I'm in Montreal and I've served as a scrutineer. The system works pretty much as described in the article, but I can add a few details.
The voting section of the ballot is done with blank/white circles on a black background. This way, there is no confusion about making marks outside the lines. One circle and one circle only must have a mark for it to be a valid vote. The ballot is fairly large, maybe four by five inches or so, and that allows plenty of space between circles.
The counterfoils are strips that are torn off the ballot with the help of perforations in the paper. The counterfoils are saved in a plastic bag and the number of counterfoils is compared to the number of cast ballots as part of the process of counting votes. It's a simple process, but there is some human error. When I did it, the two numbers didn't match up. We were off by one or two, as I recall.
The biggest problem we had, and a potential source of fraud the scrutineers can do nothing about, is the list of registered voters. We get a stack of papers stapled together that contain the names and addresses of all voters eligible to vote at our poll (there are several polls at each voting location). This list tells us who has already voted in advance polls. Either some of these are in error or some voters don't remember going to the advance polls, but we had a few cases in which we had to refuse voters because they were marked as having already voted. Some of them got really angry, but there is nothing we at the polls can do about that.
The voting and counting are open to the public and to party witnesses. Anybody can watch the process take place, but it is absolutely hands off for them.
The hand-counting doesn't take very long. Each polling station (ballot box) only has to count a few hundred votes, which is then reported to the officer in charge of the voting location, and so on up the chain. The entire station - ballots, papers, counterfoils, etc. - are sealed in the box with special tape and returned, so that any recounts would be easy to accomplish.
This bugs me: "Wind-tunnel experiments have shown that a patch of sand would take winds of about 80 mph to move on Mars compared with only 10 mph on Earth."
In order to move the sand, the wind must overcome friction. Sealed wind-tunnel experiments with different atmospheres can easily show that winds of low-pressure atmospheres need to have more energy to move sand than winds of higher pressure atmospheres.
But the wording of that statement doesn't mention gravity. In order to move the sand, the wind must overcome the force of friction, and of course friction depends on gravity. Did anyone adjust for Mars gravity being 38% of Earth's?
I've run a voting booth for a Canadian federal election. Here's how it works.
A voter approaches and must be found on the list, and not marked as having already voted with an absentee ballot. I had a problem or two there.
I tear a perforated strip off the ballot and stuff it in a bag while giving an eligible voter the ballot. The strips are not identified but serve as a check on the number of ballots in the box.
At the end of the voting, all ballots are counted by hand. There is no electronic counting. The number of voters is validated by the names crossed off the list, by the paper strips, and by the ballots themselves. It's ridiculously easy to tell what a vote is as the ballot is all black with white names and a white circle for the voting mark. Party representatives may observe the counting.
Once the count is done, you report it to the head of the polling station. All ballots and documents are secured inside the taped-up ballot box kept.
There's only one real opportunity for fraud, and that's in the deciding for which candidate a ballot has been cast or if a ballot has been spoiled. That fraud has assuredlyhappened - and was completely ignored, with orders to destroy the ballots. It was a travesty, but at least the cheating side didn't win.
I have no problem with the imterpretation that these are stone tools from 1.8 MYA (and you can tell by my pretentious use of the "MYA" abbreviation that I was once on the road to related Ph.D.).
But I don't understand this:
The stone hand-axes were discovered last year...embedded in a type of rock formed by meteorites....
How or why were these tools embedded in rock formed by meteorites? This rock was either formed before or after the tools. If formed before, they could only have been embedded manually, by H. erectus miners, I guess.
If the rock formed later, then these tools survived intact a meteorite strike, which seems unlikely. (Or was the rock formed by meteorite splash sediments?)
There is one other possibility, but it's so unlikely that I reject it: that the tools and rocks were thrown up in to the air and the whole mess coalesced and solidified.
I wish the article had more info, or I could find the original paper, although here is an AP article with a photo of the rocks.
Never mind that. I wonder what his talking fruit said to make him think it was a bad idea. Was it a banana? They just won't shut up about where they've been. Pears, on the other hand, make philosophical debate a great way to spend an evening, especially the Anjou variety.
As alluded to in the parent, Montreal this past year devoted an entire lane of a one-way street called de Maisonneuve to a bike path and removed some crucial parking space.
But many idiot cyclists don't use it. They continue to bike on Sherbrooke, one block north, which for most of its length is only one and a half lanes of traffic each way plus a parking lane.
That's bad enough, but the idiot cyclists ignore traffic regulations like stop signs and red lights, so you have all this vehicle traffic that has to pass the same God-damned cyclist three times in the squeeze.
Instead of making it easier for Montreal cyclists, they should ban them.
The same thing happens on the Plateau. I used to live on Duluth and you'd have all these cyclists running through the stop signs on Duluth instead of using the bike path on Rachel, a block north.
Ideas and stories are not copyrightable. It's the execution of the ideas and stories that are protected.
You can take the basic story of "King Lear" and create "Ran". You can take the basic story of "Seven Samurai" and create "The Magnificent Seven". Those pairs of movies share plots and stories but each executes its own vision.
In this case, the problem with the game is that they stole the execution - i.e. the art - used in other games, not the story.
That's as bad as calling the French monstrosity the "Char". That also means "tank". The proper name for it is the B1 bis - or, in long form the Char de bataille Renault B1 bis.
Which, by the way, ran a hell of a lot better than my Renault Alliance.
The surprising thing here isn't that the astronomers discovered methane on a planet. Heck, Uranus is full of the stuff and other gas giants have it as well.
It's not surprising to find methane on an extrasolar planet. What is different about this is, to QTFA:
"Initially, that is surprising," says Sara Seager of MIT in Cambridge, US, who was not involved in the study. Because HD 189733b orbits very close to its parent star - just 10% of Mercury's distance from the Sun, it is very hot, with atmospheric temperatures of about 700 Celsius. "When the temperature is this high, the dominant form of carbon should be carbon monoxide, not methane," says Seager.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry. I wasn't a scrutineer, of course. I ran the polling station. I may be going a tad senile.
I'm in Montreal and I've served as a scrutineer. The system works pretty much as described in the article, but I can add a few details.
The voting section of the ballot is done with blank/white circles on a black background. This way, there is no confusion about making marks outside the lines. One circle and one circle only must have a mark for it to be a valid vote. The ballot is fairly large, maybe four by five inches or so, and that allows plenty of space between circles.
The counterfoils are strips that are torn off the ballot with the help of perforations in the paper. The counterfoils are saved in a plastic bag and the number of counterfoils is compared to the number of cast ballots as part of the process of counting votes. It's a simple process, but there is some human error. When I did it, the two numbers didn't match up. We were off by one or two, as I recall.
The biggest problem we had, and a potential source of fraud the scrutineers can do nothing about, is the list of registered voters. We get a stack of papers stapled together that contain the names and addresses of all voters eligible to vote at our poll (there are several polls at each voting location). This list tells us who has already voted in advance polls. Either some of these are in error or some voters don't remember going to the advance polls, but we had a few cases in which we had to refuse voters because they were marked as having already voted. Some of them got really angry, but there is nothing we at the polls can do about that.
The voting and counting are open to the public and to party witnesses. Anybody can watch the process take place, but it is absolutely hands off for them.
The hand-counting doesn't take very long. Each polling station (ballot box) only has to count a few hundred votes, which is then reported to the officer in charge of the voting location, and so on up the chain. The entire station - ballots, papers, counterfoils, etc. - are sealed in the box with special tape and returned, so that any recounts would be easy to accomplish.
...opening a can of webOS?
Yahoo's search engine IS Bing.
This bugs me: "Wind-tunnel experiments have shown that a patch of sand would take winds of about 80 mph to move on Mars compared with only 10 mph on Earth."
In order to move the sand, the wind must overcome friction. Sealed wind-tunnel experiments with different atmospheres can easily show that winds of low-pressure atmospheres need to have more energy to move sand than winds of higher pressure atmospheres.
But the wording of that statement doesn't mention gravity. In order to move the sand, the wind must overcome the force of friction, and of course friction depends on gravity. Did anyone adjust for Mars gravity being 38% of Earth's?
I've run a voting booth for a Canadian federal election. Here's how it works.
A voter approaches and must be found on the list, and not marked as having already voted with an absentee ballot. I had a problem or two there.
I tear a perforated strip off the ballot and stuff it in a bag while giving an eligible voter the ballot. The strips are not identified but serve as a check on the number of ballots in the box.
At the end of the voting, all ballots are counted by hand. There is no electronic counting. The number of voters is validated by the names crossed off the list, by the paper strips, and by the ballots themselves. It's ridiculously easy to tell what a vote is as the ballot is all black with white names and a white circle for the voting mark. Party representatives may observe the counting.
Once the count is done, you report it to the head of the polling station. All ballots and documents are secured inside the taped-up ballot box kept.
There's only one real opportunity for fraud, and that's in the deciding for which candidate a ballot has been cast or if a ballot has been spoiled. That fraud has assuredly happened - and was completely ignored, with orders to destroy the ballots. It was a travesty, but at least the cheating side didn't win.
Lance?
I was friends with Nets when we were undergrads. He was just Nets Katz, then. Hawk is a translation of his Hebrew name "Nets".
This query has to be coming from Israel, probably Tel Aviv.
That was my baby, and we had been around for two years by 1996.
Our archive of back issues is available to all. Go cruise our 1996: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v02/index.html
One sample issue, NSD 2.20, leads with the launch of Quake and the new MSNBC, whose DNS entry was suspended for lack of payment.
The main archive is here: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/backiss.html
I have no problem with the imterpretation that these are stone tools from 1.8 MYA (and you can tell by my pretentious use of the "MYA" abbreviation that I was once on the road to related Ph.D.).
But I don't understand this:
The stone hand-axes were discovered last year...embedded in a type of rock formed by meteorites....
How or why were these tools embedded in rock formed by meteorites? This rock was either formed before or after the tools. If formed before, they could only have been embedded manually, by H. erectus miners, I guess.
If the rock formed later, then these tools survived intact a meteorite strike, which seems unlikely. (Or was the rock formed by meteorite splash sediments?)
There is one other possibility, but it's so unlikely that I reject it: that the tools and rocks were thrown up in to the air and the whole mess coalesced and solidified.
I wish the article had more info, or I could find the original paper, although here is an AP article with a photo of the rocks.
According to a poster above, Mag 6 is about as visible as Uranus - so if you pull your head out of your ass, you should be able to see it.
...one cup.
Grommets are always silent, but what starts to grate on me is the whining and grumbling from the Wallace.
Eugene's also known for grass seed. And the pollen that makes it.
Whenever I visit in the summer, my allergy makes me feel like my face is going to melt.
Never mind that. I wonder what his talking fruit said to make him think it was a bad idea. Was it a banana? They just won't shut up about where they've been. Pears, on the other hand, make philosophical debate a great way to spend an evening, especially the Anjou variety.
OK, so "sunday" was fixed, to "sundae".
Now....
"a thirty second bath" should be "a thirty-second bath"
"fancy like" should be "fancy-like"
"the mans bill" should be "the man's bill"
"two page acknowledgments section" should be "two-page acknowledgments section"
"by it's incoherent nature" should be "by its incoherent nature"
That's enough. I'm bored. Let me just add that the Morse and Hughes entries in the book sound hilarious.
I've been waiting for something like that for 20 years.
Why don't you use the bike path? Why don't you stop at lights or stop signs?
As alluded to in the parent, Montreal this past year devoted an entire lane of a one-way street called de Maisonneuve to a bike path and removed some crucial parking space.
But many idiot cyclists don't use it. They continue to bike on Sherbrooke, one block north, which for most of its length is only one and a half lanes of traffic each way plus a parking lane.
That's bad enough, but the idiot cyclists ignore traffic regulations like stop signs and red lights, so you have all this vehicle traffic that has to pass the same God-damned cyclist three times in the squeeze.
Instead of making it easier for Montreal cyclists, they should ban them.
The same thing happens on the Plateau. I used to live on Duluth and you'd have all these cyclists running through the stop signs on Duluth instead of using the bike path on Rachel, a block north.
Ideas and stories are not copyrightable. It's the execution of the ideas and stories that are protected.
You can take the basic story of "King Lear" and create "Ran". You can take the basic story of "Seven Samurai" and create "The Magnificent Seven". Those pairs of movies share plots and stories but each executes its own vision.
In this case, the problem with the game is that they stole the execution - i.e. the art - used in other games, not the story.
That's as bad as calling the French monstrosity the "Char". That also means "tank". The proper name for it is the B1 bis - or, in long form the Char de bataille Renault B1 bis.
Which, by the way, ran a hell of a lot better than my Renault Alliance.
I guess Gen Con failed the saving throw.
No. How would it be a pun?
The surprising thing here isn't that the astronomers discovered methane on a planet. Heck, Uranus is full of the stuff and other gas giants have it as well.
It's not surprising to find methane on an extrasolar planet. What is different about this is, to QTFA:
"Initially, that is surprising," says Sara Seager of MIT in Cambridge, US, who was not involved in the study. Because HD 189733b orbits very close to its parent star - just 10% of Mercury's distance from the Sun, it is very hot, with atmospheric temperatures of about 700 Celsius. "When the temperature is this high, the dominant form of carbon should be carbon monoxide, not methane," says Seager.