I use Notepad every once in a while to strip all the formatting off some piece of text I found in a formatted document or on the web. That's probably about all I ever use it for anymore, but it is a use.
It's okay, I understood that part. It was the rest I couldn't figure out.
By the way, I played the Battlefield 2142 demo for two hours last night before going to bed. This morning when I was entering my office building I noticed people coming down the stairs from the parking garage. They didn't have any blue 'friendly ID' markers above their heads and I was momentarily convinced that I should be shooting at them.
Actually, I sometimes run across a particularly moving post that I wish I could MOD up, but it's already at 5. So I MOD it a TROLL so that the next person such as I might have the satisfaction of MODDING it up.
We can probably assume that Psych students are unlikely to be packing heat in class. If it was an Animal Husbandry class you might not want to try this.
Your vote does not even get counted in many (most?) jurisdictions unless the vote is very close or the losing candidate demands it. And it may not get counted for lots of other reasons even if it is a close race where your vote might have been very important.
Mailed ballots have been thrown out, uncounted, by court order in many cases for various reasons. Even before the mailed-in ballot can get past those obstacles there is the very real possibility that it will be intentionally 'lost' by someone in the chain of possession between you and the elections board.
What better way to steal an election than by 'losing' a bunch of ballots from an area that is historically likely to vote in a particular way? Before a ballot has been received by the elections board and added to the counts of ballots received it can be 'lost' and not raise any red flags.
Also, when ballots are sent out by mail many of them go astray. People die or move away, etc, yet their ballot is sent to their former address for anyone to use. The opportunities for vote fraud increase with the percentage of ballots being handled by mail.
The Representatives I had in mind had all become Vice Presidents first. And, there were actually two U.S. Senators elected President in the past 100 years, I had thought it was only one. I also learned that there have been two cabinet secretaries elected President in the past 100 years, a Sec. of War, and a Sec. of Commerce.
So it's VP's and Governors tied at 6 each (because Gerald Ford does not count)
Followed by Senators and Cabinet Secretaries tied at 2 each.
My point was who gets elected President, not who should get elected. My subject line originally referenced preparing someone to be elected President, but I shortened it before posting. The body of the message talks about the history of U.S. election results, not Presidential performance.
I can see why U.S. Senators have such a hard time getting elected President, and I think it is probably a good thing that the vast majority of them fail. They only face the voters once every six years which gives them plenty of 'safe' time to cater to special interests and make deals that they wouldn't risk doing nearer to an election. That usually creates a public record that is easy to exploit negatively in a big-money Presidential campaign.
In the movies an unpopular person in high school often hires someone who is popular to hang out with them for a while to boost their image. This sounds like a cheaper and less satisfying version of that.
Of course in the movies, the loser and the hired 'friend' always fall in love. I suppose that means that many MySpace users will soon fall in love with their artificial friends? If it makes them happy I guess that's cool.
"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life." - Frank Zappa
'So, the problem is having the paper ballots. Providing the ability to "recount" them endlessly with less and less accuracy each time doesn't make elections any better.'
Right, so we should eliminate ballots because it is possible for them to be recounted inaccurately. This would seal any inaccuracy or fraud in the first count and make it permanent. Since there is too much uncertainty in this voting procedure shouldn't we just eliminate it and use the latest opinion polls to decide elections? Then if we get results that are within the pollsters' margins of error we can ask a panel of popular celebrities to decide.
Personally, I think getting away from physical, printed ballots that can be recounted by machines or people will progressively drag down the confidence in and acceptance of election results and lead to greater and greater unrest. Eventually it could destroy our system of Representative Democracy.
Maybe just write some software that analyzes all the reflected light from objects in space and finds all the relevant bits to reconstruct views of the earth from various elapsed times.
For example, if you found a reflection from a piece of ice 5 light years from Earth, the reconstructed image from it would be of Earth 10 years in the past.
Except that with all the relative motion light would not just go from the Earth to an object and back to the Earth to be viewed again. You'd have to create an accurate computer model of all the motion involved first and use that to plan how to intercept and decode your reflected light.
"It just seems odd to me that people are foaming at the mouth over this."
Not if you remember that when Novell made Gnome the default desktop in their Novell Linux Desktop product the boards went berserk claiming that Novell had set out to destroy KDE. It turned out KDE was still supported and is still the default desktop in Novell Enterprise products. The current outcry is predictable if you remember the previous ones.
Novell's mission is to make linux mainstream in enterprises that can afford to pay them for software maintenance, so their strategy makes sense when viewed in that context. Linux suffers from a lot of designed in nuisances that made it a great system for geeks who like mastering diverse, obscure obstacles, but a poor one for general acceptance. Novell is working to improve that, so resistance from geeks who don't really want linux 'dumbed down' for people who just want to get their work done is understandable.
"It just seems odd to me that people are foaming at the mouth over this."
Not if you remember that when Novell made Gnome the default desktop in their Novell Linux Desktop product the boards went berserk claiming that Novell had set out to destroy KDE. It turned out KDE was still supported and is still the default desktop in Novell Enterprise products. The current outcry is predictable if you remember the previous ones.
Novell's mission is to make linux mainstream in enterprises that can afford to pay them for software maintenance, so their strategy makes sense when viewed in that context. Linux suffers from a lot of designed in nuisances that made it a great system for geeks who like mastering diverse, obscure obstacles, but a poor one for general acceptance. Novell is working to improve that, so resistance from geeks who don't really want linux 'dumbed down' for people who just want to get their work done is understandable.
If all machines had the printed roll that you describe, if the recorded rolls were durable and both human and machine readable, and if it were the votes on the recorded rolls that were actually counted in an election and all recounts, then the machines would approach the same validity as a physical ballot and could be an acceptable method of voting. Anything short of that should never be accepted by anyone.
The practical way of stealing votes is to change the output from the electronic voting machine, NOT to screw up the GUI interface so something appears to be wrong with it.
Electronic voting machines should never have been allowed in the first place. A physical ballot that gets counted by machines can be recounted, examined, etc. A crooked or defective electronic voting machine does not have this advantage.
I think kids who are not there to learn and can't refrain from impeding the learning of others should be removed. Kids who are there to learn should not have to be their victims.
Whether they should be removed to another type of school or just removed from the public school system entirely is another question, that should probably be handled on a case by case basis.
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone." - Bill Cosby
>> The people who come in and snipe at the last minute always end up paying more than I would have for the item because I set my one bid to what I'm willing to pay and then leave the auction alone.
>>>But the problem with this is that you never win the item. If you still just bid the one amount you're willing to pay, but you do it with a snipe, you're much more likely to actually get the auction item.
The parent is correct from what I've seen. I initially gave up on eBay after finding that I never won any auctions. Then my son-in-law told me that the only way to buy anything there was to show no interest until the last second. He was right. Anytime I bid during an auction I get outbid. When I leave it alone until the auction is ending I often get the item for the amount I would have bid earlier (and lost). Maybe when I bid early it puts the item on more people's radar and makes it look more attractive, so they outbid me. Now I use Craigslist almost exclusively, so I haven't been doing much sniping lately.
'However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. ' - Winston Churchill
A lot of radio stations spent a lot of money to upgrade their equipment and aquire additional frequencies to broadcast AM stereo twenty years ago. The only problem was, people wouldn't buy the receivers, so it went nowhere. This could be the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes,
I use Notepad every once in a while to strip all the formatting off some piece of text I found in a formatted document or on the web. That's probably about all I ever use it for anymore, but it is a use.
How about a capsule full of nanobots that bore their way into your brain and directly stimulate the pleasure center until their batteries run out?
"Sorry:"
It's okay, I understood that part. It was the rest I couldn't figure out.
By the way, I played the Battlefield 2142 demo for two hours last night before going to bed. This morning when I was entering my office building I noticed people coming down the stairs from the parking garage. They didn't have any blue 'friendly ID' markers above their heads and I was momentarily convinced that I should be shooting at them.
"No one ever marks a >+4 post as troll."
Actually, I sometimes run across a particularly moving post that I wish I could MOD up, but it's already at 5. So I MOD it a TROLL so that the next person such as I might have the satisfaction of MODDING it up.
(Just kidding!)
Just set your PVR software to record any TV series that looks like it might be interesting.
We can probably assume that Psych students are unlikely to be packing heat in class. If it was an Animal Husbandry class you might not want to try this.
I would never vote by mail.
Your vote does not even get counted in many (most?) jurisdictions unless the vote is very close or the losing candidate demands it. And it may not get counted for lots of other reasons even if it is a close race where your vote might have been very important.
Mailed ballots have been thrown out, uncounted, by court order in many cases for various reasons. Even before the mailed-in ballot can get past those obstacles there is the very real possibility that it will be intentionally 'lost' by someone in the chain of possession between you and the elections board.
What better way to steal an election than by 'losing' a bunch of ballots from an area that is historically likely to vote in a particular way? Before a ballot has been received by the elections board and added to the counts of ballots received it can be 'lost' and not raise any red flags.
Also, when ballots are sent out by mail many of them go astray. People die or move away, etc, yet their ballot is sent to their former address for anyone to use. The opportunities for vote fraud increase with the percentage of ballots being handled by mail.
Go vote at the polls.
Taft was Sec. of War
Hoover was Sec. of Commerce
I did some further checking and you are correct.
The Representatives I had in mind had all become Vice Presidents first. And, there were actually two U.S. Senators elected President in the past 100 years, I had thought it was only one. I also learned that there have been two cabinet secretaries elected President in the past 100 years, a Sec. of War, and a Sec. of Commerce.
So it's VP's and Governors tied at 6 each (because Gerald Ford does not count)
Followed by Senators and Cabinet Secretaries tied at 2 each.
Followed by Generals at 1.
My point was who gets elected President, not who should get elected. My subject line originally referenced preparing someone to be elected President, but I shortened it before posting. The body of the message talks about the history of U.S. election results, not Presidential performance.
I can see why U.S. Senators have such a hard time getting elected President, and I think it is probably a good thing that the vast majority of them fail. They only face the voters once every six years which gives them plenty of 'safe' time to cater to special interests and make deals that they wouldn't risk doing nearer to an election. That usually creates a public record that is easy to exploit negatively in a big-money Presidential campaign.
In U.S. history people from following classes have been elected President:
1. State Governors
2. Vice-Presidents
3. U.S. Congressional Representatives
4. Generals
5 (almost never, but once in a century or so) a U.S. Senator
This means that the following people will NOT be elected President in 2008:
Bill Gates
Condoleeza Rice
Rudy Guliani
and the following people have a real chance only if their opponent is also a U.S. Senator:
John Kerry
Hillary Clinton
John McCain
John Edwards
In the movies an unpopular person in high school often hires someone who is popular to hang out with them for a while to boost their image. This sounds like a cheaper and less satisfying version of that.
Of course in the movies, the loser and the hired 'friend' always fall in love. I suppose that means that many MySpace users will soon fall in love with their artificial friends? If it makes them happy I guess that's cool.
"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life." - Frank Zappa
'So, the problem is having the paper ballots. Providing the ability to "recount" them endlessly with less and less accuracy each time doesn't make elections any better.'
Right, so we should eliminate ballots because it is possible for them to be recounted inaccurately. This would seal any inaccuracy or fraud in the first count and make it permanent. Since there is too much uncertainty in this voting procedure shouldn't we just eliminate it and use the latest opinion polls to decide elections? Then if we get results that are within the pollsters' margins of error we can ask a panel of popular celebrities to decide.
Personally, I think getting away from physical, printed ballots that can be recounted by machines or people will progressively drag down the confidence in and acceptance of election results and lead to greater and greater unrest. Eventually it could destroy our system of Representative Democracy.
Maybe just write some software that analyzes all the reflected light from objects in space and finds all the relevant bits to reconstruct views of the earth from various elapsed times.
For example, if you found a reflection from a piece of ice 5 light years from Earth, the reconstructed image from it would be of Earth 10 years in the past.
Except that with all the relative motion light would not just go from the Earth to an object and back to the Earth to be viewed again. You'd have to create an accurate computer model of all the motion involved first and use that to plan how to intercept and decode your reflected light.
Never Mind.
"It just seems odd to me that people are foaming at the mouth over this."
Not if you remember that when Novell made Gnome the default desktop in their Novell Linux Desktop product the boards went berserk claiming that Novell had set out to destroy KDE. It turned out KDE was still supported and is still the default desktop in Novell Enterprise products. The current outcry is predictable if you remember the previous ones.
Novell's mission is to make linux mainstream in enterprises that can afford to pay them for software maintenance, so their strategy makes sense when viewed in that context. Linux suffers from a lot of designed in nuisances that made it a great system for geeks who like mastering diverse, obscure obstacles, but a poor one for general acceptance. Novell is working to improve that, so resistance from geeks who don't really want linux 'dumbed down' for people who just want to get their work done is understandable.
"It just seems odd to me that people are foaming at the mouth over this."
Not if you remember that when Novell made Gnome the default desktop in their Novell Linux Desktop product the boards went berserk claiming that Novell had set out to destroy KDE. It turned out KDE was still supported and is still the default desktop in Novell Enterprise products. The current outcry is predictable if you remember the previous ones.
Novell's mission is to make linux mainstream in enterprises that can afford to pay them for software maintenance, so their strategy makes sense when viewed in that context. Linux suffers from a lot of designed in nuisances that made it a great system for geeks who like mastering diverse, obscure obstacles, but a poor one for general acceptance. Novell is working to improve that, so resistance from geeks who don't really want linux 'dumbed down' for people who just want to get their work done is understandable.
If all machines had the printed roll that you describe, if the recorded rolls were durable and both human and machine readable, and if it were the votes on the recorded rolls that were actually counted in an election and all recounts, then the machines would approach the same validity as a physical ballot and could be an acceptable method of voting. Anything short of that should never be accepted by anyone.
The practical way of stealing votes is to change the output from the electronic voting machine, NOT to screw up the GUI interface so something appears to be wrong with it.
Electronic voting machines should never have been allowed in the first place. A physical ballot that gets counted by machines can be recounted, examined, etc. A crooked or defective electronic voting machine does not have this advantage.
I think kids who are not there to learn and can't refrain from impeding the learning of others should be removed. Kids who are there to learn should not have to be their victims.
Whether they should be removed to another type of school or just removed from the public school system entirely is another question, that should probably be handled on a case by case basis.
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone." - Bill Cosby
'They've been telling people to "practice random acts of beauty", now we have to deal with the consequences.'
Brilliant! I always knew there was something a little dodgy about that bumper sticker.
>>> You can do want you want to your copy (singular) and sell it. You can't make copies and sell them.
So, I can buy one copy of 'The Da Vinci Code' and replace the content with 'The Da Vinci Load (XXX)' and resell it? Can I do this 10,000 times?
That might be fun.
So, all you need to defeat the U.S. Military is:
1. Detonate a small nuke in the air.
2. The Electro Magnetic Pulse knocks out all their guns.
3. profit
>> The people who come in and snipe at the last minute always end up paying more than I would have for the item because I set my one bid to what I'm willing to pay and then leave the auction alone.
>>>But the problem with this is that you never win the item. If you still just bid the one amount you're willing to pay, but you do it with a snipe, you're much more likely to actually get the auction item.
The parent is correct from what I've seen. I initially gave up on eBay after finding that I never won any auctions. Then my son-in-law told me that the only way to buy anything there was to show no interest until the last second. He was right. Anytime I bid during an auction I get outbid. When I leave it alone until the auction is ending I often get the item for the amount I would have bid earlier (and lost). Maybe when I bid early it puts the item on more people's radar and makes it look more attractive, so they outbid me. Now I use Craigslist almost exclusively, so I haven't been doing much sniping lately.
'However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. ' - Winston Churchill
I thought of that as soon as I read the headline. Who else thinks the real world IT culprits probably get the idea from reading BOFH?
A lot of radio stations spent a lot of money to upgrade their equipment and aquire additional frequencies to broadcast AM stereo twenty years ago. The only problem was, people wouldn't buy the receivers, so it went nowhere. This could be the same thing.