What sort of things are you voting on that there's so many choices, and why are there so many different ballot styles?
Election consolidation is a big goal here. Every little board - from a municipal utility district (subdivision sized water/sewer system) or a library district, or a transit authority, or hospital district, or... have to have elections to have board members and raise taxes. Also, in this state we elect our Judges - all the way from Justice of the Peace to Supreme Court.
In my voting precinct, there are two school districts, three categories of city residence (fully annexed, limited annexed, and extra-territorial jurisdiction), and about 1/2 the houses are served by an Emergency Services District (Fire protection) where the others receive their fire protection from the city. Just a few blocks North of us has a similar mix, but a different Justice of the Peace district. just a few blocks East of us another similar mix, but a different county commissioner precinct, and just South of us a few blocks is a different State House district...
Any of these board could hold their own election, whereever they wanted, simply by posting a notice at the County Courthouse. Instead, we try to consolodate them into a single election so that voters don't have to run all over town to vote. And the Legislative goal for next year is to consolidate election days as well. four years ago we had one election or another about every other month: January bonds, March Primary, April Primary Runoff, May Municipal, June Municipal Runoff, September bonds, Novemeber General. It's hard to drag people out of their houses 7 times a year for all of these elections, so if we can consolidate to just March Primary, April Primary Runoff, and November General that would make voting much more convenient. But it also increases the ballot complexity. If the Municipal and the General ballots were combined, there might be over 100 items on the ballot.
Sure, if you have just one issue, an X is really easy to count. But, in my county, there are 41 different agencies holding elections, in 260 precincts that don't correspond completely with all of the boundaries. Many of the precincts have two, three, or even 4 ballot styles. A ballot will have between 40 and 60 items to be voted on.
So, the expense of printing up enough blank ballots in 600-700 styles to have a sufficient number on hand for all of the registered voters who might come to vote on a particular day is an amazingly complex logistical feat, requiring a lot of cash and necessary waste. And that's just one county. There are 254 counties in my state...
So, it's not so much that the marking of the ballot with an X is complex, it's providing a ballot to mark that is complex. And voting machines, that can have all 600 permutations stored away to be generated on the fly, are a great way to avoid the issues involved.
But I do agree that a paper trail would be much better in terms of verifiability. Paricularly if the ballots were machine marked (no people trying to discern the voter's intent of an X by candidate A and a circle around candidate B)
Currently, Microsoft networking uses a proprietary port-mapper on tcp/135 for many protocols. Over-loaded port-mapping protocols make firewall implementation difficult because:
the firewall has to understand the port-mapping protocol, which many (including Cisco PIX) do not
arbitrary so-called "non-privileged" ports are opened by the port-mapping protocol
the use of a portmapper precludes more granular firewall controls, such as permitting Exchange client connections but not file replication
Will Microsoft change their networking policy to be more firewall friendly, with specific ports for specific activities, so that those of us trying to use Microsoft OS's in N-Tiered environments can write a sensible rule other than permit ip any any?
Of course they are. Every power company does. OPGW (optical ground wire - a 00 cable with fiber in the middle used for the static wire on transmission circuits) is about the same price as solid static wires, so it's essentially free to install fiber on all transmission circuits.
Since the life of a transmission circuit is generally less than 10 years before it needs to be reconductored, ubiquitous fiber on the power grid can be accomplished in under a decade.
Distribution fiber is a whole different ball of wax...
at the volumes they deal in, $2 billion is almost play money for them.
Quite right. Back when I worked for Intel (from about the time Fab 12 went online, up to the beginning of development of 300mm wafers) the manufacturing group had a $5B annual budget just for construction, and the design group had a similar budget.
But revamping Fab 12 is a little suprising. Fab 12 is one of only two fabs using the same footprint. I would have expected them to do a retrofit on Fab 14 or Fab 18, which are "standard fab concept" layout, so that they could "copy exact" the upgrade plan for another six or so fabs. They will only be able to use their lessons learned from Fab 12 if they go retrofit Fab 11.
And that's what makes it news. But it's also a vindication for the design team who worked on Fab 11 and 12, since a primary design consideration was the ability to rework the fab while still producing chips at it.
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Sure, if you have just one issue, an X is really easy to count. But, in my county, there are 41 different agencies holding elections, in 260 precincts that don't correspond completely with all of the boundaries. Many of the precincts have two, three, or even 4 ballot styles. A ballot will have between 40 and 60 items to be voted on. So, the expense of printing up enough blank ballots in 600-700 styles to have a sufficient number on hand for all of the registered voters who might come to vote on a particular day is an amazingly complex logistical feat, requiring a lot of cash and necessary waste. And that's just one county. There are 254 counties in my state... So, it's not so much that the marking of the ballot with an X is complex, it's providing a ballot to mark that is complex. And voting machines, that can have all 600 permutations stored away to be generated on the fly, are a great way to avoid the issues involved. But I do agree that a paper trail would be much better in terms of verifiability. Paricularly if the ballots were machine marked (no people trying to discern the voter's intent of an X by candidate A and a circle around candidate B)
- the firewall has to understand the port-mapping protocol, which many (including Cisco PIX) do not
- arbitrary so-called "non-privileged" ports are opened by the port-mapping protocol
- the use of a portmapper precludes more granular firewall controls, such as permitting Exchange client connections but not file replication
Will Microsoft change their networking policy to be more firewall friendly, with specific ports for specific activities, so that those of us trying to use Microsoft OS's in N-Tiered environments can write a sensible rule other than permit ip any any?Of course they are. Every power company does. OPGW (optical ground wire - a 00 cable with fiber in the middle used for the static wire on transmission circuits) is about the same price as solid static wires, so it's essentially free to install fiber on all transmission circuits. Since the life of a transmission circuit is generally less than 10 years before it needs to be reconductored, ubiquitous fiber on the power grid can be accomplished in under a decade. Distribution fiber is a whole different ball of wax...
But revamping Fab 12 is a little suprising. Fab 12 is one of only two fabs using the same footprint. I would have expected them to do a retrofit on Fab 14 or Fab 18, which are "standard fab concept" layout, so that they could "copy exact" the upgrade plan for another six or so fabs. They will only be able to use their lessons learned from Fab 12 if they go retrofit Fab 11.
And that's what makes it news. But it's also a vindication for the design team who worked on Fab 11 and 12, since a primary design consideration was the ability to rework the fab while still producing chips at it.