Given the phenomenal amount of money Japan spends on this sort of thing, surely Japan (and for that matter South Korea) would ensure that they've got more than adequate bandwidth?
Australia doesn't elect judges, sheriffs, school boards, doesn't have citizen-initiated referenda (a few local councils are starting to try them, but it's not widespread) and so on, and federal, state, and local elections are on different days, so the problems of knowing how to vote on ten squillion different ballots doesn't arise. If voting is shifted online over time, the need to have one big polling day disappears and people can consider each ballot appropriately.
Additionally, could somebody convince me that it's really appropriate to elect judges, prosecutors, and police? While I'm not naive enough to believe that those jobs aren't political, wouldn't that just encourage those people to make legally dubious but politically popular decisions?
As for misinformed people voting, that is a concern, but in Australia we look at the American system, see that it's overwhelmingly the young, the poor, and minorities who don't vote, and the general (but not universal) view is it's better to make sure that politicians have to work to attract votes from those people. There has been some agitation towards voluntary voting from the conservative parties, but support for a change is very limited.
It's all a matter of definition, but wasn't the V-1 in some sense the first example of this? It was radio-controlled in real-time, and carried a warhead.
Multics had a rather interesting approach to file I/O, IIRC - when you loaded a file, it got mapped straight in to virtual memory (the machine had a 48 bit address space back in the 1960's, so you could get away with stunts like this). Read/write was just a matter writes to memory!!
Neat idea - but imagine the 32-bit address space crunch happening 20 years ago instead of now:)
I can understand how ridiculous Mission to Mars was in that department, but a little "Suspension of Disbelief" can make a slightly imperfect movie quite enjoyable.
Sure, I can suspend disbelief. I really enjoy Buffy or even get a laugh out of Monkey (Japanese low-budget martial-arts series based on the ancient Chinese novel), and more to the point I really enjoyed Event Horizon, as well as ANH and ESB (ROTJ was good, but only in parts), supposed "science-fiction" that was really fantasy.
What I can't stand is movies that ask you to take them as sci-fi, but make incredibly blatant mistakes that *any* high-school physics student could spot. It doesn't only spoil it for the Slashdot audience, it spoils it for most of the audience.
In any case, the Slashdot reviews of most of the sci-fi movies of the year have pretty much paralleled the general critics view - in other words, it's mostly been a year of turkeys.
As for scalable graphics, this will be really interesting to see. One of Windows greater failings (IMHO) has always been its lack of geometry management. Most Windows apps basically nail things to specific X,Y positions in a dialog, rather than having a fluid layout which specifies relative attachments. (This is one area where Motif does something better than Windows).
I haven't done any Windows GUI programming so I can't really compare, but GTK+ still has many distances measured in pixels. Getting resolution
dependance out of our applications will take quite a long time.
The other question I have is whether scalable graphics for the GUI is really feasible on existing 72 dpi displays with all the aliasing effects that implies. Does the new Mac interface really use vector graphics for *all* its icons and such?
If we've all got 22" 200dpi displays, sure, but that's not going to happen for a long time yet.
Re:Why is it necessary to serve alcohol?
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Hacking The City
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Contrast: I'm in Hong Kong working just now, and the people here take it much easier, and hence I've yet to come across any alchohol related incidents.
The natives might not drink much, but the expat community really gets stuck in (there not being a great deal else to do on a Saturday night). However, with so many police around in Lan Kwai Fong and the other nightlife areas, it certainly feels very safe.
If you want to check out every bad stereotype you have of Australians, for instance, go to the Downunder Bar in Tsim Sha Tsui. Scary stuff:)
I think the ABC does a pretty good job with a comparatively tiny budget (even per capita funded much less than the Beeb). Its current affairs is far, far better than anything the commercials do (with the sole exception of the "Sunday" program), and it does the *only* serious radio current affairs.
It has a national youth radio station (http://abc.net.au/triplej) which not only broadcasts on the net, it plays a wider selection of music than anything you're likely to find on commercial radio anywhere. While the drama department has suffered with the funding cuts, most of the best drama Australia has produced has initially been shown on the ABC. Its coverage of rural issues, particularly on radio, is far more comprehensive than the largely Sydney-based commercial broadcasters.
One criticism that it consistently receives is that of political bias, particularly from the conservative parties, and they are using it as an excuse to cut funding. Like all such accusations, it has some basis in truth, but not nearly as much as the bleating would imply. While it gives both sides of politics a hard time when in office, its the issues that it pushes and the attitudes that it presents are usually that of the inner-city tertiary-educated elite who, particularly on social issues, are far more liberal than the government and the outer-suburban and rural voters it works very hard to attract.
However, I think the ABC does a very good job for the money and I'm quite happy that my taxes are spent on it. In fact, I'd like it to receive *more* funding so it can resume producing more drama and resume a real shortwave service to the world.
Re:The problem is proving a negative
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eLection '04
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· Score: 2
Precisely. Anybody with a high-school education can verify a paper ballot. A computerised system requires expert verification at every level.
Orthogonal to the question.
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Your proposals, interesting as many of them are, are basically orthogonal to the process of voting itself. You can do most of the above using just about any technology for recording/counting the votes.
No, they may not be using a general purpose computer, but Linux is already starting to be used on embedded devices.
The *interface* may or may not be a variant of X (an embedded graphics toolkit such as Qt/embedded would probably be more appropriate), and you're certainly not going to bother with a full posix environment, let alone KDE or GNOME, but why reinvent the wheel and write your own kernel? I'm not saying that Linux is the only or even the best choice, but it would probably be a quite viable one.
The current de facto rulers of most of Afghanistan (a bunch of crazies called the Taliban) are inflicting a cruel and brutal version of fundamentalist Islam on its citizens. As I understand it, TV and radio are banned as "undesirable influences", and about the only "entertainment" are the public stonings, amputations, and killings for violating Islamic laws. However, they are not internationally recognized as the legitimate government, and as such there is *no* government that can sign the Berne convention.
According to the CIA world factobook, Afghanistan is also the world's largest illicit opium producer and exports large amounts of hashish, and profits from that drug trade go to continuing the perpetual civil war.
While I don't regard the issues raised by Napster as trivial, a bit of perspective might go a long way sometimes.
One step at a time doesn't really cut it in the world of broadcasting. New formats have to be *huge* improvements over the existing systems, or totally backwards-compatible. Oh, and it helps if they don't cost much more than the old format too.
HDTV fails on so many of these it's not funny, at least in the short term. Given ten years worth of cost-cutting and technology development, maybe.
The Queen stepping into Canadian politics has about the same probability as all the air molecules in your room spontaneously moving into your coffee cup. (It isn't going to happen.)
In fact, the Queen said something to this effect when she was asked to override the Australian Governor-General's dismissal of the Prime Minister back in 1975. She wrote back and said that it was entirely a matter for the Governor-General.
In practical terms, if the monarch were *ever* to interfere directly in Australian politics ties with the monarchy would be severed as soon as the referendum could be organised to do so. In addition, it would be an immense diplomatic embarrassment to the British government to the point where the serving monarch would be virtually forced to step down. It would probably go close to spelling the end of the monarchy, in fact, as Britons would be concerned about the monarch acting in similar ways in their own domestic politics.
While I don't know for sure, I'd imagine that similar sentiments exist in Canada, and New Zealanders would almost certainly feel the same way.
BTW, has there ever been a supply crisis in either the Canadian federal or any of the provincial governments? What happened?
Yeah. By the way, does anyone know of a *coherent* explanation of the supposed Illuminati on the net somewhere? After playing Deus Ex, I wanted to satisfy my curiosity about them, but all the conspiracy theorist websites I found weren't too big on spelling or grammar. I don't think the people behind the idea are exactly rocket scientists:)
The current results as of 11:14 EST shows the following from Florida:
Bush 2,111,170 51%
Gore 1,964,211 47%
Nader 67,503 2%
IIRC, Florida carries 25 electoral college votes, enough to give the winner the presidancy at this point. I just hope the 67,503 Nader voters feel smug about voting their concience while they're riding in this hand basket come January 20th.
Additionally, from what I've seen on the web sites, Nader's not going to get anything close to the 5% he needs to get the Green Party government funding next time around. If Gore loses because of Nader's campaign, and the Greens don't get the funding they were after, I'm betting for some recriminations amongst the American left:)
Yes, but the US electoral system means that votes cast with "integrity" can mean that a person who the majority of voters dislike can get elected over somebody who would convincingly beat him/her in a two-horse race.
Given such a broken electoral system, I see nothing morally wrong with voting tactically.
If you noticed, Taco also wondered out loud whether he could "kill him." Are you going to now claim Rob is homicidal?
Now, if you've got an example of Taco *seriously* advocating a DoS on anyone, come back and post it. Otherwise, go back to the hole you crawled out of.
He is eager to throw money as ``good" causes, but has never thought about how much money he made by causing problems that need to be addressed by those ``good" causes.
BillG has made most of his money from ripping off large, wealthy Western companies and large, wealthy Westerners. While ripping people off is always unethical, the cynical side of me says that if a large proportion of Bill Gates' wealth earned, by and large, from rich people, ends up going to people who really need it, that goes some way to squaring the ledger:)
And if you're going to tell me that the government would actually use quantum computers to break into Joe Schmoe's porn files, you have another coming.
Pr0n perhaps not, but there's plenty of people who have a legitimate and real need to protect themselves from intelligence gathering from governments, including the US government.
I'm no expert, but as I understand it the recent Pakistani and Indian nuclear tests were picked up on seismographs thousands of kilometres away. If that is the case, a megaton impact would be picked up by seismographs, and the media would *certainly* be interested. Heck, the asteroid scares that have been publicised attract plenty of media attention, why wouldn't a real collision?
Education, health care, even food and shelter (if you can't afford it yourself). What a generous government to give so freely of its own money! I sure wouldn't give my money away like that!
No! Let the lazy bastards starve! Just as long as I pay less tax, I don't give a shit about the rest of my country, or the world for that matter (if they get uppity we'll just nuke'em).
Cars dont distill the essence of what humanity holds as its definitive triumph: intelligence. When intelligence is under threat of subsumption, its time to raise the barrier of entry:-)
To me, all that Kasparov's loss demonstrated was that chess could be played at the highest level by brute force and a large opening database rather than intelligence. The techniques used to make Deep Blue win don't help with any other artificial intelligence problem.
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Given the phenomenal amount of money Japan spends on this sort of thing, surely Japan (and for that matter South Korea) would ensure that they've got more than adequate bandwidth?
Australia doesn't elect judges, sheriffs, school boards, doesn't have citizen-initiated referenda (a few local councils are starting to try them, but it's not widespread) and so on, and federal, state, and local elections are on different days, so the problems of knowing how to vote on ten squillion different ballots doesn't arise. If voting is shifted online over time, the need to have one big polling day disappears and people can consider each ballot appropriately.
Additionally, could somebody convince me that it's really appropriate to elect judges, prosecutors, and police? While I'm not naive enough to believe that those jobs aren't political, wouldn't that just encourage those people to make legally dubious but politically popular decisions?
As for misinformed people voting, that is a concern, but in Australia we look at the American system, see that it's overwhelmingly the young, the poor, and minorities who don't vote, and the general (but not universal) view is it's better to make sure that politicians have to work to attract votes from those people. There has been some agitation towards voluntary voting from the conservative parties, but support for a change is very limited.
It's all a matter of definition, but wasn't the V-1 in some sense the first example of this? It was radio-controlled in real-time, and carried a warhead.
Neat idea - but imagine the 32-bit address space crunch happening 20 years ago instead of now :)
Sure, I can suspend disbelief. I really enjoy Buffy or even get a laugh out of Monkey (Japanese low-budget martial-arts series based on the ancient Chinese novel), and more to the point I really enjoyed Event Horizon, as well as ANH and ESB (ROTJ was good, but only in parts), supposed "science-fiction" that was really fantasy.
What I can't stand is movies that ask you to take them as sci-fi, but make incredibly blatant mistakes that *any* high-school physics student could spot. It doesn't only spoil it for the Slashdot audience, it spoils it for most of the audience.
In any case, the Slashdot reviews of most of the sci-fi movies of the year have pretty much paralleled the general critics view - in other words, it's mostly been a year of turkeys.
I haven't done any Windows GUI programming so I can't really compare, but GTK+ still has many distances measured in pixels. Getting resolution dependance out of our applications will take quite a long time.
The other question I have is whether scalable graphics for the GUI is really feasible on existing 72 dpi displays with all the aliasing effects that implies. Does the new Mac interface really use vector graphics for *all* its icons and such? If we've all got 22" 200dpi displays, sure, but that's not going to happen for a long time yet.
The natives might not drink much, but the expat community really gets stuck in (there not being a great deal else to do on a Saturday night). However, with so many police around in Lan Kwai Fong and the other nightlife areas, it certainly feels very safe.
If you want to check out every bad stereotype you have of Australians, for instance, go to the Downunder Bar in Tsim Sha Tsui. Scary stuff :)
It has a national youth radio station (http://abc.net.au/triplej) which not only broadcasts on the net, it plays a wider selection of music than anything you're likely to find on commercial radio anywhere. While the drama department has suffered with the funding cuts, most of the best drama Australia has produced has initially been shown on the ABC. Its coverage of rural issues, particularly on radio, is far more comprehensive than the largely Sydney-based commercial broadcasters.
One criticism that it consistently receives is that of political bias, particularly from the conservative parties, and they are using it as an excuse to cut funding. Like all such accusations, it has some basis in truth, but not nearly as much as the bleating would imply. While it gives both sides of politics a hard time when in office, its the issues that it pushes and the attitudes that it presents are usually that of the inner-city tertiary-educated elite who, particularly on social issues, are far more liberal than the government and the outer-suburban and rural voters it works very hard to attract.
However, I think the ABC does a very good job for the money and I'm quite happy that my taxes are spent on it. In fact, I'd like it to receive *more* funding so it can resume producing more drama and resume a real shortwave service to the world.
Precisely. Anybody with a high-school education can verify a paper ballot. A computerised system requires expert verification at every level.
Your proposals, interesting as many of them are, are basically orthogonal to the process of voting itself. You can do most of the above using just about any technology for recording/counting the votes.
The *interface* may or may not be a variant of X (an embedded graphics toolkit such as Qt/embedded would probably be more appropriate), and you're certainly not going to bother with a full posix environment, let alone KDE or GNOME, but why reinvent the wheel and write your own kernel? I'm not saying that Linux is the only or even the best choice, but it would probably be a quite viable one.
According to the CIA world factobook, Afghanistan is also the world's largest illicit opium producer and exports large amounts of hashish, and profits from that drug trade go to continuing the perpetual civil war.
While I don't regard the issues raised by Napster as trivial, a bit of perspective might go a long way sometimes.
HDTV fails on so many of these it's not funny, at least in the short term. Given ten years worth of cost-cutting and technology development, maybe.
In fact, the Queen said something to this effect when she was asked to override the Australian Governor-General's dismissal of the Prime Minister back in 1975. She wrote back and said that it was entirely a matter for the Governor-General.
In practical terms, if the monarch were *ever* to interfere directly in Australian politics ties with the monarchy would be severed as soon as the referendum could be organised to do so. In addition, it would be an immense diplomatic embarrassment to the British government to the point where the serving monarch would be virtually forced to step down. It would probably go close to spelling the end of the monarchy, in fact, as Britons would be concerned about the monarch acting in similar ways in their own domestic politics.
While I don't know for sure, I'd imagine that similar sentiments exist in Canada, and New Zealanders would almost certainly feel the same way.
BTW, has there ever been a supply crisis in either the Canadian federal or any of the provincial governments? What happened?
Yeah. By the way, does anyone know of a *coherent* explanation of the supposed Illuminati on the net somewhere? After playing Deus Ex, I wanted to satisfy my curiosity about them, but all the conspiracy theorist websites I found weren't too big on spelling or grammar. I don't think the people behind the idea are exactly rocket scientists :)
Additionally, from what I've seen on the web sites, Nader's not going to get anything close to the 5% he needs to get the Green Party government funding next time around. If Gore loses because of Nader's campaign, and the Greens don't get the funding they were after, I'm betting for some recriminations amongst the American left :)
Given such a broken electoral system, I see nothing morally wrong with voting tactically.
Now, if you've got an example of Taco *seriously* advocating a DoS on anyone, come back and post it. Otherwise, go back to the hole you crawled out of.
Yes, but Microsoft will probably require you to install MSBalls to run whistler :-p
BillG has made most of his money from ripping off large, wealthy Western companies and large, wealthy Westerners. While ripping people off is always unethical, the cynical side of me says that if a large proportion of Bill Gates' wealth earned, by and large, from rich people, ends up going to people who really need it, that goes some way to squaring the ledger :)
Pr0n perhaps not, but there's plenty of people who have a legitimate and real need to protect themselves from intelligence gathering from governments, including the US government.
I'm no expert, but as I understand it the recent Pakistani and Indian nuclear tests were picked up on seismographs thousands of kilometres away. If that is the case, a megaton impact would be picked up by seismographs, and the media would *certainly* be interested. Heck, the asteroid scares that have been publicised attract plenty of media attention, why wouldn't a real collision?
I was being sarcastic. I fully support the role of government in education and welfare. Perhaps I wasn't blunt enough.
No! Let the lazy bastards starve! Just as long as I pay less tax, I don't give a shit about the rest of my country, or the world for that matter (if they get uppity we'll just nuke'em).
To me, all that Kasparov's loss demonstrated was that chess could be played at the highest level by brute force and a large opening database rather than intelligence. The techniques used to make Deep Blue win don't help with any other artificial intelligence problem.