Except that the article you link to seems to assume that the voting process starts with the ballot. It doesn't, because the ballot may be cast fraudulently. It doesn't stop dead people from voting (see the history of Chicago). It doesn't stop illegal aliens from voting. It doesn't stop college students and Florida snowbirds from voting in two places. It doesn't stop groups like ACORN from registering fictitious voters. It doesn't stop corrupt jurisdictions from just stuffing the ballot box.
I know the topic of electronic vote fraud is a natural for Slashdot, but the discussions tend to focus on technical aspects of potential fraud, and totally ignore the good old-fashioned methods of vote fraud, of which there are many, many documented instances.
I need to wrap up this post so I don't have the references, but there are numerous instances of big cities (like Philadelphia) that have reported more votes than there are voting-age adults living in the city! Sometimes these votes come in oddly late in state-wide and national elections, and are just enough to tip the election.
So your home user checking his email, running a web browser, etc is not going to benefit much from having all that compute power
But with 1,000 cores perhaps Microsoft could speed up Vista or Windows 7 so that 498 cores are devoted to Aero, 498 to DRM, and the last four could be used for work.
3. Mark Steyn's thesis is that muslims are taking over the west, "breeding like mosquitoes," and that they plan to replace our western legal system with Sharia law. And he is pretty offensive in the way he argues it.
"We're the ones who will change you," the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children." As he summed it up: "Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours."
So is it hate speech against Muslims to quote a Muslim? (By the way, the above link is the original "hate speech" article in question.)
But the REAL issue of why he's on trial is because McLean's [sic] magazine (Canada's largest circulated magazine) has him as a regular contributer while refusing to let anyone offer a rebuttal. So, people complained.
You're absolutely correct, and it's a huge opportunity for Apple. All they need is a cut-down Mac Pro, call it a Mac Pro Mini. One (not four) hard drive bays, one (not two) optical bays, two (not eight) RAM slots, one slot for a graphics, and maybe one other slot. They can't sell that for $999 and make a profit? Or sell it for $799 and use it to storm the gates of corporate America.
One more comment, not mentioned so far: Psystar is doomed if for no other reason than that they are selling a computer with "Mac" in the name. Talk about painting a bull's eye on yourself for Apple's lawyers!
Well, that was my problem with David Lynch's movie, basically. It's like an abbreviated summary of the book
True, and it could have been done better, but to some extent it's just inevitable. The rule of thumb for screenplays is that one page (about 250 words) equals one minute of screen time, whether it's dialog, action, description, or a combination. The paperback of Dune is about 540 pages, with about 400 words per page. So if made, literally and entirely, into a movie, it would be over 14 hours long. The extra time helped make the mini-series better (in some ways!), as others have noted.
There is an ancient technique for decorating pottery called sgraffito. One of the ways it can be done is to spin a pot on a wheel and slowly move the point of a sharp tool down the outside of the pot, making a long helical groove. Sounds like Edison cylinder recording, doesn't it? I've read that scientists have used lasers to "read" such a groove, and got the sound of the potter's wheel squeaking. More here, including a discussion of a recent hoax.
Also, there are rumors that Abraham Lincoln's voice was recorded by phonautograph:
In 1863, nearly 15 years before Thomas Alva Edison created the first phonograph, an inventor named Leon Scott is said to have visited the White House. If historical anecdotes are accurate, he made a tracing of President Lincoln's voice with his newly invented "phonautograph," a machine that scratched sound vibrations onto a soot-blackened sheet of paper wrapped around a drum.
The cylinder on which a paper record of Lincoln's voice was apparently made has never been found.
If it weren't for junk mail, first class mail would cost considerably more than it does. Junk mail subsidizes regular mail and helps keep costs down.
I hear this said a lot, could somebody please explain to me how larger, heavier mail which costs much much less could possibly subsidize smaller, lighter mail which costs much more?
Which do you think would be easier and cheaper to sort and deliver: 1) 10,000 catalogs, large but all the same size and with machine-readable labels, arriving at the Post Office bundled in Zip code order, or 2) 10,000 random birthday cards, bills, postcards, etc., etc., many addressed by hand, and arriving loose in big sacks?
Also, while the per-piece charge is much lower, the total payments are larger. The big mailers are, in effect, getting cheaper stamps, but they're buying them by the millions.
Well, yeah, but it's not worth five minutes of your time to save $15? Do you make more than $180 an hour? Besides, I'll bet it takes you longer than that to buy and install new blades. And you'll be reducing your carbon footprint like all the trendy people.
Was there something terribly wrong with wipers to begin with?
Apparently they weren't expensive enough.
Good point and funny reply, and this seems to be a good spot to reveal one of the great secrets of auto maintenance: you can sharpen your windshield wipers and make them last many times longer. All you need is a small piece of fine sandpaper. Get the wiper blade wet (if it's not already), fold the sandpaper into a V shape, and pull it along the edge a number of times. You want to take off the stiff and cracked edge and expose a fresh layer of rubber. I get extra years out of blades this way, though YMMV.
I use a little gadget I bought at a flea market for a dime decades ago, a little piece of sheet aluminum that's mostly handle to hold an inch-long groove like two sides of an inside-out triangular file. Forget the "100 mile-per-gallon carburetor," it's the windshield wiper blade sharpener that's my candidate for great suppressed invention.
For anybody who wants a reasonably specced system (better than Mini, not as tricked out as the Pro)
Precisely. I call it a Mac MiniPro: basically the current single chip Mac Pro ($2,299 as a BTO option), but with just one optical drive (not two), one hard drive bay (not four), two RAM slots (not eight), two PCI slots (not four) and two USB ports (not five). The case, power supply, and packaging all become smaller and less expensive. Surely Apple could sell something like that for $1,499 or $1,299 at a reasonable profit?
Or better yet, they could charge $999 and watch their market share rise as gamers, hobbyists, switchers, and enterprises rush to buy them.
But, I guess that is how all social animals behave.
Indeed. And the desire to support a winner exists after the election as well: post-election polls usually find that more people say they voted for the winner than actually did!
For example, SC gets the players to discover that the way to counter rising crime is to put in more police stations.
That is at least arguable, but there was an even worse one I remember: once a city got to a certain size, the only way to end citizen complaints about traffic was to convert 100% of the roads into mass-transit rail lines! I had a hard time imagining deliveries to supermarkets, or people moving households, or buying new refrigerators, all via commuter rail....
Adobe makes sense as an acquisition, but more people watch TV than use Photoshop. And, of course, Apple is moving more into consumer electronics. They should buy TiVo, redo the interface in a slick Apple way, and link it to the iTunes Movie Store. At the same time, sell them alongside big, beautiful Apple-brand HDTVs with well-designed connections and controls, which is a weak point on other HDTVs.
Also, come out with some sort of mini-tower Mac in between (in cost and features) the Mini and the Mac Pro....
This is all about money. Lots and lots of money to be made from registration fees as companies line up to protect their trademarks and domain parkers line up to bottom-feed.
And don't forget what a boon this will be for phishers. Won't they be able to register domains like "ebaý.com" or "banköfamerica.com" or even names with characters that would look, to users of English-language browsers, identical to the real domains?
In fact, with the early Macs, you needed a "Mac Cracker," a funky metal device that looks something like a book stand, to open the machine.
I remember needing just a putty knife and a foot-long Torx wrench (the screws that held it together were seated at the top of the machine, but only accessible through deep holes in the bottom)....
Nuclear is about the only source (okay, geothermal, too) that isn't a form of solar energy.
Everything else you say is true, but to nitpick: isn't nuclear power another form of "stored" solar energy? Those heavy elements were originally formed in stars that blew up. Nuclear power is solar energy from dead suns!
Cool to think about, and a point to confound anti-nuclear power types....
The US is *NOT* the only country where something someone else finds offensive will get shut down.
Very true, but what all the commenters are missing so far is that while Exxon wanted this shut down because they didn't like it, that's almost certainly not how they got it shut down. They didn't call the ISP and say "We're offended, shut it down." I'll bet they said "Our trademarks are being violated, shut it down."
I know many Slashdotters don't like copyrights and trademarks, but that's the law, and any company's brand is a valuable asset they are legally obligated to protect. (If they don't protect it, they could lose it, which could mean the corporate officers can get sued by the shareholders.) Using a company's logo without their permission is more or less the corporate equivalent of identity theft, and saying "it's just satire" is not a defense that's going to work.
Example: back in the '70s there was a famous series of magazine ads for Volkswagen Beetles, one of which was based on the fact that it floats. In '73 the National Lampoon did a dead-on parody ad in their Encyclopedia of Humor, headlined "If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he'd be President today." But due to a production error, they used the real VW logo. Oops! They got sued and had to remove that piece from future reprintings.
From what I can tell, the Yes Men made something that looked exactly like the Exxon site. To be safe, they should have made it about the "Ezzon corporation" or something like that. With a parody of the logo, they're in the clear. (Maybe: IANAL.) Granted, that might not have been as funny, but if they had done it that way I'll bet they wouldn't be having ISP troubles.
But consider how the USSR's central planning would have gone if it had Walmart's computing power, [...]
Sorry, that would still be central planning. Walmart uses those tools in a free(ish) market, and so gets price signals from the competition and different suppliers, etc. It's the old economic calculation problem. If Stalin had those tools to use, or if Walmart were run as a government retail monopoly, they would still be doomed to fail.
Central planning failed everywhere? Singapore? Nordic countries?
They are not centrally-planned economies, not by most standards, at least. They have meddled with the market as all governments are wont to do, but not on the scale of nationalizing entire industries, etc.
Well, no, that doesn't explain everything about Chavez hatred.
Chavez is best buds with the dictators and thugs who rule Cuba, China, Zimbabwe, Iran, etc. If your country is a human rights nightmare, an economic backwater, and/or a one-party state, Chavez will speak well of you, while blaming all problems on the USA. Is it any wonder Americans don't like him?
Chavez began hating the USA long before anyone here had ever heard of him. Is it a surprise if there's hatred directed back at him?
But regardless of the software or other details, this is all still autarky and, even worse, central planning. Chavez is clearly ignorant of the fact that in the 20th century, central planning failed everywhere and produced 100 million corpses in the process. In addition to the 0% record in practice, the theory has been totally demolished by people like Mises, Hayek, and Friedman. Among present-day economists, central planning is about as popular and respected as the phlogiston theory of combustion is among chemists. No matter what Linux-friendly, appealing-sounding program he tries, the fact that he's determined to run the economy according to these ideas means it's doomed to crash and burn. The only questions are how soon and how hard.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the article you link to seems to assume that the voting process starts with the ballot. It doesn't, because the ballot may be cast fraudulently. It doesn't stop dead people from voting (see the history of Chicago). It doesn't stop illegal aliens from voting. It doesn't stop college students and Florida snowbirds from voting in two places. It doesn't stop groups like ACORN from registering fictitious voters. It doesn't stop corrupt jurisdictions from just stuffing the ballot box.
I know the topic of electronic vote fraud is a natural for Slashdot, but the discussions tend to focus on technical aspects of potential fraud, and totally ignore the good old-fashioned methods of vote fraud, of which there are many, many documented instances.
I need to wrap up this post so I don't have the references, but there are numerous instances of big cities (like Philadelphia) that have reported more votes than there are voting-age adults living in the city! Sometimes these votes come in oddly late in state-wide and national elections, and are just enough to tip the election.
Not only conceivable, but almost certain, since that's exactly what Title IX did to men's college sports.
But with 1,000 cores perhaps Microsoft could speed up Vista or Windows 7 so that 498 cores are devoted to Aero, 498 to DRM, and the last four could be used for work.
You do know the mosquitoes phrase is a quote from Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar, right?
So is it hate speech against Muslims to quote a Muslim? (By the way, the above link is the original "hate speech" article in question.)
Except the complainers were demanding the magazine publish an unedited five page rebuttal in the magazine. No magazine allows that.
You're absolutely correct, and it's a huge opportunity for Apple. All they need is a cut-down Mac Pro, call it a Mac Pro Mini. One (not four) hard drive bays, one (not two) optical bays, two (not eight) RAM slots, one slot for a graphics, and maybe one other slot. They can't sell that for $999 and make a profit? Or sell it for $799 and use it to storm the gates of corporate America.
One more comment, not mentioned so far: Psystar is doomed if for no other reason than that they are selling a computer with "Mac" in the name. Talk about painting a bull's eye on yourself for Apple's lawyers!
True, and it could have been done better, but to some extent it's just inevitable. The rule of thumb for screenplays is that one page (about 250 words) equals one minute of screen time, whether it's dialog, action, description, or a combination. The paperback of Dune is about 540 pages, with about 400 words per page. So if made, literally and entirely, into a movie, it would be over 14 hours long. The extra time helped make the mini-series better (in some ways!), as others have noted.
Which do you think would be easier and cheaper to sort and deliver: 1) 10,000 catalogs, large but all the same size and with machine-readable labels, arriving at the Post Office bundled in Zip code order, or 2) 10,000 random birthday cards, bills, postcards, etc., etc., many addressed by hand, and arriving loose in big sacks?
Also, while the per-piece charge is much lower, the total payments are larger. The big mailers are, in effect, getting cheaper stamps, but they're buying them by the millions.
Well, yeah, but it's not worth five minutes of your time to save $15? Do you make more than $180 an hour? Besides, I'll bet it takes you longer than that to buy and install new blades. And you'll be reducing your carbon footprint like all the trendy people.
Good point and funny reply, and this seems to be a good spot to reveal one of the great secrets of auto maintenance: you can sharpen your windshield wipers and make them last many times longer. All you need is a small piece of fine sandpaper. Get the wiper blade wet (if it's not already), fold the sandpaper into a V shape, and pull it along the edge a number of times. You want to take off the stiff and cracked edge and expose a fresh layer of rubber. I get extra years out of blades this way, though YMMV.
I use a little gadget I bought at a flea market for a dime decades ago, a little piece of sheet aluminum that's mostly handle to hold an inch-long groove like two sides of an inside-out triangular file. Forget the "100 mile-per-gallon carburetor," it's the windshield wiper blade sharpener that's my candidate for great suppressed invention.
Precisely. I call it a Mac MiniPro: basically the current single chip Mac Pro ($2,299 as a BTO option), but with just one optical drive (not two), one hard drive bay (not four), two RAM slots (not eight), two PCI slots (not four) and two USB ports (not five). The case, power supply, and packaging all become smaller and less expensive. Surely Apple could sell something like that for $1,499 or $1,299 at a reasonable profit?
Or better yet, they could charge $999 and watch their market share rise as gamers, hobbyists, switchers, and enterprises rush to buy them.
Indeed. And the desire to support a winner exists after the election as well: post-election polls usually find that more people say they voted for the winner than actually did!
That is at least arguable, but there was an even worse one I remember: once a city got to a certain size, the only way to end citizen complaints about traffic was to convert 100% of the roads into mass-transit rail lines! I had a hard time imagining deliveries to supermarkets, or people moving households, or buying new refrigerators, all via commuter rail....
Adobe makes sense as an acquisition, but more people watch TV than use Photoshop. And, of course, Apple is moving more into consumer electronics. They should buy TiVo, redo the interface in a slick Apple way, and link it to the iTunes Movie Store. At the same time, sell them alongside big, beautiful Apple-brand HDTVs with well-designed connections and controls, which is a weak point on other HDTVs.
Also, come out with some sort of mini-tower Mac in between (in cost and features) the Mini and the Mac Pro....
Well, don't real London Underground stations have ads in them?
And don't forget what a boon this will be for phishers. Won't they be able to register domains like "ebaý.com" or "banköfamerica.com" or even names with characters that would look, to users of English-language browsers, identical to the real domains?
Time.gov.
And you can't know the true meaning of "uncomfortable flight" until you've had to sit next to that guy....
The article says:
I remember needing just a putty knife and a foot-long Torx wrench (the screws that held it together were seated at the top of the machine, but only accessible through deep holes in the bottom)....
Everything else you say is true, but to nitpick: isn't nuclear power another form of "stored" solar energy? Those heavy elements were originally formed in stars that blew up. Nuclear power is solar energy from dead suns!
Cool to think about, and a point to confound anti-nuclear power types....
Very true, but what all the commenters are missing so far is that while Exxon wanted this shut down because they didn't like it, that's almost certainly not how they got it shut down. They didn't call the ISP and say "We're offended, shut it down." I'll bet they said "Our trademarks are being violated, shut it down."
I know many Slashdotters don't like copyrights and trademarks, but that's the law, and any company's brand is a valuable asset they are legally obligated to protect. (If they don't protect it, they could lose it, which could mean the corporate officers can get sued by the shareholders.) Using a company's logo without their permission is more or less the corporate equivalent of identity theft, and saying "it's just satire" is not a defense that's going to work.
Example: back in the '70s there was a famous series of magazine ads for Volkswagen Beetles, one of which was based on the fact that it floats. In '73 the National Lampoon did a dead-on parody ad in their Encyclopedia of Humor, headlined "If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he'd be President today." But due to a production error, they used the real VW logo. Oops! They got sued and had to remove that piece from future reprintings.
From what I can tell, the Yes Men made something that looked exactly like the Exxon site. To be safe, they should have made it about the "Ezzon corporation" or something like that. With a parody of the logo, they're in the clear. (Maybe: IANAL.) Granted, that might not have been as funny, but if they had done it that way I'll bet they wouldn't be having ISP troubles.
But consider how the USSR's central planning would have gone if it had Walmart's computing power, [...]
Sorry, that would still be central planning. Walmart uses those tools in a free(ish) market, and so gets price signals from the competition and different suppliers, etc. It's the old economic calculation problem. If Stalin had those tools to use, or if Walmart were run as a government retail monopoly, they would still be doomed to fail.
Central planning failed everywhere? Singapore? Nordic countries?
They are not centrally-planned economies, not by most standards, at least. They have meddled with the market as all governments are wont to do, but not on the scale of nationalizing entire industries, etc.
Well, no, that doesn't explain everything about Chavez hatred.
But regardless of the software or other details, this is all still autarky and, even worse, central planning. Chavez is clearly ignorant of the fact that in the 20th century, central planning failed everywhere and produced 100 million corpses in the process. In addition to the 0% record in practice, the theory has been totally demolished by people like Mises, Hayek, and Friedman. Among present-day economists, central planning is about as popular and respected as the phlogiston theory of combustion is among chemists. No matter what Linux-friendly, appealing-sounding program he tries, the fact that he's determined to run the economy according to these ideas means it's doomed to crash and burn. The only questions are how soon and how hard.
(From "My Name is Earl"):