...to escape being swallowed by the sun in a red-giant expansion? Then you need to be further away than Mars.
...to survive a nearby supernova, your only chance is to be underground inside of a giant mass (and be able to survive the extreme conditions).
...to have abundant raw materials? Then Luna is closer than Mars, and the asteroid belt requires less energy if you are going to import the materials.
...to build a space-faring capability? Then yeah, you'll want to live in space but don't forget you'll need lots of materials for shielding. You would probably want to reduce the cost of space launches first by building a space elevator or a skyhook.
...to relieve population pressure? Education of our beyond-carrying-capacity population may work better, except for those who are about as smart than a bacterial colony about to self-asphyxiate.
...to inspire an interest in science? Almost anything will do that. Unmanned missions with lots of audiovisuals will go further than a single trip to Mars (which you could just fake through video editing anyway). Even a flight sim with detailed Mars scenery bundled with an OS would be more instructive than a news announcement "Look, humans are on Mars" good for about five minutes of press attention.
Does anyone really think that a heater requiring a 400W heatsink is really progress?
The bar has been raised on what constitutes progress. If you want to succeed in today's world you have to know what your customers need.
Also, the prevalent marketing that something is "new and improved" while it really isn't has been a constant crying of wolf and so I'm sick of rewarding the marketing instead of incentivizing something more sustainable.
Finally, why should I pay for a DRM-enabled chipset, a DRM-enabled soundcard, etc. Why should I incentivize the opposite of progress?
The mission, costing just under $4 million, will attempt the first controlled flight of a solar sail.
Maybe this technology could be used someday to boost light satellites so they don't fall out of orbit? In any case the investment to find out sounds like it's well worth it.
Sometimes the data streams contain multiple programs (such as a standard definition simulcast alongside a high definition one). And there might also be null packets to pad out the bitrate.
I guess this was done for the sake of backward compatibility, but it's a bandwidth-hogging, CPU-cycle burning mess in the meantime. Now if nobody switches over to HD then we will be stuck with it as the de-facto permanent standard:) I personally don't have any driving need to spend a fortune on HDTV since 99% of the content is garbage. Sure, it'll be sharper, brighter, flashing, jumping-out-of-the-screen at you garbage, but still garbage.
...high definition MPEG [decompression]...
That explains it all.
If the tools were available, this is what I would try: decode the video stream into a raw format on disk. Then, play back from the raw format. Either it does so smoothly or your disk [array] or bus is swamped by the data rate. Then, you would basically have to filter out extraneous stuff and/or take reductions in image quality until it fits through the bus. For most people, the hassle factor is pretty strong.
Under Windows there are many other video cards and drivers that claim some level of HD video support, so perhaps it's easier to get good results.
Putting on my wild speculation hat, I wouldn't be surprised if most modern video cards already come equipped to do MPEG decompression right out of the box. But maybe it's a behind-the-scenes gag order forcing the driver either to remain closed in order to enable MPEG mode, or to keep the appropriate register settings well hidden.
For a non-TV consumer like me, buying a DTV card may be unlikely, but even less than that is to buy in to non-freedom just for the sake of convenience.
Actually with the range extension it looks like you already do own a bluetooth device but unfortunately it is your garage door opener.
The only thing you're missing, apparently is that currently, the door only opens when you push the button on your remote. From now on it will open... automatically!
[soapbox] There might be some valid reasons why modifying the bluetooth equipment isn't universally a good idea.
If 1080i blasts out at 200 Megs per second (as someone else in this discussion claims) then it definitely is a drain on resources requiring, what, 700 Gigs just to store a 1 hour program? Either that's a lot of storage, or a lot of cpu time compressing it to 70 Gigs.
How well do the 720 and 480 modes work and what are the real performance requirements for that?
Maybe it's possible to buy this card, get some use out of it before july, and because it supports Linux, count on ongoing support even if the unthinkable should happen.
It sounds to me like the mainstream political machinery views this as nothing but a newfangled fundraising scheme, to be "tapped into" until it runs out of sweet sap and then they move onto whatever else is causing a fuss.
Sure, they'll take the ideas, give them some lip service, and certainly take the money gladly but even if elected I'm cynical the ideas would go very far.
That's why a separate party would be preferable. Not that it would get very far politically, I just think it would be convenient to read a forum about proposition X or amendment X, or local politician X and have a better idea of what it would do than what the current pro/con commercial soundbites provide.
Sadly, an incredibly small amount of mental horsepower goes into making most political decisions, and we just don't learn from our mistakes very well, especially if they happen in another state.
A new party with small ambitions (e.g. mostly local political discussions) would probably spend political contributors' money far more cost-effectively and get results much sooner.
Q: Who benefits from these paper trail add-ons to electronic voting machines?
A: The same companies that supplied the defectively designed machines in the first place.
(How idiotic is it to supply a machine without a valid recount capability? Sounds pretty self-serving if you ask me, for them to benefit any further from this incompetence. Are Diebold lobbyists supporting these new bills by chance?)
Q: Now, who gets to design the add-ons?
A: The same companies.
And let me guess, further revisions will be needed as a result of future flaws...
I think the public and election officials are being played for fools, or they are being asked to design a system on the spot that they are not qualified to even describe the requirements for.
No, let's not send any more money down this black hole. Switch back to an all-paper system, repeal the HAVA fiasco entirely, and be done with this.
Thank you Lulu for clearing up and addressing some of my concerns. The OVC design is far preferable to some of the other options out there.
But, whatever the technical excellence of the design that is adopted, in the long term, I expect that certain undesirable changes will creep in under the tent as a result of public ignorance.
For instance, don't you see it coming with all the brouhaha over illegal aliens? Soon a driver license RFID reader will be integrated with such a system tied to an identity database so as to "make sure" that only legal, registered voters can vote. It'll easily pass right under the radar of the voting public without guessing that such a system takes away their right to the secret ballot (not that most people know that they have this right).
Specifically, this can evolve into a system where the record of each voter is stored for later review by profile-builders in order to investigate those who did not vote for the Great Leader. Then, elections will always go 99% to the same party. Oh wait...
It sounds like an advance at first, but once you think about it, it is worse than the current stuff for the average person.
The average user, for instance can't tell the difference between 16 and 24 bits with average headphones or speakers at 44kHz. For the average user, upping this to 24 with 32 for mixing is not an advance but a regression into slower downloads. And then what? 192KHz sample rate? This is not 192kpbs total data rate as in
your MP3 but 192KHz per data word. Sure, they just unilaterally multiply the size of "standard" sound files by 8, and hope no one will notice.
Is this a plot to smash razor-thin ISP profit margins? To force people to upgrade to broadband just to be able to do the same stuff? Or is this so that every song can include a unique signature inside it to trace copies back to the source? I would prefer if the next advance were simply stable drivers...
Speaking of which, the article mentions:
The new HD audio standard ties tightly with Microsoft's United Audio Architecture, which limits the amount of driver writing necessary for chip and codec manufacturers, which may in turn limit their design flexibility as well.
Doesn't surprise me. There is a lot of tightness going on. And it wouldn't surprise me either if the design will evolve into something
DRM compliant.
I wonder if it was deliberately named MUAA (i.e. MU-HA-hA-AA) by some secretly sympathetic, clueful MS insiders? Very appropriate.
Article continues:
It also emphasizes the importance of onboard audio over PCI and external solutions.
Naturally, this would coincidentally also prevent an encrypted data stream from being intercepted. For this to work, the entire stream must flow inside the motherboard chipset, be decrypted away from prying eyes and never go to an external interface until it is actually decoded.
I don't know who is going to pay to lock themselves into DRM drivers and bloated audio standards, but it's not going to be me.
That's only if you can report the theft before the thief gains entry to your home... Since you have no phone, it's possible that this might take you longer to report it. You may not even be aware that your phone has been stolen for a while. Then, if you deactivate your phone account, how do you enter your own home when you get back?
"[they are] looking into a biometric reader instead"
They can look into it all they want but biometrics aren't a complete solution either. Once thieves have captured your biometric data it just becomes another number for them to store away, just a bit longer than the typical ID. Then, stupid banks and marketing organizations will start requiring it, thinking it is more secure and it will eventually become useless for other purposes.
It's paradoxical isn't it, how a move toward greater security actually turns out to be less in the long term?
An AC elsewhere in this discussion has mentioned that there is a yes/no button to approve the charges; it isn't just waving that is necessary (whew, what a relief). It seems the article was being a bit too optimistic about the convenience aspect. Maybe it was just marketing-spin.
But, I agree that if the phone is stolen all bets are off. Of course the thief will have no compunction about pressing the yes button all over town. So it looks like the phone needs to have a PIN entry feature as well.
Don't fall for it just to get those measly advantages. It is far better to make sure that nobody can change thousands of votes easily, and that's why paper is best.
If you were blind wouldn't you prefer a braille ballot to having your votes broadcasted out loud to everyone in the room? (This voids the right to a secret ballot.)
Isn't it better to print out ballot instructions in several languages than to try to help a foreign speaker use a funky user interface without knowing that person's language?
In general, who is going to provide the tech support to the person who wants to enable the extra-large fonts?
A voting machine looks to me like a way to create more problems than to provide a real solution to anything. I won't support them because the average volunteer lacks the proficiency to know if anything is wrong with a complex system, and I don't want anyone handling the election except for ordinary citizens.
With a normal ballot box, it's obvious if someone is trying to break into it. It's obvious if it's being swapped with another ballot box. It's obvious if your paper ballot has been physically placed inside it. Many things are obvious that would remain hidden with a voting machine. It's just a risk not worth taking.
Does this mean that unauthorized charges can be made without even being able to turn off the capability?
If so, then drive-by theft suddenly becomes possible. Gives war-driving a whole new meaning.
OK, not all of them, but enough of them
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Not every office worker can perform their job from home
True, but only a small percentage needs to switch for this to pay for itself, both monetarily and environmentally. Even if only the people at the peak of rush hour are targetted for it, think of the savings....
Of course, I wouldn't be happy just leaving it there. Part of a long term effort is to find out what's keeping the rest of them tied to their office and to build the software (e.g. rich collaboration, better internet security, stronger privacy protections) or business-school pedagogy (or whatever) needed to change that.
Re:Care to explain that?
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"Seriously, how?"
Look at rush hour traffic and consider why it's there. It consists of a bunch of people commuting to work because their presence is required elsewhere. The number one reason most of these people can't telecommute to work is because of insufficient bandwidth. They have or they can only get or afford a dial-up connection. It would hurt productivity to telecommute while using slow speed or unreliable connections. Resolve this problem and that excuse is taken away for the employee as well as the employer. I believe that eventually rich collaboration tools will mature and make the home the preferred work environment, more productive and flexible than the typical office.
Say only 10% of the U.S. population can be taken off the roads due to more widespread viability of broadband. This, by itself, would save enough barrels of oil to match the entire fuel consumption of a dozen small countries.
I look at this as something that could be done today, whereas many alternative energy solutions, or old-school infrastructure (like roads, bridges, tunnels, etc.) depend on much larger $$$ investments, require more expensive maintenance and take a longer time to begin to pay for themselves.
Consider how much fuel money fast broadband would already save one person in the first month alone, and once out in full force how many expensive (in the billions) road projects can even be postponed or avoided.
Arctic ice is melting at such a fast rate that
the Northwest Passage is going to be navigable by commercial ship traffic within 20-30 years, something that in all of recorded history
has never been possible. That means that even in the medium term (centuries) the trend is a warming one.
Some background on the Northwest Passage: the ancient European
explorers had long been seeking a shorter route for trade with the
Orient, and some, like Magellan did find a route, but it was a very long
one, by rounding the tips of the southern continents. No similar consistently
navigable route through the North was found at the time. This seems to show that the temperatures in the Arctic have been colder in the past (or that northern explorers were more incompetent than southern explorers). Even today, only a few
ships have ever made it through, and it is certainly too dangerous for commercial shipping.
If you want to read more about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_passage
So much for multi-camera VR...
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If most of the populace is still trying to suck their bandwidth through a dial-up straw.
I hope someone on high wakes up and realizes that a fast broadband infrastructure has the potential to reduce energy consumption more than any other technology out there.
I just had a disturbing thought. What if the pretty pictures of the die as obviously having dual cores is just a marketing gimmick, and inside the silicon there will really be only one processor with hyperthreading to make you think there are two?
How would the average consumer be able to tell the difference? Even if a benchmark appears to show that dual core is no faster, this could just be explained away as some sort of obscure architectural bottleneck.
Is there any externally visible way to determine for sure that the customer is getting two separate cores and not just HT enabled by default?
*reads article*
Sure enough, from the article:
The major issue with Intel's approach to dual core designs is that the dual cores must contest with one another for bandwidth across Intel's 64-bit NetBurst FSB...
In that case, I'm going to wait for the benchmarks on this one.
Collect statistics. Profile the Xlib code to see which functions are being called most often on a typical system. Skim off the top 10% or so of the functions for implementation on the card and leave the rest for the driver.
Keep the entry cost minimal. Use a fast DSP (only a few bucks anyway), but a really cheap FPGA that just offloads the most parallelizable things. Have only a small amount of RAM in the base unit but leave open expansion slots to upgrade to an obscene amount. Leave an expansion slot for a huge mother of an FPGA. Leave open holes on the PCB for people to insert and solder in their favorite IO ports. Use PCI for the first revision.
Don't worry much about 3D yet, pick your battles and stick to 2D for now. Your best bet is to gain the support of people that migrate computers to Linux for a living and don't want to worry about surprises, licensing overhead or closed-source support contracts that either come to an end or refuse to support kernel upgrades.
Work towards a simple, stable system first, with clean, extensible driver code and with a mind to provide a graceful fallback/reset if the firmware is buggy.
Get the base unit to run cool and fanless so that it can be plug-and-forget.
Release beta, sit back and let the OSS community do the bulk of the optimization (and cross-platform testing!) based on its own interests and priorities.
Pick and choose the best patches for the "official" driver, matched to the "official" firmware. Maintain a standard of stability, and let those who have other priorities release their own variants.
As the large FPGA becomes cheap, include it in the base unit and move more functions into the firmware in new revisions.
If you can't finance it yourself, issue stock in a Dutch auction on your own website and require all bidders to preorder at least 1 unit. If you go this route, produce no IP of your own, as this would make you a hostile takeover target.
The first version will be slower than the big budget video cards for the average off-the-shelf fragfest, no question about that. But, the hacking potential is hard to pass up, and it doesn't become obsolete that quickly because you can reprogram it into accelerating any number of things besides video.
Eventually, an entire set of firmware-loadable functions will develop around this, and seeing as the FPGA can be reprogrammed on the fly, it may be possible to make an adaptive driver that "swaps out" an infrequently used set in favor of another set that is repeated more often. Thus, video playback, for instance, may start out a bit choppy on a slow machine but will smooth out after a few frames. I don't know if this will obviate freezing the design in ASIC at some point, but it is worth a try.
Tell me, at what point would you consider the electronic machines reliable enough to stop demanding a recount of the paper ballots after every single election?
There are a lot of requirements to be satisfied before these machines are acceptable (if ever). For instance, recounts only take place if the vote is close, but what if only a single person in a locked room is the one rigging it? They can just change the voting counts electronically so that it isn't close so that no one has the grounds to contest the election. If anyone catches them, they just claim it was because of a software bug.
Under such conditions, even with backup paper ballots thrown into a ballot box, the voice of the voters can be effectively ignored.
That is why paper is best. People can still cheat but the impact of the cheating is at least limited.
Multiple backups, all over the place. I should have been more explicit about this.
To break it down more explicitly (I am agreeing with you but am warning that the devil may be in the details) you would need:
Multiple backups of the media, which may become unreadable even on the same drives that recorded them due to bad media quality, and
Multiple backups of the hardware, because the quality of the drives themselves may be too low to last more than the 1 year warranty.
An unbroken line of training to assure that there always exists the engineering expertise to make head or tail of old media, old hardware, old software.
With enough (masssive) redundancy maybe a future Alexandria-style fire event can be avoided. It may be cheaper in the long run just to produce quality products with the redundancy built in to the technology, but the current distribution infrastructure seems to favor only the survival of commodity vendors.
Either way, it would be a great great boon to research to put so much wisdom at everyone's fingertips (now if only if we can get Congress itself to use it...)
Don't count your chickens yet, maybe the "details" that remain to be worked out are some list of exceptions so that the new media side doesn't get whacked... so that basic stuff bundled with Windoze (e.g. IE, media players, etc.), ISP software, networking stacks, etc. don't themselves become liable at some time in the future, creating a huge legal "inconvenience" for their "upstanding corporate citizens."
It is fundamentally unsound anyway, even without an exceptions list. Software doesn't induce anything, it only facilitates decisions (unless it's spyware that doesn't ask permission, but that's not what they had in mind here). Only marketing, or word of mouth can induce a decision.
Slashdot Mirror
*searches*
Argh!
Which one was the paper you read? I'm afraid to click on some of the links :)
++
Within 100 years the act of thinking will require royalty payments.
If it is...
...to escape being swallowed by the sun in a red-giant expansion? Then you need to be further away than Mars.
...to survive a nearby supernova, your only chance is to be underground inside of a giant mass (and be able to survive the extreme conditions).
...to have abundant raw materials? Then Luna is closer than Mars, and the asteroid belt requires less energy if you are going to import the materials.
...to build a space-faring capability? Then yeah, you'll want to live in space but don't forget you'll need lots of materials for shielding. You would probably want to reduce the cost of space launches first by building a space elevator or a skyhook.
...to relieve population pressure? Education of our beyond-carrying-capacity population may work better, except for those who are about as smart than a bacterial colony about to self-asphyxiate.
...to inspire an interest in science? Almost anything will do that. Unmanned missions with lots of audiovisuals will go further than a single trip to Mars (which you could just fake through video editing anyway). Even a flight sim with detailed Mars scenery bundled with an OS would be more instructive than a news announcement "Look, humans are on Mars" good for about five minutes of press attention.
Does anyone really think that a heater requiring a 400W heatsink is really progress?
The bar has been raised on what constitutes progress. If you want to succeed in today's world you have to know what your customers need.
Also, the prevalent marketing that something is "new and improved" while it really isn't has been a constant crying of wolf and so I'm sick of rewarding the marketing instead of incentivizing something more sustainable.
Finally, why should I pay for a DRM-enabled chipset, a DRM-enabled soundcard, etc. Why should I incentivize the opposite of progress?
The cnn article says:
Maybe this technology could be used someday to boost light satellites so they don't fall out of orbit? In any case the investment to find out sounds like it's well worth it.
Sometimes the data streams contain multiple programs (such as a standard definition simulcast alongside a high definition one). And there might also be null packets to pad out the bitrate.
I guess this was done for the sake of backward compatibility, but it's a bandwidth-hogging, CPU-cycle burning mess in the meantime. Now if nobody switches over to HD then we will be stuck with it as the de-facto permanent standard :) I personally don't have any driving need to spend a fortune on HDTV since 99% of the content is garbage. Sure, it'll be sharper, brighter, flashing, jumping-out-of-the-screen at you garbage, but still garbage.
That explains it all.
If the tools were available, this is what I would try: decode the video stream into a raw format on disk. Then, play back from the raw format. Either it does so smoothly or your disk [array] or bus is swamped by the data rate. Then, you would basically have to filter out extraneous stuff and/or take reductions in image quality until it fits through the bus. For most people, the hassle factor is pretty strong.
Under Windows there are many other video cards and drivers that claim some level of HD video support, so perhaps it's easier to get good results.
Putting on my wild speculation hat, I wouldn't be surprised if most modern video cards already come equipped to do MPEG decompression right out of the box. But maybe it's a behind-the-scenes gag order forcing the driver either to remain closed in order to enable MPEG mode, or to keep the appropriate register settings well hidden.
For a non-TV consumer like me, buying a DTV card may be unlikely, but even less than that is to buy in to non-freedom just for the sake of convenience.
Actually with the range extension it looks like you already do own a bluetooth device but unfortunately it is your garage door opener.
The only thing you're missing, apparently is that currently, the door only opens when you push the button on your remote. From now on it will open... automatically!
[soapbox] There might be some valid reasons why modifying the bluetooth equipment isn't universally a good idea.
If 1080i blasts out at 200 Megs per second (as someone else in this discussion claims) then it definitely is a drain on resources requiring, what, 700 Gigs just to store a 1 hour program? Either that's a lot of storage, or a lot of cpu time compressing it to 70 Gigs.
How well do the 720 and 480 modes work and what are the real performance requirements for that?
Maybe it's possible to buy this card, get some use out of it before july, and because it supports Linux, count on ongoing support even if the unthinkable should happen.
I don't use FC, but this gives me an idea to lighten the burden on distro servers everywhere.
Why not an apt-get with a bt capability? Or is it already in the works? Shouldn't be that hard to add...
It sounds to me like the mainstream political machinery views this as nothing but a newfangled fundraising scheme, to be "tapped into" until it runs out of sweet sap and then they move onto whatever else is causing a fuss.
Sure, they'll take the ideas, give them some lip service, and certainly take the money gladly but even if elected I'm cynical the ideas would go very far.
That's why a separate party would be preferable. Not that it would get very far politically, I just think it would be convenient to read a forum about proposition X or amendment X, or local politician X and have a better idea of what it would do than what the current pro/con commercial soundbites provide.
Sadly, an incredibly small amount of mental horsepower goes into making most political decisions, and we just don't learn from our mistakes very well, especially if they happen in another state.
A new party with small ambitions (e.g. mostly local political discussions) would probably spend political contributors' money far more cost-effectively and get results much sooner.
Q: Who benefits from these paper trail add-ons to electronic voting machines?
A: The same companies that supplied the defectively designed machines in the first place.
(How idiotic is it to supply a machine without a valid recount capability? Sounds pretty self-serving if you ask me, for them to benefit any further from this incompetence. Are Diebold lobbyists supporting these new bills by chance?)
Q: Now, who gets to design the add-ons?
A: The same companies.
And let me guess, further revisions will be needed as a result of future flaws...
I think the public and election officials are being played for fools, or they are being asked to design a system on the spot that they are not qualified to even describe the requirements for.
No, let's not send any more money down this black hole. Switch back to an all-paper system, repeal the HAVA fiasco entirely, and be done with this.
Thank you Lulu for clearing up and addressing some of my concerns. The OVC design is far preferable to some of the other options out there.
But, whatever the technical excellence of the design that is adopted, in the long term, I expect that certain undesirable changes will creep in under the tent as a result of public ignorance.
For instance, don't you see it coming with all the brouhaha over illegal aliens? Soon a driver license RFID reader will be integrated with such a system tied to an identity database so as to "make sure" that only legal, registered voters can vote. It'll easily pass right under the radar of the voting public without guessing that such a system takes away their right to the secret ballot (not that most people know that they have this right).
Specifically, this can evolve into a system where the record of each voter is stored for later review by profile-builders in order to investigate those who did not vote for the Great Leader. Then, elections will always go 99% to the same party. Oh wait...
It sounds like an advance at first, but once you think about it, it is worse than the current stuff for the average person.
The average user, for instance can't tell the difference between 16 and 24 bits with average headphones or speakers at 44kHz. For the average user, upping this to 24 with 32 for mixing is not an advance but a regression into slower downloads. And then what? 192KHz sample rate? This is not 192kpbs total data rate as in your MP3 but 192KHz per data word. Sure, they just unilaterally multiply the size of "standard" sound files by 8, and hope no one will notice.
Is this a plot to smash razor-thin ISP profit margins? To force people to upgrade to broadband just to be able to do the same stuff? Or is this so that every song can include a unique signature inside it to trace copies back to the source? I would prefer if the next advance were simply stable drivers...
Speaking of which, the article mentions:
Doesn't surprise me. There is a lot of tightness going on. And it wouldn't surprise me either if the design will evolve into something DRM compliant.
I wonder if it was deliberately named MUAA (i.e. MU-HA-hA-AA) by some secretly sympathetic, clueful MS insiders? Very appropriate.
Article continues:
Naturally, this would coincidentally also prevent an encrypted data stream from being intercepted. For this to work, the entire stream must flow inside the motherboard chipset, be decrypted away from prying eyes and never go to an external interface until it is actually decoded.
I don't know who is going to pay to lock themselves into DRM drivers and bloated audio standards, but it's not going to be me.
"You'd be liable for some charges, not others"
That's only if you can report the theft before the thief gains entry to your home... Since you have no phone, it's possible that this might take you longer to report it. You may not even be aware that your phone has been stolen for a while. Then, if you deactivate your phone account, how do you enter your own home when you get back?
"[they are] looking into a biometric reader instead"
They can look into it all they want but biometrics aren't a complete solution either. Once thieves have captured your biometric data it just becomes another number for them to store away, just a bit longer than the typical ID. Then, stupid banks and marketing organizations will start requiring it, thinking it is more secure and it will eventually become useless for other purposes.
It's paradoxical isn't it, how a move toward greater security actually turns out to be less in the long term?
An AC elsewhere in this discussion has mentioned that there is a yes/no button to approve the charges; it isn't just waving that is necessary (whew, what a relief). It seems the article was being a bit too optimistic about the convenience aspect. Maybe it was just marketing-spin.
But, I agree that if the phone is stolen all bets are off. Of course the thief will have no compunction about pressing the yes button all over town. So it looks like the phone needs to have a PIN entry feature as well.
Don't fall for it just to get those measly advantages. It is far better to make sure that nobody can change thousands of votes easily, and that's why paper is best.
A voting machine looks to me like a way to create more problems than to provide a real solution to anything. I won't support them because the average volunteer lacks the proficiency to know if anything is wrong with a complex system, and I don't want anyone handling the election except for ordinary citizens.
With a normal ballot box, it's obvious if someone is trying to break into it. It's obvious if it's being swapped with another ballot box. It's obvious if your paper ballot has been physically placed inside it. Many things are obvious that would remain hidden with a voting machine. It's just a risk not worth taking.
Does this mean that unauthorized charges can be made without even being able to turn off the capability?
If so, then drive-by theft suddenly becomes possible. Gives war-driving a whole new meaning.
True, but only a small percentage needs to switch for this to pay for itself, both monetarily and environmentally. Even if only the people at the peak of rush hour are targetted for it, think of the savings....
Of course, I wouldn't be happy just leaving it there. Part of a long term effort is to find out what's keeping the rest of them tied to their office and to build the software (e.g. rich collaboration, better internet security, stronger privacy protections) or business-school pedagogy (or whatever) needed to change that.
Look at rush hour traffic and consider why it's there. It consists of a bunch of people commuting to work because their presence is required elsewhere. The number one reason most of these people can't telecommute to work is because of insufficient bandwidth. They have or they can only get or afford a dial-up connection. It would hurt productivity to telecommute while using slow speed or unreliable connections. Resolve this problem and that excuse is taken away for the employee as well as the employer. I believe that eventually rich collaboration tools will mature and make the home the preferred work environment, more productive and flexible than the typical office.
Say only 10% of the U.S. population can be taken off the roads due to more widespread viability of broadband. This, by itself, would save enough barrels of oil to match the entire fuel consumption of a dozen small countries.
I look at this as something that could be done today, whereas many alternative energy solutions, or old-school infrastructure (like roads, bridges, tunnels, etc.) depend on much larger $$$ investments, require more expensive maintenance and take a longer time to begin to pay for themselves.
Consider how much fuel money fast broadband would already save one person in the first month alone, and once out in full force how many expensive (in the billions) road projects can even be postponed or avoided.
Arctic ice is melting at such a fast rate that the Northwest Passage is going to be navigable by commercial ship traffic within 20-30 years, something that in all of recorded history has never been possible. That means that even in the medium term (centuries) the trend is a warming one.
Some background on the Northwest Passage: the ancient European explorers had long been seeking a shorter route for trade with the Orient, and some, like Magellan did find a route, but it was a very long one, by rounding the tips of the southern continents. No similar consistently navigable route through the North was found at the time. This seems to show that the temperatures in the Arctic have been colder in the past (or that northern explorers were more incompetent than southern explorers). Even today, only a few ships have ever made it through, and it is certainly too dangerous for commercial shipping.
If you want to read more about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_passage
If most of the populace is still trying to suck their bandwidth through a dial-up straw.
I hope someone on high wakes up and realizes that a fast broadband infrastructure has the potential to reduce energy consumption more than any other technology out there.
I just had a disturbing thought. What if the pretty pictures of the die as obviously having dual cores is just a marketing gimmick, and inside the silicon there will really be only one processor with hyperthreading to make you think there are two?
How would the average consumer be able to tell the difference? Even if a benchmark appears to show that dual core is no faster, this could just be explained away as some sort of obscure architectural bottleneck.
Is there any externally visible way to determine for sure that the customer is getting two separate cores and not just HT enabled by default?
*reads article*
Sure enough, from the article:
In that case, I'm going to wait for the benchmarks on this one.
I suggest that they:
The first version will be slower than the big budget video cards for the average off-the-shelf fragfest, no question about that. But, the hacking potential is hard to pass up, and it doesn't become obsolete that quickly because you can reprogram it into accelerating any number of things besides video.
Eventually, an entire set of firmware-loadable functions will develop around this, and seeing as the FPGA can be reprogrammed on the fly, it may be possible to make an adaptive driver that "swaps out" an infrequently used set in favor of another set that is repeated more often. Thus, video playback, for instance, may start out a bit choppy on a slow machine but will smooth out after a few frames. I don't know if this will obviate freezing the design in ASIC at some point, but it is worth a try.
There are a lot of requirements to be satisfied before these machines are acceptable (if ever). For instance, recounts only take place if the vote is close, but what if only a single person in a locked room is the one rigging it? They can just change the voting counts electronically so that it isn't close so that no one has the grounds to contest the election. If anyone catches them, they just claim it was because of a software bug.
Under such conditions, even with backup paper ballots thrown into a ballot box, the voice of the voters can be effectively ignored.
That is why paper is best. People can still cheat but the impact of the cheating is at least limited.
To break it down more explicitly (I am agreeing with you but am warning that the devil may be in the details) you would need:
With enough (masssive) redundancy maybe a future Alexandria-style fire event can be avoided. It may be cheaper in the long run just to produce quality products with the redundancy built in to the technology, but the current distribution infrastructure seems to favor only the survival of commodity vendors.
Either way, it would be a great great boon to research to put so much wisdom at everyone's fingertips (now if only if we can get Congress itself to use it...)
Don't count your chickens yet, maybe the "details" that remain to be worked out are some list of exceptions so that the new media side doesn't get whacked... so that basic stuff bundled with Windoze (e.g. IE, media players, etc.), ISP software, networking stacks, etc. don't themselves become liable at some time in the future, creating a huge legal "inconvenience" for their "upstanding corporate citizens."
It is fundamentally unsound anyway, even without an exceptions list. Software doesn't induce anything, it only facilitates decisions (unless it's spyware that doesn't ask permission, but that's not what they had in mind here). Only marketing, or word of mouth can induce a decision.