There's a major difference between an electronic assistance for victims of disabilities and a voting machine that does the actual counting. A single machine per office could be setup for those cases and print a valid ballot ready for the disabled person to review, and if that person has enough motricity to use the machine unaided in the first place, then she certainly can put (or be helped to put) the printed paper ballot in the box.
Doesn't work like that, at least where I live. In my place, you can come in to check if the see-through box is empty and sealed before the voting begin. Then you have parties representatives that take turn to check the whole process during the day (and keep an eye on each others as well as looking after election judges), and finally, the public is much welcomed to come back (or even stay the whole day, if you prefer so) and help count the ballots at the end of the day. The result is then phoned at the town house, where all results for the town are tallied on a paperboard in front of the public. Through some administrative layers, it climbs up through counties and districts up to the national level. Nothing is ever done behind closed doors ; anybody has a right to attend every step physically, in person. In the end, it's a giant peer-reviewed open-source process that's happening under the very eyes of everybody. In the morning, through local newspapers, you can break down the full result down to every single voting place in the whole country.
No, for the good reason in my country, primaries are under the responsibility of the party that want them, they must man whatever voting place they want and provide the logistic out of their own chest, therefore not abusing public funds for what really is a private endeavour.
This said, my remark was obviously ironic, as I'm not absolutely alien to the US voting process quirkiness. My intention was to show that technology in itself is neutral, but can be a double edged sword. On the one hand, you have a perfectly legit use for such a process, but you can as easily turn it against the people on the other hand.
Quicker : maybe. But most of the times, out the voting booth polls are accurate enough to feed the media frenzy until the real results are known.
Cheaper : I really, really doubt it since to properly secure any e-voting process, you need to back it up on a paper trail of sort, which consumes as much ressources as a full paper vote. You still need officials, party representatives, administrative clercks, rooms, etc. etc.
Finally, what's 120 min compared to 4 years of office time, really ?
Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I've never seen the necessity to complicate things any further than paper, pencil, double physical count. Cheap, no machines involved, fast. On a national election down here (about 15 million voters), voting booths close at 6pm and results are known nation wide right on time to open the 8pm evening news.
crypto primitives relies on a strong link between 2 ends. voting explicitly implies discarding the identity of the voter, hence the whole link thing breaks. If you maintain the link, you know who voted for whom : that's not a good idea at all to preserve democracy. If you discard the link, you have *no way on earth* to actually prove something hasn't been rigged somewhere.
... to the point of vandalism is a petty crime for an already evil company, using SQL stored procedures to do the tally in a voting machine certainly reaches the 7th inner circle of hell.
I think you're getting it backward. CP/M did not used backslash (for there are no directories in CP/M to begin with), and unix already made heavy use of the slash when that little kludge of DOS came along. I fact, it can be argued that in those days, backslash was certainly the least used key on the keyboard. Silly Microsoft made a really counter intuitive choice here.
Having played ET on and off for some time, I agree the game itself is fun, but the quality vastly depends on the players connected to a specific server. While extremely enjoyable with experienced players and a soundly administered server, it can be a nightmare when played in a clueless team, because of the cooperative nature of the maps, and the necessity to fill every role to achieve objectives. There's nothing more frustrating than being the sole engie' of a rambo-medic team that doesn't cure you !
And speaking of maps, the originals are good but there's only a few of them, while most fan-made ones are crap. Urban Terror has much more good maps to begin with, and community made ones are a lot better too, making for and ever challenging game, while ET runs out of 'gas' pretty quickly.
I'm with you on this one. My only regret is the current amount of lowlife cheaters (aimbots and other wallhackers) on public servers, but release 4.2 due real soon now will hopefully solve that.
The bonnet didn't show any sign of crumpling / bending, and could very well have intruded the '09 interior through the windshield, neatly decapitating the driver. Sadly, it happened historically. That would have avenged the old lady.
It is, but you need a (possibly home made) reproduction stand, uniform lightening (not necessarily colour corrected, if you intend to go grayscale only in the end, can be home made too) and a V shaped holder for the book. Be sure your CCD plan is mostly parallel to your page plan.
Hugins certainly can do what's required. But OTOH, it can be painfully slow, so beware. A few seconds of attention when taking the pictures can save hours of struggle with any software later in the post-processing.
It keeps a failure of the network stack from forcing a restart of the filesystems, and vice versa.
You have a valid point, but this can be alleviated by careful usage of user-space fs mounts. Other techniques exist that work around this, too. And in my limited experience, it's been a very long time since I lost control of a machine to the point of not being able to rmmod / insmod an offending driver. YMMV. Calling an overall 'failure' what amounts mostly to a 'good enough' approach is gross over reaction in my book.
It also allows the the upgrade of almost all of the drivers without calling for a complete hardware reboot.[...]System reboots are _bad_ in high-reliability or even in normal user environments.
I beg to differ. Most sys admins I know do planned reboots as part of a normal, scheduled maintenance, even on high-availability systems. What's a liability is un-planed, forced-reboots. Then again, there's a kernel level tool to avoid most of these : Ksplice.
Stop flogging that dead horse, will you. You can experience what you call "stability" with L4Linux already. In a pinch, that's a linux kernel running as service on top of a L4 microkernel. It's about like MacOS X running of top of XNU.
In microkernel fantasy world, to put it simply, when anything goes wrong in the useful (to users) parts of the services (say, net stack, fs drivers etc.), the servers on top of a microkernel are "rebooted", just like a so-called monolithic kernel reboots. It serves nothing to prevent loss of data, it does nothing against drivers bloat.
It's no silver bullet to anything. It just helps to vitualize (partition) a cpu between many clients systems, and that's about it in real world. Not that it doesn't count, but by themselves, microkernels don't bring any improvements to current concerns. Specifically, in linux realm, on-demand loadable modules already provide much of the microkernels advantages. What Linux doesn't do is insulation between privileged code and driver code, memory space being the same. A true microkernel would do that, but with such a penalty none has succeeded in the real world. Even the Hurd, which begun on top of Mach to follow that road is turning away, and considered L4+an enormous bunch of cruft as primary server+ dedicated servers before drowning into yet-another-delusional approach.
This design may work well for a small system with limited hardware but is doomed to fail at some point when trying to scale it up for the real world.
Are you Sir serious ? Did you actually take a look at all the hardware current kernel supports ? Linux runs on about as many arch as NetBSD, supports more add-on hardware, and in fact supports more hardware than windows right now (since XP, then Vista, windows ABI changed and many older hardware isn't supported anymore).
If this is a failure, I'd rather fail than succeed with less capabilities.
Thank you for the tip. Last I tried, it was a dead end and as a result I had no more OS/2 running (I keep a PS/2 model 70, but it's in storage). I may give it a go - still have my blue spine warp box at hand reach.
I might have to install it in a VM one of these days just to play with it again.:)
It's so difficult it's almost impossible (and I say 'almost' from hearsay as I remember reading that a vmware special beta version could do it, never tried myself). The problem is OS/2 needs to use the ring-1 of the processor, for device drivers, while almost every other OS only use ring-0 (system) and ring-2 (userland). Most emulators / virtual machines cut corners, either by not implementing ring-1, or by requesting ring-1 for themselves. As a result, OS/2 cannot run virtually.
I totally agree, this is pure genius. Distributed Human-engined OCR is certainly the best solution to traditional OCR problems, and at the same time it leaves many doors to unforeseen traps ajar.
Last time I did that to get internet was 10 years ago. Today, I just put whatever distro cd I have handy into any computer, and internet here I am. Mind you, it even works magically with virtual hosts inside my computer.
I have to agree. I don't like to shoot at ambulances, but cinelerra is so broken I wonder if it could be salvaged in any meaningful way.
OTOH, kdenlive while not as feature-full as cinelerra is maturing quickly, and while some people complain of random crashes, I didn't myself found it to be excessively crash-prone. (Kdenlive 7.4, up-to-date fedora 10 32bits-PAE, AMD X64 3800+).
Just get rid of all immaterial patents altogether, stick back to copyright for software / business methods, and only use patents in the physical world. Patents were never conceived to reward mere ideas, but factual industrial process ; patents are extremely useful to keep track of some non-obvious industrial techniques that would otherwise remain trade secrets, and be forgotten after a while. Their aim is to accrue global human knowledge and benefit mankind. The balance side of the deal is a time-limited exclusivity granted to the inventor. Nowdays, patents have been ripped open and gutted. They work backward. Most process described in the software realm are so fuzzy they don't describe any real secret 'sauce' necessary to make an actual software out of them, they reward ideas, and they're basically granted forever. The best way for the intellectual patent system to put itself out of its misery is to produce so devastating effects that the biggest patents holders (like Microsoft) suffer so much they beg mercy themselves.
... I've got karma to lose, but when the EU take a couple of months to review the buyout of Sun by Oracle to assess the impact on competition, it's evil protectionism, but when a US court of appeal overturn the damages awarded by a lower court to a rightful holder of a patent, it's just sheer justice done to a strategic company. It absolutely doesn't matter in the latter case that the victim is EU based and the offender is an already convicted US based monopolist with a track record of shoddy behaviours as long as the road 66.
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There's a major difference between an electronic assistance for victims of disabilities and a voting machine that does the actual counting. A single machine per office could be setup for those cases and print a valid ballot ready for the disabled person to review, and if that person has enough motricity to use the machine unaided in the first place, then she certainly can put (or be helped to put) the printed paper ballot in the box.
Doesn't work like that, at least where I live. In my place, you can come in to check if the see-through box is empty and sealed before the voting begin. Then you have parties representatives that take turn to check the whole process during the day (and keep an eye on each others as well as looking after election judges), and finally, the public is much welcomed to come back (or even stay the whole day, if you prefer so) and help count the ballots at the end of the day. The result is then phoned at the town house, where all results for the town are tallied on a paperboard in front of the public. Through some administrative layers, it climbs up through counties and districts up to the national level. Nothing is ever done behind closed doors ; anybody has a right to attend every step physically, in person. In the end, it's a giant peer-reviewed open-source process that's happening under the very eyes of everybody. In the morning, through local newspapers, you can break down the full result down to every single voting place in the whole country.
MOD ++
No, for the good reason in my country, primaries are under the responsibility of the party that want them, they must man whatever voting place they want and provide the logistic out of their own chest, therefore not abusing public funds for what really is a private endeavour.
This said, my remark was obviously ironic, as I'm not absolutely alien to the US voting process quirkiness. My intention was to show that technology in itself is neutral, but can be a double edged sword. On the one hand, you have a perfectly legit use for such a process, but you can as easily turn it against the people on the other hand.
Quicker : maybe. But most of the times, out the voting booth polls are accurate enough to feed the media frenzy until the real results are known.
Cheaper : I really, really doubt it since to properly secure any e-voting process, you need to back it up on a paper trail of sort, which consumes as much ressources as a full paper vote. You still need officials, party representatives, administrative clercks, rooms, etc. etc.
Finally, what's 120 min compared to 4 years of office time, really ?
Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I've never seen the necessity to complicate things any further than paper, pencil, double physical count. Cheap, no machines involved, fast. On a national election down here (about 15 million voters), voting booths close at 6pm and results are known nation wide right on time to open the 8pm evening news.
All of which is perfectly benign when voters are not eligible to vote for certain candidates for any number of reasons.
Like what ?... Let me guess : no need to show someone that's not supposed to win, for instance ?
crypto primitives relies on a strong link between 2 ends. voting explicitly implies discarding the identity of the voter, hence the whole link thing breaks. If you maintain the link, you know who voted for whom : that's not a good idea at all to preserve democracy. If you discard the link, you have *no way on earth* to actually prove something hasn't been rigged somewhere.
... to the point of vandalism is a petty crime for an already evil company, using SQL stored procedures to do the tally in a voting machine certainly reaches the 7th inner circle of hell.
I think you're getting it backward. CP/M did not used backslash (for there are no directories in CP/M to begin with), and unix already made heavy use of the slash when that little kludge of DOS came along. I fact, it can be argued that in those days, backslash was certainly the least used key on the keyboard. Silly Microsoft made a really counter intuitive choice here.
Having played ET on and off for some time, I agree the game itself is fun, but the quality vastly depends on the players connected to a specific server. While extremely enjoyable with experienced players and a soundly administered server, it can be a nightmare when played in a clueless team, because of the cooperative nature of the maps, and the necessity to fill every role to achieve objectives. There's nothing more frustrating than being the sole engie' of a rambo-medic team that doesn't cure you !
And speaking of maps, the originals are good but there's only a few of them, while most fan-made ones are crap. Urban Terror has much more good maps to begin with, and community made ones are a lot better too, making for and ever challenging game, while ET runs out of 'gas' pretty quickly.
I'm with you on this one. My only regret is the current amount of lowlife cheaters (aimbots and other wallhackers) on public servers, but release 4.2 due real soon now will hopefully solve that.
The bonnet didn't show any sign of crumpling / bending, and could very well have intruded the '09 interior through the windshield, neatly decapitating the driver. Sadly, it happened historically. That would have avenged the old lady.
It is, but you need a (possibly home made) reproduction stand, uniform lightening (not necessarily colour corrected, if you intend to go grayscale only in the end, can be home made too) and a V shaped holder for the book. Be sure your CCD plan is mostly parallel to your page plan.
Hugins certainly can do what's required. But OTOH, it can be painfully slow, so beware. A few seconds of attention when taking the pictures can save hours of struggle with any software later in the post-processing.
It keeps a failure of the network stack from forcing a restart of the filesystems, and vice versa.
You have a valid point, but this can be alleviated by careful usage of user-space fs mounts. Other techniques exist that work around this, too. And in my limited experience, it's been a very long time since I lost control of a machine to the point of not being able to rmmod / insmod an offending driver. YMMV. Calling an overall 'failure' what amounts mostly to a 'good enough' approach is gross over reaction in my book.
It also allows the the upgrade of almost all of the drivers without calling for a complete hardware reboot.[...]System reboots are _bad_ in high-reliability or even in normal user environments.
I beg to differ. Most sys admins I know do planned reboots as part of a normal, scheduled maintenance, even on high-availability systems. What's a liability is un-planed, forced-reboots. Then again, there's a kernel level tool to avoid most of these : Ksplice.
Stop flogging that dead horse, will you. You can experience what you call "stability" with L4Linux already. In a pinch, that's a linux kernel running as service on top of a L4 microkernel. It's about like MacOS X running of top of XNU.
In microkernel fantasy world, to put it simply, when anything goes wrong in the useful (to users) parts of the services (say, net stack, fs drivers etc.), the servers on top of a microkernel are "rebooted", just like a so-called monolithic kernel reboots. It serves nothing to prevent loss of data, it does nothing against drivers bloat.
It's no silver bullet to anything. It just helps to vitualize (partition) a cpu between many clients systems, and that's about it in real world. Not that it doesn't count, but by themselves, microkernels don't bring any improvements to current concerns. Specifically, in linux realm, on-demand loadable modules already provide much of the microkernels advantages. What Linux doesn't do is insulation between privileged code and driver code, memory space being the same. A true microkernel would do that, but with such a penalty none has succeeded in the real world. Even the Hurd, which begun on top of Mach to follow that road is turning away, and considered L4+an enormous bunch of cruft as primary server+ dedicated servers before drowning into yet-another-delusional approach.
This design may work well for a small system with limited hardware but is doomed to fail at some point when trying to scale it up for the real world.
Are you Sir serious ? Did you actually take a look at all the hardware current kernel supports ? Linux runs on about as many arch as NetBSD, supports more add-on hardware, and in fact supports more hardware than windows right now (since XP, then Vista, windows ABI changed and many older hardware isn't supported anymore).
If this is a failure, I'd rather fail than succeed with less capabilities.
Thank you for the tip. Last I tried, it was a dead end and as a result I had no more OS/2 running (I keep a PS/2 model 70, but it's in storage). I may give it a go - still have my blue spine warp box at hand reach.
I might have to install it in a VM one of these days just to play with it again. :)
It's so difficult it's almost impossible (and I say 'almost' from hearsay as I remember reading that a vmware special beta version could do it, never tried myself). The problem is OS/2 needs to use the ring-1 of the processor, for device drivers, while almost every other OS only use ring-0 (system) and ring-2 (userland). Most emulators / virtual machines cut corners, either by not implementing ring-1, or by requesting ring-1 for themselves. As a result, OS/2 cannot run virtually.
I totally agree, this is pure genius. Distributed Human-engined OCR is certainly the best solution to traditional OCR problems, and at the same time it leaves many doors to unforeseen traps ajar.
Last time I did that to get internet was 10 years ago. Today, I just put whatever distro cd I have handy into any computer, and internet here I am. Mind you, it even works magically with virtual hosts inside my computer.
I have to agree. I don't like to shoot at ambulances, but cinelerra is so broken I wonder if it could be salvaged in any meaningful way.
OTOH, kdenlive while not as feature-full as cinelerra is maturing quickly, and while some people complain of random crashes, I didn't myself found it to be excessively crash-prone. (Kdenlive 7.4, up-to-date fedora 10 32bits-PAE, AMD X64 3800+).
Just get rid of all immaterial patents altogether, stick back to copyright for software / business methods, and only use patents in the physical world. Patents were never conceived to reward mere ideas, but factual industrial process ; patents are extremely useful to keep track of some non-obvious industrial techniques that would otherwise remain trade secrets, and be forgotten after a while. Their aim is to accrue global human knowledge and benefit mankind. The balance side of the deal is a time-limited exclusivity granted to the inventor. Nowdays, patents have been ripped open and gutted. They work backward. Most process described in the software realm are so fuzzy they don't describe any real secret 'sauce' necessary to make an actual software out of them, they reward ideas, and they're basically granted forever. The best way for the intellectual patent system to put itself out of its misery is to produce so devastating effects that the biggest patents holders (like Microsoft) suffer so much they beg mercy themselves.
... I've got karma to lose, but when the EU take a couple of months to review the buyout of Sun by Oracle to assess the impact on competition, it's evil protectionism, but when a US court of appeal overturn the damages awarded by a lower court to a rightful holder of a patent, it's just sheer justice done to a strategic company. It absolutely doesn't matter in the latter case that the victim is EU based and the offender is an already convicted US based monopolist with a track record of shoddy behaviours as long as the road 66.