As well as letting you use a TV as a display for your phone, without having to connect a cable,
So, what you're really telling us, is that soon, with a directional antenna and a little work, I'll be able to goatse the tv aisle at best buy, walmart, and the local sports bar.
Easy, allow multiple votes with only the last one being counted.
I hate to post a followup to myself but another great idea I had comes from some statistical crypto work I looked into for anonymous cash.
My idea is give everyone ten ballots and you may only receive a receipt for one of your ballots. So, if you expect intimidation, submit one "R" and get a receipt, and nine "D" and you're safe. The system has no record of which receipts you keep and which you toss in a bonfire or shredder, but a human makes sure you only leave the building with precisely one or zero fully documented paper receipts.
A public list of serial numbers of all ballots cast for them is published for each candidate.
Voter intimidation seems pointless because any voter in the country can throw away 10% of their vote to fake any response. Furthermore the intimidators know it, so it seems pointless to either purchase receipts or beat.
Lets say fraud occurs. They have no idea which receipts were kept and which were burned so there is a 1 in 10 chance that they could be caught. Lets say only one in ten people bother to look up their published voting record to make sure it was not tampered with or deleted. Ballot #17 is listed under the R column on the website. I check to make sure my receipt appears on the site. Just my luck that I had a 1 in 10 chance of holding the paper receipt that says ballot #17 voted D. Big trouble ensues.
That would indicate you can only tamper with an election to the order of a hundred votes without getting caught.
If I can verify that my vote was counted, and can prove how I voted if there was a fraud to force a recount/etc, how does the system make it impossible for me to prove to my boss/spouse/friends/church/etc how I voted?
Easy, allow multiple votes with only the last one being counted. The only people whom know which receipt is the last, valid receipt, is you, and the govt voting machine.
This fixes the casual problem as I can now "prove" to management at work that I voted "R" but still maintain hipster street cred while showing I voted straight communist party ticket. However someone in the govt or an electioneering volunteer could obtain the list of valid last votes. So you'd need some manner of verified destruction on a fixed date.
It wouldn't matter how great an e-voting system we installed if I can just go from polling site to polling site voting in the place of anyone I know is out of town, dead, planning to vote later in the day, etc
Why go to all the trouble? Due to popular "motor-voter" registration laws anyone living in your district with a legal license and/or legal vehicle is probably registered. So all you need to do is crack last years phone book for name/address pairs and start voting. Most years there is a well under 50% chance you'd even be noticed as so few vote. If by some miracle you're "busted" simply walk away, its not like the 90+ year old poll worker will capture you for the feds.
Reason #324823 to not bother voting, anyone with the slightest knowledge of how the system works can break it, therefore someone probably has probably already done so.
They only benefit I see to having to bolt these into the wall is in a school or a public place where theft would be a concern.
Bolt it into a wall behind the big screen. Instant super digital picture frame or announcement board, just add software.
The main threat is from the long cable industry, using a traditional cheap PC somewhere else with long cables. The other threat is no upgrade path, if you'll need to do the long cable thing on the next generation anyway, why not do it now.
Perhaps you made a mistake, but if you really mean that, you must have a very unusual interpretation of fiduciary duty. Something oriented toward tax law?
If enough people accept their responsibility and vote, the message WILL go across to the politicians...eventually.
Oh they heard it loud and clear... "We can do whatever we want as long as we trade off every 2/4 years." A prisoners dilemma situation where as long as the two teams play together nicely, they both get to eventually do what they want (which is power, of course)
As a result of the 2000 election, hundreds of thousands of people died.
And to you, it's the same as a TV show.
I was assured as a result of the 2008 election, we would end two wars, bring em all back home, close our concentration camp in Cuba, and implement a REAL federal medical plan. Nothing happened. Correct, to me its the same as a TV show, its gonna turn out the same regardless if I "participate" or not.
Think about it, if there were even one good choice out there amongst all this drek, wouldn't you feel morally obligated to campaign for that one good politician?
No, I would not feel obligated to work for them, because I do not see myself as a slave, or "owned property" or however you wish to phrase it. Their failure creates no obligations upon me.
Note that I did voluntarily donate money to one congressman's campaign, a guy whom is not a crook... But I don't live in his district so I can't vote for him... So I won't be voting for any crooks today, at all.
Voting for the guy or gal that lies the least still means I'm supporting a liar.
At least where I live, you can vote on propositions / referendum / whatever the word is for nonbinding-survey and leave the rest of the ballot blank and it will count as a valid ballot, if, as I do, you think they're all crooks.
I will not vote for any crooks today, but there is a property tax referendum...
Get up off your hole and vote who you think is the best candidate, if you don't like your options get involved and perhaps even run yourself.
I don't think you fully understand our position.
I don't vote on American Idol (Fox? Don't even know) or Big Brother (CBS). I see no point in voting for any of the "actors". My life will not change (very much) regardless of whom "wins" on Idol or BB. Doesn't require Carlin's pessimism nor some kind of spacey optimism, just kind of is. Your ears are lucky that I don't apply to Idol, and I cannot allocate the months of time to be on BB, so I refuse to get involved and run myself as a candidate, if that offends you too bad. I can't stand Idol and don't watch. Some of the eye candy on BB makes it worth watching. But I'm not going to vote or participate, nor am I responsible for anyone activities when they are on BB or Idol. I do enjoy the right of being offended if I don't like how the show goes, and if that bothers you, well, my apologies for offending you but too bad for you. Your problem does not create an obligation on my part to do anything, up to and including voting. Your declaring it as dangerous, or pie in the sky, does not make it so, that strategy only works with revealed religious truths. Try again.
True for shade-tree mechanics. But even just as a supply-chain compressor it would help. In my situation it was a Toyota certified mechanic doing the work whom was delayed...
Even further up the chain, car assembly plants will have to figure out how to balance the probably higher cost of printing parts vs shutting down the entire plant while waiting for cheaper mass produced parts to arrive from subcontractors (or bust strikes at subcontractors, etc)
Once the technology improves, this could be a way of making less expensive, much stronger bodies for vehicles.
Not sure about that, but am certain that it would simplify life for repairmen. It took about three weeks to obtain a mysterious minor little trim piece by the front grill for my wife's Toyota about a year ago. (the bracket-y thing by the fog lights ish area) Life would be a lot simpler if you could just print a replacement.
I was aiming more for the idea that the chattering classes don't talk about failed TV shows which are hundreds of times more popular than paying for The Times online.
Its possible to make profitable things which appeal to almost no one.
Much as I'm sure the Times will rapidly discover, its possible to make a profitable online newspaper that almost no one bothers to read.
About a billion people are more or less on the internet. That being 1e9. The Times count it a success that 1e5 or so people signed up. Only about 1 in 10000 people even theoretically can access their site. Not very impressive.
I suppose other newspapers could try to "compete" by shutting off their webservers 99.999% of the time. Another way to compare, is TV shows get canceled when their market viewer share drops to something like a hundred times the Times market share.
Then each individual loss will have twice the logistical impact. Also, arguably, twice the terror impact on the folks in the flak jackets, which has all kinds of interesting effect from increased PTSD to increased civilian casualties (itchy trigger finger when terrified)
In other words, though it may shock you to your very core, sometimes occasionally people think about things at least as hard as dedicated Slashbots.
Yes the.mil folks think hard about winning at the.mil game. But this is a PR puff piece meant to amuse the foolish public while posing as all.mil. Outsmarting them is not all that much of an achievement. Especially when we're too smart to have been a target of their puff piece PR release anyway. It is still funny to point and laugh, at least a little.
Convoy kills aren't done by martyrs (generally). Convoys are attacked opportunistically with IEDs. Guess what happens when you reduce the opportunities for opportunistic kills?
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that providing twice the time between convoys to plant IEDs would result in twice the booms and half the number of trucks to adsorb the booms.
Lots of maybe / optimistically in my post. Don't forget that from the "other guys" point of view, fewer targets equals increased value of intel data, able to focus your human intel assets more closely, more rifles on target... If you can pull off the perfect attack because you now have twice the time to set it up, maybe doubling the defenders security forces just means you buy twice as many body bags. Its not clear.
There are two other issues with my numbers.
1) Odds of death for the convoy guys just went from 1 in 5 to about 1 in 3. Making everyone jumpy. Jumpy = dangerous to both civilians and themselves.
2) Loss rate in personnel and logistics went from 1 in 5 (probably survivable) to 1 in 3 (time to retreat!). Actual numbers probably won't cross that threshold (probably?) but lower quantities always means individual losses are will be more acute. Maybe before, a loss meant the stryker guys had to go slow and idle less for a few days. Now a loss might mean they park it. And a parked APC/AFV is just a target. Secondary losses like this might be very expensive yet not immediately obvious.
A classic misunderstanding of statistics. Lets see how this works.
Lets assume we have 100 future martyrs loaded up and ready to blow. Send 500 convoys. Lets say 90 get blown up by the 100 martyrs.
Ivory tower metrics MBA says, lets cut back so we only send 250 convoys. Since a bit under a fifth of convoys are blown up, that means by definition only about 40 convoys will get blown up.
Send 250 convoys. 90 get blown up by the 100 martyrs. Maybe due to doubled security, VERY optimistically twice as many fail, so best case only 80 convoys get blown up by the 100 martyrs.
Ivory tower metrics MBA gets confused that losses are 100% higher than expected.
Google's a US corporation, so isn't it by definition an "interested party" in any transaction involving the US government?
I think the reasoning is that corporations own and control the US govt and/or have essentially been "merged". So, whom exactly is the interested party if you try to sue yourself?
Also everyone knows you pay money to politicians to get them to do what you want. Google apparently did not. So why is the govt to blame? I decided not to pay McDonalds for a hamburger. Oddly enough, I did not get a hamburger. Should I sue them? There is no interested party if there is no transaction.
I don't see that happening -- they have Google Docs, why would they compete with themselves?
Step 1 Massage google docs and oo.org to have identical user interfaces, or at least as close as possible.
Step 2 Then set up some sort of weird file sharing/syncing service between them so you'll have access and backups anywhere you have internet, or you can work locally on an airplane or in the boonies if necessary, perfectly transparently and reliably.
Step 3 Charge a fee for business corporate accounts, maybe blur the issue with the use of encryption on the gdocs side for corporate sekrets. As long as its cheaper than the MS Office upgrade treadmill...
Step 4 Profit. Big profit. Sure your development process is harder because you have more features, but you get at least some of it for free from the open source side.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome back to teletext, hopefully a little faster this time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
I remember Wisconsin PBS network stations had the best Teletext pages back in the 80s. "Infotext" as I recall.
As well as letting you use a TV as a display for your phone, without having to connect a cable,
So, what you're really telling us, is that soon, with a directional antenna and a little work, I'll be able to goatse the tv aisle at best buy, walmart, and the local sports bar.
I'm liking it!
Easy, allow multiple votes with only the last one being counted.
I hate to post a followup to myself but another great idea I had comes from some statistical crypto work I looked into for anonymous cash.
My idea is give everyone ten ballots and you may only receive a receipt for one of your ballots. So, if you expect intimidation, submit one "R" and get a receipt, and nine "D" and you're safe. The system has no record of which receipts you keep and which you toss in a bonfire or shredder, but a human makes sure you only leave the building with precisely one or zero fully documented paper receipts.
A public list of serial numbers of all ballots cast for them is published for each candidate.
Voter intimidation seems pointless because any voter in the country can throw away 10% of their vote to fake any response. Furthermore the intimidators know it, so it seems pointless to either purchase receipts or beat.
Lets say fraud occurs. They have no idea which receipts were kept and which were burned so there is a 1 in 10 chance that they could be caught. Lets say only one in ten people bother to look up their published voting record to make sure it was not tampered with or deleted. Ballot #17 is listed under the R column on the website. I check to make sure my receipt appears on the site. Just my luck that I had a 1 in 10 chance of holding the paper receipt that says ballot #17 voted D. Big trouble ensues.
That would indicate you can only tamper with an election to the order of a hundred votes without getting caught.
If I can verify that my vote was counted, and can prove how I voted if there was a fraud to force a recount/etc, how does the system make it impossible for me to prove to my boss/spouse/friends/church/etc how I voted?
Easy, allow multiple votes with only the last one being counted. The only people whom know which receipt is the last, valid receipt, is you, and the govt voting machine.
This fixes the casual problem as I can now "prove" to management at work that I voted "R" but still maintain hipster street cred while showing I voted straight communist party ticket. However someone in the govt or an electioneering volunteer could obtain the list of valid last votes. So you'd need some manner of verified destruction on a fixed date.
It wouldn't matter how great an e-voting system we installed if I can just go from polling site to polling site voting in the place of anyone I know is out of town, dead, planning to vote later in the day, etc
Why go to all the trouble? Due to popular "motor-voter" registration laws anyone living in your district with a legal license and/or legal vehicle is probably registered. So all you need to do is crack last years phone book for name/address pairs and start voting. Most years there is a well under 50% chance you'd even be noticed as so few vote. If by some miracle you're "busted" simply walk away, its not like the 90+ year old poll worker will capture you for the feds.
Reason #324823 to not bother voting, anyone with the slightest knowledge of how the system works can break it, therefore someone probably has probably already done so.
and how much better is it than marking a circle with a pen and having someone scan the ballot into a machine?
That is an insightful comment. Could anyone explain the following quote
many of us feel it is not yet time for this technology.
That would imply some sort of roadmap or goal is in mind. What is it and why can it not be discussed?
There seems to be little point in it, other than making money by selling something new.
They only benefit I see to having to bolt these into the wall is in a school or a public place where theft would be a concern.
Bolt it into a wall behind the big screen. Instant super digital picture frame or announcement board, just add software.
The main threat is from the long cable industry, using a traditional cheap PC somewhere else with long cables. The other threat is no upgrade path, if you'll need to do the long cable thing on the next generation anyway, why not do it now.
You mean a "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Livers"?
It is also your fiduciary duty to vote.
Perhaps you made a mistake, but if you really mean that, you must have a very unusual interpretation of fiduciary duty. Something oriented toward tax law?
If enough people accept their responsibility and vote, the message WILL go across to the politicians...eventually.
Oh they heard it loud and clear... "We can do whatever we want as long as we trade off every 2/4 years." A prisoners dilemma situation where as long as the two teams play together nicely, they both get to eventually do what they want (which is power, of course)
As a result of the 2000 election, hundreds of thousands of people died.
And to you, it's the same as a TV show.
I was assured as a result of the 2008 election, we would end two wars, bring em all back home, close our concentration camp in Cuba, and implement a REAL federal medical plan. Nothing happened. Correct, to me its the same as a TV show, its gonna turn out the same regardless if I "participate" or not.
Think about it, if there were even one good choice out there amongst all this drek, wouldn't you feel morally obligated to campaign for that one good politician?
No, I would not feel obligated to work for them, because I do not see myself as a slave, or "owned property" or however you wish to phrase it. Their failure creates no obligations upon me.
Note that I did voluntarily donate money to one congressman's campaign, a guy whom is not a crook ... But I don't live in his district so I can't vote for him... So I won't be voting for any crooks today, at all.
Voting for the guy or gal that lies the least still means I'm supporting a liar.
At least where I live, you can vote on propositions / referendum / whatever the word is for nonbinding-survey and leave the rest of the ballot blank and it will count as a valid ballot, if, as I do, you think they're all crooks.
I will not vote for any crooks today, but there is a property tax referendum...
Get up off your hole and vote who you think is the best candidate, if you don't like your options get involved and perhaps even run yourself.
I don't think you fully understand our position.
I don't vote on American Idol (Fox? Don't even know) or Big Brother (CBS).
I see no point in voting for any of the "actors". My life will not change (very much) regardless of whom "wins" on Idol or BB.
Doesn't require Carlin's pessimism nor some kind of spacey optimism, just kind of is.
Your ears are lucky that I don't apply to Idol, and I cannot allocate the months of time to be on BB, so I refuse to get involved and run myself as a candidate, if that offends you too bad.
I can't stand Idol and don't watch. Some of the eye candy on BB makes it worth watching. But I'm not going to vote or participate, nor am I responsible for anyone activities when they are on BB or Idol. I do enjoy the right of being offended if I don't like how the show goes, and if that bothers you, well, my apologies for offending you but too bad for you. Your problem does not create an obligation on my part to do anything, up to and including voting.
Your declaring it as dangerous, or pie in the sky, does not make it so, that strategy only works with revealed religious truths. Try again.
My view on Nov 2 is about the same.
True for shade-tree mechanics. But even just as a supply-chain compressor it would help. In my situation it was a Toyota certified mechanic doing the work whom was delayed...
Even further up the chain, car assembly plants will have to figure out how to balance the probably higher cost of printing parts vs shutting down the entire plant while waiting for cheaper mass produced parts to arrive from subcontractors (or bust strikes at subcontractors, etc)
Once the technology improves, this could be a way of making less expensive, much stronger bodies for vehicles.
Not sure about that, but am certain that it would simplify life for repairmen. It took about three weeks to obtain a mysterious minor little trim piece by the front grill for my wife's Toyota about a year ago. (the bracket-y thing by the fog lights ish area) Life would be a lot simpler if you could just print a replacement.
Is that the right analogy though?
I was aiming more for the idea that the chattering classes don't talk about failed TV shows which are hundreds of times more popular than paying for The Times online.
Its possible to make profitable things which appeal to almost no one.
Much as I'm sure the Times will rapidly discover, its possible to make a profitable online newspaper that almost no one bothers to read.
About a billion people are more or less on the internet. That being 1e9.
The Times count it a success that 1e5 or so people signed up.
Only about 1 in 10000 people even theoretically can access their site.
Not very impressive.
I suppose other newspapers could try to "compete" by shutting off their webservers 99.999% of the time.
Another way to compare, is TV shows get canceled when their market viewer share drops to something like a hundred times the Times market share.
So if there are half as many of them
Then each individual loss will have twice the logistical impact. Also, arguably, twice the terror impact on the folks in the flak jackets, which has all kinds of interesting effect from increased PTSD to increased civilian casualties (itchy trigger finger when terrified)
In other words, though it may shock you to your very core, sometimes occasionally people think about things at least as hard as dedicated Slashbots.
Yes the .mil folks think hard about winning at the .mil game. But this is a PR puff piece meant to amuse the foolish public while posing as all .mil. Outsmarting them is not all that much of an achievement. Especially when we're too smart to have been a target of their puff piece PR release anyway. It is still funny to point and laugh, at least a little.
Convoy kills aren't done by martyrs (generally). Convoys are attacked opportunistically with IEDs. Guess what happens when you reduce the opportunities for opportunistic kills?
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that providing twice the time between convoys to plant IEDs would result in twice the booms and half the number of trucks to adsorb the booms.
Lots of maybe / optimistically in my post. Don't forget that from the "other guys" point of view, fewer targets equals increased value of intel data, able to focus your human intel assets more closely, more rifles on target... If you can pull off the perfect attack because you now have twice the time to set it up, maybe doubling the defenders security forces just means you buy twice as many body bags. Its not clear.
There are two other issues with my numbers.
1) Odds of death for the convoy guys just went from 1 in 5 to about 1 in 3. Making everyone jumpy. Jumpy = dangerous to both civilians and themselves.
2) Loss rate in personnel and logistics went from 1 in 5 (probably survivable) to 1 in 3 (time to retreat!). Actual numbers probably won't cross that threshold (probably?) but lower quantities always means individual losses are will be more acute. Maybe before, a loss meant the stryker guys had to go slow and idle less for a few days. Now a loss might mean they park it. And a parked APC/AFV is just a target. Secondary losses like this might be very expensive yet not immediately obvious.
>I'm thinking the only reason it gets shot down is because they then realize they'd be out of their jobs.
Don't fret there's always civil wars, religious "cults", war on some drugs, etc.
A classic misunderstanding of statistics. Lets see how this works.
Lets assume we have 100 future martyrs loaded up and ready to blow.
Send 500 convoys. Lets say 90 get blown up by the 100 martyrs.
Ivory tower metrics MBA says, lets cut back so we only send 250 convoys. Since a bit under a fifth of convoys are blown up, that means by definition only about 40 convoys will get blown up.
Send 250 convoys. 90 get blown up by the 100 martyrs. Maybe due to doubled security, VERY optimistically twice as many fail, so best case only 80 convoys get blown up by the 100 martyrs.
Ivory tower metrics MBA gets confused that losses are 100% higher than expected.
Google's a US corporation, so isn't it by definition an "interested party" in any transaction involving the US government?
I think the reasoning is that corporations own and control the US govt and/or have essentially been "merged". So, whom exactly is the interested party if you try to sue yourself?
Also everyone knows you pay money to politicians to get them to do what you want. Google apparently did not. So why is the govt to blame? I decided not to pay McDonalds for a hamburger. Oddly enough, I did not get a hamburger. Should I sue them? There is no interested party if there is no transaction.
I don't see that happening -- they have Google Docs, why would they compete with themselves?
Step 1 Massage google docs and oo.org to have identical user interfaces, or at least as close as possible.
Step 2 Then set up some sort of weird file sharing/syncing service between them so you'll have access and backups anywhere you have internet, or you can work locally on an airplane or in the boonies if necessary, perfectly transparently and reliably.
Step 3 Charge a fee for business corporate accounts, maybe blur the issue with the use of encryption on the gdocs side for corporate sekrets. As long as its cheaper than the MS Office upgrade treadmill...
Step 4 Profit. Big profit. Sure your development process is harder because you have more features, but you get at least some of it for free from the open source side.
Oracle may yet be the end of Java too.
"Every mushroom cloud has a silver lining"