This is a standard statistical thing, when testing for anything rare. Doctors ought to hand out pamphlets on this when discussing any of these kinds oftest results. Consider this contrived example:
You have a condition whose incidence in the population in 1 in 1 million (i.e. if you pick a person at random, there's a 1 in 1 million chance they have this condition). You test for it with a test that's 99.9% accurate. This means that 1 out of every 1000 tests gives a wrong indication.
Suppose you run this test on 1 million random people. You'd expect one person in this group to have it. However, because of the 0.1% error rate of the test, you'll get, on average, 1000 positives. This means, on average, there will be 999 false positives for every true positive, so there's about a 0.1% chance that any particular positive result is genuine.
This example is contrived (few conditions are that rare), but the statistics hold regardless. The more common the condition, the more likely that a positive test result is genuine.
don't you think these mysterious, nefarious, greedy "commercial interests" have some stake in protecting the planet?
Of course not. Protecting the planet is way too long-term of a project. Better to have good numbers this quarter, no matter how bad for the company / industry / economy / planet later.
The U.S. government apparently doesn't have a problem pushing for harsh copyright laws in other countries, so that foreign citizens in foreign countries can get taken down if they pirate American entertainment content.
No effort though on trying to get laws enacted that protect regular American people, though. Even all put together, we're not nearly as important as Disney.
On the other hand, it's not like American data-protection laws are any good either; you don't own your data, so any company can buy and sell any information about you to their hearts' content. If only the EU could get their privacy laws pushed out to the rest of the world...
Seriously, I say let them go ahead and wiretap, with judicial oversight. Right now anyone can be declared a "terrorist", disappeared and killed with no oversight or accountability.
To take a cynical political example, how long before someone organizing a boycott of a major campaign contributor is declared an "economic terrorist", whisked off into military custody and disappeared? The way things are going, there's no legal framework whatsoever to prevent this. The President declared that person an "enemy combatant", and there can be no debate. (A leak to the media might help, if people get outraged enough, but people seem to be getting outrage fatigue these days).
At least if there's judicial oversight, some judge could stand up and say "no, these powers are being used inappropriately", then block the action, when such abuses occur.
Software is just the worst, because of the low capital requirements.
If car designers could pull crap like "we don't have time to get the trunk finished before release, we'll release the car without a back end, then bolt on a trunk later", then cars would suck just as much as software.
The company has to be willing to use it, though. Most companies don't want to feel dependent on particular staff (even though you could just hire someone with similar skills if that person gets too uppity).
Case in point: My employer needed a new toolchain for embedded Linux products. All we ever use is a compiler, target libraries, and gdb. I whipped up one using 'crosstool' but it was rejected in favor of WindRiver's offering (which costs big bucks, and has a lot of stuff they'll never use). This way, they can keep on phasing me out and get my job moved to India.
If the standard living of a given nation increases over time, why wouldn't the standard of living of the global population do the same?
Not necessarily, because other nations may be declining faster than that one is advancing.
My scenario comes about because any country can get all the jobs by simply having a lower standard of living than others. (This does assume perfect capital mobility and zero inertia to get to the Really Bad Scenario). E.g. certainly India is increasing in standards of living now; what happens when those jobs start getting exported to Uzbekistan?
Example: India undercuts U.S. on price, all exportable jobs go there. U.S. SOL is declining while India's is increasing. Due to India's increase in SOL (and therefore wages), it gets more attractive to outsource to South Elbonia. India's SOL decreases, U.S.'s is still down, South Elbonia's increases. Then North Elbonia undercuts South Elbonia, and on and on and on... Eventually, the U.S.'s or India's SOL deteriorates to the point where it's similar to North Elbonia's, and jobs come back, until someone undercuts them again...
It's like retail - whoever has the lowest prices gets substantially all of the business, so prices race to the bottom for everybody.
The fancy touch-screen HAVA-compliant machine prints ScanTron-style circles onto the exact same ballot people can fill out by hand. Then that ballot is put into the exact same scanner that scans hand-completed ballots. Bingo - accessibility and a paper trail.
But it is. Everything's aggregated at the precinct level on up through county and state.
In my precinct, the machine prints out a totals strip at poll closing. (Certainly if my machine were compromised, then those might be suspect, but it's optical scan, and a randomly-selected couple of precincts are hand-counted for audit). This is posted at the polling place for anyone to come by and inspect.
The county then publishes official results, which include a precinct-by-precinct breakdown, which should match that totals tape except for provisional and absentee ballots.
Recounts and audits can be done by hand at the county level, and are observed by representatives of all interested parties.
they will begin to insist on those things like clean air, health care, better infrastructure...
Will they? Or will it be impossible to compete with the low-standard-of-living countries, so every country ends up lowering its standard of living to the lowest common denominator?
That's what I see coming from unrestricted globalization - the entire world's standard of living drops to the lowest standard of living existing today, and stays there.
Sure, those efficiencies will create more wealth in toto. After a few years of that growth, CEOs will be able to buy twice as many gold-plated bathroom fixtures as before, and ordinary families will be able to afford 1000 calories a day of food pellets instead of 800.
over the past 11 quarters, dating back to the June 2003 Bush tax cuts, America has increased the size of its entire economy by 20 percent
Huh. That kind of makes me wonder where the money goes. I don't personally know anybody who is better off (especially taking inflation into account) as they were then.
Find friends among poll workers. (I'm one, for example, but my county thankfully doesn't use Diebold machines or direct-record machines of any kind. There are a lot - several workers for each polling place - so this shouldn't be that hard). Have one of them demonstrate the exploit to the board of elections during a training class. They won't get in trouble, and the problem will be graphically brought to the attention of those who buy the machines.
Make the voter-verified paper audit trail be a human-readable, optically-scannable ballot. Then you have easy verification and some assurance against DRE shenanigans.
Where I live, every time they've hand-counted to audit the optical-scan machines, discrepancies have all turned out to be mistakes by the humans doing the hand counting. This is expected; most of the time there won't be any funny business going on with the machines. That doesn't mean we should stop the auditing, of course; just because we haven't spotted shenanigans yet (where I live) doesn't mean we won't.
In fact, because the federal Help America Vote Act now mandates every precinct have some technology to allow disabled voters to vote without assistance, they found the Right Way to do touchscreens.
Our touch-screen machines just print filled-in ScanTron-style circles on the very same ballots thatall voters use, which then go into the very same sccanner/counter/ballot box that all voters use.
To run as an independent, you had to get petition signatures of 4% of registered voters in your district. That doesn't actually sound too bad, but, having no political experience, I don't know how hard that is to do.
The big hurdle, though (besides all of the other reasons I'd make a bad politician) is that they make $14000 a year (it's technically a part-time job). Subtract costs of campaigning, and it sounds infeasible unless you're independently wealthy and/or own your own business.
because they've heard--for years--how much people hate the "Press 1 for this, Press 2 for that" system
That's the crux of this problem. Those of us who prefer Touch-Tone(TM) systems to voice recognition need to stand up and be heard. I, personally, would rather pick from a list of selections than have a machine try to recognize my free-form question, and then parse it (both are kind of dodgy typically.)
That's why, for really high-security situations, such locking devices need to be supplemented by human guards. It becomes harder to muck about with gels, bedsheets etc. if you also have to keep an armed Marine from noticing you doing so.
My house's doors has (ordinary pin-tumbler) locks on both sides. This is because the doors all either contain windows, or have a window close by. If the deadbolt had a handle on the inside, it could be trivially compromised by breaking through the window, reaching in, and turning.
How I deal with the fire risk is to keep a spare key reasonably close to each door, but not so close that it could be gotten at by breaking the window (unless the attacker knows exactly where it is, and has some long grabby gadgets). This makes sure we can always get out, while being more secure than a single-lock deadbolt.
Like any door, they can certainly be brute-forced (which is probably a good thing, so e.g. the fire department can get in if necessary), but I've never tested to see how much brute force it takes.
Be interesting to hear about how those random hand counts compare to the machine tabulations.
When we recently added that requirement in my county, our elections supervisor said that every time in the past that they had had discrepancies between a manual hand count and the machine count, on closer inspection it was the humans that were wrong. That's what you expect, though, with machines that work and aren't being tampered with.
Our system is pretty simple, though: easy-to-read fill-in-the-bubble ballots, optically scanned. The machines do the totalling, the ballots are saved for auditing and recountability. Each precinct gets a fancy touch-screen / audio machine, which just fills in the bubbles on the same ballots everyone else uses, which are scanned by the machines everyone else uses, and able to be recounted, like everyone else's votes.
People will upgrade to Vista when it starts coming "free" with their machines. Or when MS stops selling XP. Or when MS stops allowing XP to run. Or when some app they need requires it.
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This is a standard statistical thing, when testing for anything rare. Doctors ought to hand out pamphlets on this when discussing any of these kinds oftest results. Consider this contrived example:
You have a condition whose incidence in the population in 1 in 1 million (i.e. if you pick a person at random, there's a 1 in 1 million chance they have this condition). You test for it with a test that's 99.9% accurate. This means that 1 out of every 1000 tests gives a wrong indication.
Suppose you run this test on 1 million random people. You'd expect one person in this group to have it. However, because of the 0.1% error rate of the test, you'll get, on average, 1000 positives. This means, on average, there will be 999 false positives for every true positive, so there's about a 0.1% chance that any particular positive result is genuine.
This example is contrived (few conditions are that rare), but the statistics hold regardless. The more common the condition, the more likely that a positive test result is genuine.
Of course not. Protecting the planet is way too long-term of a project. Better to have good numbers this quarter, no matter how bad for the company / industry / economy / planet later.
It seems like telework jobs would be way too easy for an employer to move to e.g. India... how are those still around?
There's also "anti-corporatism":
The U.S. government apparently doesn't have a problem pushing for harsh copyright laws in other countries, so that foreign citizens in foreign countries can get taken down if they pirate American entertainment content.
No effort though on trying to get laws enacted that protect regular American people, though. Even all put together, we're not nearly as important as Disney.
On the other hand, it's not like American data-protection laws are any good either; you don't own your data, so any company can buy and sell any information about you to their hearts' content. If only the EU could get their privacy laws pushed out to the rest of the world...
Maybe.
Seriously, I say let them go ahead and wiretap, with judicial oversight. Right now anyone can be declared a "terrorist", disappeared and killed with no oversight or accountability.
To take a cynical political example, how long before someone organizing a boycott of a major campaign contributor is declared an "economic terrorist", whisked off into military custody and disappeared? The way things are going, there's no legal framework whatsoever to prevent this. The President declared that person an "enemy combatant", and there can be no debate. (A leak to the media might help, if people get outraged enough, but people seem to be getting outrage fatigue these days).
At least if there's judicial oversight, some judge could stand up and say "no, these powers are being used inappropriately", then block the action, when such abuses occur.
Huh. Moderating messages, with some kind of 'meta-moderation' to keep track of the moderators.
Nope, that'll never catch on.
Software is just the worst, because of the low capital requirements.
If car designers could pull crap like "we don't have time to get the trunk finished before release, we'll release the car without a back end, then bolt on a trunk later", then cars would suck just as much as software.
The company has to be willing to use it, though. Most companies don't want to feel dependent on particular staff (even though you could just hire someone with similar skills if that person gets too uppity).
Case in point: My employer needed a new toolchain for embedded Linux products. All we ever use is a compiler, target libraries, and gdb. I whipped up one using 'crosstool' but it was rejected in favor of WindRiver's offering (which costs big bucks, and has a lot of stuff they'll never use). This way, they can keep on phasing me out and get my job moved to India.
Sell it to the company's employees, who would probably love to know what's really going on.
I heard a while back about a local Hooters hosting some event or other to benefit breast cancer research.
I thought that was kind of cool, actually.
Not necessarily, because other nations may be declining faster than that one is advancing.
My scenario comes about because any country can get all the jobs by simply having a lower standard of living than others. (This does assume perfect capital mobility and zero inertia to get to the Really Bad Scenario). E.g. certainly India is increasing in standards of living now; what happens when those jobs start getting exported to Uzbekistan?
Example: India undercuts U.S. on price, all exportable jobs go there. U.S. SOL is declining while India's is increasing. Due to India's increase in SOL (and therefore wages), it gets more attractive to outsource to South Elbonia. India's SOL decreases, U.S.'s is still down, South Elbonia's increases. Then North Elbonia undercuts South Elbonia, and on and on and on... Eventually, the U.S.'s or India's SOL deteriorates to the point where it's similar to North Elbonia's, and jobs come back, until someone undercuts them again...
It's like retail - whoever has the lowest prices gets substantially all of the business, so prices race to the bottom for everybody.
Do it the way my county does it.
The fancy touch-screen HAVA-compliant machine prints ScanTron-style circles onto the exact same ballot people can fill out by hand. Then that ballot is put into the exact same scanner that scans hand-completed ballots. Bingo - accessibility and a paper trail.
But it is. Everything's aggregated at the precinct level on up through county and state.
In my precinct, the machine prints out a totals strip at poll closing. (Certainly if my machine were compromised, then those might be suspect, but it's optical scan, and a randomly-selected couple of precincts are hand-counted for audit). This is posted at the polling place for anyone to come by and inspect.
The county then publishes official results, which include a precinct-by-precinct breakdown, which should match that totals tape except for provisional and absentee ballots.
Recounts and audits can be done by hand at the county level, and are observed by representatives of all interested parties.
Will they? Or will it be impossible to compete with the low-standard-of-living countries, so every country ends up lowering its standard of living to the lowest common denominator?
That's what I see coming from unrestricted globalization - the entire world's standard of living drops to the lowest standard of living existing today, and stays there.
Sure, those efficiencies will create more wealth in toto. After a few years of that growth, CEOs will be able to buy twice as many gold-plated bathroom fixtures as before, and ordinary families will be able to afford 1000 calories a day of food pellets instead of 800.
Huh. That kind of makes me wonder where the money goes. I don't personally know anybody who is better off (especially taking inflation into account) as they were then.
Find friends among poll workers. (I'm one, for example, but my county thankfully doesn't use Diebold machines or direct-record machines of any kind. There are a lot - several workers for each polling place - so this shouldn't be that hard). Have one of them demonstrate the exploit to the board of elections during a training class. They won't get in trouble, and the problem will be graphically brought to the attention of those who buy the machines.
Make the voter-verified paper audit trail be a human-readable, optically-scannable ballot. Then you have easy verification and some assurance against DRE shenanigans.
Where I live, every time they've hand-counted to audit the optical-scan machines, discrepancies have all turned out to be mistakes by the humans doing the hand counting. This is expected; most of the time there won't be any funny business going on with the machines. That doesn't mean we should stop the auditing, of course; just because we haven't spotted shenanigans yet (where I live) doesn't mean we won't.
My county has this too.
In fact, because the federal Help America Vote Act now mandates every precinct have some technology to allow disabled voters to vote without assistance, they found the Right Way to do touchscreens.
Our touch-screen machines just print filled-in ScanTron-style circles on the very same ballots thatall voters use, which then go into the very same sccanner/counter/ballot box that all voters use.
I looked at state (NC) House once.
To run as an independent, you had to get petition signatures of 4% of registered voters in your district. That doesn't actually sound too bad, but, having no political experience, I don't know how hard that is to do.
The big hurdle, though (besides all of the other reasons I'd make a bad politician) is that they make $14000 a year (it's technically a part-time job). Subtract costs of campaigning, and it sounds infeasible unless you're independently wealthy and/or own your own business.
The way I handle this, though I have a lot less (couple hundred gigs), is to just not back that particular stuff up.
Losing it might mean that I need to wait for some episodes to come back around in reruns again, oh well.
That's the crux of this problem. Those of us who prefer Touch-Tone(TM) systems to voice recognition need to stand up and be heard. I, personally, would rather pick from a list of selections than have a machine try to recognize my free-form question, and then parse it (both are kind of dodgy typically.)
That's why, for really high-security situations, such locking devices need to be supplemented by human guards. It becomes harder to muck about with gels, bedsheets etc. if you also have to keep an armed Marine from noticing you doing so.
My house's doors has (ordinary pin-tumbler) locks on both sides. This is because the doors all either contain windows, or have a window close by. If the deadbolt had a handle on the inside, it could be trivially compromised by breaking through the window, reaching in, and turning.
How I deal with the fire risk is to keep a spare key reasonably close to each door, but not so close that it could be gotten at by breaking the window (unless the attacker knows exactly where it is, and has some long grabby gadgets). This makes sure we can always get out, while being more secure than a single-lock deadbolt.
Like any door, they can certainly be brute-forced (which is probably a good thing, so e.g. the fire department can get in if necessary), but I've never tested to see how much brute force it takes.
When we recently added that requirement in my county, our elections supervisor said that every time in the past that they had had discrepancies between a manual hand count and the machine count, on closer inspection it was the humans that were wrong. That's what you expect, though, with machines that work and aren't being tampered with.
Our system is pretty simple, though: easy-to-read fill-in-the-bubble ballots, optically scanned. The machines do the totalling, the ballots are saved for auditing and recountability. Each precinct gets a fancy touch-screen / audio machine, which just fills in the bubbles on the same ballots everyone else uses, which are scanned by the machines everyone else uses, and able to be recounted, like everyone else's votes.
People will upgrade to Vista when it starts coming "free" with their machines. Or when MS stops selling XP. Or when MS stops allowing XP to run. Or when some app they need requires it.