I don't have any grand conclusion or poignant observation other than people implicitly trust the electronic voting machines despite the nationally-publicized problems with them, they are unaware there have been major issues with them (Diebold in particular) or the shiny touchscreen is newer and cooler or perhaps perceived as easier to use.
I've used the Diebold machine in the last 3 elections. But I live in Chicago so I'm used to my vote not counting.
The 4 reasons I prefer electronic machines over paper:
1. If I make a mistake, I can undo it without getting a new ballot
2. I know that I have voted for what I want to vote for - I don't have to worry that the scanning machine won't be able to read my vote because I didn't push the pin all the way through or the line was too dark or not dark enough or whatever.
3. When I have to choose 3 (for example) the screen grays out after the 3rd name is chosen, which prevents me from selecting 4 accidentally.
4. At the end I get an on screen summary of all of my votes, and I can go back and make changes if I made a mistake.
5. profit!
At my polling place there was a line for electronic machines, even though there were several unused paper ballot booths.
Um, why Virginia? You do realize that the last two elections hinged on Ohio and Florida, right? and that we really were NOT expecting that at all. So how do you say with such confidence that Virginia is THE key state this year?
It has been suggested that Obama has locked up 260 electoral votes. Which means that he needs 7 more from one of the states that is either traditionally Republican (like Virginia with 11 electoral votes) or a swing state (like Ohio with 20 or Florida with 27). If Obama does win Virginia, the rest of the swing states won't really matter.
Perhaps the original poster feels that Virginia will do a better job of reporting results than Ohio or Florida, or perhaps Obama has a larger lead in Virginia than he does in Ohio or Florida.
What is with these stupid 'not a viable business model' posts in every article about copyrights? Do authors write books? Yes. Do publishers publish them? Yes. Does the author get paid? Yes. Does the publisher make a profit? Yes. Hence, viable business model. The only non-viable business models are the ones where the costs exceed the revenues.
I see from the context of your post that you don't understand what viable means. Viable means 'capable of growing and developing'. Many people seem to think that it means 'feasible', which is how you are using it, saying that any business model that makes a profit is viable.
However, I disagree that this business plan is not viable. For those who didn't RTFA: The plan allows for consumers to go to a member institution (and all US public libraries are going to be member institutions) and browse content for free. If the consumer is lucky enough to be able to go to a subscribing institution, the consumer can not only browse, but can also print out content for free.
It seems to me that this plan would allow somebody to market an e-ink reader that had read only access to content (member level) and give the consumer a device that has limitless access to books. Which shows a viable (capable of growing and developing) business model.
For how long can we assume that an ET civilization will be using/monitoring "conventional" EM band emissions?
That is the last term in the Drake equation. The Drake equation is not intended to be an estimate of the number of contactable civilizations that have ever or will ever exist, it is intended to be an estimate of the number of contactable civilizations right now.
To answer your question, I think that pessimists say 500 years, optimists say 10,000 years. But I didn't RTFA.
The following is attributed to Ben Franklin:
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Your question may have been rhetorical, but I wanted to put the real quote in because while your paraphrasing (which is very common) correctly says that trading freedom (essential liberty) for security (temporary safety) doesn't work, it leaves out the part about people who try to trade freedom for security don't deserve the freedom or security they've been given. Which I think is the more powerful half of the quote.
While there may prove to be some problem in the source code that destroys accuracy, it would be far more likely that any error is caused by the actual sensor.
Your assumptions that the manufacturer of the tester wants a fair test is unverified.
I'm not saying that this is the case, but what if the manufacturer, who is selling to law enforcement, wants to build a tester that will err on the side of too many positives? For example, what if the auditing the source revealed that the tester takes 5 readings and reports the highest value?
I think that it is reasonable for someone accused of a crime by a machine to know how that machine works.
The Judiciary Committee voted to pass the bill 14-4 Thursday; voting "no" were Senators John Kyl of Arizona, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Sam Brownback of Kansas, and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, all Republicans. Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, was absent for the vote.
I didn't read TFA, but the summary implies that he did it during work time. So the day is 8 hours, not 24. Plugging that information into your formula yields 15 weeks.
Not really. UA had announced ahead of time that they were in trouble and would be filing for protection from creditors. So the stock price at the time reflected this public information.
So, if this story were *current* would the bots have simply destroyed UA?
Sort of. The stock price reflected no public knowledge of this level of trouble at UA, and was therefore overpriced. The sell off wouldn't have driven the stock price to $0, but it would drive the price down to one that reflected a company that was filing for creditor protection for the second time in 6 years.
Like many people, I don't like the Idle section and I usually don't come here on purpose. But today when I saw another Disagree Mail entry in the RSS feed, it suddenly dawned on me that since Disagree Mail is now a regular feature, there will be people who will aspire to have their emails included, if they can trick the editors into thinking that they are cranks. So I thought I should check it out.
Alas, the ones posted predate the first appearance of Disagree Mail (a few weeks ago if I remember correctly), so none of them are an attempt to get onto the page by fooling the editors.
But my trip was not wasted. A troll about trolls that went right over the editor's head! Delicious.
Hmmmmm. I thought Scotty's ashes had been lost before:
From Wikipedia:
Almost two years after his death, approximately one-quarter ounce (7 grams) of Doohan's ashes were sent into space, as he had requested in his will. The ashes, along with those of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper as well as almost 200 others, were launched on the SpaceLoft XL rocket, on April 28, 2007, when the rocket briefly entered outer space in a four-minute suborbital flight before parachuting to earth, as planned, with the ashes still inside. The ashes were subsequently launched on a Falcon 1 rocket, on 3 August 2008, into what was intended to be a low Earth orbit, however the rocket failed two minutes after launch. The rest of his ashes were scattered over Puget Sound in Washington.
if the government is more precise in what they shut down (ie, if they shut down just alt.binaries)
I don't have a comment on your points, but I did want to clear up what seem to be major misconceptions by several of the posters.
The government didn't shut down anything on Usenet, the government made some noise and several of the largest ISPs reduced or eliminated their involvement with Usenet. These ISPs had been providing access to Usenet as part of their service, although in some (all?) cases their binary retention policies made the alt.binary.* groups useless.
I have DSL from AT&T, and they only removed the alt.binary.* groups. Comp.lang.c is just as good (or bad, depending on your perspective) as it has ever been. The alt.binary.* groups still exist, but people who get services from the aforementioned ISPs (which is most people in the US) will have to pay a third party Usenet access company to get them.
Today, you are most certainly not obliged to use US dollars. You can use any currency you wish, provided the other party in the transaction agrees.
This is not completely true. There were some guys (nuts?) in Idaho who coined their own currency which they called a Liberty Dollar (you may have seen their commercials on late night tv 10 years ago). Liberty Dollars were purchased by weight and backed by a commodity (gold or silver). Purchasers of Liberty Dollars entered into voluntary transactions with other people. Then the FBI raided them and seized everything, saying that it is criminal to create a competing currency.
So a more correct statement would be, "You can use any currency you wish, provided the other party in the transaction agrees and the issuer of that currency hasn't been raided by the FBI".
If AI can solve captcha's it must also be able to solve useful problems.
Not a bad idea, but the AI that can solve captcha's isn't very good at it (I think the original article said it could get the word right 25% of the time). But even if they had only a 1% chance of cracking, it would still be a useful tool for what the miscreants want it to do, since they can automate the process.
I'd never heard of him, but I followed your link and thought it was hilarious.
I looked Jonathan Lee Riches up on Wikipedia, and while the entry is woefully inadequate for someone who has given so much to our judicial system, it did lead me to his suit claiming that O.J. is a hitman for Steve Jobs (amongst other things), which I found amusing.
I'm tempted to set up the JonathanLeeRiches.com website and link all of his suits, but I'm pretty sure he would sue me.
Erm, isn't Steve Wozniak one person?** Perhaps he meant "...neither Jobs nor Woz..."?
Steve Jobs is another person, so I guess it is technically correct. Maybe the people at pagetable.com are on first name / nickname basis with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and they just type they way they talk.
I read TFA, and according to the article, the logic goes something like this:
Viacom: YouTube shows our copyrighted material. Google, you own YouTube and a lot of money, give us some of your money or else.
Google: Safe Harbor defense! Under the DMCA, we can't be held liable if somebody else posts copyrighted material on a site we host, if we don't know that these strangers are posting copyrighted material.
So Viacom thinks that if they can show that Google employees knowing posted copyrighted materials to YouTube, then Google won't be covered by the Safe Harbor defense.
This is what TFA says. I have no idea if that is what Viacom is actually doing, or if it would even work. But it is interesting.
There are low-end but fully-fledged laptops (i.e. 10s of gigs, 512MB-1GB, 13"+ screen) of the OEM-unbranded type in this price range selling all over the Web in the UK. For 50 quid more, you get an Acer. And they all come with 12 month warranties, often extensible. Who actually wants the eepc?
I think the niche that Eee PC is trying to fill is for people who don't want the size and weight associated with the 13" screen. The Eee PC models have screens that range from 7" to 10", in weights from 2 - 3 pounds.
There are other options for palmtops and ultraportables, but they all seem to be quite a bit more expensive than the Eee PC models. I'm sure the competitors are justified in what they are charging - perhaps Eee PC has found the sweet spot of price and performance.
Someone give me some possible downsides to solar energy.
It isn't so much the solar energy itself, it is the stuff that is necessary to collect the solar energy and then get it to people's houses.
If somebody wants to build a large solar collecting station out in the middle of nowhere* there are some questions that need to be answered. I'm kind of disappointed that they don't already know most of this stuff since people have been building on BLM land for 200 years, but hey that's the government for you.
[*The BLM manages land in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. There probably are not a lot of requests for solar plants in Alaska though.]
I don't pretend to be at all knowledgeable on the subject, but I would guess that before the BLM lets somebody start a project, they would want to know stuff like:
What kind of construction is necessary to build the collecting station and how will that impact local wildlife?
How high off the ground should the panels be deployed so that they don't interfere with migrating animals?
How much clearcutting around the project is necessary to be safe from wildfires?
Will the wire that moves the electricity from the collector to the substation be above ground or below ground and what are the impacts of both approaches?
How are the collectors cleaned and is there any runoff?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have any grand conclusion or poignant observation other than people implicitly trust the electronic voting machines despite the nationally-publicized problems with them, they are unaware there have been major issues with them (Diebold in particular) or the shiny touchscreen is newer and cooler or perhaps perceived as easier to use.
I've used the Diebold machine in the last 3 elections. But I live in Chicago so I'm used to my vote not counting.
The 4 reasons I prefer electronic machines over paper:
1. If I make a mistake, I can undo it without getting a new ballot
2. I know that I have voted for what I want to vote for - I don't have to worry that the scanning machine won't be able to read my vote because I didn't push the pin all the way through or the line was too dark or not dark enough or whatever.
3. When I have to choose 3 (for example) the screen grays out after the 3rd name is chosen, which prevents me from selecting 4 accidentally.
4. At the end I get an on screen summary of all of my votes, and I can go back and make changes if I made a mistake.
5. profit!
At my polling place there was a line for electronic machines, even though there were several unused paper ballot booths.
Um, why Virginia? You do realize that the last two elections hinged on Ohio and Florida, right? and that we really were NOT expecting that at all. So how do you say with such confidence that Virginia is THE key state this year?
It has been suggested that Obama has locked up 260 electoral votes. Which means that he needs 7 more from one of the states that is either traditionally Republican (like Virginia with 11 electoral votes) or a swing state (like Ohio with 20 or Florida with 27). If Obama does win Virginia, the rest of the swing states won't really matter.
Perhaps the original poster feels that Virginia will do a better job of reporting results than Ohio or Florida, or perhaps Obama has a larger lead in Virginia than he does in Ohio or Florida.
Polachek in 2008!
Typical reading comprehension challenge.
Finland only has ~11600 electronic voters.
What is with these stupid 'not a viable business model' posts in every article about copyrights? Do authors write books? Yes. Do publishers publish them? Yes. Does the author get paid? Yes. Does the publisher make a profit? Yes. Hence, viable business model. The only non-viable business models are the ones where the costs exceed the revenues.
I see from the context of your post that you don't understand what viable means. Viable means 'capable of growing and developing'. Many people seem to think that it means 'feasible', which is how you are using it, saying that any business model that makes a profit is viable.
However, I disagree that this business plan is not viable. For those who didn't RTFA: The plan allows for consumers to go to a member institution (and all US public libraries are going to be member institutions) and browse content for free. If the consumer is lucky enough to be able to go to a subscribing institution, the consumer can not only browse, but can also print out content for free.
It seems to me that this plan would allow somebody to market an e-ink reader that had read only access to content (member level) and give the consumer a device that has limitless access to books. Which shows a viable (capable of growing and developing) business model.
For how long can we assume that an ET civilization will be using/monitoring "conventional" EM band emissions?
That is the last term in the Drake equation. The Drake equation is not intended to be an estimate of the number of contactable civilizations that have ever or will ever exist, it is intended to be an estimate of the number of contactable civilizations right now.
To answer your question, I think that pessimists say 500 years, optimists say 10,000 years. But I didn't RTFA.
who said that?
The following is attributed to Ben Franklin:
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Your question may have been rhetorical, but I wanted to put the real quote in because while your paraphrasing (which is very common) correctly says that trading freedom (essential liberty) for security (temporary safety) doesn't work, it leaves out the part about people who try to trade freedom for security don't deserve the freedom or security they've been given. Which I think is the more powerful half of the quote.
What exactly are people using to show the FPS on screen while they play games?
Probably Fraps. It is what I use.
While there may prove to be some problem in the source code that destroys accuracy, it would be far more likely that any error is caused by the actual sensor.
Your assumptions that the manufacturer of the tester wants a fair test is unverified.
I'm not saying that this is the case, but what if the manufacturer, who is selling to law enforcement, wants to build a tester that will err on the side of too many positives? For example, what if the auditing the source revealed that the tester takes 5 readings and reports the highest value?
I think that it is reasonable for someone accused of a crime by a machine to know how that machine works.
The Judiciary Committee voted to pass the bill 14-4 Thursday; voting "no" were Senators John Kyl of Arizona, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Sam Brownback of Kansas, and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, all Republicans. Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, was absent for the vote.
I didn't read TFA, but the summary implies that he did it during work time. So the day is 8 hours, not 24. Plugging that information into your formula yields 15 weeks.
So the US equivalent in area is Springfield, IL. Source: Wikipedia & demographia.com.
Were the trading bots dumping the stock in 2002?
Not really. UA had announced ahead of time that they were in trouble and would be filing for protection from creditors. So the stock price at the time reflected this public information.
So, if this story were *current* would the bots have simply destroyed UA?
Sort of. The stock price reflected no public knowledge of this level of trouble at UA, and was therefore overpriced. The sell off wouldn't have driven the stock price to $0, but it would drive the price down to one that reflected a company that was filing for creditor protection for the second time in 6 years.
What a geek
Like many people, I don't like the Idle section and I usually don't come here on purpose. But today when I saw another Disagree Mail entry in the RSS feed, it suddenly dawned on me that since Disagree Mail is now a regular feature, there will be people who will aspire to have their emails included, if they can trick the editors into thinking that they are cranks. So I thought I should check it out.
Alas, the ones posted predate the first appearance of Disagree Mail (a few weeks ago if I remember correctly), so none of them are an attempt to get onto the page by fooling the editors.
But my trip was not wasted. A troll about trolls that went right over the editor's head! Delicious.
Hmmmmm. I thought Scotty's ashes had been lost before:
From Wikipedia:
Almost two years after his death, approximately one-quarter ounce (7 grams) of Doohan's ashes were sent into space, as he had requested in his will. The ashes, along with those of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper as well as almost 200 others, were launched on the SpaceLoft XL rocket, on April 28, 2007, when the rocket briefly entered outer space in a four-minute suborbital flight before parachuting to earth, as planned, with the ashes still inside. The ashes were subsequently launched on a Falcon 1 rocket, on 3 August 2008, into what was intended to be a low Earth orbit, however the rocket failed two minutes after launch. The rest of his ashes were scattered over Puget Sound in Washington.
I for one welcome our new Republican overlords... wait a minute
if the government is more precise in what they shut down (ie, if they shut down just alt.binaries)
I don't have a comment on your points, but I did want to clear up what seem to be major misconceptions by several of the posters.
The government didn't shut down anything on Usenet, the government made some noise and several of the largest ISPs reduced or eliminated their involvement with Usenet. These ISPs had been providing access to Usenet as part of their service, although in some (all?) cases their binary retention policies made the alt.binary.* groups useless.
I have DSL from AT&T, and they only removed the alt.binary.* groups. Comp.lang.c is just as good (or bad, depending on your perspective) as it has ever been. The alt.binary.* groups still exist, but people who get services from the aforementioned ISPs (which is most people in the US) will have to pay a third party Usenet access company to get them.
Today, you are most certainly not obliged to use US dollars. You can use any currency you wish, provided the other party in the transaction agrees.
This is not completely true. There were some guys (nuts?) in Idaho who coined their own currency which they called a Liberty Dollar (you may have seen their commercials on late night tv 10 years ago). Liberty Dollars were purchased by weight and backed by a commodity (gold or silver). Purchasers of Liberty Dollars entered into voluntary transactions with other people. Then the FBI raided them and seized everything, saying that it is criminal to create a competing currency.
So a more correct statement would be, "You can use any currency you wish, provided the other party in the transaction agrees and the issuer of that currency hasn't been raided by the FBI".
Hmm-- a tradeoff between pissing off vast majority of users who are annoyed by spam, and pissing off the tiny minority of users with impaired vision.
Yes, while captha was king I got no spam. Ah, the good old days.
If AI can solve captcha's it must also be able to solve useful problems.
Not a bad idea, but the AI that can solve captcha's isn't very good at it (I think the original article said it could get the word right 25% of the time). But even if they had only a 1% chance of cracking, it would still be a useful tool for what the miscreants want it to do, since they can automate the process.
I'd never heard of him, but I followed your link and thought it was hilarious.
I looked Jonathan Lee Riches up on Wikipedia, and while the entry is woefully inadequate for someone who has given so much to our judicial system, it did lead me to his suit claiming that O.J. is a hitman for Steve Jobs (amongst other things), which I found amusing.
I'm tempted to set up the JonathanLeeRiches.com website and link all of his suits, but I'm pretty sure he would sue me.
"...neither Steve nor Woz..."
Erm, isn't Steve Wozniak one person?** Perhaps he meant "...neither Jobs nor Woz..."?
Steve Jobs is another person, so I guess it is technically correct. Maybe the people at pagetable.com are on first name / nickname basis with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and they just type they way they talk.
I read TFA, and according to the article, the logic goes something like this:
Viacom: YouTube shows our copyrighted material. Google, you own YouTube and a lot of money, give us some of your money or else.
Google: Safe Harbor defense! Under the DMCA, we can't be held liable if somebody else posts copyrighted material on a site we host, if we don't know that these strangers are posting copyrighted material.
So Viacom thinks that if they can show that Google employees knowing posted copyrighted materials to YouTube, then Google won't be covered by the Safe Harbor defense.
This is what TFA says. I have no idea if that is what Viacom is actually doing, or if it would even work. But it is interesting.
There are low-end but fully-fledged laptops (i.e. 10s of gigs, 512MB-1GB, 13"+ screen) of the OEM-unbranded type in this price range selling all over the Web in the UK. For 50 quid more, you get an Acer. And they all come with 12 month warranties, often extensible. Who actually wants the eepc?
I think the niche that Eee PC is trying to fill is for people who don't want the size and weight associated with the 13" screen. The Eee PC models have screens that range from 7" to 10", in weights from 2 - 3 pounds.
There are other options for palmtops and ultraportables, but they all seem to be quite a bit more expensive than the Eee PC models. I'm sure the competitors are justified in what they are charging - perhaps Eee PC has found the sweet spot of price and performance.
It isn't so much the solar energy itself, it is the stuff that is necessary to collect the solar energy and then get it to people's houses.
If somebody wants to build a large solar collecting station out in the middle of nowhere* there are some questions that need to be answered. I'm kind of disappointed that they don't already know most of this stuff since people have been building on BLM land for 200 years, but hey that's the government for you.
[*The BLM manages land in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. There probably are not a lot of requests for solar plants in Alaska though.]
I don't pretend to be at all knowledgeable on the subject, but I would guess that before the BLM lets somebody start a project, they would want to know stuff like: