Err, where I live counters are voluntary voters who sign up for counting, and nodody gets paid. I did it once, just to see how it works.
Everybody who cares can come and help in the office where he votes, but there is a strict cross-checking procedure. Each political party generally arrange to have a few members at each poll office, so everybody is sure of what happens. There is a large number of poll offices so each has only to count a few hundred votes, and the results come in in 2-4 hours.
I'm not sure that having the poll counted by counters chosen and paid by the local elected power would be such a smart idea, by the way...
Voters choose between several small printed bits of paper with the candidate name, no pencil required. And the paper trail can be kept for a while. There have been no recent major screwups with this system.
your saying it is possible that the permuations of millions of lines of object code could create a nice gui
Yes. any nice GUI is composed of bits. What it takes to find a working combination is time, and life did not begin yesterday.
I dare you to write a program that generates 1000 random ASCII characters, and each time parsing it through a c compiler. Do think you would ever see that baby compile???
One would, with time. Then you modify tiny bits of it (say, a couple of bytes in a huge program) each time and discard unwokable copies. You don't have to start from scratch each time:-)
Random biological change only destoys information
Hmmm... change changes information, deletion destroys. Every changed bit of info is new.
Now consider that the only way of copying (the program is GPL'd, of course;-) ) randomly alters some bits in the process. Each new copy is then tested, unworkable ones are discarded, then more imperfect copies are made from the most efficient ones.
Now make hundreds, thousands, millons, billons of billions of copies, and compare what you get to what you had first. Some copies drag along useless pieces of code that make no sense, until a few million copy later the useless bits of code mutated enough to happen to do something useful.
Give it enough time, and the more you near infinity, the greater the chances of finding on the way MS Office (large floppy;-) ), the linux kernel, or the complete works of shakespeare scrolling on a nice GUI.
I'll agree that it is a very strange way to write a program, but it seems quite a good way to try every workable combination of bits on that floppy.
What we call evolution is blind, has no purpose, no reason, no target. It just happens and is efficient on the ( very ) long term in creating the improbable working combinations:-)
As medecine progresses, physical abilities tend not to be an important selective trait anymore: humans can now live long and happily with a bad heart.
If we still had to run fast and climb trees to avoid predators, it might be another matter. Or if we had no access to medecine. The genetic pool might be stronger in poorer country than ours.
Yet I see evolution in action, all around me, even in our countries... Consider bad driving...
Anybody else ever considered regigions as some kind of parasistic idea, living and propagating on the human mind, and subjected to the same kind of natural selection as living beings ?
Imagine that : religions appear and mutate randomly, and only the liveliest branches, the ones most able to hold out against reality and other religions gain followers and thus multiply...
It's a bit more complicated than that, usually: you need a minimum "Runway visual range (RVR)" to just begin the approach.
It varies between 75m and several kilometers dependind on the type of approach (ILS ? NDB ?), the class of aicraft and airfield equipment (Cat I/II/II), and of course crew qualification. A pilot in a 777 will need the same RVR as in a Cessna, if he is not Cat III qualified.
Once you've begun the approach, you can descend to the procedure's "Minimum height of descent" (MDH) or "Decision altitude" (DH) : At that point, either you can see the runway or you go around. MDH, for non-precision approaches is typically between 200 and 1000 feet. DH, for precision (Cat II/II) approaches is between 15 and 200 feet. Same variables as RVR.
Note that in a modern airliner which has a minimum DH of 20 feet, the pilot performing a Cat III landing needs to see just ONE runway light to consider the runway identified and continues landing. If he does not, he can't avoid touching the ground during the go around.
And by the way, those approaches are flown under autopilot, including the flare and runway roll. Did you think you could keep on the runway a 100 tons, 40m wide thing at 200 mph with 75m of visibility in the fog ?;-)
As I get it, the point is not that the position information is more accurate,as it still comes from the same mix of radio beacons, inertial navigation systems an GPS datas. It is just that the data is more readable for the pilot.
Yet i'm not sure it's more useful: Commercial airliners are _all_ equiped with "Flight directors", with seems to be the best info a pilot could get. It is displayed as two bars on the artificial horizon, and tells the pilot which way he should move the commands to follow in the best possible way the planned route, heading, vertical speed, ILS, speed, whatever the pilot chose to follow.
It uses derivates to the second degree of the raw position data to compute intercept path and anticipations, and following it is a breeze : just keep the cross centered, and you'll get a smooth, perfect trajectory. Cross up, you pull until it's centered. Cross left, bank left until centered. No brain required.
I'm not sure fancy graphics would be quite as reliable or useful: have you ever tried following a tunnel thing in some flight simulator ? It's much harder than stupidly keeping a cross centered, especially after a long trancoceanic flight;-)
Got to be veeeeery careful with those ones...
I'm a commercial pilot, and one fine night we sighted strange, very bright lights floating slowly in formation, sometime going off and reappearing somewhere else.
Soon many other planes on the same frequency began reporting the sighting. You could hear in everybody's voices the adrenalin increase, and some were begining to get _quite_ nervous... We weren't very confident in the cockpit either, and as some passengers saw the lights too, the pressure soon became very high.
Then the controller came in : a call to the military indicated that there was a nightly artillery training in a nearby military training area, that night, with flaring, parachute equipped shells...
Slashdot Mirror
> Machines are "cheaper" than people, after all
Err, where I live counters are voluntary voters who sign up for counting, and nodody gets paid. I did it once, just to see how it works.
Everybody who cares can come and help in the office where he votes, but there is a strict cross-checking procedure. Each political party generally arrange to have a few members at each poll office, so everybody is sure of what happens. There is a large number of poll offices so each has only to count a few hundred votes, and the results come in in 2-4 hours.
I'm not sure that having the poll counted by counters chosen and paid by the local elected power would be such a smart idea, by the way...
Voters choose between several small printed bits of paper with the candidate name, no pencil required. And the paper trail can be kept for a while. There have been no recent major screwups with this system.
your saying it is possible that the permuations of millions of lines of object code could create a nice gui
:-)
Yes. any nice GUI is composed of bits. What it takes to find a working combination is time, and life did not begin yesterday.
I dare you to write a program that generates 1000 random ASCII characters, and each time parsing it through a c compiler. Do think you would ever see that baby compile???
One would, with time. Then you modify tiny bits of it (say, a couple of bytes in a huge program) each time and discard unwokable copies. You don't have to start from scratch each time
Random biological change only destoys information
Hmmm... change changes information, deletion destroys. Every changed bit of info is new.
Consider a program on a floppy disk.
;-) ) randomly alters some bits in the process. Each new copy is then tested, unworkable ones are discarded, then more imperfect copies are made from the most efficient ones.
;-) ), the linux kernel, or the complete works of shakespeare scrolling on a nice GUI.
Now consider that the only way of copying (the program is GPL'd, of course
Now make hundreds, thousands, millons, billons of billions of copies, and compare what you get to what you had first. Some copies drag along useless pieces of code that make no sense, until a few million copy later the useless bits of code mutated enough to happen to do something useful.
Give it enough time, and the more you near infinity, the greater the chances of finding on the way MS Office (large floppy
I'll agree that it is a very strange way to write a program, but it seems quite a good way to try every workable combination of bits on that floppy.
What we call evolution is blind, has no purpose, no reason, no target. It just happens and is efficient on the ( very ) long term in creating the improbable working combinations:-)
As medecine progresses, physical abilities tend not to be an important selective trait anymore: humans can now live long and happily with a bad heart.
If we still had to run fast and climb trees to avoid predators, it might be another matter. Or if we had no access to medecine. The genetic pool might be stronger in poorer country than ours.
Yet I see evolution in action, all around me, even in our countries...
Consider bad driving...
Anybody else ever considered regigions as some kind of parasistic idea, living and propagating on the human mind, and subjected to the same kind of natural selection as living beings ?
Imagine that : religions appear and mutate randomly, and only the liveliest branches, the ones most able to hold out against reality and other religions gain followers and thus multiply...
http://www.starwars.com/databank/character/general grievous/
Now, that's a bad guy with an attitude !
> The sender just goes about it's business spewing out packets until it's informed the receiver didn't get one.
Great ! So I can tell a bunch of machines to transmit blinly at full throttle ? No more need for viruses to get my zombie DoS network running, then.
Thanks Ian !
It's a bit more complicated than that, usually: you need a minimum "Runway visual range (RVR)" to just begin the approach.
;-)
It varies between 75m and several kilometers dependind on the type of approach (ILS ? NDB ?), the class of aicraft and airfield equipment (Cat I/II/II), and of course crew qualification. A pilot in a 777 will need the same RVR as in a Cessna, if he is not Cat III qualified.
Once you've begun the approach, you can descend to the procedure's "Minimum height of descent" (MDH) or "Decision altitude" (DH) : At that point, either you can see the runway or you go around. MDH, for non-precision approaches is typically between 200 and 1000 feet. DH, for precision (Cat II/II) approaches is between 15 and 200 feet. Same variables as RVR.
Note that in a modern airliner which has a minimum DH of 20 feet, the pilot performing a Cat III landing needs to see just ONE runway light to consider the runway identified and continues landing. If he does not, he can't avoid touching the ground during the go around.
And by the way, those approaches are flown under autopilot, including the flare and runway roll. Did you think you could keep on the runway a 100 tons, 40m wide thing at 200 mph with 75m of visibility in the fog ?
As I get it, the point is not that the position information is more accurate,as it still comes from the same mix of radio beacons, inertial navigation systems an GPS datas. It is just that the data is more readable for the pilot.
;-)
Yet i'm not sure it's more useful: Commercial airliners are _all_ equiped with "Flight directors", with seems to be the best info a pilot could get. It is displayed as two bars on the artificial horizon, and tells the pilot which way he should move the commands to follow in the best possible way the planned route, heading, vertical speed, ILS, speed, whatever the pilot chose to follow.
It uses derivates to the second degree of the raw position data to compute intercept path and anticipations, and following it is a breeze : just keep the cross centered, and you'll get a smooth, perfect trajectory. Cross up, you pull until it's centered. Cross left, bank left until centered. No brain required.
I'm not sure fancy graphics would be quite as reliable or useful: have you ever tried following a tunnel thing in some flight simulator ? It's much harder than stupidly keeping a cross centered, especially after a long trancoceanic flight
>Eh, something tells me there'll be plenty of crashing even without your intervention...
Did anybody else think "HERF gun", too ?
Errr...You're beginning to get the same speeds all over Europe, too. And commercially available since a few weeks ago.
In France, SFR (Vodafone group) annouced here 384kbps available,starting last month...
Got to be veeeeery careful with those ones... I'm a commercial pilot, and one fine night we sighted strange, very bright lights floating slowly in formation, sometime going off and reappearing somewhere else. Soon many other planes on the same frequency began reporting the sighting. You could hear in everybody's voices the adrenalin increase, and some were begining to get _quite_ nervous... We weren't very confident in the cockpit either, and as some passengers saw the lights too, the pressure soon became very high. Then the controller came in : a call to the military indicated that there was a nightly artillery training in a nearby military training area, that night, with flaring, parachute equipped shells...