Depends on what you mean by "rigging." If you wanted to say, register in 5 different precincts, then vote at each one, you might get away with it. But that's 4 extra votes. If you wanted to say, change every 5th vote from a district, or just plain "lose" the results of the district entirely, you'd have a hard time doing it on paper.
In general, I'd say that any kind of large-scale vote rigging done by paper ballots would require a conspiricy involving multiple staffers and observers at the polling places. You'd need to physically replace thousands of paper ballots with fake ones. Good luck doing that by yourself. And afterwards, if the results look fishy, there is a good chance that the fraud could be discovered on a recount.
With these Diebold machines, on the other hand, any one person, even one without any special access given to election workers, could modify as many votes as they want, while arousing no suspicion, leaving no physical evidence in the form of discarded ballots, and leaving no trace of the original results should a recount or investigation be ordered.
There will always be some dishonest people who see democracy as a game they can "cheat" at to win. But if a voting machine doesn't produce a solid meat-space record that can be guarded, stored, and re-examined, the effects of those cheaters on the outcome is greater by orders of magnitude.
Accounts are free, and people should be required to get one (so they can easily be banned once they start causing trouble).
I hope you were joking. Don't you mean, "Accounts are free, and people should be required to get one (so they can easily be forced to JUST OPEN ANOTHER ONE when they start causing trouble)?" Requiring a freely obtained login will not strip user's of their anonymity, and as you pointed out, Wikipedia already tracks the ip address for each edit.
Simple fact of the matter is that even though tracking ip address doesn't uniquely identify a user, it is the very best that any site can do without resorting to requiring credit card information to confirm your identity. And personally, I won't enter my credit card info into any site that isn't selling me something.
Um, wow -- Listen, I Am Not An Optimologist, but I think you might have some kind of night-blindness. A reaction of the severity you describe to the flashing lights on a pedestrian crossing sign, or to the blinky lights on a cyclist (!!!) is not normal.
I'm not trying to criticize or challenge your sincerity, honestly -- it's just that these are pretty common uses of flashing lights, and while the brightness is noticeable (kinda the point), I don't think most people are affected enough to feel impaired by it in any way.
This is great news! At last, we can get stem cells from embryos without harming them, allowing them to remain healthy and viable right up to the moment they hit the medical waste incinerator that they were destined for anyway!
Seriously, as it stands today these leftover embryos are being discarded and destroyed, and the President's policy says, hey, I'm not going to get in the way of that, but for the love of God, don't try to get any medical benefit from them first! Because it's wrong to destroy an embryo for medical research, but just fine to destroy one for no benefit whatsoever.
So now we've been reduced to investing our research dollars in finding a way to make sure that they aren't harmed until after we take the cells, just to appease people who can't grasp basic logic?
That's basicly what I've been trying to get accross to people for a long time. This isn't a technology problem. This isn't a problem with the Internet. It's a management issue. I can surf the net all day or I can sit at my desk and read a novel all day. There's really no difference. If I did the latter I'd probably get a stern talking to or worse. They probably wouldn't go so far as to ban books from the office.
What creates the problem is that management often have misguided ways of measuring whether they think someone is working or not. If your background is in technical support, or sales, or running an assembly line, browsing the web likely means you are ignoring something else that you are supposed to be doing.
If you are say, an engineer (software or otherwise), then you need to be keeping yourself informed about what is going on in your industry, and with the technologies avaialable to you. More than that, though, the biggest parts of your job are problem-solving and designing things, and you can't just sit in front of an IDE, UML modelling app, or CAD diagram and spit some stuff onto it -- you have to have some idea of what your design is first. Most of the real work gets done in your head, and if you are stuck on something, staring at it will not make an answer appear. Things sometimes need time to percolate -- so you read slashdot and check out things that interest you for a while.
Someone above mentioned being extremely productive for 2 hours and doing nothing else the rest of the day -- hell, there are plenty of times when I do nothing for several days except contemplate how I'm going to build something. Then when the idea has coalesced enough, I hunch over my keyboard for a solid 10 hours on each of the next three days, oblivious to the world and not noticing that it is past time to go home.
A lot of managers, and especially upper executives who may walk by your cube on the way to their private washroom, don't understand that a software engineer is not the same thing as a typist. This is why a company needs to have objective ways to measure an employee's performance. Good work is measurable -- it is not always observable.
Yes, they both do excellent work on SG-1 -- by disconcerting, I just meant that it was hard for me not to see them as Criton and Aeron, transplanted en masse from Farscape, acting wierd.
For me this mental twitch of forgetting they were different characters was particularly bad because I never watched Farscape when it was on the air, I watched it on DVD, consuming the entire series in order over the course of a few months. When Ben Browder showed up on SG-1 as Mitchell, and Vala became a frequent character, I was still in the beginning of the last season of Farscape on DVD.
So from my perspective if felt like both shows were still "going on" at the same time with the same actors in different roles. That was disconcerting.
Star Trek only ran for a few seasons, IIRC. Seventy-some episodes or so? The only way Star Trek can be considered the longest running sci-fi show is if you chain all the shows in the Star Trek franchise together. Apples to Oranges.
In all frankness, though I love SG-1 (I watch but am less keen on Atlantis), I can accept that the show has been around a long time and is starting to get a little stale. It sucked when O'Neil and Hammond were replaced, and I don't like the Ori. Still, even with these handicaps, It's still one of the best sci-fi shows still on television -- It doesn't compare to it's own earlier self, and it doesn't compare to gems like Firefly that were cancelled well before their time, but it's still good.
So while I don't think it will be huge tragedy if it ends after this season, I just can't figure out how the SciFi channel could think that is a good thing for them. Aside from Battlestar Galactica, which is brilliant but painfully absent for months and months on end (what is with the long mid-season breaks, damn!), the network really doesn't have anything else. I've often referred to it among friends as "The Stargate Channel."
2. SG-1 is probably at its best when the cast & crew isn't taking itself too seriously. And with that in mind, let me tell you that if you missed the 200th episode... well, it's a shame. It was a bit uneven, but it was packed with in-jokes for the kind of people who like not only the show, but sci-fi in general, and even things "vaguely related" to sci-fi. (Veiled Firefly/Serenity references? Check. Not so veiled Star Trek, Farscape, and Team America: World Police references? Check.)
I watched the 200th episode and loved all the references and in-jokes, but I must have missed the references to Firefly -- can you remind me?
The show is produced by MGM, and they intend to try and sell it to a different channel. I think that implies that none of the actors want to leave, and that it could easily go on if another channel wants to carry it. This might be the end of the show, or it might just mean season 11 airs on a different network.
Well, the Asgaard were originally much more human-like in appearance, and came to look as they do now because of millenia of genetic deterioration as a side-effect of the cloning process they use to maintain their numbers. My hypothesis, therefore, is that they have developed a painful hereditary skin condition that chaffes them terribly.
SG-1 and Farscape are nothing alike in content, except I suppose that both have wormholes. Though I did find it very disconcerting when Colonel Mitchell joined SG-1 and they made Vala Maldoran a main character. Wierd. But I guess sci-fi has always been a genre where you see the same people over and over again in different roles.
It is my understanding that presently, the earth's rotation is gradually slowing and the moon is gradually getting further away in its orbit. I have only a layman's understanding of the dynamics involved, by my basic understanding of the prinicple is that because the earth spins more rapidly than the moon orbits us, the tide creates a drag on the earth's rotation, slowing it. At the same time, because the spin of the earth keeps the tidal bulge slightly "ahead" of the moon instead of directly under it, the gravity irregularities increase the moon's velocity, enlarging it's orbit.
So right now, the dynamic is that energy is being transferred from the earth's rotation to the moon's revolution. I think siphoning some of this energy off in the form of tidal power could -- in a very, very small way -- reduce this effect, making the earth's spin slow down even more gradually than it is now.
I am not an astronomer, but I once made a model solar system out of styrofoam balls.
I became very interested in the whole "instantaneous data transfer at any distance idea" a while back and spent some time reading equations that are WAY beyond my meager mind's ability to grasp. But I think, if I understood the basics correctly, entanglement doesn't actually allow for this. Here's a wikipedia link: No-communication Theorem
Anybody out there with a PhD in Quantum Information Theory, please feel free to explain it to me.
Heh heh, that reminds me of something that happened to my grandfather. Before he retired, he was a school principle in a relatively rural area. Decades after he worked at a particular school, someone rediscovered a safe that hadn't been opened in years, it was presumably in use until some time after he left, but not long after, and the people at the school figured there might be something valuable or interesting in it, and he was the only one that might remember the combination. He insisted that there was no way he could still remember the combination, but they kept asking him to come out there, thinking he might remember if he just put his fingers on the dial. He didn't.
Finally, the school broke down and just hired someone to break open the safe (not a trivial expense for a rural school district). Inside were a couple dozen "Admit One" type paper tickets.
I guess people just like to believe the world is full of treasure.
Why do people write bad software? Who knows. But since they sometimes do, and there are bad programs out there which demand entry in all caps, it would be an awful annoyance to those users to scrap the caps lock.
I think the more unfortunate case is that of corporate standards requiring your documents to utilize all caps for some sections, such as section headings or legal disclaimers. If it is as hard as it is to get programmers to write software that doesn't require all caps, imagine how hard it will be to get corporations' business process officers to write process documentation rules that don't require all caps.
Of course, none of that means the key couldn't be moved, or as someone suggested, changed to a "hold shift for 5 seconds" thing. But personally I don't feel like putting something else there and then relearning typing acions that I'm already used to doing differently. I mean, do I want to learn a new location for CTRL? Or anything else? For me it would just become unused space, like it is now.
Yeah, yeah, evolution is only a theory. So is gravity. From wikipedia:
In scientific usage, a theory does not mean an unsubstantiated guess or hunch, as it often does in other contexts. A theory is a logically self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of a related set of natural or social phenomena. It originates from and/or is supported by experimental evidence (see scientific method). In this sense, a theory is a systematic and formalized expression of all previous observations that is predictive, logical and testable.
The reason so few Americans understand the concept of states rights is the same reason so few of us understand how to operate a medieval loom. We've never seen one in action.
Slashdot Mirror
In general, I'd say that any kind of large-scale vote rigging done by paper ballots would require a conspiricy involving multiple staffers and observers at the polling places. You'd need to physically replace thousands of paper ballots with fake ones. Good luck doing that by yourself. And afterwards, if the results look fishy, there is a good chance that the fraud could be discovered on a recount.
With these Diebold machines, on the other hand, any one person, even one without any special access given to election workers, could modify as many votes as they want, while arousing no suspicion, leaving no physical evidence in the form of discarded ballots, and leaving no trace of the original results should a recount or investigation be ordered.
There will always be some dishonest people who see democracy as a game they can "cheat" at to win. But if a voting machine doesn't produce a solid meat-space record that can be guarded, stored, and re-examined, the effects of those cheaters on the outcome is greater by orders of magnitude.
!!! all ebuilds that could satisfy "girlfriend" have been masked.
!!! possible candidates are:
- jen/girlfriend-1.1.3-r5 (masked by: ~taken)
- mary/girlfriend-1.1.3-r5 (masked by: ~uninterested)
- karen/girlfriend-1.1.3-r5 (masked by: ~uninterested)
!!! Error calculating dependencies. Please correct.
I hope you were joking. Don't you mean, "Accounts are free, and people should be required to get one (so they can easily be forced to JUST OPEN ANOTHER ONE when they start causing trouble)?" Requiring a freely obtained login will not strip user's of their anonymity, and as you pointed out, Wikipedia already tracks the ip address for each edit.
Simple fact of the matter is that even though tracking ip address doesn't uniquely identify a user, it is the very best that any site can do without resorting to requiring credit card information to confirm your identity. And personally, I won't enter my credit card info into any site that isn't selling me something.
Never held the ROKR, heard it sucked, but Motorola also makes the RAZR and SLVR, both of which boast compatibility with iTunes.
I'm not trying to criticize or challenge your sincerity, honestly -- it's just that these are pretty common uses of flashing lights, and while the brightness is noticeable (kinda the point), I don't think most people are affected enough to feel impaired by it in any way.
Seriously, as it stands today these leftover embryos are being discarded and destroyed, and the President's policy says, hey, I'm not going to get in the way of that, but for the love of God, don't try to get any medical benefit from them first! Because it's wrong to destroy an embryo for medical research, but just fine to destroy one for no benefit whatsoever.
So now we've been reduced to investing our research dollars in finding a way to make sure that they aren't harmed until after we take the cells, just to appease people who can't grasp basic logic?
What creates the problem is that management often have misguided ways of measuring whether they think someone is working or not. If your background is in technical support, or sales, or running an assembly line, browsing the web likely means you are ignoring something else that you are supposed to be doing.
If you are say, an engineer (software or otherwise), then you need to be keeping yourself informed about what is going on in your industry, and with the technologies avaialable to you. More than that, though, the biggest parts of your job are problem-solving and designing things, and you can't just sit in front of an IDE, UML modelling app, or CAD diagram and spit some stuff onto it -- you have to have some idea of what your design is first. Most of the real work gets done in your head, and if you are stuck on something, staring at it will not make an answer appear. Things sometimes need time to percolate -- so you read slashdot and check out things that interest you for a while.
Someone above mentioned being extremely productive for 2 hours and doing nothing else the rest of the day -- hell, there are plenty of times when I do nothing for several days except contemplate how I'm going to build something. Then when the idea has coalesced enough, I hunch over my keyboard for a solid 10 hours on each of the next three days, oblivious to the world and not noticing that it is past time to go home.
A lot of managers, and especially upper executives who may walk by your cube on the way to their private washroom, don't understand that a software engineer is not the same thing as a typist. This is why a company needs to have objective ways to measure an employee's performance. Good work is measurable -- it is not always observable.
For me this mental twitch of forgetting they were different characters was particularly bad because I never watched Farscape when it was on the air, I watched it on DVD, consuming the entire series in order over the course of a few months. When Ben Browder showed up on SG-1 as Mitchell, and Vala became a frequent character, I was still in the beginning of the last season of Farscape on DVD.
So from my perspective if felt like both shows were still "going on" at the same time with the same actors in different roles. That was disconcerting.
Star Trek only ran for a few seasons, IIRC. Seventy-some episodes or so? The only way Star Trek can be considered the longest running sci-fi show is if you chain all the shows in the Star Trek franchise together. Apples to Oranges.
So while I don't think it will be huge tragedy if it ends after this season, I just can't figure out how the SciFi channel could think that is a good thing for them. Aside from Battlestar Galactica, which is brilliant but painfully absent for months and months on end (what is with the long mid-season breaks, damn!), the network really doesn't have anything else. I've often referred to it among friends as "The Stargate Channel."
So how can this be good for them?
I watched the 200th episode and loved all the references and in-jokes, but I must have missed the references to Firefly -- can you remind me?
The show is produced by MGM, and they intend to try and sell it to a different channel. I think that implies that none of the actors want to leave, and that it could easily go on if another channel wants to carry it. This might be the end of the show, or it might just mean season 11 airs on a different network.
Well, the Asgaard were originally much more human-like in appearance, and came to look as they do now because of millenia of genetic deterioration as a side-effect of the cloning process they use to maintain their numbers. My hypothesis, therefore, is that they have developed a painful hereditary skin condition that chaffes them terribly.
SG-1 and Farscape are nothing alike in content, except I suppose that both have wormholes. Though I did find it very disconcerting when Colonel Mitchell joined SG-1 and they made Vala Maldoran a main character. Wierd. But I guess sci-fi has always been a genre where you see the same people over and over again in different roles.
So right now, the dynamic is that energy is being transferred from the earth's rotation to the moon's revolution. I think siphoning some of this energy off in the form of tidal power could -- in a very, very small way -- reduce this effect, making the earth's spin slow down even more gradually than it is now.
I am not an astronomer, but I once made a model solar system out of styrofoam balls.
Anybody out there with a PhD in Quantum Information Theory, please feel free to explain it to me.
My mistake, I misread the sentance to mean only those bodies that could be seen from earth would be planets.
Finally, the school broke down and just hired someone to break open the safe (not a trivial expense for a rural school district). Inside were a couple dozen "Admit One" type paper tickets.
I guess people just like to believe the world is full of treasure.
So much for extra-solar planets then.
So, what? You're saying Mars isn't a planet anymore? Think of all the sci-fi that will need to be re-written!
I think the more unfortunate case is that of corporate standards requiring your documents to utilize all caps for some sections, such as section headings or legal disclaimers. If it is as hard as it is to get programmers to write software that doesn't require all caps, imagine how hard it will be to get corporations' business process officers to write process documentation rules that don't require all caps.
Of course, none of that means the key couldn't be moved, or as someone suggested, changed to a "hold shift for 5 seconds" thing. But personally I don't feel like putting something else there and then relearning typing acions that I'm already used to doing differently. I mean, do I want to learn a new location for CTRL? Or anything else? For me it would just become unused space, like it is now.
Of course, we'll have to tack on some more when 2003UB313 gets a real name.
There is also a minimum mass requirement.
Yeah, yeah, evolution is only a theory. So is gravity. From wikipedia:
In scientific usage, a theory does not mean an unsubstantiated guess or hunch, as it often does in other contexts. A theory is a logically self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of a related set of natural or social phenomena. It originates from and/or is supported by experimental evidence (see scientific method). In this sense, a theory is a systematic and formalized expression of all previous observations that is predictive, logical and testable.
The reason so few Americans understand the concept of states rights is the same reason so few of us understand how to operate a medieval loom. We've never seen one in action.