet to account for hurricane storm surge and waves. Next time you have the chance, look up at the top of a 23-story building. You're talking about a dike that tall. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of a dike that tall to defend New Orleans. Relocate the city -- it's cheaper.
If all of the icecaps melt, the result is to raise the global ocean level about 200 feet. IIRC, over 80% of the world's population lives in places that are less than 200 feet above sea level. At current rates it will take a few hundred years for this to occur, but the implication is that a large part of the human race and much of its wealth (in the form of cities and associated means of production) will have to be relocated.
The Supreme Court really has no role in protecting minorities -- other than saying that a particular law violates the protections built into the Constitution. Further, suppose (since this is all hypothetical) that the 12 states in this example now control the House and the Presidency. You are right that the Senate can block bills from becoming law, but suppose a regulatory agency (and we've certainly got enough of those) establishes a regulation that takes all of Colorado's water and awards it to California (an example someone else used), and the President uses the forces at his disposal to enforce the regulation. Colorado goes to court and the Supremes rule that the action is unconstitutional. What happens?
The President ignores them. This has been at least threatened before -- Jackson famously said, "John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can." The check on this is that the President is supposed to be impeached. But in this example, the 12 states who have set out to loot the other 38 control the House, so no articles of impeachment are passed. With the Electoral College, this President will certainly not get elected the next time since the small states will band together. Without the College, those small states have no voice in selecting the President.
Granted, at this point the whole system has fallen apart. The Founders' writings certainly indicate that they were aware that such situations were theoretically possible. The Declaration of Independence becomes relevant: "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another... That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."