And what amount of error will machines add to the process? There is no point reducing error in one process and adding it in another. And machines WILL add error, don't assume otherwise.
I think we can design a system where the error is minimized, if we want to. The "machines" which add the most error to this process are the "political machines" -- if there's a way to abuse a system, politicians eventually find a way to bend it to their aims. I'm just advocating one way you can take spoilage out of the process, obviously it will need to be examined and tested so that the error is minimized. Maybe you can explain exactly what error machine written paper ballots will introduce, and it can be taken into account?
It is very simple, you don't read the instructions, your vote may not be counted. It sucks but that's life. Maybe that will encourage people to ask questions and read the instructions.
Apparently people are embarrassed and afraid to ask questions. It makes them feel stupid, and their pride gets in the way. Telling them "It sucks but that's life" and tossing out their vote is only a little better than having a test they have to pass before they're allowed to vote, or a poll tax they have to pay, like in the Jim Crow South. I just think it would be good if we could ensure that valid, machine readable and unambiguous paper ballots could be generated. I think it could reduce the claims of spoiled ballots, which can be manipulated to political advantage.
This is why I like the solution of machine generated, but human readable paper ballots. I think it can help cut down on ballot spoilage, which is often pointed to as evidence of political bias (and probably IS sometimes caused by political bias).
Before you write back saying that my answer to your first three questions (which was that the ballot is spoiled and is not counted) is unacceptable, ask yourself this: How hard is it to make a single, unambiguous mark (preferably an X as instructed) in a big white circle beside a candidate's name? And yes, to answer another question, for those people that have physical problems marking their ballot, they are allowed to bring an assistant or aide with them to mark their ballot.
Given the difficulty that people have had with paper and pencil in the past, I figure it must be pretty difficult!
I think we're both in agreement, though, that having a paper record (pencil- or printer- generated) is a good thing, and allowing all parties to inspect and recount them is essential for having an auditable and believable election.
Hi -- It sounds like you have more reasonable (and perhaps less partisan) election officials than we do. While I'm sure THAT is really the best solution, I'm not sure how we get from here to there, so I'll stick with suggestions that it might be possible to implement!
Pencil marks don't smudge. Ink does. That's why we use pencils. Unless the detection device is a wad of rubber, the pencil marks will remain, if they were put there correctly.
I'm not sure I agree with you there. I can smudge a pencil mark off with my sweaty finger, especially if it isn't made very dark. Pencil is, after all, just graphite and clay pressed together. A quick Google search on "pencil smudges" finds at least a few sites about handwriting and pencils that agree with me. I think you can agree it is harder to smudge off a laser printed ballot, right?
Having watched people follow "idiot-proof" input methods, I don't think that having input methods that disallow invalid entries solves the problem. All it does is make the problem less easy to see, because now we have what looks like a valid ballot. An invalid ballot is an indication of some other problem, and forcing the voter to create a valid ballot only hides that problem.
Instead, your solution leads to "spoiled" ballots, and every ballot that is "spoiled" leads to a cry of "I've been disenfranchised!" or "The <winning party> has cheated!" (note: I'm not making any statement as to the validity of these claims - valid or not, I would just like to have fewer spoiled ballots, and therefore fewer chances for either this type of problem to occur or to be claimed by the loser.)
It is impossible for an input method to disallow certain choices without also assisting the user in making a choice. That assistance will always bias towards some result.
Again, your system allows someone to mark both candidate A and candidate B, and doesn't alert them to this, and essentially throws their vote away as spoiled. I don't think it would be biased to warn the voter that their choice is invalid, reset it so there is NO choice for that office (which is what you would do by spoiling their ballot) and telling them they should choose one candidate again. The two possible outcomes are A) no vote is cast (same as a spoiled ballot) or B) they actually choose one candidate. How is that biased?
While better than the current crop of eVoting machines, I don't think paper and pencil is the best we can do.
What do your exection boards do when someone marks an X in BOTH spots? What if someone puts a slash in one, and a slash in the other? What if someone circles a candidate's name, and doesn't put an X? What if they put an X over the whole name? What if on the 10th counting, the light pencil marks on a ballot have been smudged off completely? What if they just put a tiny dot in the middle of the first candidate's box (like they rested the pencil there), then didn't mark anything else in either? I'm asking because this is the kind of nonsense that put Florida on the map 4 years ago.
I personally think that the current, unauditable, unverifiable electronic voting fad is a bad thing. I don't, however, think giving people a piece of paper and a pencil is necessarily the answer.
You're right that a paper ballot is a good thing.
There is a lot of good sense behind a two machine system -- One machine accepts user input, verifies user input, and prints a machine-and-human-readable ballot in a consistent and verifiable manner. This prevents the "input error" scenarios, where the voter doesn't mark the ballot properly; it also makes the ballot easy to machine count, and makes the mark more permanent than a pencil. The second machines just read and count ballots.
The voters enter and confirm their choices on the first machine, are given a paper ballot form they confirm (again), then they slide it into a ballot box. The paper ballots are later counted by the second machine, and if there is any doubt, they can be hand counted by the election board with observers from all candidates' election comittees present. Permanent record, recountable, two verifications by the voter (one on screen, one on the paper in their hand).
Well, I just went and reread the grandparent, and I think he at least warned us that this was his own personal experience. Since neither one of us included it in our posts, I'll do so now:
I got another one for you... not everyone who hunts is as economically endowed as the average computer geek. Most of the guys I know who hunt, save massive amounts on their grocery bills. You say "buy it at the store!"... you know what venison (or any other meat) goes for by the pound? You know how many pounds of meat can be had for the price of a bullet and a hunting tag?
Repeat after me: In many (but not all) cases, hunting is an economic affair.
(the bold was mine)
You'd said you had a hard time believing the "many" part, based upon your "on the road" observations, so I just thought I might be able to offer an explanation of why the two might not match.
I guess the sticking point would be what the original poster meant by "many". I'm not sure it implies a majority, but I'd guess it means at least it's not the least likely reason that people hunt.
It's funny, apparently neither the original poster, you, nor I actually hunt and none of us bothered to go and try to find some hunting demographics studies! Gotta love/.
Here's a survey (granted, at the grounds of a US military base, so possibly biased) that would suggest "meat" hunting is behind recreational, but sizable.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service (you think they might know something about this!) does lots of hunting and fishing surveys, there's an index here. There are some interesting things in there, but after plowing through some of it, I doubt it comes out and give any clear answers on this. We can tell that "avid hunters" are most likely rural, and most likely "below median" income, but it'd be a stretch to draw "they hunt for economic reasons" from that. I'd wager that the "casual hunter" category that is split between urban and rural and is more frequently "above median" income is where you see your mega-SUV drivers. Maybe you can wade through the study if you're curious.
I only skimmed the FA, because I actually watched the presentation from the NIMF as it was aired on C-SPAN yesterday (and you can, too if you don't mind RealPlayer - there's a link).
From what I saw, they did raise a few interesting points -- the AO rating, for example... Based on some of the clips they showed from the M rated games, even I began to wonder what it took to bump a game from M to AO. I guess only the makers and purchasers of "Singles" know for sure. I figure that ESRB M is sort of like MPAA R (just like NC-17, apparently few retailers will carry AO), and I'm thinking that if they were from movies, some of those clips would would have pushed the MPAA to NC-17, especially if you consider Team America had a tough time getting an R, and it's all puppets. The speaker essentially said why have an AO rating, if there isn't anything that can bump you into AO teritory?
On the other hand, you could easily argue that these rating systems make parents feel they don't need to pay attention to what their children are playing, and that's probably bad.
I would imagine that some of this can be easily explained by the fact that the people who the parent is talking about (who hunt for economic reasons) can't afford to travel far to hunt, hunt near their homes, and therefore aren't driving it strapped to their vehicles very far. You therefore don't see them, unless you live in one of those areas. You are more likely to see those who travel greater distances, and those people are less likely to be hunting for economic reasons. Your anecdotal evidence is a poor sample biased heavily by collection method.
Based on the info http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/381420here, it took 53 days from initial contact to public release of the patch (and public notice of the vulnerability). How does this stack up against other OSes?
In the last election for example an incredible number of Americans were shown to believe in things that were demonstrably false. For example saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 and that Iraq had nuclear weapons. The odd thing is that even if you were to go to one of these people and argue that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 they would dismiss you as being a communist/liberal and stop listening to you.
My personal experience is that people form an initial impression about an issue on an emotional basis, so whoever reaches their emotional buttons better (or maybe even just faster) sways that initial impression. Once they have that initial impression formed, they seek out support for that conclusion (hooray for me for making a smart decision!) and they discount evidence to the contrary (because that would only make them feel stupid for being wrong).
OK, that's not everybody all the time, but I think I see it enough to say it happens frequently. Of course I could just have formed that opinion and been ignoring evidence to the contrary...
All of the compact florescent's I've run into take at least a minute or two to come up to full brightness. LED's should be 100% as soon as they're turned on.
And longer in cold temperatures, like my front porch in the winter.
One thing I've taken to doing when there are multiple bulbs in a fixture is to put in a mix of incandescents and compact fluorescent bulbs -- the incandescent come on at full strength immediately, and the fluorescents gradually build up. Saves some money over just populating the fixture with only incandescents, but I find it less annoying w/r/t spectrum and time to sufficient illumination.
What about the cost of spending $80 now, instead of keeping it invested in something? $75 invested at 5% (i.e. in your stock market portfolio w/ a lot of your other money) for 1 yr is more than the "annual replacement bulb cost" ($78.75 - $75 = $3.75; $3.75 > $1.76). So paying the $80 up front doesn't save you ANYTHING on the bulb costs over the life of the LED bulb. You do save on the electricity, and you do save if you have high maintenance costs in replacing them, but I think the true "break even" point could be even longer out than they say.
On the other hand, none of this calculates in the piece of mind and safety of never having to navigate your stairs in the dark, because the LED bulbs should "fail gracefully" instead of working fine one instant and being completely useless the next.
OK, so I don't have XP on my own boxes, but I thought I'd relate two second hand experiences. My brother runs his own business doing network admin / support for many businesses, and he loves it. Installs it for every client he can. But when something goes wrong on the install, he can usually troubleshoot it and have it fixed in a few minutes. He probably represents a good number of/. users.
My mother-in-law, on the other hand, is a nurse, and to her the computer is just a mysterious box on her desk that lets her send email and surf the internet. She decided to follow the advice her computer gave her, and she installed SP2 on her < 1 yr old Dell. She lost all internet connectivity and spent over 6 hours on the phone talking to tech support for her internet provider and Microsoft. I feel pretty confident that she will no longer follow her computer's update advice, which will probably be a bad thing in the long run. Plus, she has no idea what it was that tech support ultimately had her do, so next time she wants something installed or if she ever has another problem, she's starting from an unknown state - I'll have no idea if the next problem is a result of whatever 6 hours of tech support did, or if it's whatever new thing I'm trying to install for her. At this point, I'm worried because I don't know if they made her disable the virus protection and/or her software firewall. I know SP2 turns one on by default, but I don't know how good it is. What's the current feeling on the built in firewall?
So far my conclusion is that SP2 is great if you are an expert, or if you're lucky enough to have it all go smoothly. But it can really hose up a casual user when it doesn't install cleanly -- and even recent PCs from fairly large / well known vendors are at risk for a bad install.
Work hasn't taken the plunge yet, but they have a massive number of users and many different waves of hardware purchases and software sets that they have to support, so I'm not terribly surprised. It will be interesting to see how long it takes them. The good news is that whenever they break your PC and can't fix it on the spot, they roll out a (usually newer) one on a cart and swap it out. Might mean I'll get a faster box!
Yeah, acid can be a big problem. What kind of album were they in? Cheap albums can damage the photos quickly, light or no light. In fact, packed densely into the original lab envelope and tossed in a drawer could be much better than placed carefully into an album full of acidic pages, stuck on with that really aweful gummy/sticky adhesive, and covered with a piece of PVC. The Library of Congress has a good writeup about preserving photos. I wouldn't suggest that every vacation picture warrants mounting on museum board, but acid-free / non-PVC plastic albums aren't that expensive.
Unless subject to poor conditions, I haven't seen much of our 35mm film degrade significantly. I've recently been scanning some slides (positives) that my parents took in the 50s, and the ones that weren't subject to dampness are beautiful. They were simply stored in the box the processing lab provided. Some of those that were stored where they got damp got mold on them.
But, to put all this in context with this article, you wouldn't store your digital images on a CD left in the sun, loose in a backpack, or on a hard drive that you then subjected to strong magnetic fields. There's always some environmental hazard that can destroy them. But 45 years from now, that picture in an acid-free album (excluding catastrophes) should be easy to view -- to view the digital ones you probably will have had to transfer them from format to format to format over the years, or you may find yourself in a frantic search to locate a viewer that views those quaint "JPG" files from 2004, and it might be as hard as locating a working Commodore 1541 floppy disk is now.
Unless you're using very high paper it's chances of being guaranteed for more than 30 years are low.
I send my pics to an online print place, they use Fuji Crystal Archive paper, which has an expected life of 60 years (note, that's when exposed to 450lux 12hrs/day).
Can you help get the files off my QuikTapes archived on my Amiga 10yrs ago? Probably not as easy as I can view photos of my dad taken in 1940.
True, but I have photos in my posession taken by my grandparents, of my parents when my parents were just kids. The photos are >60 years old, but they're still in pretty good shape. Even tintypes taken in the mid 1800s are still viewable, since you still have ready access to the proper viewing aparatus (your eyes). They may have degraded, but you can still make out the images. Data saved off on the computers I had in 1986 or 1990 is largely inaccessable to me now, even if the media itself did not degrade, the viewing platform is not readily available. I love digital photography, but I print out anything I REALLY want to pass down to my eventual offspring.
Before I voted, I made sure I was familiar with every candidate and question on the ballot by going out to the League of Women Voters. They redirected me to "DNet" which had a link for "Polling Location Info", which is apparently state specific.
The state of Pennsylvania site was nice enough to include not only the location of the polls for my district, and the hours they would be open, but they also told me I was going to encounter Sequoia electronic voting machines.
The state of Ohio's link doesn't appear to contain that information, unfortunately.
This is intellectual property -- it doesn't have to be an all-right-now-or-nothing approach. Perhaps it would be worth trying to negotiate a deal where the photographer or the photographer's studio sell you the rights, but you immediately license them exclusive reproduction rights for 24 months. Having recently tried to get a copy of a portrait taken at least 50 years ago of my wife's great-grandparents (no copyright notice on the picture, no date, no owner, both subjects dead, no one alive knows where it was taken...) I know that I personally would want those negatives and rights to end up in my hands -- but I don't begrudge the photographer/studio the chance to make money based on the quality of their work (the better the pictures, the more copies people will order). After 2 years, I bet the bulk of the prints are sold -- or at least I'm sure there's some date after which the photographer knows most of the reprint business drops off.
Heck, at too much longer than 2 years the couple is probably divorced anyway...
Nah, the reason we don't eat people is more likely the diseases like kuru.
Or perhaps because the symbolic kind of cannibalism practiced in Catholicism is just less messy.
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And what amount of error will machines add to the process? There is no point reducing error in one process and adding it in another. And machines WILL add error, don't assume otherwise.
I think we can design a system where the error is minimized, if we want to. The "machines" which add the most error to this process are the "political machines" -- if there's a way to abuse a system, politicians eventually find a way to bend it to their aims. I'm just advocating one way you can take spoilage out of the process, obviously it will need to be examined and tested so that the error is minimized. Maybe you can explain exactly what error machine written paper ballots will introduce, and it can be taken into account?
It is very simple, you don't read the instructions, your vote may not be counted. It sucks but that's life. Maybe that will encourage people to ask questions and read the instructions.
Apparently people are embarrassed and afraid to ask questions. It makes them feel stupid, and their pride gets in the way. Telling them "It sucks but that's life" and tossing out their vote is only a little better than having a test they have to pass before they're allowed to vote, or a poll tax they have to pay, like in the Jim Crow South. I just think it would be good if we could ensure that valid, machine readable and unambiguous paper ballots could be generated. I think it could reduce the claims of spoiled ballots, which can be manipulated to political advantage.
Ax: This ballot is spoiled and is not counted.
This is why I like the solution of machine generated, but human readable paper ballots. I think it can help cut down on ballot spoilage, which is often pointed to as evidence of political bias (and probably IS sometimes caused by political bias).
Before you write back saying that my answer to your first three questions (which was that the ballot is spoiled and is not counted) is unacceptable, ask yourself this: How hard is it to make a single, unambiguous mark (preferably an X as instructed) in a big white circle beside a candidate's name? And yes, to answer another question, for those people that have physical problems marking their ballot, they are allowed to bring an assistant or aide with them to mark their ballot.
Given the difficulty that people have had with paper and pencil in the past, I figure it must be pretty difficult!
I think we're both in agreement, though, that having a paper record (pencil- or printer- generated) is a good thing, and allowing all parties to inspect and recount them is essential for having an auditable and believable election.
Pencil marks don't smudge. Ink does. That's why we use pencils. Unless the detection device is a wad of rubber, the pencil marks will remain, if they were put there correctly.
I'm not sure I agree with you there. I can smudge a pencil mark off with my sweaty finger, especially if it isn't made very dark. Pencil is, after all, just graphite and clay pressed together. A quick Google search on "pencil smudges" finds at least a few sites about handwriting and pencils that agree with me. I think you can agree it is harder to smudge off a laser printed ballot, right?
Having watched people follow "idiot-proof" input methods, I don't think that having input methods that disallow invalid entries solves the problem. All it does is make the problem less easy to see, because now we have what looks like a valid ballot. An invalid ballot is an indication of some other problem, and forcing the voter to create a valid ballot only hides that problem.
Instead, your solution leads to "spoiled" ballots, and every ballot that is "spoiled" leads to a cry of "I've been disenfranchised!" or "The <winning party> has cheated!" (note: I'm not making any statement as to the validity of these claims - valid or not, I would just like to have fewer spoiled ballots, and therefore fewer chances for either this type of problem to occur or to be claimed by the loser.)
It is impossible for an input method to disallow certain choices without also assisting the user in making a choice. That assistance will always bias towards some result.
Again, your system allows someone to mark both candidate A and candidate B, and doesn't alert them to this, and essentially throws their vote away as spoiled. I don't think it would be biased to warn the voter that their choice is invalid, reset it so there is NO choice for that office (which is what you would do by spoiling their ballot) and telling them they should choose one candidate again. The two possible outcomes are A) no vote is cast (same as a spoiled ballot) or B) they actually choose one candidate. How is that biased?
What do your exection boards do when someone marks an X in BOTH spots? What if someone puts a slash in one, and a slash in the other? What if someone circles a candidate's name, and doesn't put an X? What if they put an X over the whole name? What if on the 10th counting, the light pencil marks on a ballot have been smudged off completely? What if they just put a tiny dot in the middle of the first candidate's box (like they rested the pencil there), then didn't mark anything else in either? I'm asking because this is the kind of nonsense that put Florida on the map 4 years ago.
I personally think that the current, unauditable, unverifiable electronic voting fad is a bad thing. I don't, however, think giving people a piece of paper and a pencil is necessarily the answer.
You're right that a paper ballot is a good thing.
There is a lot of good sense behind a two machine system -- One machine accepts user input, verifies user input, and prints a machine-and-human-readable ballot in a consistent and verifiable manner. This prevents the "input error" scenarios, where the voter doesn't mark the ballot properly; it also makes the ballot easy to machine count, and makes the mark more permanent than a pencil. The second machines just read and count ballots.
The voters enter and confirm their choices on the first machine, are given a paper ballot form they confirm (again), then they slide it into a ballot box. The paper ballots are later counted by the second machine, and if there is any doubt, they can be hand counted by the election board with observers from all candidates' election comittees present. Permanent record, recountable, two verifications by the voter (one on screen, one on the paper in their hand).
(the bold was mine)
You'd said you had a hard time believing the "many" part, based upon your "on the road" observations, so I just thought I might be able to offer an explanation of why the two might not match.
I guess the sticking point would be what the original poster meant by "many". I'm not sure it implies a majority, but I'd guess it means at least it's not the least likely reason that people hunt.
It's funny, apparently neither the original poster, you, nor I actually hunt and none of us bothered to go and try to find some hunting demographics studies! Gotta love /.
Here's a survey (granted, at the grounds of a US military base, so possibly biased) that would suggest "meat" hunting is behind recreational, but sizable.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service (you think they might know something about this!) does lots of hunting and fishing surveys, there's an index here. There are some interesting things in there, but after plowing through some of it, I doubt it comes out and give any clear answers on this. We can tell that "avid hunters" are most likely rural, and most likely "below median" income, but it'd be a stretch to draw "they hunt for economic reasons" from that. I'd wager that the "casual hunter" category that is split between urban and rural and is more frequently "above median" income is where you see your mega-SUV drivers. Maybe you can wade through the study if you're curious.
OK... any under 17 /.ers ever been carded / refused when trying to purchase an "M" rated (17+) game? An "AO" (18+) game? If so, where?
From what I saw, they did raise a few interesting points -- the AO rating, for example... Based on some of the clips they showed from the M rated games, even I began to wonder what it took to bump a game from M to AO. I guess only the makers and purchasers of "Singles" know for sure. I figure that ESRB M is sort of like MPAA R (just like NC-17, apparently few retailers will carry AO), and I'm thinking that if they were from movies, some of those clips would would have pushed the MPAA to NC-17, especially if you consider Team America had a tough time getting an R, and it's all puppets. The speaker essentially said why have an AO rating, if there isn't anything that can bump you into AO teritory?
On the other hand, you could easily argue that these rating systems make parents feel they don't need to pay attention to what their children are playing, and that's probably bad.
I would imagine that some of this can be easily explained by the fact that the people who the parent is talking about (who hunt for economic reasons) can't afford to travel far to hunt, hunt near their homes, and therefore aren't driving it strapped to their vehicles very far. You therefore don't see them, unless you live in one of those areas. You are more likely to see those who travel greater distances, and those people are less likely to be hunting for economic reasons. Your anecdotal evidence is a poor sample biased heavily by collection method.
Based on the info http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/381420here, it took 53 days from initial contact to public release of the patch (and public notice of the vulnerability). How does this stack up against other OSes?
My personal experience is that people form an initial impression about an issue on an emotional basis, so whoever reaches their emotional buttons better (or maybe even just faster) sways that initial impression. Once they have that initial impression formed, they seek out support for that conclusion (hooray for me for making a smart decision!) and they discount evidence to the contrary (because that would only make them feel stupid for being wrong).
OK, that's not everybody all the time, but I think I see it enough to say it happens frequently. Of course I could just have formed that opinion and been ignoring evidence to the contrary...
And longer in cold temperatures, like my front porch in the winter.
One thing I've taken to doing when there are multiple bulbs in a fixture is to put in a mix of incandescents and compact fluorescent bulbs -- the incandescent come on at full strength immediately, and the fluorescents gradually build up. Saves some money over just populating the fixture with only incandescents, but I find it less annoying w/r/t spectrum and time to sufficient illumination.
On the other hand, none of this calculates in the piece of mind and safety of never having to navigate your stairs in the dark, because the LED bulbs should "fail gracefully" instead of working fine one instant and being completely useless the next.
My mother-in-law, on the other hand, is a nurse, and to her the computer is just a mysterious box on her desk that lets her send email and surf the internet. She decided to follow the advice her computer gave her, and she installed SP2 on her < 1 yr old Dell. She lost all internet connectivity and spent over 6 hours on the phone talking to tech support for her internet provider and Microsoft. I feel pretty confident that she will no longer follow her computer's update advice, which will probably be a bad thing in the long run. Plus, she has no idea what it was that tech support ultimately had her do, so next time she wants something installed or if she ever has another problem, she's starting from an unknown state - I'll have no idea if the next problem is a result of whatever 6 hours of tech support did, or if it's whatever new thing I'm trying to install for her. At this point, I'm worried because I don't know if they made her disable the virus protection and/or her software firewall. I know SP2 turns one on by default, but I don't know how good it is. What's the current feeling on the built in firewall?
So far my conclusion is that SP2 is great if you are an expert, or if you're lucky enough to have it all go smoothly. But it can really hose up a casual user when it doesn't install cleanly -- and even recent PCs from fairly large / well known vendors are at risk for a bad install.
Work hasn't taken the plunge yet, but they have a massive number of users and many different waves of hardware purchases and software sets that they have to support, so I'm not terribly surprised. It will be interesting to see how long it takes them. The good news is that whenever they break your PC and can't fix it on the spot, they roll out a (usually newer) one on a cart and swap it out. Might mean I'll get a faster box!
Unless subject to poor conditions, I haven't seen much of our 35mm film degrade significantly. I've recently been scanning some slides (positives) that my parents took in the 50s, and the ones that weren't subject to dampness are beautiful. They were simply stored in the box the processing lab provided. Some of those that were stored where they got damp got mold on them.
But, to put all this in context with this article, you wouldn't store your digital images on a CD left in the sun, loose in a backpack, or on a hard drive that you then subjected to strong magnetic fields. There's always some environmental hazard that can destroy them. But 45 years from now, that picture in an acid-free album (excluding catastrophes) should be easy to view -- to view the digital ones you probably will have had to transfer them from format to format to format over the years, or you may find yourself in a frantic search to locate a viewer that views those quaint "JPG" files from 2004, and it might be as hard as locating a working Commodore 1541 floppy disk is now.
Can you help get the files off my QuikTapes archived on my Amiga 10yrs ago? Probably not as easy as I can view photos of my dad taken in 1940.
I hope this isn't redundant already, but I thought The Long Now Library discussion of this topic was pretty good.
True, but I have photos in my posession taken by my grandparents, of my parents when my parents were just kids. The photos are >60 years old, but they're still in pretty good shape. Even tintypes taken in the mid 1800s are still viewable, since you still have ready access to the proper viewing aparatus (your eyes). They may have degraded, but you can still make out the images. Data saved off on the computers I had in 1986 or 1990 is largely inaccessable to me now, even if the media itself did not degrade, the viewing platform is not readily available. I love digital photography, but I print out anything I REALLY want to pass down to my eventual offspring.
The state of Pennsylvania site was nice enough to include not only the location of the polls for my district, and the hours they would be open, but they also told me I was going to encounter Sequoia electronic voting machines.
The state of Ohio's link doesn't appear to contain that information, unfortunately.
Heck, at too much longer than 2 years the couple is probably divorced anyway...
Nah, the reason we don't eat people is more likely the diseases like kuru. Or perhaps because the symbolic kind of cannibalism practiced in Catholicism is just less messy.
But a quick, well handled recall is 1000% better than deny, deny, deny, deny... oh? oh yeah! we do have a problem!