It doesn't matter that they won't cause 2nd hand smoke or litter. A lot anti-smoking lobby essentially wants a ban on nicotine period. Basically they say its bad for you and therefore no one should be allowed to do it. Even if you know the risks to yourself and what not. Think somewhere along the lines of "If you're smoking this you obviously aren't smart enough to make your own decisions and protect yourself so I will have to make your decisions for you.
How fast can this thing do SETI@HOME and Distributed.net computations? Thats a lot of processors and what do they need 6.5Gigabytes of Rame perprocessor for anyway?
see respones here Although I guess we could have two classes of patents. One for physical objects and one for intangibles like software. In the case of intangibles working code must be provided in order to recieve a patent. Otherwise you can only use "Trade Secret" laws.
I'm willing to consider a CAD drawing a working design. The main problem I've seen is that companies will patent something and literaly do nothing other than patent an idea and not even try building a concept. However, I will say that if the device designed don't work, you don't get a patent. Otherwise I could file a patent for a non-working holodeck. Anyone else would then have to pay me money even if the designs were complete BS. Now lets say someone comes along and has an actual working version. I can screw them over/charge them through the nose. I'm willing to conside the design plans, but would be awfully skeptical.
This actually makes a lot of sense. The robots can do a lot of scouting ahead of time so that when we do send people back to the moon we can cut out the areas we are sure are of no interest. There are still a lot of things that humans can do that remote controlled robots can't though. At least using robots we can eliminate one of the problems we had with the original Lunar Landing. The original site was too rocky and they had to move over a bit (and wasted fuel) trying to get to a "smooth" landing point. With robots we can get more detailed maps and set down precise landing areas. This will save trouble later on.
These innovative ideas should not be stifled due to lack of funds.
The patent system wasn't created to patent objects that never get created. It was made so that people who come up with an idea can create it and sell it with monopoly ownership on that idea for a limited ammount of time. It would be like Eli Whitney filing a patent for a mechanical methode of seperating coton seads from coton without inventing the coton gin.
Being able to patent an idea without having to have a working implementation stifles work because otherwise people who have the same idea and actually put the work in to develope a working implementation would have to pay money to those that just see where the market is going. Like the company that is saying that anyone who does streaming media owes them money. They saw where the market was going and patented the idea. They didn't make any form of product while other people did. Neither did they try to sell their concept to others. They are just trying to rake in money from liscensing for it.
Patents were made so that the ideas and knowlege behind something eventually reach the public domain. By not developing the knowlege and only patenting the idea, you are not doing this. You are stifling the system. Hence why there should be a working implementation.
Seeing as how one computer generation elapses about every 18 to 24 months, how about 4 or 4.5 years for an experation? And one that also requires you to have a working implementation at time of filing? That way you get people that actually develope something instead of patenting where the market is going.
Patents are for 20 years. This one will run out on either April 6, 2007 or March 29, 2008 depending on if it runs out on the filing date or the publishing date. Thats assuming its not renewed for another 20 years.
4) 'what about spaceship-one' - what was the payload capacity? 200kilo? Roughly?
Not even that really. Space Ship One can't get to Orbit and wasn't designed to. The shuttle can. The best comparison for space ship one might be to the early Gemini capsules.
I'd personaly like to several at each lagrange point, a couple in earth orbit, and a few around some other planets and on some of the major moons as well.
Once upon a time there were technicians that could take any piece of consumer electronics, and given a good repair manual, trouble shoot the problem and replace the offending component.
Ah yes, and then they developed the integrated circuit with 10,000 transistors on them. And we are in the millions today. It just isn't possible anymore to be able to repair individual components in a modern day computer with the current level of minituriziation. The only way we could do that would be to go back to having some really simple chips that don't do much individually. That would drive up costs, and the physical size of the boards and lower their clockspeed because the components are farther away from each other. I don't know about you but I don't want my GPU to be bigger than my house.
A year or so ago I saw a story here on/. or at TheRegister.CO.UK that a Windows ATM had crashed and rebooted and didn't start up the ATM program. It was running a full version of Windows. Some college students (It was in a student union) loaded up Windows Media Player and opened up the Bethoven track that was on the machine and video taped it playing Bethoven and posted it on the web.
To go over some, under the FOIA i think it was soemone actually go their hands on the balots after the count and Bush did win. Sorry, can't site a source.
allegations of flaws in a certain version of the e-vote software places all votes cast on boxes running that version into dispute.
This would be the entire counties/systems votes since they all should be running the exact same version. Hmmm... That would be interesting, the entire states voting challenged all in one go.
I mean really, shouldn't they be looking for real threats (like terrorists)?
The Secret Service primarily exists to keep the President and other public figures from getting killed/hurt. After Kenedy they really started taking this seriously. Someone I know was once pissed when he got pulled over by a cop and at one point said "I'm going to kill the president" Quote Unquote. The cop legally had to report him to the secret service even though he had no intention of killing the president at the time. And the Secret Service did show up to ask him some questions. We have had 4 presidents assinated in office and many more have had attempts on their life. They have to investigate every one that comes to their attention just to make sure. At this point Senator Kerry is on their protection list being a candidate this late in the game. If someone had said the same thing and it came to the attention of the Secret Service then they would also have to investigate.
On a side not, anyone that says that it is OK to take out any president cause you don't agree with his views/policy/action? Well, that aint Democracy its assanation politics. You either have to accept those who are voted in under the Electoral College system or move to another country.
Actually, it would be imposible because the voting machine makers do not load in the names of the candidates. The election offices do. And this software will be on the machines permanently. So, in order to rig the elections not only would you have to re-program the software every time, you would have to get it past all the testing the counties would do everytime you re-program it. And something tells me that the counties would get suspicious if you had to reprogram the machines every time. Besides the fact that you would also have to know the poll results at election time when you program the machines. Predicting this ahead of time is not possible. Between all that, you can't rig a machine and not get caught.
What hasn't changed much in seven years is how hard people are willing to work at searching. The answer: not very. Spink and Jansen found that people averaged about two words per query and two queries per search session.
"The searches are taking less than five minutes, and they're only looking at the first page of results," Spink said. "That's why people are wanting to get their results on the first page" of search engine results.
"We were surprised that people weren't doing more complex searches," Spink said. "If you put a couple of words into the web, you're going to get hundreds of thousands of results. I think people aren't trained very well to use the search engines."
Having worked in a college library having to help other students find stuff I am amazed at how non-geeks think all they have to do is type in a word/sentence/phrase and they think the computer will magically bring them what they are looking for. It would take an hour to get them to grasp the idea of "keywords" and that putting in more keywords only narrows the results without using any operators (AND, OR). Even when they came back with zero results they would add more words thinking that they could get a hit this time. The main reason is that most people have no idea how the search engines work and instead think that it is as capable as a human sitting down and looking at everything. When they learn how it all works they will start doing smarter seaches and get less lazy.
Without a paper trail, how could anyone contest the results of a tampered election?
In order for the Chinese Crackers to get access to the voting machines, the voting machines would have to be on the internet and accepting all incoming connections. Adn they would have to be able to hack them in under 12 hours. All electronic machines I know of so far only make outgoing Phone Modem connections to report results, never going over the internet. The computer that tallies the individual results is not connected to the internet and will only take calls from certain phone numbers (AKA where the voting machines are located). Prior to using these electronic machines we used mechanical ones for 30+ years. They went to electronic machines in my county cause the mechanical ones had to be delivered 2 days early, weighed hundreds of pounds each and cost a hell of a lot to store in a wharehouse. They also took longer to count and did not have a paper trail. So not having paper is nothing new unless you wanted to do a write-in or use a paper ballot.
They do not deny third parties the ability to be voted for. You can still do write ins by law. Anyone in Jersey can go to the election officials and ask for a paper write in ballot instead of using the machines.
Voting terminals here in Texas had wide-open USB ports. What's to say that my little keyfob wouldn't accidentally be inserted, and that pesky autorun.inf would do strange, scary things to the machine?
How do you know that it will actually run? Are they running linux or windows or do they even have an OS at all? Are the USB drives enabled? Do the machines even have USB drivers installed? Etc... Etc...
How are you then going to prove that you voted for who you say you voted for? You can't.
Sounds just like the mechanical voting machines my county had been using for 30+ years.
Pure electronic voting cannot provide this audit trail. Only a combined paper/electronic system is able to match it.
I am in a county that had been using mechanical voting machines prior to the electronic machines. Tell me how we had any form of paper trail whith them. Also, you can always do a write in vote and submit it on PAPER. If you don't like the electronic machines do that instead.
That has been the ultimate failure of Bush but also Clinton, the other bush, reagan... (before is before my time so I couldn't say).
A good leader should be able once elected to then be a leader to the whole country.
I have no idea how the hell you are involving Bush Senior and Reagan in this. Reagan was re-elected by a land slide and Bush Sr. was too so leave them out of this dam rant.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter that they won't cause 2nd hand smoke or litter. A lot anti-smoking lobby essentially wants a ban on nicotine period. Basically they say its bad for you and therefore no one should be allowed to do it. Even if you know the risks to yourself and what not. Think somewhere along the lines of "If you're smoking this you obviously aren't smart enough to make your own decisions and protect yourself so I will have to make your decisions for you.
How fast can this thing do SETI@HOME and Distributed.net computations? Thats a lot of processors and what do they need 6.5Gigabytes of Rame perprocessor for anyway?
see respones here
Although I guess we could have two classes of patents. One for physical objects and one for intangibles like software. In the case of intangibles working code must be provided in order to recieve a patent. Otherwise you can only use "Trade Secret" laws.
I'm willing to consider a CAD drawing a working design. The main problem I've seen is that companies will patent something and literaly do nothing other than patent an idea and not even try building a concept. However, I will say that if the device designed don't work, you don't get a patent. Otherwise I could file a patent for a non-working holodeck. Anyone else would then have to pay me money even if the designs were complete BS. Now lets say someone comes along and has an actual working version. I can screw them over/charge them through the nose. I'm willing to conside the design plans, but would be awfully skeptical.
This actually makes a lot of sense. The robots can do a lot of scouting ahead of time so that when we do send people back to the moon we can cut out the areas we are sure are of no interest. There are still a lot of things that humans can do that remote controlled robots can't though. At least using robots we can eliminate one of the problems we had with the original Lunar Landing. The original site was too rocky and they had to move over a bit (and wasted fuel) trying to get to a "smooth" landing point. With robots we can get more detailed maps and set down precise landing areas. This will save trouble later on.
These innovative ideas should not be stifled due to lack of funds.
The patent system wasn't created to patent objects that never get created. It was made so that people who come up with an idea can create it and sell it with monopoly ownership on that idea for a limited ammount of time. It would be like Eli Whitney filing a patent for a mechanical methode of seperating coton seads from coton without inventing the coton gin.
Being able to patent an idea without having to have a working implementation stifles work because otherwise people who have the same idea and actually put the work in to develope a working implementation would have to pay money to those that just see where the market is going. Like the company that is saying that anyone who does streaming media owes them money. They saw where the market was going and patented the idea. They didn't make any form of product while other people did. Neither did they try to sell their concept to others. They are just trying to rake in money from liscensing for it.
Patents were made so that the ideas and knowlege behind something eventually reach the public domain. By not developing the knowlege and only patenting the idea, you are not doing this. You are stifling the system. Hence why there should be a working implementation.
but you don't get to "renew" for another 20
Sorry, my bad. Thought that they courld get renewed for a second period. Must be thinking of copyrights which get automatically renewd.
Seeing as how one computer generation elapses about every 18 to 24 months, how about 4 or 4.5 years for an experation? And one that also requires you to have a working implementation at time of filing? That way you get people that actually develope something instead of patenting where the market is going.
Patents are for 20 years. This one will run out on either April 6, 2007 or March 29, 2008 depending on if it runs out on the filing date or the publishing date. Thats assuming its not renewed for another 20 years.
If this ever starts to take off the Anti-Smoking loby will grind it into the ground.
4) 'what about spaceship-one' - what was the payload capacity? 200kilo? Roughly?
Not even that really. Space Ship One can't get to Orbit and wasn't designed to. The shuttle can. The best comparison for space ship one might be to the early Gemini capsules.
I'd personaly like to several at each lagrange point, a couple in earth orbit, and a few around some other planets and on some of the major moons as well.
Shotgun Pidgeon Shooting
Once upon a time there were technicians that could take any piece of consumer electronics, and given a good repair manual, trouble shoot the problem and replace the offending component.
Ah yes, and then they developed the integrated circuit with 10,000 transistors on them. And we are in the millions today. It just isn't possible anymore to be able to repair individual components in a modern day computer with the current level of minituriziation. The only way we could do that would be to go back to having some really simple chips that don't do much individually. That would drive up costs, and the physical size of the boards and lower their clockspeed because the components are farther away from each other. I don't know about you but I don't want my GPU to be bigger than my house.
A year or so ago I saw a story here on /. or at TheRegister.CO.UK that a Windows ATM had crashed and rebooted and didn't start up the ATM program. It was running a full version of Windows. Some college students (It was in a student union) loaded up Windows Media Player and opened up the Bethoven track that was on the machine and video taped it playing Bethoven and posted it on the web.
To go over some, under the FOIA i think it was soemone actually go their hands on the balots after the count and Bush did win. Sorry, can't site a source.
allegations of flaws in a certain version of the e-vote software places all votes cast on boxes running that version into dispute.
This would be the entire counties/systems votes since they all should be running the exact same version. Hmmm... That would be interesting, the entire states voting challenged all in one go.
I mean really, shouldn't they be looking for real threats (like terrorists)?
The Secret Service primarily exists to keep the President and other public figures from getting killed/hurt. After Kenedy they really started taking this seriously. Someone I know was once pissed when he got pulled over by a cop and at one point said "I'm going to kill the president" Quote Unquote. The cop legally had to report him to the secret service even though he had no intention of killing the president at the time. And the Secret Service did show up to ask him some questions. We have had 4 presidents assinated in office and many more have had attempts on their life. They have to investigate every one that comes to their attention just to make sure. At this point Senator Kerry is on their protection list being a candidate this late in the game. If someone had said the same thing and it came to the attention of the Secret Service then they would also have to investigate.
On a side not, anyone that says that it is OK to take out any president cause you don't agree with his views/policy/action? Well, that aint Democracy its assanation politics. You either have to accept those who are voted in under the Electoral College system or move to another country.
Actually, it would be imposible because the voting machine makers do not load in the names of the candidates. The election offices do. And this software will be on the machines permanently. So, in order to rig the elections not only would you have to re-program the software every time, you would have to get it past all the testing the counties would do everytime you re-program it. And something tells me that the counties would get suspicious if you had to reprogram the machines every time. Besides the fact that you would also have to know the poll results at election time when you program the machines. Predicting this ahead of time is not possible. Between all that, you can't rig a machine and not get caught.
What hasn't changed much in seven years is how hard people are willing to work at searching. The answer: not very. Spink and Jansen found that people averaged about two words per query and two queries per search session.
"The searches are taking less than five minutes, and they're only looking at the first page of results," Spink said. "That's why people are wanting to get their results on the first page" of search engine results.
"We were surprised that people weren't doing more complex searches," Spink said. "If you put a couple of words into the web, you're going to get hundreds of thousands of results. I think people aren't trained very well to use the search engines."
Having worked in a college library having to help other students find stuff I am amazed at how non-geeks think all they have to do is type in a word/sentence/phrase and they think the computer will magically bring them what they are looking for. It would take an hour to get them to grasp the idea of "keywords" and that putting in more keywords only narrows the results without using any operators (AND, OR). Even when they came back with zero results they would add more words thinking that they could get a hit this time. The main reason is that most people have no idea how the search engines work and instead think that it is as capable as a human sitting down and looking at everything. When they learn how it all works they will start doing smarter seaches and get less lazy.
Without a paper trail, how could anyone contest the results of a tampered election?
In order for the Chinese Crackers to get access to the voting machines, the voting machines would have to be on the internet and accepting all incoming connections. Adn they would have to be able to hack them in under 12 hours. All electronic machines I know of so far only make outgoing Phone Modem connections to report results, never going over the internet. The computer that tallies the individual results is not connected to the internet and will only take calls from certain phone numbers (AKA where the voting machines are located). Prior to using these electronic machines we used mechanical ones for 30+ years. They went to electronic machines in my county cause the mechanical ones had to be delivered 2 days early, weighed hundreds of pounds each and cost a hell of a lot to store in a wharehouse. They also took longer to count and did not have a paper trail. So not having paper is nothing new unless you wanted to do a write-in or use a paper ballot.
They do not deny third parties the ability to be voted for. You can still do write ins by law. Anyone in Jersey can go to the election officials and ask for a paper write in ballot instead of using the machines.
Voting terminals here in Texas had wide-open USB ports. What's to say that my little keyfob wouldn't accidentally be inserted, and that pesky autorun.inf would do strange, scary things to the machine?
How do you know that it will actually run? Are they running linux or windows or do they even have an OS at all? Are the USB drives enabled? Do the machines even have USB drivers installed? Etc... Etc...
How are you then going to prove that you voted for who you say you voted for? You can't.
Sounds just like the mechanical voting machines my county had been using for 30+ years.
Pure electronic voting cannot provide this audit trail. Only a combined paper/electronic system is able to match it.
I am in a county that had been using mechanical voting machines prior to the electronic machines. Tell me how we had any form of paper trail whith them. Also, you can always do a write in vote and submit it on PAPER. If you don't like the electronic machines do that instead.
Can you post a link on the Mandatory National Service?
That has been the ultimate failure of Bush but also Clinton, the other bush, reagan ... (before is before my time so I couldn't say).
A good leader should be able once elected to then be a leader to the whole country.
I have no idea how the hell you are involving Bush Senior and Reagan in this. Reagan was re-elected by a land slide and Bush Sr. was too so leave them out of this dam rant.