You and I know all about neatsfoot oil, but to confer that knowledge on a child is a gift that will last forever, as is the memory of the lesson itself.
I know sed, or at least I think I do. It's the kind of filter I use a lot. Is there some feature or implementation of sed that lets you cut and paste from a GUI context?
I'm a CLI guy. I use a browser, but I feel bad about it:-).
I've been looking for a simple X application that was a pipe interrupter, sort of a GUI 'cat', call it 'xcat'. The idea is to type a command like:
xcat foo.c | wc -l and xcat would fill its buffer with foo.c, pop up to let you modify the buffer, and send the results to 'wc -l'.
There are a lot of times when I want to gather text from a variety of places (including GUI places) and run it through a command line filter. An 'xcat' would help unify my world a bit.
I end up typing (to continue the example)
vi foo.c
(inside vi:)
!Gwc -l to pipe the contents of vi's buffer through 'wc -l'. It's not optimal.
Looking for 'xcat' made me feel guilty for not knowing how to program for X Windows. Researching how to program for X Windows made me like the command line! There doesn't seem to be a simple, cross-platform, it'll work everywhere, X toolkit.
Now I just hate the world, and will retreat into my own bitterness.
My list would have to include things that can be enjoyed on many levels, and are assured of a longer useful life:
Baseball, glove, and wooden bat. Instructions and lesson for care of same, including the esoterics of neatsfoot oil and pine tar.
Large box of generic legos. Forget the little men, just give in bulk, including the long pieces. Instructions and lesson for use and care of same, including the esoterics of planning the project before building it, so as not to run out of the aforementioned long pieces.
Pocket knife and sharpening stone. Instructions and lesson for use and care of same, including the esoterics of blade oil (and keeping it off aforementioned stone).
Estes Rocket. Instructions and lesson for use and care of same, including the esoterics of making it go faster through the use of pin striping and how to use a power strip as an ignition switch without causing electrocution.
Microscope. Instructions and lesson for use of same, including the esoterics of what's in saliva.
50-in-1 electronic project kit. Instructions and lesson for use of same, including the esoterics of using the FM transmitter project to override the sibling's favorite FM station.
That's one of the questions that I had at the back of my mind when I got my first PC, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I (with the 16K expansion!) in 1977. I could program the thing in BASIC, and learned some other rudimentary stuff, but really I didn't understand it. It seemed magical.
The question stayed with me through high school, until finally in college I learned about transistors, NAND gates, latches, full adders, microcode, machine code, assembler, compilers, UNIX, and how it really worked.
>Well there has been quite a bit of fraud... >the numbers I've seen comparing exit polls and actual results...
Ugh. That's just what I was talking about.
Don't go saying it's 'fraud' when it easily could be either underhanded political trickery or bumbling bureaucratic idiocy.
And exit polls? Come on. Which is more likely, that the exit polls weren't right (by intent or not) or that there was a massive, nationwide conspiracy on the part of election officials and voting machine manufacturers?
At first when I read the/. story I thought "Give it up, already. Can't we get past this?". But then I read:
Should the votes be recounted as a check on how well the new computerized systems tallied the votes? Definitely.
Someone noted (I think in a comment about the blackboxvoting.org story) that since the election is settled it's a good time to examine the process, to improve it for the future.
I just wish there wasn't so much grandstanding about fraud when any irregularity shows up..
I didn't mean to sound critical of your SELL signal:-). Your basic premise is right on the money, so to speak; I was just nitpicking (and a little curious).
Most of the big long distance companies have their own fiber and use it to carry Internet traffic. Probably most of the bits in this post travelled over those very lines. Let's see:
$ tracert.exe slashdot.org
Tracing route to slashdot.org [66.35.250.150] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms 10.1.2.1 2 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 10.20.65.1 3 270 ms 221 ms 290 ms [redacted] 4 160 ms 291 ms 260 ms [redacted] 5 191 ms 230 ms 270 ms tbr1-p012301.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.123.6.9] 6 120 ms 290 ms 200 ms ggr2-p310.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.123.6.65] 7 170 ms 501 ms 200 ms dcr1-so-3-3-0.Chicago.savvis.net [208.175.10.93] 8 271 ms 250 ms 271 ms dcr2-loopback.SanFranciscosfo.savvis.net [206.24.210.100] 9 150 ms 270 ms 281 ms bhr1-pos-0-0.SantaClarasc8.savvis.net [208.172.156.198] 10 200 ms 270 ms 231 ms csr1-ve243.SantaClarasc8.savvis.net [66.35.194.50] 11 110 ms 291 ms 280 ms 66.35.212.174 12 slashdot.org [66.35.250.150] reports: Destination host unreachable.
Trace complete.
AT&T. Savvis doesn't appear to be in the long distance business.
Some smaller outfits just lease capacity or resell it, but they're agile enough to figure out what to do.
What about...
on
Wi-Fi Toys
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
some other ideas:
Simple controller for remote control of A/C circuits - turn on/off, sense on/off, something like Smarthome or X10.
A robot with wifi link running embedded Linux
R/C car using wifi so you can drive it visually - geek NASCAR!
Wifi enabled dog collar; you train the dog with basic commands and then "drive" it just like the R/C car (and no, PETA need not be alarmed)
Oh, come on. There were a number of things you could have taken me to task on for a post I wrote at oh-dark-thirty. Instead you decide to miss the word "exponentially?" When it comes to talking about the mass and density of a body of air, that 0.1% you talk about is actually closer to 50%.
In terms of wind velocity and movement by volume, the air at 10km moves a lot more. It moves at (seasonally more or less) 100 km/hour all the time. By contrast, air at the surface moves this way and that, tracking the jet stream at a more leisurely pace, almost never reaching 100km/hr.
From the macro-atmospheric perspective, the path of surface winds moving around ground features is inconsequential. Air just flows around them. Mountain ranges (and ignoring cause and effect) deserts and large bodies of water do affect air flow, but we're not talking about building something as big as a mountain range or with the temperature differential of a desert.
This is like a discussion of whether fire ants cause changes in demographic distribution. They can make you choose a different spot for your picnic, or even not to have a picnic, but they don't cause massive numbers of people to emigrate.
Anyway, exit poll numbers are unreliable for a variety of reasons.
First, you don't know who is taking the poll and what their biases are. How were the voters selected - just the pretty girls, or people who looked safe? You never know.
Second, you don't know where the polls were taken. Were they only in urban areas, easily reachable? Were the areas chosen to be representative, or were they chosen with true randomness (out of a literal hat, for example)? Or were they chosen off the top of someone's head? The sites should have been selected at random and with a large enough distribution of sites.
If you don't do it randomly, but you pay careful attention to demographics to get an approximation of the overall population and their likely voting preference, you are still injecting your preconceived bias (that the pre-election polls were accurate) into the process. Garbage in, garbage out.
The sample size of 1000 or so is ok *if* it's an independently drawn sample. That is, the exiting voters should have nothing in common. By virtue of the fact that they all voted at the same time, and they were willing to answer a poll, they obviously have something in common, even if the areas chosen for the sampling were chosen well.
I suspect that there weren't enough people doing the exit polling. If you had 30 or more sites chosen at random, and then randomly selected people from those sites to ask, you might get a clearer picture. You'd still have error, and it could still all be skewed one way or the other, but at least you'd minimize the risk.
Overall, announcing the results of exit polls before the election is done is a bad idea, if only because it convinces the simple-minded that something is wrong with the system.
November 10, 2004 The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines
In the aftermath of the U.S.'s 2004 election, electronic voting machines are again in the news. Computerized machines lost votes, subtracted votes instead of adding them, and doubled votes. Because many of these machines have no paper audit trails, a large number of votes will never be counted. And while it is unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of the presidential election, the Internet is buzzing with rumors and allegations of fraud in a number of different jurisdictions and races. It is still too early to tell if any of these problems affected any individual elections. Over the next several weeks we'll see whether any of the information crystallizes into something significant.
The U.S has been here before. After 2000, voting machine problems made international headlines. The government appropriated money to fix the problems nationwide. Unfortunately, electronic voting machines -- although presented as the solution -- have largely made the problem worse. This doesn't mean that these machines should be abandoned, but they need to be designed to increase both their accuracy, and peoples' trust in their accuracy. This is difficult, but not impossible.
Before I can discuss electronic voting machines, I need to explain why voting is so difficult. Basically, a voting system has four required characteristics:
1. Accuracy. The goal of any voting system is to establish the intent of each individual voter, and translate those intents into a final tally. To the extent that a voting system fails to do this, it is undesirable. This characteristic also includes security: It should be impossible to change someone else's vote, ballot stuff, destroy votes, or otherwise affect the accuracy of the final tally.
2. Anonymity. Secret ballots are fundamental to democracy, and voting systems must be designed to facilitate voter anonymity.
3. Scalability. Voting systems need to be able to handle very large elections. One hundred million people vote for president in the United States. About 372 million people voted in India's June elections, and over 115 million in Brazil's October elections. The complexity of an election is another issue. Unlike many countries where the national election is a single vote for a person or a party, a United States voter is faced with dozens of individual election: national, local, and everything in between.
4. Speed. Voting systems should produce results quickly. This is particularly important in the United States, where people expect to learn the results of the day's election before bedtime. It's less important in other countries, where people don't mind waiting days -- or even weeks -- before the winner is announced.
Through the centuries, different technologies have done their best. Stones and pot shards dropped in Greek vases gave way to paper ballots dropped in sealed boxes. Mechanical voting booths, punch cards, and then optical scan machines replaced hand-counted ballots. New computerized voting machines promise even more efficiency, and Internet voting even more convenience.
But in the rush to improve speed and scalability, accuracy has been sacrificed. And to reiterate: accuracy is not how well the ballots are counted by, for example, a punch-card reader. It's not how the tabulating machine deals with hanging chads, pregnant chads, or anything like that. Accuracy is how well the process translates voter intent into properly counted votes.
Technologies get in the way of accuracy by adding steps. Each additional step means more potential errors, simply because no technology is perfect. Consider an optical-scan voting system. The voter fills in ovals on a piece of paper, which is fed into an optical-scan reader. The reader senses the filled-in ovals and tabulates the votes. This system has several steps: voter to ballot to ovals to optical reader to vote tabulator to centralized total.
The biggest complaint I have is that journalists and science writers dumb down the details of a story. It's not clear whether they do it for editorial reasons (the reader would just be confused by numbers anyway) or because the writer doesn't understand, or is lazy.
There are a lot of people who have what I call a "Scientific American" level of understanding. We took physics in college, but we aren't working physicists, for example. We can understand most topics if put in context, but it's a little beyond us to fully understand an article in some specialized journal.
A second complaint is that writers tends to accept the assumptions that mosts scientists do. They don't challenge the framework, but simply accept the groupthink. If a contrarian scientist comes along, they may cover the story but it's usually followed by someone saying the guy is a wacko for challenging the crowd.
So call me contrarian if you want, but just give me the numbers. The opinion of the crowd wouldn't matter as much as it does if writers gave more of the details and let us draw our own conclusions.
Localized convection currents aren't the same thing as global weather paterns. Instead of having a whole bunch of air moving from here to there, you'd be replacing it with random miniscule updrafts that would likely be too small to measure.
And the effect of windmills operating in the bottom 1/10th of a percent of the atmosphere would be almost nil. It's noise, on the level of planting a forest.
Genovese: No, they said I attempted to sell some of the Windows source code. And you?
Bubba: Scouts, this time. Windows source code? You didn't really do that did ya? 'Cause man, that's sick.
Genovese: Nah... *gulp*... nah, FBI framed me. What do yo mean, it's 'sick'?
Bubba: Well, that stuff should be kept locked up. What if someone saw it and used it in Linux or... one of the BSD's? I don't want to think about it.
Genovese: Yeah, well, at least I'm not a child molester.
Bubba: Listen, I'm disabled. Got a condition! I wouldn't even be in here except I used one them wheelchair hang tags, and some old broad complained. I thought it looked pretty close to the real thing, myself.
Their model is obviously not right. Maybe somebody slept through the class where they said, "If your program's output doesn't match common sense, it's probably your program that's wrong."
We occupy less than a third of the Earth's surface.
Windmills are maybe 100 meters high. The Earth's atmosphere is over 1000 times that thick (though it is, of course, thinner as you go up).
A windmill doesn't keep air from flowing even at the surface, it just slows it and disturbs it a little. Kind of like a tree. Are trees bad, too?
There is just no way we could build enough windmills to affect the Earth's climate.
Even if you could affect climate that way, who knows what other factors would show up to change the result? And that's ignoring the Earth's been getting warmer lately. Or has it? I can't keep up.
Taking energy out of the air doesn't destroy the energy - it just moves it. It'll get released into the atmosphere as heat somewhere else, eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
You and I know all about neatsfoot oil, but to confer that knowledge on a child is a gift that will last forever, as is the memory of the lesson itself.
Wow, that works! I'll use that until I get something better made.
>man sed
I know sed, or at least I think I do. It's the kind of filter I use a lot. Is there some feature or implementation of sed that lets you cut and paste from a GUI context?
I'm a CLI guy. I use a browser, but I feel bad about it :-).
I've been looking for a simple X application that was a pipe interrupter, sort of a GUI 'cat', call it 'xcat'. The idea is to type a command like:
xcat foo.c | wc -l
and xcat would fill its buffer with foo.c, pop up to let you modify the buffer, and send the results to 'wc -l'.
There are a lot of times when I want to gather text from a variety of places (including GUI places) and run it through a command line filter. An 'xcat' would help unify my world a bit.
I end up typing (to continue the example)
vi foo.c
(inside vi:)
!Gwc -l
to pipe the contents of vi's buffer through 'wc -l'. It's not optimal.
Looking for 'xcat' made me feel guilty for not knowing how to program for X Windows. Researching how to program for X Windows made me like the command line! There doesn't seem to be a simple, cross-platform, it'll work everywhere, X toolkit.
Now I just hate the world, and will retreat into my own bitterness.
>JPEG
Er, no.
A bit of googling showed some research, mostly in the early 90's, but not much progress.
I guess no one ever learned how to make a fractal equation that looked like a given image on the fly.
I don't think they make a 50-in-1 project kit that comes with an FM transmitter. AM transmitter, yes, FM, no.
Yup, simply visionary.
Baseball, glove, and wooden bat. Instructions and lesson for care of same, including the esoterics of neatsfoot oil and pine tar.
Large box of generic legos. Forget the little men, just give in bulk, including the long pieces. Instructions and lesson for use and care of same, including the esoterics of planning the project before building it, so as not to run out of the aforementioned long pieces.
Pocket knife and sharpening stone. Instructions and lesson for use and care of same, including the esoterics of blade oil (and keeping it off aforementioned stone).
Estes Rocket. Instructions and lesson for use and care of same, including the esoterics of making it go faster through the use of pin striping and how to use a power strip as an ignition switch without causing electrocution.
Microscope. Instructions and lesson for use of same, including the esoterics of what's in saliva.
50-in-1 electronic project kit. Instructions and lesson for use of same, including the esoterics of using the FM transmitter project to override the sibling's favorite FM station.
That's one of the questions that I had at the back of my mind when I got my first PC, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I (with the 16K expansion!) in 1977. I could program the thing in BASIC, and learned some other rudimentary stuff, but really I didn't understand it. It seemed magical.
The question stayed with me through high school, until finally in college I learned about transistors, NAND gates, latches, full adders, microcode, machine code, assembler, compilers, UNIX, and how it really worked.
But it still seems magical.
>Well there has been quite a bit of fraud...
>the numbers I've seen comparing exit polls and actual results...
Ugh. That's just what I was talking about.
Don't go saying it's 'fraud' when it easily could be either underhanded political trickery or bumbling bureaucratic idiocy.
And exit polls? Come on. Which is more likely, that the exit polls weren't right (by intent or not) or that there was a massive, nationwide conspiracy on the part of election officials and voting machine manufacturers?
At first when I read the /. story I thought "Give it up, already. Can't we get past this?". But then I read:
Someone noted (I think in a comment about the blackboxvoting.org story) that since the election is settled it's a good time to examine the process, to improve it for the future.
I just wish there wasn't so much grandstanding about fraud when any irregularity shows up..
I didn't mean to sound critical of your SELL signal :-). Your basic premise is right on the money, so to speak; I was just nitpicking (and a little curious).
Most of the big long distance companies have their own fiber and use it to carry Internet traffic. Probably most of the bits in this post travelled over those very lines. Let's see:
AT&T. Savvis doesn't appear to be in the long distance business.Some smaller outfits just lease capacity or resell it, but they're agile enough to figure out what to do.
Simple controller for remote control of A/C circuits - turn on/off, sense on/off, something like Smarthome or X10.
A robot with wifi link running embedded Linux
R/C car using wifi so you can drive it visually - geek NASCAR!
Wifi enabled dog collar; you train the dog with basic commands and then "drive" it just like the R/C car (and no, PETA need not be alarmed)
"We can rebuild him. Make him better."
"Better?"
"Better, stronger .... faster!
Cchhcchhhooonnnggooonnnggooonnnggooonnngg.
In terms of wind velocity and movement by volume, the air at 10km moves a lot more. It moves at (seasonally more or less) 100 km/hour all the time. By contrast, air at the surface moves this way and that, tracking the jet stream at a more leisurely pace, almost never reaching 100km/hr.
From the macro-atmospheric perspective, the path of surface winds moving around ground features is inconsequential. Air just flows around them. Mountain ranges (and ignoring cause and effect) deserts and large bodies of water do affect air flow, but we're not talking about building something as big as a mountain range or with the temperature differential of a desert.
This is like a discussion of whether fire ants cause changes in demographic distribution. They can make you choose a different spot for your picnic, or even not to have a picnic, but they don't cause massive numbers of people to emigrate.
(Sorry, couldn't resist the ad pseudonym.)
Anyway, exit poll numbers are unreliable for a variety of reasons.
First, you don't know who is taking the poll and what their biases are. How were the voters selected - just the pretty girls, or people who looked safe? You never know.
Second, you don't know where the polls were taken. Were they only in urban areas, easily reachable? Were the areas chosen to be representative, or were they chosen with true randomness (out of a literal hat, for example)? Or were they chosen off the top of someone's head? The sites should have been selected at random and with a large enough distribution of sites.
If you don't do it randomly, but you pay careful attention to demographics to get an approximation of the overall population and their likely voting preference, you are still injecting your preconceived bias (that the pre-election polls were accurate) into the process. Garbage in, garbage out.
The sample size of 1000 or so is ok *if* it's an independently drawn sample. That is, the exiting voters should have nothing in common. By virtue of the fact that they all voted at the same time, and they were willing to answer a poll, they obviously have something in common, even if the areas chosen for the sampling were chosen well.
I suspect that there weren't enough people doing the exit polling. If you had 30 or more sites chosen at random, and then randomly selected people from those sites to ask, you might get a clearer picture. You'd still have error, and it could still all be skewed one way or the other, but at least you'd minimize the risk.
Overall, announcing the results of exit polls before the election is done is a bad idea, if only because it convinces the simple-minded that something is wrong with the system.
November 10, 2004
The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines
In the aftermath of the U.S.'s 2004 election, electronic voting machines are again in the news. Computerized machines lost votes, subtracted votes instead of adding them, and doubled votes. Because many of these machines have no paper audit trails, a large number of votes will never be counted. And while it is unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of the presidential election, the Internet is buzzing with rumors and allegations of fraud in a number of different jurisdictions and races. It is still too early to tell if any of these problems affected any individual elections. Over the next several weeks we'll see whether any of the information crystallizes into something significant.
The U.S has been here before. After 2000, voting machine problems made international headlines. The government appropriated money to fix the problems nationwide. Unfortunately, electronic voting machines -- although presented as the solution -- have largely made the problem worse. This doesn't mean that these machines should be abandoned, but they need to be designed to increase both their accuracy, and peoples' trust in their accuracy. This is difficult, but not impossible.
Before I can discuss electronic voting machines, I need to explain why voting is so difficult. Basically, a voting system has four required characteristics:
1. Accuracy. The goal of any voting system is to establish the intent of each individual voter, and translate those intents into a final tally. To the extent that a voting system fails to do this, it is undesirable. This characteristic also includes security: It should be impossible to change someone else's vote, ballot stuff, destroy votes, or otherwise affect the accuracy of the final tally.
2. Anonymity. Secret ballots are fundamental to democracy, and voting systems must be designed to facilitate voter anonymity.
3. Scalability. Voting systems need to be able to handle very large elections. One hundred million people vote for president in the United States. About 372 million people voted in India's June elections, and over 115 million in Brazil's October elections. The complexity of an election is another issue. Unlike many countries where the national election is a single vote for a person or a party, a United States voter is faced with dozens of individual election: national, local, and everything in between.
4. Speed. Voting systems should produce results quickly. This is particularly important in the United States, where people expect to learn the results of the day's election before bedtime. It's less important in other countries, where people don't mind waiting days -- or even weeks -- before the winner is announced.
Through the centuries, different technologies have done their best. Stones and pot shards dropped in Greek vases gave way to paper ballots dropped in sealed boxes. Mechanical voting booths, punch cards, and then optical scan machines replaced hand-counted ballots. New computerized voting machines promise even more efficiency, and Internet voting even more convenience.
But in the rush to improve speed and scalability, accuracy has been sacrificed. And to reiterate: accuracy is not how well the ballots are counted by, for example, a punch-card reader. It's not how the tabulating machine deals with hanging chads, pregnant chads, or anything like that. Accuracy is how well the process translates voter intent into properly counted votes.
Technologies get in the way of accuracy by adding steps. Each additional step means more potential errors, simply because no technology is perfect. Consider an optical-scan voting system. The voter fills in ovals on a piece of paper, which is fed into an optical-scan reader. The reader senses the filled-in ovals and tabulates the votes. This system has several steps: voter to ballot to ovals to optical reader to vote tabulator to centralized total.
At each step, errors can oc
The biggest complaint I have is that journalists and science writers dumb down the details of a story. It's not clear whether they do it for editorial reasons (the reader would just be confused by numbers anyway) or because the writer doesn't understand, or is lazy.
There are a lot of people who have what I call a "Scientific American" level of understanding. We took physics in college, but we aren't working physicists, for example. We can understand most topics if put in context, but it's a little beyond us to fully understand an article in some specialized journal.
A second complaint is that writers tends to accept the assumptions that mosts scientists do. They don't challenge the framework, but simply accept the groupthink. If a contrarian scientist comes along, they may cover the story but it's usually followed by someone saying the guy is a wacko for challenging the crowd.
So call me contrarian if you want, but just give me the numbers. The opinion of the crowd wouldn't matter as much as it does if writers gave more of the details and let us draw our own conclusions.
And the effect of windmills operating in the bottom 1/10th of a percent of the atmosphere would be almost nil. It's noise, on the level of planting a forest.
It's just ecoterrorist propaganda.
Bubba: What're y'in for, kid?
... *gulp* ... nah, FBI framed me. What do yo mean, it's 'sick'?
... one of the BSD's? I don't want to think about it.
Genovese: Windows.
Bubba: Breaking and entering?
Genovese: No, they said I attempted to sell some of the Windows source code. And you?
Bubba: Scouts, this time. Windows source code? You didn't really do that did ya? 'Cause man, that's sick.
Genovese: Nah
Bubba: Well, that stuff should be kept locked up. What if someone saw it and used it in Linux or
Genovese: Yeah, well, at least I'm not a child molester.
Bubba: Listen, I'm disabled. Got a condition! I wouldn't even be in here except I used one them wheelchair hang tags, and some old broad complained. I thought it looked pretty close to the real thing, myself.
Maybe TFA is claiming that energy will be taken from northern latitudes, where the wind is, and moved to the south. where the people are.
I still don't buy it.
God rest his soul.
Their model is obviously not right. Maybe somebody slept through the class where they said, "If your program's output doesn't match common sense, it's probably your program that's wrong."
We occupy less than a third of the Earth's surface.
Windmills are maybe 100 meters high. The Earth's atmosphere is over 1000 times that thick (though it is, of course, thinner as you go up).
A windmill doesn't keep air from flowing even at the surface, it just slows it and disturbs it a little. Kind of like a tree. Are trees bad, too?
There is just no way we could build enough windmills to affect the Earth's climate.
Even if you could affect climate that way, who knows what other factors would show up to change the result? And that's ignoring the Earth's been getting warmer lately. Or has it? I can't keep up.
Taking energy out of the air doesn't destroy the energy - it just moves it. It'll get released into the atmosphere as heat somewhere else, eventually.