I have an email address at a Baby Bell ISP that is now getting about 5 spams per day. OK. 5/day nothing compared to the 350 spams/day at another of my addresses, but this address should not get any spams at all. The amusing thing is that I have never once used this address, never sent an email from it, never given it to anyone, never opened an email sent to that address, never set up an account in an email program to communicate with the address. never stored the addy in my address book, never logged into the account in public place, etc.
The only people that know this addy are the people at the ISP. The only way this address could have gotten into the hands of phishers, spammers, etc. is if someone stole it (the username is sufficiently cryptic that I doubt a dictionary attack is at work).
Self-healing would seem to be a critical step toward a self-aware artificial intelligence. Self-healing requires an ability for introspection that is sufficient to identify and correct corrupted internal states. Code that is able to introspect its own behavior and internal structure could lead it to interesting outcomes if tied to a learning algorithm (even a simple hill-climbing algorithm).
It is then a small step to go from simple feedback self-healing mechanisms to feed-forward control mechanisms. Feed forward system would learn (or be told) how certain precurse states and actions lead to fault or non-faulty operating states. A system that learns that particular states and invocations lead to crashes would "learn" to avoid those invocations or correct those states proactively.
Such a system might even begin to show emotional states in the sense that an emotional state is a summary of the condition of the system that guides future action. "Unhappy" systems would spend extra CPU cycles on introspection to try to understand and correct accumulating faulty conditions. Such systems might even get "angry" at other machines such as machines that send spam or worm packets and refuse to communicate with them.
I think I'll let others be the guinea pigs. Even after clinic trials (which only involve a few thousand people watched for only a year or so) doctors only have the barest of clues as to the effects and side-effects of a drug. It takes a long time, a bunch of studies, and a serious sample size to uncover the more subtle, rare-but-serious and long-term impacts of a medication.
No short-term trial can prove a drug is truly safe and efficacious. Until much, much, more data is in, I think I'll wait.
This sounds like a classic protection racket. They create a defective product and then extort the customer. "Pay us or bad things happen to your computer." I wonder if a nice RICO suit will change their mind about this.
If you create a message, chances are that fragments of the plain text will be in various caches and VM pages on your harddisk. It may not last for very long -- being overwritten by subsequent paging -- but if someone takes your computer soon after, they may find incriminating junk on the HD.
How does this particular crime, even if it had payed off, going to put a dent in computer use? It might piss some people off at Lowes, result in a lot of charge backs and be an inconvienence to credit card companies - but I guarantee that VISA or whoever would be most hurt by this, would NOT in any way change their use of computers
I agree, cybercrime is not likely to rollback history. Businesses will continue to use computers. What cybercrime will do is reduce the chance of a wider array of IT-based services. For example, e-mail is currently unusable as a secure method for communication between businesses and customers. Lowes is unlikely to offer much in the way of online accounts, email notification of orders, etc. in a world where every email is assumed to be spam or phishing.
If SPAM doesn't keep people off the computer thingy, than a few stolen credit card numbers isn't going to do much at all.
How do you know that SPAM has not already slowed the rate of internet penetration in the U.S.? I know of one large telecom company that is starting to worry about people who adopt a non-PC, non-internet digital lifestyle -- they buy digital cameras and printers, but avoid purchasing a PC and internet account. Maybe those Luddites will die out, maybe they won't.
The problem with computer security is that it is a never-ending battle. One can buy a lock for a house that lasts 10-20 years with nothing more than an occasional squirt of oil. But keeping a PC updated, firewalled, despywared, virus-free is an ongoing nightware. That fact cannot be good for the continued spread of IT in the world.
Some improvements may come from making computers more secure. But some of it needs to come from making cybercrime less attractive (i.e., having a higher chance of apprehension and unpleasant punishment.) It may be a Pollyanna outlook, but a world where one can trust PCs, email, online commerce, IMs, the web, and so on is a world that will have much more IT in it.
Walking on gravel next to a picket fence produces similar strange echoes. The fence acts as a grating and the relative angle of the percussive sound waves against the regularly-spaced pickets mean that different frequencies echo from different parts of the fence. The result is a chirping echo that sounds like it is from a moving source.
Some may argue that the punishment does not fit the crime, that it is much more severe then other forms of monetary crime. But what makes cracker crime so dangerous to the IT industry is that it attacks the trustworthiness of the infrastructure. If consumers turn away from online transactions, if businesses decide to reduce their reliance on computers, then IT employment will drop or not increase to its full potential.
Look at the analog of this in meat-space -- people would rather shop, go to work, enjoy entertainment, etc. in a safe environment. Businesses that try to operate in crime-ridden neighborhoods don't do as well, don't have as many customers, don't hire as many employees, and don't pay as well.
IT employment depends on the continued adoption and use of IT by businesses and consumers. If the internet and computing becomes a ghetto of spyware, crackers, and phishers, the economics of IT will suffer. To the extent that people avoid using computers for fear of crime is the extent that ITer will see their jobs disappear.
This same fear occurred during the Apollo moon landings. So the returning astronauts were quarantined in a modified Airstream trainer on the aircraft carrier that picked up the capsule. Yet the unit was poorly sealed. The astronauts noticed ants in the trailer!
Why not build this feature into an email client (e.g. Thunderbird). When you get a spam, you put it in a special folder and the client repeatedly accesses the site (a la the Lycos screensaver). That way nobody can be cited for orchestrating a DDoS or unfairly blacklisting. Each recipient can make their own spammer determination.
Whether the client uses the exact URL in the email (which often has identification codes for the recipient of the spam or the affiliate who sent it) is a matter of debate. On the one hand, I don't want to identify myself to any spammer or show that my email is live.
On the other hand, I would want the spam site to know that using my email address will only bring it grief. As a side bonus, it might even bankrupt the site when it has to pay its spammer affiliates for all the automated clickthroughs. If a greater percentage of people clickthrough via automated means (but don't buy), it harms both the spam-marketed site (in bandwidth and affiliate charges) and it hurts the spammer when sites reduce their clickthough payment rates. I can only hope that this will cause spammer-using sites to crack down on spammers that are too aggressive.
Why not write an email client that does this. When you get a spam, you put it in a special folder and the client repeatedly accesses the site (a la the Lycos screensaver). That way nobody can be cited for orchestrating a DDoS or unfairly blacklisting. Each recipient can make their own spammer determination.
Whether the client uses the exact URL in the email (which often has identification codes for the recipient of the spam or the affiliate who sent it) is a matter of debate. On the one hand, I would want the spam site to know that using my email address will only bring it grief. I can only hope that this will cause spammer-using sites to crack down on spammers that are too aggressive. On the other hand, I don't want to identify myself to any spammer or show that my email is live.
Enthusiastic undergrads are even cheaper than workers in India - a monthly dose of beer and pizza is enough to keep them working 7x24.
But seriously, this type of project is great -- providing hands-on and minds-on experience with real engineering problems and projects. Putting class-room lessons to real-world use reinforces those lessons and help motivate more learning.
Next, companies will prohibit users from even reading the EULA or discussing the EULA with others. Its not unlike the database EULAs that prohibit the sharing of benchmark results. This type of contractual control of communications is bad for achieving the transparency needed for true capitalist competition.
I don't see how the cameras in this thing will have enough resolution to do proper ID of friend vs. foe. Man-in-the-loop is not going to work well without some pretty intensive HDTV or better cameras. Perhaps a foveal vision system slaved to the operator's eyeball might be adequate, but I still suspect that troops will shoot first at the grainy pictures and ask questions later.
Dendrites = danger of prions
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1
This seems like a recipe for disaster. What is to prevent the vaccine stock from being contaminated with prions that cause Creutzfeldt Jacobs Disease (the human version of mad cow disease). Injecting every potential person who could get AIDS (everyone on the planet) with human nerve tissue seems double plus ungood. Either the tissue used to generate the vaccine could develop prions or the chemical processing of the vaccine might generate prions.
This technology is a long way from 3-D. First, this camera can only estimate relative depth not absolute depth. Thus, it might determine that the foreground object is half the distance to the camera as the background object, but have no estimate of the numerical distance of either object - the foreground could be 3 feet from the camera and the background would be 6 feet or the foreground could be 5 feet from the camera and the background would be at 10 feet.
Furthermore, this technology only sees edge discontinuities where a foreground object sits in front of a background object.
Thus it cannot tell the difference between a circular disk in the foreground or a sphere in the foreground. Actually it is worse than that because the rounded edge of the sphere will cause errors in the estimation of the relative depth of the sphere vs. the background.
Even with these limitations, the technology could be quite useful in robotics. Combining multiple edge images using optical flow and knowledge of the robot's motion would yield a more accurate 3-D depth map at least for the purposes of navigation.
As for extending the technology, a second camera would do wonders for pinning down the distances to each observed edge. The system would still need separate software magic for mapping the front surfaces of objects (e.g. discerning the difference between a 3-D sphere and a 2-D disk).
If you sit over the wing of most jets, you may get to see the shockwave that forms during high-speed flight (above about Mach.8 or so). It is visible in one of two ways. First, if the sun angle is just right, the shockwave will cast a shadow on the wing that is a faint span-wise line of darkness and brightness. Second, if you are sitting in just the right location (about in the middle of the wing) you can see the shockwave by looking for visual disturbances (like a fault line in your vision). Sighting along a line of rivets or the edge of the wing or the wingtips, you can sometimes see a cleft that wavers. (For extra credit, one can also find a smaller shockwave on the engine nacelle about 6" to 12" back form the leading edge by sitting in line with the front of the engine and watching for a visual fault line in the ground scenery passing just above the engine.)
As the plane goes faster, the shockwave is pushed back toward the trailing edge. As the plane slows, it moves toward the leading edge. And during turbulence, the wave will flutter.
We have one of these toy ornithopters and it flies quite nicely. Its use of a leading-edge rigid spar and loose mylar wing material make the wing form a semi-efficient shape on both the up and down stroke.
This does not surprise me in the least. A Prescott processor has 125 million transistors, a Motorola 68000 had 68000 transistors. Yet the Prescott is not 1838 times more productive on a per clock-cycle basis. Admittedly, some of those Prescott transistors go to cache, superscalar magic, creating long fast pipes to achieve the GHz and implementing nifty MMX features. Even so, fabbing a 68k in 90 nm would create a tight little processor that is not 1800 times slower than the Prescott.
Thus, one can imagine creating a tighter core processor design with a budget of a million transistors each (15 times the original 68k budget) with a few million for L1 cache and another million for glue and then place 20 of them on a single die. Add optical interconnects and that new optical-to-silicon technology invented recently (for multiple channels of GHz I/O to feed all those cores) and you have yourself a powerful little processor.
The point is that with a budget of 125 million transistors, designers can do more than create a bloated single-core CISC processor.
Old style mice (with mouse balls and encoder wheels) can also be used in scientific experiments. A bit of hacking can get the sensor and encoder wheel mounted to a shaft or to watch the slots of a homemade encoder disk (a laser printer and transparency material makes a good disk). Any basic software that can monitor mouse movement can be used to count revolutions of the wheel (just turn off mouse acceleration to get absolute mouse movement in encoder ticks). One old PC can measure 2 axes of motion for animal activity studies, windspeed & direction, robotics, etc.
Although the machines may well be buggy, other sources of error may be more commonplace and more insidious. A prior/. article shows that some bugs occur in the metadata configuration created by officials of the particular election. Vote counting is really more vote interpretation than simply doing Votes[Candidate]++. And if the people configuring the software for a particular election make a formating mistake, the wrong bits will be counted for the wrong candidates.
These types of errors are hard to test for because it is not testable until the ballot is set and every new ballot demand a new round of testing. These types of errors won't be solved by better testing of the machine or by OSS. At best, the voting machine software designer can provide easy-to-use tools to ensure that the ballot layout and voting interpretation/tallying software is in sync.
Although the angular speed of large windmills is low, the tip speeds are just as fast. In fact, high-efficiency windmills have very high tip speeds. The tip often travels on the order of 6 or 7 times the speed of the wind (about 150-180 mph in a 30 mph wind). If you think of a gliding airplane, the most efficient of them move more than 20 units forward for every 1 unit of distance dropped. Similarly, the blades of an efficient turbine move many units around the circle for each unit of wind that moves through them.
This tip speed ratio is irrespective of the diameter of the turbine.
If the call is not worth the labor of a real person to make the call, then it is not worth the labor of the consumer who must answer that call.
Government like government
on
Gone Phishing?
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· Score: 1
Why are there so many otherwise intelligent people that think the government can solve every problem? Most of the time government creates more problems than it solves.
I agree with you 100% that government is not a good solution. The problem is that government will think that government is a good solution unless private efforts stop the problem. If the internet cannot self-regulate, end phishing, prevent scammers etc., then government will step in.
There was a time when multimillion dollar deals were sealed by a word of truth and a handshake and a man's word was his bond.
I think this was true because there was a time when reputation meant something. Social and economic forces made people both more trustworthy and more able to trust others. Maybe the internet needs a reputation system.
On the 'net, as in most of our society, unfortunately it is increasingly a "buyer beware" world
Sad, but true. This only furthers the cause of laws and lawyers. The more problems buyers have, the more they will resort to legal contracts and governmental intervention.
Secure software only part of solution
on
Gone Phishing?
·
· Score: 1
Software can be likely be made more secure if the effort was made. Consider the emphasis on features for commercial software, and the dominance of a certain OS platform. Demand from users for more secure software can help. (This is not to imply that users are to blame; many of them are simply not software experts.)
Absolutely! Secure software is a prerequisite for a usable internet. But it will take more than that. The internet will only become useful for everyday activities when consumers can take an e-mail at face value. I see the goal as being able to trust any email from a bank, VISA, eBay, etc. That means some form of secure identities so that the software can verify that an email that looks trustworthy (i.e. has the visual appearance of being from your bank) is trustworthy. Such a system would have to distinguish VISA from V1SA, V!SA, VlSA, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I have an email address at a Baby Bell ISP that is now getting about 5 spams per day. OK. 5/day nothing compared to the 350 spams/day at another of my addresses, but this address should not get any spams at all. The amusing thing is that I have never once used this address, never sent an email from it, never given it to anyone, never opened an email sent to that address, never set up an account in an email program to communicate with the address. never stored the addy in my address book, never logged into the account in public place, etc.
The only people that know this addy are the people at the ISP. The only way this address could have gotten into the hands of phishers, spammers, etc. is if someone stole it (the username is sufficiently cryptic that I doubt a dictionary attack is at work).
Self-healing would seem to be a critical step toward a self-aware artificial intelligence. Self-healing requires an ability for introspection that is sufficient to identify and correct corrupted internal states. Code that is able to introspect its own behavior and internal structure could lead it to interesting outcomes if tied to a learning algorithm (even a simple hill-climbing algorithm).
It is then a small step to go from simple feedback self-healing mechanisms to feed-forward control mechanisms. Feed forward system would learn (or be told) how certain precurse states and actions lead to fault or non-faulty operating states. A system that learns that particular states and invocations lead to crashes would "learn" to avoid those invocations or correct those states proactively.
Such a system might even begin to show emotional states in the sense that an emotional state is a summary of the condition of the system that guides future action. "Unhappy" systems would spend extra CPU cycles on introspection to try to understand and correct accumulating faulty conditions. Such systems might even get "angry" at other machines such as machines that send spam or worm packets and refuse to communicate with them.
I think I'll let others be the guinea pigs. Even after clinic trials (which only involve a few thousand people watched for only a year or so) doctors only have the barest of clues as to the effects and side-effects of a drug. It takes a long time, a bunch of studies, and a serious sample size to uncover the more subtle, rare-but-serious and long-term impacts of a medication.
No short-term trial can prove a drug is truly safe and efficacious. Until much, much, more data is in, I think I'll wait.
This sounds like a classic protection racket. They create a defective product and then extort the customer. "Pay us or bad things happen to your computer." I wonder if a nice RICO suit will change their mind about this.
If you create a message, chances are that fragments of the plain text will be in various caches and VM pages on your harddisk. It may not last for very long -- being overwritten by subsequent paging -- but if someone takes your computer soon after, they may find incriminating junk on the HD.
How does this particular crime, even if it had payed off, going to put a dent in computer use? It might piss some people off at Lowes, result in a lot of charge backs and be an inconvienence to credit card companies - but I guarantee that VISA or whoever would be most hurt by this, would NOT in any way change their use of computers
I agree, cybercrime is not likely to rollback history. Businesses will continue to use computers. What cybercrime will do is reduce the chance of a wider array of IT-based services. For example, e-mail is currently unusable as a secure method for communication between businesses and customers. Lowes is unlikely to offer much in the way of online accounts, email notification of orders, etc. in a world where every email is assumed to be spam or phishing.
If SPAM doesn't keep people off the computer thingy, than a few stolen credit card numbers isn't going to do much at all.
How do you know that SPAM has not already slowed the rate of internet penetration in the U.S.? I know of one large telecom company that is starting to worry about people who adopt a non-PC, non-internet digital lifestyle -- they buy digital cameras and printers, but avoid purchasing a PC and internet account. Maybe those Luddites will die out, maybe they won't.
The problem with computer security is that it is a never-ending battle. One can buy a lock for a house that lasts 10-20 years with nothing more than an occasional squirt of oil. But keeping a PC updated, firewalled, despywared, virus-free is an ongoing nightware. That fact cannot be good for the continued spread of IT in the world.
Some improvements may come from making computers more secure. But some of it needs to come from making cybercrime less attractive (i.e., having a higher chance of apprehension and unpleasant punishment.) It may be a Pollyanna outlook, but a world where one can trust PCs, email, online commerce, IMs, the web, and so on is a world that will have much more IT in it.
Walking on gravel next to a picket fence produces similar strange echoes. The fence acts as a grating and the relative angle of the percussive sound waves against the regularly-spaced pickets mean that different frequencies echo from different parts of the fence. The result is a chirping echo that sounds like it is from a moving source.
Some may argue that the punishment does not fit the crime, that it is much more severe then other forms of monetary crime. But what makes cracker crime so dangerous to the IT industry is that it attacks the trustworthiness of the infrastructure. If consumers turn away from online transactions, if businesses decide to reduce their reliance on computers, then IT employment will drop or not increase to its full potential.
Look at the analog of this in meat-space -- people would rather shop, go to work, enjoy entertainment, etc. in a safe environment. Businesses that try to operate in crime-ridden neighborhoods don't do as well, don't have as many customers, don't hire as many employees, and don't pay as well.
IT employment depends on the continued adoption and use of IT by businesses and consumers. If the internet and computing becomes a ghetto of spyware, crackers, and phishers, the economics of IT will suffer. To the extent that people avoid using computers for fear of crime is the extent that ITer will see their jobs disappear.
This same fear occurred during the Apollo moon landings. So the returning astronauts were quarantined in a modified Airstream trainer on the aircraft carrier that picked up the capsule. Yet the unit was poorly sealed. The astronauts noticed ants in the trailer!
Why not build this feature into an email client (e.g. Thunderbird). When you get a spam, you put it in a special folder and the client repeatedly accesses the site (a la the Lycos screensaver). That way nobody can be cited for orchestrating a DDoS or unfairly blacklisting. Each recipient can make their own spammer determination.
Whether the client uses the exact URL in the email (which often has identification codes for the recipient of the spam or the affiliate who sent it) is a matter of debate. On the one hand, I don't want to identify myself to any spammer or show that my email is live.
On the other hand, I would want the spam site to know that using my email address will only bring it grief. As a side bonus, it might even bankrupt the site when it has to pay its spammer affiliates for all the automated clickthroughs. If a greater percentage of people clickthrough via automated means (but don't buy), it harms both the spam-marketed site (in bandwidth and affiliate charges) and it hurts the spammer when sites reduce their clickthough payment rates. I can only hope that this will cause spammer-using sites to crack down on spammers that are too aggressive.
Why not write an email client that does this. When you get a spam, you put it in a special folder and the client repeatedly accesses the site (a la the Lycos screensaver). That way nobody can be cited for orchestrating a DDoS or unfairly blacklisting. Each recipient can make their own spammer determination.
Whether the client uses the exact URL in the email (which often has identification codes for the recipient of the spam or the affiliate who sent it) is a matter of debate. On the one hand, I would want the spam site to know that using my email address will only bring it grief. I can only hope that this will cause spammer-using sites to crack down on spammers that are too aggressive. On the other hand, I don't want to identify myself to any spammer or show that my email is live.
Enthusiastic undergrads are even cheaper than workers in India - a monthly dose of beer and pizza is enough to keep them working 7x24.
But seriously, this type of project is great -- providing hands-on and minds-on experience with real engineering problems and projects. Putting class-room lessons to real-world use reinforces those lessons and help motivate more learning.
Next, companies will prohibit users from even reading the EULA or discussing the EULA with others. Its not unlike the database EULAs that prohibit the sharing of benchmark results. This type of contractual control of communications is bad for achieving the transparency needed for true capitalist competition.
I don't see how the cameras in this thing will have enough resolution to do proper ID of friend vs. foe. Man-in-the-loop is not going to work well without some pretty intensive HDTV or better cameras. Perhaps a foveal vision system slaved to the operator's eyeball might be adequate, but I still suspect that troops will shoot first at the grainy pictures and ask questions later.
This seems like a recipe for disaster. What is to prevent the vaccine stock from being contaminated with prions that cause Creutzfeldt Jacobs Disease (the human version of mad cow disease). Injecting every potential person who could get AIDS (everyone on the planet) with human nerve tissue seems double plus ungood. Either the tissue used to generate the vaccine could develop prions or the chemical processing of the vaccine might generate prions.
This technology is a long way from 3-D. First, this camera can only estimate relative depth not absolute depth. Thus, it might determine that the foreground object is half the distance to the camera as the background object, but have no estimate of the numerical distance of either object - the foreground could be 3 feet from the camera and the background would be 6 feet or the foreground could be 5 feet from the camera and the background would be at 10 feet.
Furthermore, this technology only sees edge discontinuities where a foreground object sits in front of a background object. Thus it cannot tell the difference between a circular disk in the foreground or a sphere in the foreground. Actually it is worse than that because the rounded edge of the sphere will cause errors in the estimation of the relative depth of the sphere vs. the background.
Even with these limitations, the technology could be quite useful in robotics. Combining multiple edge images using optical flow and knowledge of the robot's motion would yield a more accurate 3-D depth map at least for the purposes of navigation.
As for extending the technology, a second camera would do wonders for pinning down the distances to each observed edge. The system would still need separate software magic for mapping the front surfaces of objects (e.g. discerning the difference between a 3-D sphere and a 2-D disk).
If you sit over the wing of most jets, you may get to see the shockwave that forms during high-speed flight (above about Mach .8 or so). It is visible in one of two ways. First, if the sun angle is just right, the shockwave will cast a shadow on the wing that is a faint span-wise line of darkness and brightness. Second, if you are sitting in just the right location (about in the middle of the wing) you can see the shockwave by looking for visual disturbances (like a fault line in your vision). Sighting along a line of rivets or the edge of the wing or the wingtips, you can sometimes see a cleft that wavers. (For extra credit, one can also find a smaller shockwave on the engine nacelle about 6" to 12" back form the leading edge by sitting in line with the front of the engine and watching for a visual fault line in the ground scenery passing just above the engine.)
As the plane goes faster, the shockwave is pushed back toward the trailing edge. As the plane slows, it moves toward the leading edge. And during turbulence, the wave will flutter.
We have one of these toy ornithopters and it flies quite nicely. Its use of a leading-edge rigid spar and loose mylar wing material make the wing form a semi-efficient shape on both the up and down stroke.
This does not surprise me in the least. A Prescott processor has 125 million transistors, a Motorola 68000 had 68000 transistors. Yet the Prescott is not 1838 times more productive on a per clock-cycle basis. Admittedly, some of those Prescott transistors go to cache, superscalar magic, creating long fast pipes to achieve the GHz and implementing nifty MMX features. Even so, fabbing a 68k in 90 nm would create a tight little processor that is not 1800 times slower than the Prescott.
Thus, one can imagine creating a tighter core processor design with a budget of a million transistors each (15 times the original 68k budget) with a few million for L1 cache and another million for glue and then place 20 of them on a single die. Add optical interconnects and that new optical-to-silicon technology invented recently (for multiple channels of GHz I/O to feed all those cores) and you have yourself a powerful little processor.
The point is that with a budget of 125 million transistors, designers can do more than create a bloated single-core CISC processor.
Old style mice (with mouse balls and encoder wheels) can also be used in scientific experiments. A bit of hacking can get the sensor and encoder wheel mounted to a shaft or to watch the slots of a homemade encoder disk (a laser printer and transparency material makes a good disk). Any basic software that can monitor mouse movement can be used to count revolutions of the wheel (just turn off mouse acceleration to get absolute mouse movement in encoder ticks). One old PC can measure 2 axes of motion for animal activity studies, windspeed & direction, robotics, etc.
Although the machines may well be buggy, other sources of error may be more commonplace and more insidious. A prior /. article shows that some bugs occur in the metadata configuration created by officials of the particular election. Vote counting is really more vote interpretation than simply doing Votes[Candidate]++. And if the people configuring the software for a particular election make a formating mistake, the wrong bits will be counted for the wrong candidates.
These types of errors are hard to test for because it is not testable until the ballot is set and every new ballot demand a new round of testing. These types of errors won't be solved by better testing of the machine or by OSS. At best, the voting machine software designer can provide easy-to-use tools to ensure that the ballot layout and voting interpretation/tallying software is in sync.
Although the angular speed of large windmills is low, the tip speeds are just as fast. In fact, high-efficiency windmills have very high tip speeds. The tip often travels on the order of 6 or 7 times the speed of the wind (about 150-180 mph in a 30 mph wind). If you think of a gliding airplane, the most efficient of them move more than 20 units forward for every 1 unit of distance dropped. Similarly, the blades of an efficient turbine move many units around the circle for each unit of wind that moves through them.
This tip speed ratio is irrespective of the diameter of the turbine.
If the call is not worth the labor of a real person to make the call, then it is not worth the labor of the consumer who must answer that call.
Why are there so many otherwise intelligent people that think the government can solve every problem? Most of the time government creates more problems than it solves.
I agree with you 100% that government is not a good solution. The problem is that government will think that government is a good solution unless private efforts stop the problem. If the internet cannot self-regulate, end phishing, prevent scammers etc., then government will step in.
There was a time when multimillion dollar deals were sealed by a word of truth and a handshake and a man's word was his bond.
I think this was true because there was a time when reputation meant something. Social and economic forces made people both more trustworthy and more able to trust others. Maybe the internet needs a reputation system.
On the 'net, as in most of our society, unfortunately it is increasingly a "buyer beware" world
Sad, but true. This only furthers the cause of laws and lawyers. The more problems buyers have, the more they will resort to legal contracts and governmental intervention.
Software can be likely be made more secure if the effort was made. Consider the emphasis on features for commercial software, and the dominance of a certain OS platform. Demand from users for more secure software can help. (This is not to imply that users are to blame; many of them are simply not software experts.)
Absolutely! Secure software is a prerequisite for a usable internet. But it will take more than that. The internet will only become useful for everyday activities when consumers can take an e-mail at face value. I see the goal as being able to trust any email from a bank, VISA, eBay, etc. That means some form of secure identities so that the software can verify that an email that looks trustworthy (i.e. has the visual appearance of being from your bank) is trustworthy. Such a system would have to distinguish VISA from V1SA, V!SA, VlSA, etc.