I was pretty excited to see that Virginia wasn't using Diebold machines in the voting booths. I was happy to see the WinVote machines. They looked slick, they worked fine and I had no complaints.
This morning I looked into the company and found out that it is run by 2 former Diebold executives.
Those numbers have been siting up on several political blogs this afternoon. Drudge took them down (which doesn't make sense since it would comfort his more liberal visitors and throw is conservative visitors into a voting hissy fit).
the previous response to this is right. They weren't handing out official ballots. They were just samples ballots so you knew what you were going to be looking at on the computer screen.
The whole voting process was computerized and was operated via a touch screen device that was shielded from everyones view (except for the voters, of course).
It was similar in Arlington (the long lines and the voter cards after registering), but once you got the card you were less than 2 minutes from voting, so everyone just waited.
I would think that if you went up and verified your registration your name you were pretty much obligated to vote right then and there. Why waste the time you spent in line just to get a business card that says "VOTER". Thats pretty assine.
They were touch screen devices that were named "WinVote". The first thing I saw was a blue screen. Man was I scared.
On a side note, I don't remember seeing voter turnout like this before, but the only elections I was involved with in this state were strictly senatorial or congressional. Those times I was in line for a good 10 minutes, this morning was a little over an hour. There was a great turnout and just about everyone in line seemed pretty excited. The folks at the polls who weren't election officials (people from the different parties) did a good job of helping people out without bugging the hell out of us (handing out copies of the ballots, walking the old people to the building and through the line - BUT not to the voting machines).
All in all it was a good experience, and I hope it works like this across the whole country.
I hardly ever saw a politcal commercial while I was at my house in northern virginia, but when I went to my parents place in northeastern pennsylvania I was inundated with 30 second snippets every 15 minutes.
It was an eye opening experience to go from only dealing with the election during prime time news to having it sprayed in my face during every possible commercial break.
Great point. WHY WHY WHY would you say that this is the most important election of our lifetime? Just to get people out to the polls? Jesus, the democratic process doesn't allow for "the most important election", it allows for "ELECTIONS" in general. All of them are equally important.
Don't be one and done. Vote now, vote later, vote all the time. Whatever you do, don't just vote once (except during each election, voting multiple times is bad).
From what I can remember about my time with AT&T, every single desktop was running Windows NT. Its not like they were actually using it. Every single desktop was running Reflection so they can access the unix server that maintains their switches.
Granted this was 4 years ago, and I only dealt with two call centers, but there really was no reason for them to be using Windows NT for any of the PC's in the office, whether it be the desktops for the supervisors/managers or the dummy terminals running the ascii based clients that did the backend work for the operators and the directory assistant workers.
Maybe they would be better off just popping in some unix based OS.
The other thing I can remember is all 300+ dummy terminals (from our one office; 1000+ if you counted the sister office) were maintained by one system admin. He would be able to broadcast out a new OS on those bad boys overnight without blinking an eye. One thing AT&T knows is how to network. Those bastards were tight, and the SA knew how to get the job done right the first time, on time.
I can't think of any console that kept a developer from working on their own graphics engine. Its really a matter of them wanting to spend the time to work all that good stuff out or buy an off-the-shelf engine developed by someone else.
What Sony is doing by giving out these emulators is letting the developers know that they aren't going to hold themselves responsible for their shitty research, development and production techniques. They are so set in their ways with this mini-disc shit, when they totally forgot all of the issues associated with it.
Consumers won't put up with shitty power consumption, they'll hate carrying around a media that won't work once it gets scratched and they'll certainly get sick of waiting over a minute for a game to load. Sony fucked up, they won't admit it.
good point. Lets say that I know that I have a worm on my computer. I know that that worm is sharing itself with other computers. I don't know how to get rid of said worm. Said worm just happens to be copyrighted by some 16 year old lesbian from california who goes by the name of "HotLEZ16FCA".
Am I breaking the law because I know that I am sharing this copyrighted file?
That Mel Brooks is in the process of preparing The Producers for another film based outing. It seems to still be doing very well on broadway, and a majority of people don't know that it was originally a Mel Brooks film.
If he is currently in the pre-production process of the producers he really shouldn't be able to start up something on Spaceballs. Perhaps this is just some new publicity stunt or something. Who the fuck knows.
Ansari and Allen aren't the ones who created the craft. Burt Rutan and his team did all of the work. Allen provided the money and Ansari just gave the X-Prize a much needed booster shot.
Don't forget that another team from Canada plans on making a go at the prize too (or at least a footnote on the record books at this point).
I guess calling him an asshole was a little bit much. Essentially I was just trying to say that he is making this $25 million dollar investment to save himself a few hundred million in research and development.
Don't expect the likes of Boeing or Lockheed to take up this challenge. They already know how to do it, but they won't because they probably have agreements with NASA and the Federal Gov.
The main job of a web designer for a commercial site is to create something that is memorable for the end user. You want them to come back. Thats why you find these whiz bang filled pages with hundreds of images, table based layouts and seizure inducing flash animations.
Once the HTML (or XHTML) spec is fully realized and utilized these type of accessibility issues won't be around. Properly (standardly) marked content is the way to go, so if you want to see Section 508 in the marketplace (the interet marketplace that is), support organizations like the w3c and mozilla. They are the future of the internet and the internet is the future of everything.
Without nasa we wouldn't know if manufacturing cpu's in space would make them twice as fast. There are plently of products that come out of research and development that was done while in, or done for, space.
Intel certainly wouldn't build a space station simply to manufacture chipsets. The cost involved in something that like would be greater than building a second state of the art factility on solid ground. Sure, it would be great to have the double speed CPU, but at what cost? No company would devote the time to build something like that if it wasn't proven beforehand through NASA's research teams.
NASA gets all the bad publicity now, but prior to Columbia they were doing pretty good. The ISS has been behind schedule (due to Russia, not the Columbia disaster) - and that time table is getting worse and worse every day for the last year - but there is nothing that can be done about it. You should thank NASA for at least going forward with the ISS even though every other attempt at a space station in the past has led to catastrophe (MIR was not cake walk and sky lab?? puh-leeze).
NASA has announced its own intentions to offer cash prizes for private space accomplishments through its Centennial Challenges office, which may offer prizes that range from $250,000 to $30 million. Potential challenges could include soft lunar landings and asteroid sample return missions, NASA officials have said.
This seems like it would have been a bit of a better story then this asshole looking to find a partner for his inflated space hotels.
By offering the $50 million prize he is essentially forcing someone else to do research and development. He already promised to dump $500 million into the space hotel project, so he really can't afford to put another couple of hundred million into something else.
Ever wondered why there were no clouds in ANY of the images?
They usually provide the public with clearest of all of their satellite images. I am more than sure that they have their fair share of cloudy pictures that they would never send out to the public.
Well, if you take a look at the maps you'll see that they removed a significant portion of the national mall to cover up the area that the whitehouse takes up. They definitely exceeded the boundries of the whitehouse grounds by a few hundred (or maybe thousand) feet.
If you were planning some kind of ground based attack you really wouldn't get any use from the map provided in the link above. Sure you'd get a general picture of where the whitehouse is located (its one of the white blobs for those who don't know), but you certainly couldn't make any plans for storming the grounds.
The majority if news organizations follow standards similar to the AP Style Guidelines. When dealing with proper names you usually would do the following:
On first reference, use a person's full name, including the middle initial, and title if important to the story. On second reference, use only the last name with no title. In the following example, for instance, we assume that on first reference the person was called Dr. Donald Drumm. The following are possible second-reference uses: The doctor agreed. Drumm agreed.
Any GIS type application is considered a threat to our national security. If you take a look at these aerial views of DC you can see how the federal government had the overhead views of the whitehouse and the capitol removed (or blocked). The last thing the government wants is to be responsible for a terrorist act. They feel that tools like this are useful to the general public, so they make them available. At the same time, they can see the emminent threat, so they limit its capabilities.
I am sure that the financial hit isn't as bad as you made it out to be.
1) They wouldn't have purchased a small amount of fobs. We are probably talking about an order between 100,000 and 1,000,000. That means they probably received a vast discount. The fobs themselves are glorified calculators that run off of a preset algorithm. They most certainly wouldn't cost upwards of $50 a piece. I am sure that they are partnering with RSA for this business venture.
2) The security features were already put in place so all they had to do was beef it up a bit, so again, the initial investment isn't that great.
3) They are a corporation. They wouldn't do anything if it didn't have the promise of a return on their investment. They wouldn't do something like this unless they researched it and found that there was a need and that they will be able to make a...
4) PROFIT!!!
I of course just don't get it. Why would people want to secure their data on the client end when they should be worrying just as much about the data stored on the server end. What is AOL doing to ensure that the data is kept secure throughout the whole transaction? Is this whole secureID thing just a method of coddling their non-technical customers (Look you get fancy number changers for your keychain!!!).
They even branded the secureID with AOL graphics and colors. Its insane.
Slashdot Mirror
I was pretty excited to see that Virginia wasn't using Diebold machines in the voting booths. I was happy to see the WinVote machines. They looked slick, they worked fine and I had no complaints.
This morning I looked into the company and found out that it is run by 2 former Diebold executives.
I really don't like that too much.
Those numbers have been siting up on several political blogs this afternoon. Drudge took them down (which doesn't make sense since it would comfort his more liberal visitors and throw is conservative visitors into a voting hissy fit).
the previous response to this is right. They weren't handing out official ballots. They were just samples ballots so you knew what you were going to be looking at on the computer screen.
The whole voting process was computerized and was operated via a touch screen device that was shielded from everyones view (except for the voters, of course).
It was similar in Arlington (the long lines and the voter cards after registering), but once you got the card you were less than 2 minutes from voting, so everyone just waited.
I would think that if you went up and verified your registration your name you were pretty much obligated to vote right then and there. Why waste the time you spent in line just to get a business card that says "VOTER". Thats pretty assine.
They were touch screen devices that were named "WinVote". The first thing I saw was a blue screen. Man was I scared.
On a side note, I don't remember seeing voter turnout like this before, but the only elections I was involved with in this state were strictly senatorial or congressional. Those times I was in line for a good 10 minutes, this morning was a little over an hour. There was a great turnout and just about everyone in line seemed pretty excited. The folks at the polls who weren't election officials (people from the different parties) did a good job of helping people out without bugging the hell out of us (handing out copies of the ballots, walking the old people to the building and through the line - BUT not to the voting machines).
All in all it was a good experience, and I hope it works like this across the whole country.
I hardly ever saw a politcal commercial while I was at my house in northern virginia, but when I went to my parents place in northeastern pennsylvania I was inundated with 30 second snippets every 15 minutes.
It was an eye opening experience to go from only dealing with the election during prime time news to having it sprayed in my face during every possible commercial break.
My Name is Slungsolow and I approve this message.
Great point. WHY WHY WHY would you say that this is the most important election of our lifetime? Just to get people out to the polls? Jesus, the democratic process doesn't allow for "the most important election", it allows for "ELECTIONS" in general. All of them are equally important.
Don't be one and done. Vote now, vote later, vote all the time. Whatever you do, don't just vote once (except during each election, voting multiple times is bad).
if you are a fan of the music, why would you want to fast forward? Wouldn't you want to rewind instead?
It seems to me that people are just trying to find area's to critize these devices so they can be compared to the iPod.
I wonder if this is the guy that won the Omega Collection...
From what I can remember about my time with AT&T, every single desktop was running Windows NT. Its not like they were actually using it. Every single desktop was running Reflection so they can access the unix server that maintains their switches.
Granted this was 4 years ago, and I only dealt with two call centers, but there really was no reason for them to be using Windows NT for any of the PC's in the office, whether it be the desktops for the supervisors/managers or the dummy terminals running the ascii based clients that did the backend work for the operators and the directory assistant workers.
Maybe they would be better off just popping in some unix based OS.
The other thing I can remember is all 300+ dummy terminals (from our one office; 1000+ if you counted the sister office) were maintained by one system admin. He would be able to broadcast out a new OS on those bad boys overnight without blinking an eye. One thing AT&T knows is how to network. Those bastards were tight, and the SA knew how to get the job done right the first time, on time.
I can't think of any console that kept a developer from working on their own graphics engine. Its really a matter of them wanting to spend the time to work all that good stuff out or buy an off-the-shelf engine developed by someone else.
What Sony is doing by giving out these emulators is letting the developers know that they aren't going to hold themselves responsible for their shitty research, development and production techniques. They are so set in their ways with this mini-disc shit, when they totally forgot all of the issues associated with it.
Consumers won't put up with shitty power consumption, they'll hate carrying around a media that won't work once it gets scratched and they'll certainly get sick of waiting over a minute for a game to load. Sony fucked up, they won't admit it.
good point. Lets say that I know that I have a worm on my computer. I know that that worm is sharing itself with other computers. I don't know how to get rid of said worm. Said worm just happens to be copyrighted by some 16 year old lesbian from california who goes by the name of "HotLEZ16FCA".
Am I breaking the law because I know that I am sharing this copyrighted file?
That Mel Brooks is in the process of preparing The Producers for another film based outing. It seems to still be doing very well on broadway, and a majority of people don't know that it was originally a Mel Brooks film.
If he is currently in the pre-production process of the producers he really shouldn't be able to start up something on Spaceballs. Perhaps this is just some new publicity stunt or something. Who the fuck knows.
Ansari and Allen aren't the ones who created the craft. Burt Rutan and his team did all of the work. Allen provided the money and Ansari just gave the X-Prize a much needed booster shot.
Don't forget that another team from Canada plans on making a go at the prize too (or at least a footnote on the record books at this point).
This is why I don't go to ttb anymore. You bastards. You screwed with PA and then you screwed with /.
I guess calling him an asshole was a little bit much. Essentially I was just trying to say that he is making this $25 million dollar investment to save himself a few hundred million in research and development.
Don't expect the likes of Boeing or Lockheed to take up this challenge. They already know how to do it, but they won't because they probably have agreements with NASA and the Federal Gov.
The main job of a web designer for a commercial site is to create something that is memorable for the end user. You want them to come back. Thats why you find these whiz bang filled pages with hundreds of images, table based layouts and seizure inducing flash animations.
Once the HTML (or XHTML) spec is fully realized and utilized these type of accessibility issues won't be around. Properly (standardly) marked content is the way to go, so if you want to see Section 508 in the marketplace (the interet marketplace that is), support organizations like the w3c and mozilla. They are the future of the internet and the internet is the future of everything.
Without nasa we wouldn't know if manufacturing cpu's in space would make them twice as fast. There are plently of products that come out of research and development that was done while in, or done for, space.
Intel certainly wouldn't build a space station simply to manufacture chipsets. The cost involved in something that like would be greater than building a second state of the art factility on solid ground. Sure, it would be great to have the double speed CPU, but at what cost? No company would devote the time to build something like that if it wasn't proven beforehand through NASA's research teams.
NASA gets all the bad publicity now, but prior to Columbia they were doing pretty good. The ISS has been behind schedule (due to Russia, not the Columbia disaster) - and that time table is getting worse and worse every day for the last year - but there is nothing that can be done about it. You should thank NASA for at least going forward with the ISS even though every other attempt at a space station in the past has led to catastrophe (MIR was not cake walk and sky lab?? puh-leeze).
Tax money well spent. Thats my opinion.
NASA has announced its own intentions to offer cash prizes for private space accomplishments through its Centennial Challenges office, which may offer prizes that range from $250,000 to $30 million. Potential challenges could include soft lunar landings and asteroid sample return missions, NASA officials have said. This seems like it would have been a bit of a better story then this asshole looking to find a partner for his inflated space hotels.
By offering the $50 million prize he is essentially forcing someone else to do research and development. He already promised to dump $500 million into the space hotel project, so he really can't afford to put another couple of hundred million into something else.
Ever wondered why there were no clouds in ANY of the images?
They usually provide the public with clearest of all of their satellite images. I am more than sure that they have their fair share of cloudy pictures that they would never send out to the public.
Well, if you take a look at the maps you'll see that they removed a significant portion of the national mall to cover up the area that the whitehouse takes up. They definitely exceeded the boundries of the whitehouse grounds by a few hundred (or maybe thousand) feet.
If you were planning some kind of ground based attack you really wouldn't get any use from the map provided in the link above. Sure you'd get a general picture of where the whitehouse is located (its one of the white blobs for those who don't know), but you certainly couldn't make any plans for storming the grounds.
Any GIS type application is considered a threat to our national security. If you take a look at these aerial views of DC you can see how the federal government had the overhead views of the whitehouse and the capitol removed (or blocked). The last thing the government wants is to be responsible for a terrorist act. They feel that tools like this are useful to the general public, so they make them available. At the same time, they can see the emminent threat, so they limit its capabilities.
Why would you do something like this? The "level" is completely arbitrary and there would certainly be no way to certify or verify it.
What about when a year or two passes and your "Level 7" PC is now a "level 2"? What happens with the previous "level 2" PC?
I am sure that the financial hit isn't as bad as you made it out to be.
1) They wouldn't have purchased a small amount of fobs. We are probably talking about an order between 100,000 and 1,000,000. That means they probably received a vast discount. The fobs themselves are glorified calculators that run off of a preset algorithm. They most certainly wouldn't cost upwards of $50 a piece. I am sure that they are partnering with RSA for this business venture.
2) The security features were already put in place so all they had to do was beef it up a bit, so again, the initial investment isn't that great.
3) They are a corporation. They wouldn't do anything if it didn't have the promise of a return on their investment. They wouldn't do something like this unless they researched it and found that there was a need and that they will be able to make a...
4) PROFIT!!!
I of course just don't get it. Why would people want to secure their data on the client end when they should be worrying just as much about the data stored on the server end. What is AOL doing to ensure that the data is kept secure throughout the whole transaction? Is this whole secureID thing just a method of coddling their non-technical customers (Look you get fancy number changers for your keychain!!!).
They even branded the secureID with AOL graphics and colors. Its insane.