Make them buy a cheap TI-30 and that can be the only thing they use. No programmable calculators, no smartphones, no netbooks, etc. If they can't do an open notes test with just a simple calculator, the deserve an F. And if they can afford to go to college, they can afford a $10 calculator.
There were economic issues with Edison's ideas. The biggest problem was his insistence with DC. DC only worked with local power stations. AC scaled and could transmit over much farther distances with much less loss.
More fault tolerant, perhaps. More scalable? Not from an economic standpoint.
The electric grid has already suffered multiple cascading failures from simple events that led to widespread outage. Look into the West Coast outages of 1996 and 1998 as well as the failure in the Northeast in 2003.
There's a lot of interesting science going on around networks, graph theory, complexity and all. There's a really good book on teh subject, "Six Degrees" by Watts.
If innovative design interests you, I highly recommend "The Art of Innovation" by Tom Kelley and Henry Petroski's books "The Evolution of Useful Things" and "Small Things Considered". Kelly's book is all about innovation in the workplace and uses IDEO to illustrate his ideas. Petroski's books (and I love all of his stuff) are more of an academic view of how engineering intersects with the real world. His books should be on every geeks must read list.
...have the polling take place over a two or three day weekend instead of Tuesday and have ALL the poll stations open and close at exactly the same time irrespective of time zone...
No. Just say no.
I'm a poll worker and we have enough trouble getting volunteers to cover the polls for one day. There is absolutley no way we could get enough bodies to cover for three. As it is now, the senior citizens who work there are fried by 5 and barely make it until 8. If they had to come back the next day, they'd need an ambulance half way through.
They hear more because anyone who has no hope in any other courtroom can always count on the 9th to stretch the law in ways it was never intended to be stretched. I'd be willing to bet the 9th gets overturned more than any other court both in terms of sheer numbers AND percentage of case overturned. Whenever the Supreme Court overturns a ruling, you can bet money it came from the 9th.
"You left your door unlocked. I can't help it that I walked around your house while your weren't home. I was just curious."
Yeah? It's still breaking and entering. And if you took anything, it's robbery.
If that doesn't get you, how about... "She wore the mini-skirt your honor. Then she got drunk right in front of me. It couldn't be rape! After all, she was asking for it!"
It's a bit of an extreme example but crime is crime. Victims don't ask for it, no matter how stupidly they act.
I wrote for a couple of computer industry trade rags back in the early 90s and the editorial policy was that we never gave bad reviews. If a product sucked, the review was never published. We gave feedback back to the manufacturer but nothing got printed.
The reasoning was simple. If the manufacturer really wanted a review printed, they would fix their product (and some of them REALLY wanted good reviews and actually did make improvements). And if the magazine wanted to continue to get advertising dollars, they didn't print bad reviews. It was the unspoken quid pro quo.
The other flaw in exit polling is the secret vs. non-secret answer. People don't always tell the truth when faced with a pollster.
Years ago there was a Philadelphia mayor named Frank Rizzo. He ALWAYS garned far more votes than the polls would have predicted or indicated. It was even coined "the Rizzo factor" by the Philadelphia media. People would happily tell other people that they were going to vote for Rizzo's opponent but when they were in the voting booth, they'd pull the lever for that big, loud, hard core law-and-order bastard that loved Philadelphia with every bone in his body. As much as they didn't want to admit it, Philly loved him right back.
And to go back a little further... no one would admit that they voted for Nixon after he resigned. If you went by those polls, McGovern would have taken at least 80% of the vote.
When news reports of laptops were being stolen started popping up in the WSJ, the big boss asked my group to look into enterprise encryption solutions for all our laptops and the crap rolled down hill to me. Since I have no one to dump work on, I actually went out and looked at enterprise encryption solutions from about 20 vendors. I pared it down to four and sent them RFPs. There were a lot of good ones but those four fit our requirements best. I'm not naming names since your mileage may vary.
Anyway, I beat them all bloody over price but when all was said and done, the price tag to protect 7,500 laptops still came to somewhere between $500k and $600k the first year plus 20ish% maintenance thereafter. The big boss nearly *&!@ a brick. Needless to say, we don't have an enterprise encryption solution in place.
The concept of a paper trail or voter receipt or whatever you want to call it is stupid. It violates the whole concept of the secret ballot not to mention adding layers of potential abuse to the vote counting process. Just imagine a paid thug taking people to the polling place and then asking to see their paper receipt to make sure they voted "the right way". How will you handle "wrong" votes? Where will you change them? When will you change them? How long will people have to change their mind? When they leave the polling place? Once they leave they can be pressured by anybody.
I keep hearing that this will make elections "more secure". If I'm smart enough to hack votes inside a machine, why would you assume that I'm not smart enough to spoof the paper trail? Or better yet, I'll let the vote for my guy be counted right but futz the paper trail, and get the change process to take a legitimate vote away from the other guy.
Every layer of complexity that you add to a process adds opportunity for bad guys to hack the process and steal votes. Want to make elections more accurate and secure? Forget the voting machines and focus on the weakest elements of the election process, absentee ballots and voter registration.
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I'm relieved that the TSA is finally stepping up to protect us from the threat of three year olds with explosive diahrrhea.
Make them buy a cheap TI-30 and that can be the only thing they use. No programmable calculators, no smartphones, no netbooks, etc. If they can't do an open notes test with just a simple calculator, the deserve an F. And if they can afford to go to college, they can afford a $10 calculator.
There were economic issues with Edison's ideas. The biggest problem was his insistence with DC. DC only worked with local power stations. AC scaled and could transmit over much farther distances with much less loss. More fault tolerant, perhaps. More scalable? Not from an economic standpoint.
The electric grid has already suffered multiple cascading failures from simple events that led to widespread outage. Look into the West Coast outages of 1996 and 1998 as well as the failure in the Northeast in 2003. There's a lot of interesting science going on around networks, graph theory, complexity and all. There's a really good book on teh subject, "Six Degrees" by Watts.
Point taken. I was thinking some of the weirder orbits such as Molniya or semi-synchronous.
Ummmm.... no.
Satellites run proprietary, custom computers that run dedicated, real time operating systems.
It's a different article but it's about the same guys.
Low Earth Orbit It's impossible to see satellites in higher orbits with your basic backyard optics.
I'm a big fan of Heavens Above, http://www.heavens-above.com/
Good point. Norman's book, "The Invisible Computer" is excellent as well.
If innovative design interests you, I highly recommend "The Art of Innovation" by Tom Kelley and Henry Petroski's books "The Evolution of Useful Things" and "Small Things Considered". Kelly's book is all about innovation in the workplace and uses IDEO to illustrate his ideas. Petroski's books (and I love all of his stuff) are more of an academic view of how engineering intersects with the real world. His books should be on every geeks must read list.
No. Just say no.
I'm a poll worker and we have enough trouble getting volunteers to cover the polls for one day. There is absolutley no way we could get enough bodies to cover for three. As it is now, the senior citizens who work there are fried by 5 and barely make it until 8. If they had to come back the next day, they'd need an ambulance half way through.
They hear more because anyone who has no hope in any other courtroom can always count on the 9th to stretch the law in ways it was never intended to be stretched. I'd be willing to bet the 9th gets overturned more than any other court both in terms of sheer numbers AND percentage of case overturned. Whenever the Supreme Court overturns a ruling, you can bet money it came from the 9th.
Well worth the read, by the way.
"You left your door unlocked. I can't help it that I walked around your house while your weren't home. I was just curious."
Yeah? It's still breaking and entering. And if you took anything, it's robbery.
If that doesn't get you, how about... "She wore the mini-skirt your honor. Then she got drunk right in front of me. It couldn't be rape! After all, she was asking for it!"
It's a bit of an extreme example but crime is crime. Victims don't ask for it, no matter how stupidly they act.
... that there's a place in the universe for dorky looking white guys.
Zune, meet Bob. Bob, meet Zune.
I wrote for a couple of computer industry trade rags back in the early 90s and the editorial policy was that we never gave bad reviews. If a product sucked, the review was never published. We gave feedback back to the manufacturer but nothing got printed.
The reasoning was simple. If the manufacturer really wanted a review printed, they would fix their product (and some of them REALLY wanted good reviews and actually did make improvements). And if the magazine wanted to continue to get advertising dollars, they didn't print bad reviews. It was the unspoken quid pro quo.
They should make him stay in his parent's bedroom. Punish the kid for being a dope And punish his parents for raising an ignorant twerp.
I highly recommend "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy" by John Fund.
The other flaw in exit polling is the secret vs. non-secret answer. People don't always tell the truth when faced with a pollster.
Years ago there was a Philadelphia mayor named Frank Rizzo. He ALWAYS garned far more votes than the polls would have predicted or indicated. It was even coined "the Rizzo factor" by the Philadelphia media. People would happily tell other people that they were going to vote for Rizzo's opponent but when they were in the voting booth, they'd pull the lever for that big, loud, hard core law-and-order bastard that loved Philadelphia with every bone in his body. As much as they didn't want to admit it, Philly loved him right back.
And to go back a little further... no one would admit that they voted for Nixon after he resigned. If you went by those polls, McGovern would have taken at least 80% of the vote.
Anyway, I beat them all bloody over price but when all was said and done, the price tag to protect 7,500 laptops still came to somewhere between $500k and $600k the first year plus 20ish% maintenance thereafter. The big boss nearly *&!@ a brick. Needless to say, we don't have an enterprise encryption solution in place.
There's an excellent book on the subject... "The Invisible Computer" by Donald Norman. Very interesting read.
The concept of a paper trail or voter receipt or whatever you want to call it is stupid. It violates the whole concept of the secret ballot not to mention adding layers of potential abuse to the vote counting process. Just imagine a paid thug taking people to the polling place and then asking to see their paper receipt to make sure they voted "the right way". How will you handle "wrong" votes? Where will you change them? When will you change them? How long will people have to change their mind? When they leave the polling place? Once they leave they can be pressured by anybody.
I keep hearing that this will make elections "more secure". If I'm smart enough to hack votes inside a machine, why would you assume that I'm not smart enough to spoof the paper trail? Or better yet, I'll let the vote for my guy be counted right but futz the paper trail, and get the change process to take a legitimate vote away from the other guy.
Every layer of complexity that you add to a process adds opportunity for bad guys to hack the process and steal votes. Want to make elections more accurate and secure? Forget the voting machines and focus on the weakest elements of the election process, absentee ballots and voter registration.
I'd bring toilet paper myself. Life without TP isn't worth living.