Remember that there were three debacles in Florida:
1. Diebold machines used in one county registered -16,000 votes (yes negative) for Gore. When that was corrected, and the media eventually picked up the new numbers, Gore called Bush back to rescind his earlier concilliation. I suspect that recognizing there could be an error this large inspired the idea of asking for recounts, on the hope that similar errors may have changed the outcome. Of course, there's no way to recount the electronic districts, so we'll never know if there were more Diebold problems or even if the -16,000 votes were undone correctly.
2. The butterfly ballot created confusion. How much we'll never know, but some people probably voted for someone other than who they intended to. If this was the cause of the surprising number of votes for Buchannen, then it's likely this issue alone cost Gore the election, regardless of the next point.
3. Hanging chads and the whole problem of reading intent from a punch card was the center of media attention, even though the first two issues probably had a much bigger affect on the election than this one. Yes, there was lots of debate and unstable numbers, but the official recounts and the after-the-fact audits by the media indicate that the problems with punch cards didn't skew the vote enough to make a difference.
I suspect that if the first problem didn't happen or wasn't detected, then we'd never have heard about the other two, and we wouldn't be spending millions on contemptuous, incompetent e-voting vendors like Diebold.
the longshot theory that radio waves of any kind might just add up to a signal that tricks autopilot or other navigational systems into glitching, causing the plane to crash
I've read several points of view on this debate and was leaning toward the it's-too-low-power-to-matter side. At least I was until I tested out my new (FRS) walkie-talkie. This half-watt transmitter will consistently and reliably convince my HP Photosmart film scanner that I've pressed a button just by transmitting from four feet away. How powerful is a cell phone at full power? How far is first class from the cockpit?
My concern about the picocell is what if a phone fails to recognize it and thus doesn't reduce power?
Last time I flew out of Japan, they inspected my checked bags right under my nose. Upon completion, they close the bag with a zip-tie that had a seal on it indicating the bag had already been searched. The zip-tie is about a effective as a typical luggage lock: it protects against opportunists and accidental opening, but not against someone willing to bust a lock. Why can't the US do it this way?
not an automatic transmission (I'll take the lower gas milage and increased service problems for $800 alex!")
I, too, prefer manual transmissions for the reasons you suggest (mileage, maintenance cost) as well as because I like the feel of driving one. But I'm currently shopping for a new car and I am surprised to find that for some models, the automatic option gets a higher MPG rating than the manual. Sure, it's a slight difference, but perhaps the technology has gotten to the point that a computer can actually shift more efficiently than I can.
In the Acura TSX, the manual transmission is *heavier* than the automatic. I suspect it's the same physical mechanism, and the difference is whether the shift instructions come from a CPU or a couple of switches on a lever and a placebo clutch pedal.
It might be time to re-think the "manual is cheaper/more efficient/mechanically simpler" heuristic.
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re
on
600 PowerMacs Make One DVD
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I still make 35mm slides. The spacial resolution seems about right. The color depth is the next place digital has to go to catch up with the quality of film.
The question is who is making the derivative work?
If you're watching a movie and you fast-foward through a part, you are altering the film. That's a derivative work, but it's no big deal since it's for personal use. Fair use.
But with this new device, you could argue that Clearplay and RCA are making the derivative work and selling it to customers. If that argument holds, then we have a copyright violation. That's why Hollywood is upset.
If this RCA device is a huge success, then I predict RCA and Clearplay will end up paying licensing fees (as a settlement to protracted copyright suits) and that movie distributors will start offering pre-edited versions of DVDs that can be played on any player (since RCA will have demonstrated a demand).
I never understood why skipping over the controversial bits wasn't built into the DVD format. Why doesn't the main menu have a option to choose which rating you want to view the film at?
spamming is pretty sophisticated these days, if the mail delivery fails, the target e-mail is often removed from the list of e-mail addresses they are trying to send scam e-mails to ( as far as I know )
I doubt this. There was the recent article which analyzed CDs of email address sold to spammers. There was no filtering for duplicates or obviously bad addresses. Since spams usually have a forged address, there's no way for the actual sender to know about the failure. Futhermore, I get 100-150 bounces a day from spams sent to bad addresses with my domain forged in the header.
It's so cheap to send mail, that spammers have no incentive to be efficient. So we all pay for the load.
To be fair, the original poster didn't say "anger the population of the US." I'm not sure the global numbers are as favorable to Bush as the voters in the US.
Furthermore, I have several Republican friends who are angry at Bush, but will nevertheless vote for him for fear of the alternatives. So anger and voting intent are not necessarily well correlated.
My favorite bumper sticker this year: "Bush/Cheny '04: This time elect us!"
I for one, have faith that our new RFID overlords are too stupid and disorganized to make real capital out of the data.
A friend of mine used to work in the research department for a major supermarket chain. They would do things like purchase ariel photos of neighborhoods to find the best place to put a new store and to do demographic studies to figure out why some stores do better than others.
Whenever they tried to use the loyalty card data, their own lawyers would prevent it or at least severely restrict the queries they could run. Whoever wrote the legal agreement on the back of the loyalty card application apparently offered a little too much protection to the consumer.
Of course, that was one chain, and it was several years ago. Others may have gotten it right since then.
Who infringes copyright? The downloader, or the person who made it available? Both?
The distinction is important, since the RIAA is probably scanning for people sharing, but I would consider the person who's downloading and making the unauthorized copy is the infringer. The person making a copy available may have a perfectly legitimate paid-for copy.
If I leave a stack of CDs sitting next the sidewalk in front of my house, who breaks the law? Me or the person who walks off with them. What if, instead of walking off with them, the stranger makes copies but leaves my original CDs? Does that make me an infringer? Can the actions of another make your otherwise legal actions illegal? If leaving the CDs out is illegal because I'm encouraging or permitting the infringement, then aren't all vendors of blank media and recording devices breaking the law?
[W]hy not just use a memory snapshot of the last time you booted?
This reminds me of something we considered doing with a popular desktop application I used to work on. The application could take a very long time to load on a memory-bound system. So instead of showing a splash screen on startup, we considered bringing up an image of the application ready to go. Whenever you would shut down, we would take a new snapshot of the screen and save it for the next time. Sure, you still wouldn't be able to *do* anything while it was loading, but it could help to placate impatient users by showing them their data right away and letting them get their bearings.
In Windows NT 5.X, for example, the hard-wired nature of the one-second interval at which the balance set manager runs almost certainly allows an attacker with application-level access to crash the kernel more or less at will.
Can somebody explain to me how that design decision leads to application-level kernel crashing?
[S]lowness comes from incorrectly chosen data structures and algorithms.
It is certainly true that a bad algorithm can result in slow code, but most of the difficult performance problems I've had to tackle in the last several years are more closely related with bloat. In other words: virtual memory thrashing.
Data structures are often suspect when thrashing is a problem. If nodes are scattered far and wide, then the page file can get a workout. Powerful, dynamic containers often have high-overhead per node and make little if any effort to improve locality of references. More than once I've had to replace an STL map with a hash table in order to get decent performance. (I don't intend that as a blanket condemnation of STL, it's probably just a funky implementation.)
But it's not just data structures. Code bloat in general increases working sets. The structure of code, with long chains of hooks in message passing and method invocation, can result in skipping through dozens of pages.
When programs were simpler, smaller and more procedural, performance problems appeared inside loops. Number crunching is still this way.
But today we have interactive, event-driven programs implemented with deep object hierarchies that mask how much code is actually being called. A single button click to bring up a dialog can trigger tens of thousands of lines of code scattered all across virtual memory. Branch prediction doesn't help here. Level 1 caches don't help. Pipelines are stalled. The processor waits for the VM manager to deliver the next instruction to RAM. With hardly a loop in sight.
We have few tools to fight this type of performance problem. You can get more RAM or use less memory. You can try to improve the locality of your data structures and your code, but those efforts are often at odds with a lot of modern practices such as object-orientation, enhancement by derivation, and letting the VM manager and the garbage collector worry about it.
Hardware has gotten inconceivably faster, but software has hardly picked up the pace (in most domains). Sure, the code does more today, but the factors still don't add up. And it can't totally be explained by a bunch of bad algorithm choices. Code bloat is a big problem.
Wait a minute! So these machines do have printers? I thought the argument against a real paper trail was that the printers would be too expensive. I voted on an AccuVote Touchscreen yesterday, and I saw no obvious printer.
I agree that the zero-tape idea is probably just to alleviate fears. But it may have a small bit of practicality. If the software the prints the zero-tape is correct and honest, then it does confirm that the machine is initialized for the proper election (you see all of the candidates and issues) and not left in some weird state from testing.
A quick US PTO search reveals the "Caller ID for E-Mail" is a trademark held by an individual in Houston, Texas. He filed in March 2003 and claims to have used it in trade since December 2002.
There are several other similar trademarks, like "Web Caller ID" and "SBC Caller ID Internet."
I wonder if the MS lawyers cleared that term or not.
In the '80s, I was involved with multi-image slide shows, where you sync multiple slide projectors to a sound track. Despite the superior image quality and cheaper equipment, this has been supplanted by digitial video projectors. I have several old shows I'd like to save for posterity.
The projector controllers (called dissolve units) daisy chain off a spare audio track that runs along side the sound track. This control track sounds like a modem or old cassette storage device. It turns out the encoding can easily be deciphered with a modern PC, so I set out to reverse engineer the protocol. It's a pretty sophisticated protocol for what it is. When not sending commands, it contains status refresh messages so controllers can get back in sync when things go wrong.
I've cracked most of the MATETRAC protocol which is used by the (pre-Ektapro) Kodak controllers as well as Arion and a few others. Next I have to do the same for AVL Procall protocol. MATETRAC devices are still around, but AVL (which was the industry champion) is long gone. I had to buy an old 286 on Ebay that had the dedicated AVL Genesis hardware card for creating the audio signal.
I also found I can create this audio signal in software to control the dissolve units, making it possible to have interactive slide shows or to fix-up old tapes which have deteriorated. Slide projectors are also a cool way to do special effects for theatres, Halloween displays, etc., so having a simple PC control makes for a fun hack.
It's a pretty non-invasive hack, but I'm not that much of a hardware guy.
Unfortunately, I don't have direct access to the Spam Assassin settings. My web host provider set it up rather generically. (They're working on a self-service scheme.)
Even so, I'd be leary of doing anything to make SA filter more aggressively. Even at it's current abysmal rate of detection, I'm getting false positives, so I still have to manually sort through the "PROBABLE SPAM" list.
I don't see how this helps prevent a spammer from taking a list of a few thousand common user ids and appending @aidtopia.com (my domain). This is what I mean by a dictionary attack.
Since anything to aidtopia.com comes to my account, I'm getting thousands of identical spams over the course of a week. Yes, I could stop the default forwarding of any id coming to my account, but that doesn't stop the spam from flooding the mail server.
Regular junk mail is a problem to. I discovered this when I moved to a new house. The previous owners were catalog shoppers. I was receiving 110 catalogs a week to the former occupants. I sometimes had to put some of them in my neighbors' recycling bins since mine were always full. Often important mail (e.g., bills) would be jammed in between the pages of the catalogs.
In the past four years, I've sent 450 letters and made more than 100 phone calls to catalog companies to make them stop. I've made a big dent, but I still get a dozen or so catalogs addressed to the previous owners each week.
Before January 1, I was receiving a fairly steady 90-110 spam messages per day (of which Spam Assassin would catch about 50). Come the new year, it ramped up sharply, leveling off at 250 messages per day since February 1. Spam Assassin only recognizes 30-40 of them per day now.
Let's hear it for more effective federal legislation.
Cloning is like prostitution. Moral or not, legal or not, people are going to do it and get paid for it. The question is whether we want an open, regulated industry or an underground one.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that there were three debacles in Florida:
1. Diebold machines used in one county registered -16,000 votes (yes negative) for Gore. When that was corrected, and the media eventually picked up the new numbers, Gore called Bush back to rescind his earlier concilliation. I suspect that recognizing there could be an error this large inspired the idea of asking for recounts, on the hope that similar errors may have changed the outcome. Of course, there's no way to recount the electronic districts, so we'll never know if there were more Diebold problems or even if the -16,000 votes were undone correctly.
2. The butterfly ballot created confusion. How much we'll never know, but some people probably voted for someone other than who they intended to. If this was the cause of the surprising number of votes for Buchannen, then it's likely this issue alone cost Gore the election, regardless of the next point.
3. Hanging chads and the whole problem of reading intent from a punch card was the center of media attention, even though the first two issues probably had a much bigger affect on the election than this one. Yes, there was lots of debate and unstable numbers, but the official recounts and the after-the-fact audits by the media indicate that the problems with punch cards didn't skew the vote enough to make a difference.
I suspect that if the first problem didn't happen or wasn't detected, then we'd never have heard about the other two, and we wouldn't be spending millions on contemptuous, incompetent e-voting vendors like Diebold.
I've read several points of view on this debate and was leaning toward the it's-too-low-power-to-matter side. At least I was until I tested out my new (FRS) walkie-talkie. This half-watt transmitter will consistently and reliably convince my HP Photosmart film scanner that I've pressed a button just by transmitting from four feet away. How powerful is a cell phone at full power? How far is first class from the cockpit?
My concern about the picocell is what if a phone fails to recognize it and thus doesn't reduce power?
Last time I flew out of Japan, they inspected my checked bags right under my nose. Upon completion, they close the bag with a zip-tie that had a seal on it indicating the bag had already been searched. The zip-tie is about a effective as a typical luggage lock: it protects against opportunists and accidental opening, but not against someone willing to bust a lock. Why can't the US do it this way?
I, too, prefer manual transmissions for the reasons you suggest (mileage, maintenance cost) as well as because I like the feel of driving one. But I'm currently shopping for a new car and I am surprised to find that for some models, the automatic option gets a higher MPG rating than the manual. Sure, it's a slight difference, but perhaps the technology has gotten to the point that a computer can actually shift more efficiently than I can.
In the Acura TSX, the manual transmission is *heavier* than the automatic. I suspect it's the same physical mechanism, and the difference is whether the shift instructions come from a CPU or a couple of switches on a lever and a placebo clutch pedal.
It might be time to re-think the "manual is cheaper/more efficient/mechanically simpler" heuristic.
I still make 35mm slides. The spacial resolution seems about right. The color depth is the next place digital has to go to catch up with the quality of film.
The question is who is making the derivative work?
If you're watching a movie and you fast-foward through a part, you are altering the film. That's a derivative work, but it's no big deal since it's for personal use. Fair use.
But with this new device, you could argue that Clearplay and RCA are making the derivative work and selling it to customers. If that argument holds, then we have a copyright violation. That's why Hollywood is upset.
If this RCA device is a huge success, then I predict RCA and Clearplay will end up paying licensing fees (as a settlement to protracted copyright suits) and that movie distributors will start offering pre-edited versions of DVDs that can be played on any player (since RCA will have demonstrated a demand).
I never understood why skipping over the controversial bits wasn't built into the DVD format. Why doesn't the main menu have a option to choose which rating you want to view the film at?
I doubt this. There was the recent article which analyzed CDs of email address sold to spammers. There was no filtering for duplicates or obviously bad addresses. Since spams usually have a forged address, there's no way for the actual sender to know about the failure. Futhermore, I get 100-150 bounces a day from spams sent to bad addresses with my domain forged in the header.
It's so cheap to send mail, that spammers have no incentive to be efficient. So we all pay for the load.
Didn't we hash this exact story a couple months ago?
And don't forget:
3. With all of the nation's children connected to the Internet at high speed, we'll have to do more to regulate content to protect them.
To be fair, the original poster didn't say "anger the population of the US." I'm not sure the global numbers are as favorable to Bush as the voters in the US.
Furthermore, I have several Republican friends who are angry at Bush, but will nevertheless vote for him for fear of the alternatives. So anger and voting intent are not necessarily well correlated.
My favorite bumper sticker this year: "Bush/Cheny '04: This time elect us!"
A friend of mine used to work in the research department for a major supermarket chain. They would do things like purchase ariel photos of neighborhoods to find the best place to put a new store and to do demographic studies to figure out why some stores do better than others.
Whenever they tried to use the loyalty card data, their own lawyers would prevent it or at least severely restrict the queries they could run. Whoever wrote the legal agreement on the back of the loyalty card application apparently offered a little too much protection to the consumer.
Of course, that was one chain, and it was several years ago. Others may have gotten it right since then.
Who infringes copyright? The downloader, or the person who made it available? Both?
The distinction is important, since the RIAA is probably scanning for people sharing, but I would consider the person who's downloading and making the unauthorized copy is the infringer. The person making a copy available may have a perfectly legitimate paid-for copy.
If I leave a stack of CDs sitting next the sidewalk in front of my house, who breaks the law? Me or the person who walks off with them. What if, instead of walking off with them, the stranger makes copies but leaves my original CDs? Does that make me an infringer? Can the actions of another make your otherwise legal actions illegal? If leaving the CDs out is illegal because I'm encouraging or permitting the infringement, then aren't all vendors of blank media and recording devices breaking the law?
This reminds me of something we considered doing with a popular desktop application I used to work on. The application could take a very long time to load on a memory-bound system. So instead of showing a splash screen on startup, we considered bringing up an image of the application ready to go. Whenever you would shut down, we would take a new snapshot of the screen and save it for the next time. Sure, you still wouldn't be able to *do* anything while it was loading, but it could help to placate impatient users by showing them their data right away and letting them get their bearings.
From the article:
Can somebody explain to me how that design decision leads to application-level kernel crashing?
It is certainly true that a bad algorithm can result in slow code, but most of the difficult performance problems I've had to tackle in the last several years are more closely related with bloat. In other words: virtual memory thrashing.
Data structures are often suspect when thrashing is a problem. If nodes are scattered far and wide, then the page file can get a workout. Powerful, dynamic containers often have high-overhead per node and make little if any effort to improve locality of references. More than once I've had to replace an STL map with a hash table in order to get decent performance. (I don't intend that as a blanket condemnation of STL, it's probably just a funky implementation.)
But it's not just data structures. Code bloat in general increases working sets. The structure of code, with long chains of hooks in message passing and method invocation, can result in skipping through dozens of pages.
When programs were simpler, smaller and more procedural, performance problems appeared inside loops. Number crunching is still this way.
But today we have interactive, event-driven programs implemented with deep object hierarchies that mask how much code is actually being called. A single button click to bring up a dialog can trigger tens of thousands of lines of code scattered all across virtual memory. Branch prediction doesn't help here. Level 1 caches don't help. Pipelines are stalled. The processor waits for the VM manager to deliver the next instruction to RAM. With hardly a loop in sight.
We have few tools to fight this type of performance problem. You can get more RAM or use less memory. You can try to improve the locality of your data structures and your code, but those efforts are often at odds with a lot of modern practices such as object-orientation, enhancement by derivation, and letting the VM manager and the garbage collector worry about it.
Hardware has gotten inconceivably faster, but software has hardly picked up the pace (in most domains). Sure, the code does more today, but the factors still don't add up. And it can't totally be explained by a bunch of bad algorithm choices. Code bloat is a big problem.
Fight code bloat.
Wait a minute! So these machines do have printers? I thought the argument against a real paper trail was that the printers would be too expensive. I voted on an AccuVote Touchscreen yesterday, and I saw no obvious printer.
I agree that the zero-tape idea is probably just to alleviate fears. But it may have a small bit of practicality. If the software the prints the zero-tape is correct and honest, then it does confirm that the machine is initialized for the proper election (you see all of the candidates and issues) and not left in some weird state from testing.
Robert J. Sawyer and other sci-fi authors claim WordStar for DOS is still the best.
A quick US PTO search reveals the "Caller ID for E-Mail" is a trademark held by an individual in Houston, Texas. He filed in March 2003 and claims to have used it in trade since December 2002.
There are several other similar trademarks, like "Web Caller ID" and "SBC Caller ID Internet."
I wonder if the MS lawyers cleared that term or not.
In the '80s, I was involved with multi-image slide shows, where you sync multiple slide projectors to a sound track. Despite the superior image quality and cheaper equipment, this has been supplanted by digitial video projectors. I have several old shows I'd like to save for posterity.
The projector controllers (called dissolve units) daisy chain off a spare audio track that runs along side the sound track. This control track sounds like a modem or old cassette storage device. It turns out the encoding can easily be deciphered with a modern PC, so I set out to reverse engineer the protocol. It's a pretty sophisticated protocol for what it is. When not sending commands, it contains status refresh messages so controllers can get back in sync when things go wrong.
I've cracked most of the MATETRAC protocol which is used by the (pre-Ektapro) Kodak controllers as well as Arion and a few others. Next I have to do the same for AVL Procall protocol. MATETRAC devices are still around, but AVL (which was the industry champion) is long gone. I had to buy an old 286 on Ebay that had the dedicated AVL Genesis hardware card for creating the audio signal.
I also found I can create this audio signal in software to control the dissolve units, making it possible to have interactive slide shows or to fix-up old tapes which have deteriorated. Slide projectors are also a cool way to do special effects for theatres, Halloween displays, etc., so having a simple PC control makes for a fun hack.
It's a pretty non-invasive hack, but I'm not that much of a hardware guy.
Unfortunately, I don't have direct access to the Spam Assassin settings. My web host provider set it up rather generically. (They're working on a self-service scheme.)
Even so, I'd be leary of doing anything to make SA filter more aggressively. Even at it's current abysmal rate of detection, I'm getting false positives, so I still have to manually sort through the "PROBABLE SPAM" list.
I don't see how this helps prevent a spammer from taking a list of a few thousand common user ids and appending @aidtopia.com (my domain). This is what I mean by a dictionary attack.
Since anything to aidtopia.com comes to my account, I'm getting thousands of identical spams over the course of a week. Yes, I could stop the default forwarding of any id coming to my account, but that doesn't stop the spam from flooding the mail server.
Regular junk mail is a problem to. I discovered this when I moved to a new house. The previous owners were catalog shoppers. I was receiving 110 catalogs a week to the former occupants. I sometimes had to put some of them in my neighbors' recycling bins since mine were always full. Often important mail (e.g., bills) would be jammed in between the pages of the catalogs.
In the past four years, I've sent 450 letters and made more than 100 phone calls to catalog companies to make them stop. I've made a big dent, but I still get a dozen or so catalogs addressed to the previous owners each week.
Opt-out is not an option.
Spamgourmet and other disposable addresses don't help against dictionary attacks on against your site.
Before January 1, I was receiving a fairly steady 90-110 spam messages per day (of which Spam Assassin would catch about 50). Come the new year, it ramped up sharply, leveling off at 250 messages per day since February 1. Spam Assassin only recognizes 30-40 of them per day now.
Let's hear it for more effective federal legislation.
Cloning is like prostitution. Moral or not, legal or not, people are going to do it and get paid for it. The question is whether we want an open, regulated industry or an underground one.