Were the September 11 hijackers travelling under false passports? I was under the impression that they were not. If this system had already been in place in 2001, would the outcome have been any different?
Is accurate knowledge about who is entering the USA through airports really a significant problem for those trying to predict and prevent future terrorism incidents? I would have expected that a greater problem was knowing the intentions and tracking the actual actions of individuals.
If this system works perfectly, surely people with terrorist intentions will know it, and simply not enter the USA legally? It's not as if the USA's borders are impregnable - there are large numbers of people managing to enter without passports or visas. It's like carefully putting a lid on the bucket to make sure you don't spill any water, but ignoring the leak-hole at the bottom of the bucket.
the only big problem with FM radio quality is that it attenuates above 16kHz . ..
I would call the heavy compression required for FM broadcast a far more significant problem.
You need good hearing and good equipment for attenuation above 16kHz to be noticable, but the compression is obvious to anyone who has heard the same content direct from CD. A CD player can reproduce 96dB of dynamic range (ignoring amp and speaker issues here), but a broadcast FM radio signal is compressed heavily with a multiband compressor, along with lots of other processing to make it work with the transmitters. For an interesting read on the amount of processing done, take a look at this guide for recording industry folks at masterdigital.com
The compression applied to content before transmission is necessary for technical and practical reasons. The wider the dynamic range of a signal to transmit, the wider the frequency band required for the FM signal (an FM signal is centered around a single frequency, but actually occupies a band of frequencies). If we didn't compress, we wouldn't be able to fit many stations in the frequency range allocated to FM broadcast radio, or we would end up with lots of cross talk between stations.
Having said all of that, lots of modern music is compressed to hell anyway during the mixing and mastering stages, long before it gets to an FM transmitter.
Re:So .... what's their plan of action?
on
ISS May Have A Leak
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Ugh... three different units of measurement for the same thing in one sentence. Does anyone know the SI units for confusion?
The marketing brochure at the Cornice web site lists the transfer rate for the new drive as 4.5 MB/s (that's megabytes, not megabits), or more than 280 times the rate required for 128Kb/s audio playback. You need it to be much faster than the audio playback rate so that you can run the drive only for some of the time and cache the data in memory, therefore using less power.
It also lists the average power consumption for typical audio playback as only 4mW. That assumes that you have 32MB of memory available as a cache and that the audio is 64Kb/sec.
Interestingly, the brochure also claims that the electrical interface to the device uses true IDE mode. Using a well established standard like this means that just about anyone could interface with it - I would love to get my hands on one of these to put into my own MP3 player, but it doesn't look like this company is particular interested in selling single drives to people like me. Using a standard IDE interface also means that existing hardware and software drivers can be re-used: for example there are USB2 to IDE bridge chips that could (in theory) connected directly to this drive for a portable MP3 player, and there is also plenty of GPL'ed code for interfacing to IDE devices.
Quality mechanics are what really makes the difference between a good electronic product and crap. If you're going to buy cheap, this is where you'll feel it.
DVD players, CD players, tape decks, hard drives and VCRs all have complicated mechanics as well as complicated electronics - but it is the mechanical parts that will fail first. Compared to a spinning metal shaft or moving piece of plastic, a transistor doesn't wear out or break down at all.
just ask someone knowledgeable about the widely acknowledge low quality of the 555 timer chip
A 555 timer chip is not a quality problem. It is a relatively old but very common device - it is good example of "tried and true". They have been in production for decades, and compared to more complicated chips are extremely reliable and rugged.
You are also increasingly unlikely to find such a device in a DVD player or in other modern consumer electronics. Complex modern consumer equipment tends to revolve around either a CPU/microcontroller or other highly integrated digital electronics, combined with the minimum amount of analog circuitry required to interact with the real world. The kind of functions a 555 timer might have performed (one shot timing or oscillation) are dealt with in the digital domain, and this functionality is developed as software. Using a 555 is the expensive way, not the cheap way, as hardware is expensive compared to the cost of software, which approaches zero for sufficiently large production runs.
There are quality factors in consumer electronics - it's not all the same - but it's not so simple as the use of a single device. Factors include:
quality of passive components (e.g. are those electrolytic capacitors going to leak?)
With increasingly high levels of integration, more of the product is dependant on software (either in a CPU or as a way of describing custom silicon). Quality depends extremely heavily on design. Now, much of the complicated design isn't even performed by a hardware manufacturer. For example, take a look at the many usb key type MP3 players on the market. Notice how they're all almost identical in specifications? This is because the manufacturers don't start from scratch each time, but use the same chip set as all their competitors and often the same reference design from the chip designers. The guts of one of these players is just as good as the next, but one may be better overall due to better design and construction of the case, or a better user manual, or better headphones, etc.
It would be interesting to put the rover in a closed room so it can't be seen, then add about 10 to 20 minutes of delay each way from its camera to the user and from the controls back to the rover.
The real rover was not controlled from earth in a continuous way because of the time delay - sets of commands were uploaded infrequently.
There were rumours that George Bush would make an announcement at the Wright brother's flight re-enactment yesterday. When I read that the flight ended in the mud, I couldn't help wondering if there had been a last moment decision not to make an announcement as a result.
Imagine what would happen if a new moon program had been kicked off at the flight re-enactment. If any little thing went wrong later, the media would have a field day replaying footage of the plane dumping into the mud in association with Bush's speech.
How about this for an impressive indicator of technological progress? In the earlier story about the 100 year anniversary of powered flight there were comments suggesting that progress in aerospace seemed slow lately. Maybe we're on the verge of another surge forward?
It wasn't that long ago that the sound barrier was really considered a barrier - people involved in breaking the sound barrier are still around. Back then, it was a major effort that was incredibly risky and took the resources of a government to achieve. At the time, plenty of people wondered if it was really even possible.
Now, however, we see a small private company break the sound barrier on their first major rocket powered test flight, as if it's no big deal. We've come a long way. Nice one, Scaled Composites!
Not only are they very similar in purpose, our respective leaders seem to have a similar attitude towards them. The Prime Minister is given a place to live in Canberra (at some expense to the taxpayer) but prefers to live in Sydney, just like the President seems to prefer to spend a lot of time in Texas.
And for those who will claim, "But that is an extra step!": Yes, but the drivers only need be installed once
For you and me it's just an extra step, and no big deal. For a good number of a hardware vendor's customers, that extra step is an insurmountable obstacle. Manufacturers are selling consumer electronics to customers who want consumer electronics - not to people like us in the IT sector. My father, for example, could not / would not ever install a DLL, driver, or support application for something like a digital camera. There's plenty of people like him who only want stuff they can use off the shelf without having to configure or adjust Windows. Surely a manufacturer would cough up the money MS demands if it means they get to keep their customers?
The Government (Australia) likes to play some of these kinds of tricks too. They don't want to be known for increasing taxes, so we get things like 'stamp duty' and 'special levies' instead. Apparently if you don't call it a tax its not a tax so there's no problem with it.
To top it off, they now charge tax (our 10% Goods and Services Tax) on some of these not-a-tax taxes. They only get away with it because they know we're stupid enought to re-elect them anyway.
I don't know how Bigpond is going to keep its customers with shit like this.
Telstra has all sorts of ways to try keep their customers. For example, misleading advertisements - they were forced to take some of their TV ads off the air by the ACCC. Or abusing their monopoly on the phone lines by lying about the availability of ADSL - they told a customer he was too far from the exchange when he wanted to get ADSL through another ISP, but was close enough for Bigpond. Then they threatened him when he talked!
I think there is only so far they can slide, however, before even the most uninformed consumers see the light. Their recent run of email brown outs must have been hard for even the most tolerant of users to ignore. This article at whirpool suggests that people are finally starting to wake up.
Sounds great to me. I only have to pay $50 - $100 extra to keep using what I already have. What could be fairer?
People who purchased a TV set (and most people buying them now) did so in the expectation that they could use it to watch free to air broadcasts. As you correctly point out, it's not a right of any sort. But it is a fairly understandable assumption given the history of TV that most people are aware of: the TV signal has always been there, and it has always been available to any TV set. Now, the rules are going to change. The expensive box of electronics someone purchased will become a pile of junk unless extra money is spent - this is not how it has been in the past so it's not a normal expectation for the future, apart for those of us who know digital is coming and have some idea of what it means.
Whether you approve of the changeover process and schedule or not, the reality is that some people are going to be upset by this. Whether they should be upset or not is another question again. Many will be comforted by the fact that the hardware will probably be fairly cheap, and only needed by some. Others aren't going to be so easily satisfied - they'll see it as a matter of principal.
Now there's a concept: software as a digital rarity. How can digital information become rare, when it can be copied perfectly for just about nothing? Maybe someone ought to mention this to the record companies one day. They'll be shocked to learn that their product has very low value without them depending on an artificial scarceness, and I'm sure they'll drop their prices right away.
I've never seen electronic voting anywhere in Australia. It might be some used somewhere we don't all see: perhaps in some local council elections?
Our federal elections are all done with pencil and paper, and votes are counted by hand. No punching machines, no optical scanners, no touchscreens: nothing more high tech than an HB pencil. The voting system is federally controlled. It is highly regulated and uniform throughout the nation. Our system has has served us very well, and delivers accurate counts very quickly. We usually get the lower house of parliament (votes there determine who will be the Prime Minister) counted by a reasonable hour on election day. The system for counting the senate is more complicated (we use a proportional representation scheme) and takes longer, but it doesn't seem to cause any real problems.
Given that we have a system that works very well, our politicians will probably want to change it soon to something that fails miserably, and electronic voting looks like a good candidate so maybe the next election will be different. Each winter in Australia we send our politicians (both federal and state) on long and expensive overseas trips; officially these are fact finding missions. From what I can tell the goal is to find new and interesting ways to screw things up in Australia. We are currently pushing hard to convert our formerly successful health care system into something more like the USA model. At the state level we have successfully converted our healthy public transport system into a system based on the UK experience - we even brought in the Connex company to run our train system, based on their spectacular stuff up of transport in the UK. I believe at the moment our politicians are looking for some good overseas models of a buggered tertiary education system to copy, but I think they're running into trouble on this one because they can't find any country that is making more of a mess of it than us. Oh - have I started ranting - oops, sorry.
We are spinning and moving, but we are doing so around fixed axes: spinning around an axis from the north to south pole, and moving around an axis through the sun that is nearly parallel to the earth's rotational axis.
Try drawing yourself a diagram (looking 'side on' to earth) complete with sight lines from a person on the surface of the planet to objects out in space. It will become fairly clear that the further north you go, the less of the universe that is to the south of the earth will be visible, because the earth itself blocks your view. There is effectively a cone of non visible space. The spinning motion gives the most comprehensive view of the universe to people on the equator: they get to see it all, but only over time as the earth spins.
Many if not most of the names of stars are not Greek or Roman (as we might otherwise expect given the roots of our language), but Arabic. This is because the Arabs were further south and were able to see many more stars than the ancient Greeks or Romans. For example: Altair, Rigel, Betelgeuse, Fomalhaut, Aldebaran, Vega, and Algol are all names with Arabic origins.
Australia deciding to drop its asteroid watching program isn't much of an improvement. As far as I know, it leaves us with a very large blind spot. We could have something nearby approaching us from the south right now and not even know it. Is someone else far enough south of the equator watching?
If we were able to develop the technologies to defeat a big rock, we all might be on the lookout again. It seems like a bit of a chicken and egg situation though. We probably won't develop the technology until there is imminent danger, but we won't all bother looking for incoming trouble until we know we can do something about it.
I was misleading on the matter of it being a legal requirement to vote - it's a common misconception and I just went and contributed to it. Apparently the real deal is that adults have to show up at a polling place on election day and have their name crossed off the list (or do the equivalent by mail). This doesn't mean you have to actually fill out a ballot paper or put one into the ballot box. You can't take ballot papers out of the room, but no-one watches you vote or checks that you fill out the form. Even if you do fill out a paper, you aren't required to fill it out in a way that indicates a preference for a particular candidate. People write all sorts of creative things on the ballot paper.
As for this defeating the whole purpose of voting:- I guess you could say that if you think the whole purpose of voting is having a choice about whether to vote or not. If you happen to live in a country where the purpose of voting is to fulfill your responsibility as a citizen to participate in the selection of the country's leadership, then this process serves its purpose well.
Standardisation seems to have worked well here. How is the non standardised system in the US going? Didn't defrauding of 'just a few' election areas have a bit of an impact on the last presidential election? I accept the point that uniformity increases the potential amount of damage that could be done by a system failure, but I don't think it necessarily increases the chance of failure. On the contrary, the whole system is so important it is very closely observed and controlled. There are no small players able to sneak under the radar. That's not to say we have a perfect record as far as corruption goes. In one state, we have had lots of dead people apparently managing to turn up and vote. Of course, that's not a problem related to vote recording technology - it makes no difference if they use pen and paper or a touchscreen.
Actually, we've got another well working system down here that we could probably arrange for you to licence. We call it pencil and paper, and it has worked without fail at every election I have ever voted at. The results have always been counted very fast, and there's a good audit trail.
Every adult in Australia votes (it's the law), so we know the system works well even with lots of voters. The voting system is a preferrential system, which is more complicated to count that the 1st past the post system used in some other countries. The ballot papers are counted entirely by hand, yet we get results out on election day.
One of the things that helps make Australian elections very smooth (apart from the fact that politicians keep getting elected) is that we have a federal body (the Australian Electoral Commission) to oversee elections. They control the process in every state - we have nationally consistent rules and processes. They seem to be very organised to an outsider like me: they pop up at election time and run the whole show like clockwork.
Sure, we all win... until MS decides that music can only be downloaded from Windows onto their player (for anti-piracy or anti-terrorism or anti-child-porn reasons or whatever excuse seems good at the time). They couldn't do this now because they don't have any grip on the portable music player market, and they don't have 100% control over our computers. But add Palladium, and enough time and marketing power for them to get to critical mass in this particular market, and they'd jump on the chance to do this. Some of the other hardware they sell is good (mice, keyboards) so it seems likely they could do a good enough job of a portable music player eventually and sell lots of them.
If they can leverage their desktop OS monopoly to get a monopoly in portable music players, and get licencing fees for the technology to distribute music to them, they'd have a very nice earner. There's heaps of money in the music business, even though it's very unevenly distributed.
Granted, this course of events might seem unlikely, but a) stranger things have happened in the world of MS, and b) it's so much fun being paranoid about this kind of thing.
Even if the boards do not accept large amounts of physical memory, 64 bit is still useful. Your applications can have a massive 64 bit address space available to them - enough for example to have pointers into very large video files, amongst other things.
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Were the September 11 hijackers travelling under false passports? I was under the impression that they were not. If this system had already been in place in 2001, would the outcome have been any different?
Is accurate knowledge about who is entering the USA through airports really a significant problem for those trying to predict and prevent future terrorism incidents? I would have expected that a greater problem was knowing the intentions and tracking the actual actions of individuals.
If this system works perfectly, surely people with terrorist intentions will know it, and simply not enter the USA legally? It's not as if the USA's borders are impregnable - there are large numbers of people managing to enter without passports or visas. It's like carefully putting a lid on the bucket to make sure you don't spill any water, but ignoring the leak-hole at the bottom of the bucket.
I would call the heavy compression required for FM broadcast a far more significant problem. You need good hearing and good equipment for attenuation above 16kHz to be noticable, but the compression is obvious to anyone who has heard the same content direct from CD. A CD player can reproduce 96dB of dynamic range (ignoring amp and speaker issues here), but a broadcast FM radio signal is compressed heavily with a multiband compressor, along with lots of other processing to make it work with the transmitters. For an interesting read on the amount of processing done, take a look at this guide for recording industry folks at masterdigital.com
The compression applied to content before transmission is necessary for technical and practical reasons. The wider the dynamic range of a signal to transmit, the wider the frequency band required for the FM signal (an FM signal is centered around a single frequency, but actually occupies a band of frequencies). If we didn't compress, we wouldn't be able to fit many stations in the frequency range allocated to FM broadcast radio, or we would end up with lots of cross talk between stations.
Having said all of that, lots of modern music is compressed to hell anyway during the mixing and mastering stages, long before it gets to an FM transmitter.
Ugh... three different units of measurement for the same thing in one sentence. Does anyone know the SI units for confusion?
The marketing brochure at the Cornice web site lists the transfer rate for the new drive as 4.5 MB/s (that's megabytes, not megabits), or more than 280 times the rate required for 128Kb/s audio playback. You need it to be much faster than the audio playback rate so that you can run the drive only for some of the time and cache the data in memory, therefore using less power.
It also lists the average power consumption for typical audio playback as only 4mW. That assumes that you have 32MB of memory available as a cache and that the audio is 64Kb/sec.
Interestingly, the brochure also claims that the electrical interface to the device uses true IDE mode. Using a well established standard like this means that just about anyone could interface with it - I would love to get my hands on one of these to put into my own MP3 player, but it doesn't look like this company is particular interested in selling single drives to people like me. Using a standard IDE interface also means that existing hardware and software drivers can be re-used: for example there are USB2 to IDE bridge chips that could (in theory) connected directly to this drive for a portable MP3 player, and there is also plenty of GPL'ed code for interfacing to IDE devices.
Quality mechanics are what really makes the difference between a good electronic product and crap. If you're going to buy cheap, this is where you'll feel it.
DVD players, CD players, tape decks, hard drives and VCRs all have complicated mechanics as well as complicated electronics - but it is the mechanical parts that will fail first. Compared to a spinning metal shaft or moving piece of plastic, a transistor doesn't wear out or break down at all.
A 555 timer chip is not a quality problem. It is a relatively old but very common device - it is good example of "tried and true". They have been in production for decades, and compared to more complicated chips are extremely reliable and rugged.
You are also increasingly unlikely to find such a device in a DVD player or in other modern consumer electronics. Complex modern consumer equipment tends to revolve around either a CPU/microcontroller or other highly integrated digital electronics, combined with the minimum amount of analog circuitry required to interact with the real world. The kind of functions a 555 timer might have performed (one shot timing or oscillation) are dealt with in the digital domain, and this functionality is developed as software. Using a 555 is the expensive way, not the cheap way, as hardware is expensive compared to the cost of software, which approaches zero for sufficiently large production runs.
There are quality factors in consumer electronics - it's not all the same - but it's not so simple as the use of a single device. Factors include:
With increasingly high levels of integration, more of the product is dependant on software (either in a CPU or as a way of describing custom silicon). Quality depends extremely heavily on design. Now, much of the complicated design isn't even performed by a hardware manufacturer. For example, take a look at the many usb key type MP3 players on the market. Notice how they're all almost identical in specifications? This is because the manufacturers don't start from scratch each time, but use the same chip set as all their competitors and often the same reference design from the chip designers. The guts of one of these players is just as good as the next, but one may be better overall due to better design and construction of the case, or a better user manual, or better headphones, etc.
It would be interesting to put the rover in a closed room so it can't be seen, then add about 10 to 20 minutes of delay each way from its camera to the user and from the controls back to the rover.
The real rover was not controlled from earth in a continuous way because of the time delay - sets of commands were uploaded infrequently.
As you wish.
Q: Why is American beer like making love in a canoe?
A: Because it's fucking close to water.
There were rumours that George Bush would make an announcement at the Wright brother's flight re-enactment yesterday. When I read that the flight ended in the mud, I couldn't help wondering if there had been a last moment decision not to make an announcement as a result.
Imagine what would happen if a new moon program had been kicked off at the flight re-enactment. If any little thing went wrong later, the media would have a field day replaying footage of the plane dumping into the mud in association with Bush's speech.
How about this for an impressive indicator of technological progress? In the earlier story about the 100 year anniversary of powered flight there were comments suggesting that progress in aerospace seemed slow lately. Maybe we're on the verge of another surge forward?
It wasn't that long ago that the sound barrier was really considered a barrier - people involved in breaking the sound barrier are still around. Back then, it was a major effort that was incredibly risky and took the resources of a government to achieve. At the time, plenty of people wondered if it was really even possible.
Now, however, we see a small private company break the sound barrier on their first major rocket powered test flight, as if it's no big deal. We've come a long way. Nice one, Scaled Composites!
Not only are they very similar in purpose, our respective leaders seem to have a similar attitude towards them. The Prime Minister is given a place to live in Canberra (at some expense to the taxpayer) but prefers to live in Sydney, just like the President seems to prefer to spend a lot of time in Texas.
For you and me it's just an extra step, and no big deal. For a good number of a hardware vendor's customers, that extra step is an insurmountable obstacle. Manufacturers are selling consumer electronics to customers who want consumer electronics - not to people like us in the IT sector. My father, for example, could not / would not ever install a DLL, driver, or support application for something like a digital camera. There's plenty of people like him who only want stuff they can use off the shelf without having to configure or adjust Windows. Surely a manufacturer would cough up the money MS demands if it means they get to keep their customers?
You're insane. That's $250 please. See the receptionist on the way out and make an appointment for another session next week...
The Government (Australia) likes to play some of these kinds of tricks too. They don't want to be known for increasing taxes, so we get things like 'stamp duty' and 'special levies' instead. Apparently if you don't call it a tax its not a tax so there's no problem with it.
To top it off, they now charge tax (our 10% Goods and Services Tax) on some of these not-a-tax taxes. They only get away with it because they know we're stupid enought to re-elect them anyway.
Telstra has all sorts of ways to try keep their customers. For example, misleading advertisements - they were forced to take some of their TV ads off the air by the ACCC. Or abusing their monopoly on the phone lines by lying about the availability of ADSL - they told a customer he was too far from the exchange when he wanted to get ADSL through another ISP, but was close enough for Bigpond. Then they threatened him when he talked!
I think there is only so far they can slide, however, before even the most uninformed consumers see the light. Their recent run of email brown outs must have been hard for even the most tolerant of users to ignore. This article at whirpool suggests that people are finally starting to wake up.
Sounds great to me. I only have to pay $50 - $100 extra to keep using what I already have. What could be fairer?
People who purchased a TV set (and most people buying them now) did so in the expectation that they could use it to watch free to air broadcasts. As you correctly point out, it's not a right of any sort. But it is a fairly understandable assumption given the history of TV that most people are aware of: the TV signal has always been there, and it has always been available to any TV set. Now, the rules are going to change. The expensive box of electronics someone purchased will become a pile of junk unless extra money is spent - this is not how it has been in the past so it's not a normal expectation for the future, apart for those of us who know digital is coming and have some idea of what it means.
Whether you approve of the changeover process and schedule or not, the reality is that some people are going to be upset by this. Whether they should be upset or not is another question again. Many will be comforted by the fact that the hardware will probably be fairly cheap, and only needed by some. Others aren't going to be so easily satisfied - they'll see it as a matter of principal.
Now there's a concept: software as a digital rarity. How can digital information become rare, when it can be copied perfectly for just about nothing? Maybe someone ought to mention this to the record companies one day. They'll be shocked to learn that their product has very low value without them depending on an artificial scarceness, and I'm sure they'll drop their prices right away.
Cool - All you have to do now is change the stuff inside the box and change the company that sold it, and it will be perfect.
I've never seen electronic voting anywhere in Australia. It might be some used somewhere we don't all see: perhaps in some local council elections?
Our federal elections are all done with pencil and paper, and votes are counted by hand. No punching machines, no optical scanners, no touchscreens: nothing more high tech than an HB pencil. The voting system is federally controlled. It is highly regulated and uniform throughout the nation. Our system has has served us very well, and delivers accurate counts very quickly. We usually get the lower house of parliament (votes there determine who will be the Prime Minister) counted by a reasonable hour on election day. The system for counting the senate is more complicated (we use a proportional representation scheme) and takes longer, but it doesn't seem to cause any real problems.
Given that we have a system that works very well, our politicians will probably want to change it soon to something that fails miserably, and electronic voting looks like a good candidate so maybe the next election will be different. Each winter in Australia we send our politicians (both federal and state) on long and expensive overseas trips; officially these are fact finding missions. From what I can tell the goal is to find new and interesting ways to screw things up in Australia. We are currently pushing hard to convert our formerly successful health care system into something more like the USA model. At the state level we have successfully converted our healthy public transport system into a system based on the UK experience - we even brought in the Connex company to run our train system, based on their spectacular stuff up of transport in the UK. I believe at the moment our politicians are looking for some good overseas models of a buggered tertiary education system to copy, but I think they're running into trouble on this one because they can't find any country that is making more of a mess of it than us. Oh - have I started ranting - oops, sorry.
We are spinning and moving, but we are doing so around fixed axes: spinning around an axis from the north to south pole, and moving around an axis through the sun that is nearly parallel to the earth's rotational axis.
Try drawing yourself a diagram (looking 'side on' to earth) complete with sight lines from a person on the surface of the planet to objects out in space. It will become fairly clear that the further north you go, the less of the universe that is to the south of the earth will be visible, because the earth itself blocks your view. There is effectively a cone of non visible space. The spinning motion gives the most comprehensive view of the universe to people on the equator: they get to see it all, but only over time as the earth spins.
Many if not most of the names of stars are not Greek or Roman (as we might otherwise expect given the roots of our language), but Arabic. This is because the Arabs were further south and were able to see many more stars than the ancient Greeks or Romans. For example: Altair, Rigel, Betelgeuse, Fomalhaut, Aldebaran, Vega, and Algol are all names with Arabic origins.
Australia deciding to drop its asteroid watching program isn't much of an improvement. As far as I know, it leaves us with a very large blind spot. We could have something nearby approaching us from the south right now and not even know it. Is someone else far enough south of the equator watching?
If we were able to develop the technologies to defeat a big rock, we all might be on the lookout again. It seems like a bit of a chicken and egg situation though. We probably won't develop the technology until there is imminent danger, but we won't all bother looking for incoming trouble until we know we can do something about it.
I was misleading on the matter of it being a legal requirement to vote - it's a common misconception and I just went and contributed to it. Apparently the real deal is that adults have to show up at a polling place on election day and have their name crossed off the list (or do the equivalent by mail). This doesn't mean you have to actually fill out a ballot paper or put one into the ballot box. You can't take ballot papers out of the room, but no-one watches you vote or checks that you fill out the form. Even if you do fill out a paper, you aren't required to fill it out in a way that indicates a preference for a particular candidate. People write all sorts of creative things on the ballot paper.
:- I guess you could say that if you think the whole purpose of voting is having a choice about whether to vote or not. If you happen to live in a country where the purpose of voting is to fulfill your responsibility as a citizen to participate in the selection of the country's leadership, then this process serves its purpose well.
As for this defeating the whole purpose of voting
Standardisation seems to have worked well here. How is the non standardised system in the US going? Didn't defrauding of 'just a few' election areas have a bit of an impact on the last presidential election? I accept the point that uniformity increases the potential amount of damage that could be done by a system failure, but I don't think it necessarily increases the chance of failure. On the contrary, the whole system is so important it is very closely observed and controlled. There are no small players able to sneak under the radar. That's not to say we have a perfect record as far as corruption goes. In one state, we have had lots of dead people apparently managing to turn up and vote. Of course, that's not a problem related to vote recording technology - it makes no difference if they use pen and paper or a touchscreen.
Actually, we've got another well working system down here that we could probably arrange for you to licence. We call it pencil and paper, and it has worked without fail at every election I have ever voted at. The results have always been counted very fast, and there's a good audit trail.
Every adult in Australia votes (it's the law), so we know the system works well even with lots of voters. The voting system is a preferrential system, which is more complicated to count that the 1st past the post system used in some other countries. The ballot papers are counted entirely by hand, yet we get results out on election day.
One of the things that helps make Australian elections very smooth (apart from the fact that politicians keep getting elected) is that we have a federal body (the Australian Electoral Commission) to oversee elections. They control the process in every state - we have nationally consistent rules and processes. They seem to be very organised to an outsider like me: they pop up at election time and run the whole show like clockwork.
Sure, we all win... until MS decides that music can only be downloaded from Windows onto their player (for anti-piracy or anti-terrorism or anti-child-porn reasons or whatever excuse seems good at the time). They couldn't do this now because they don't have any grip on the portable music player market, and they don't have 100% control over our computers. But add Palladium, and enough time and marketing power for them to get to critical mass in this particular market, and they'd jump on the chance to do this. Some of the other hardware they sell is good (mice, keyboards) so it seems likely they could do a good enough job of a portable music player eventually and sell lots of them.
If they can leverage their desktop OS monopoly to get a monopoly in portable music players, and get licencing fees for the technology to distribute music to them, they'd have a very nice earner. There's heaps of money in the music business, even though it's very unevenly distributed.
Granted, this course of events might seem unlikely, but a) stranger things have happened in the world of MS, and b) it's so much fun being paranoid about this kind of thing.
Even if the boards do not accept large amounts of physical memory, 64 bit is still useful. Your applications can have a massive 64 bit address space available to them - enough for example to have pointers into very large video files, amongst other things.