Is this one of those Tandem paired-CPU fault-tolerant mainframe setups?
I remember working on one of those (had 8 pairs of CPUs). The standing joke around the department was that they NEEDED all those CPUs because the individual CPUs kept failing so frequently.
Not only that, but the company refused to upgrade the thing, so as the workload grew, we ended up pushing the machine WAY past its specs, so all of the CPUs were pegged most of the time. If one of the CPUs failed, it was often not possible for the other CPUs to take up the slack, so they all ended up failing one after the other, just like dominos.
At that point, it was up to the guy with the beeper to get everything up ASAP (so much for 24/7 availability). We passed the beeper around to keep any one person from getting burned out. We really hated that beeper.
For the price of ONE of those CPUs, we could've built a nice resilient cluster of PCs that would have been easy to swap individual units in and out.
Uh...for a verifiable system, don't you want to be able to STOP someone from reprogramming your devices in the field? I don't think using an FPGA is going to be the best choice for a system like that.
That's only changing the degree of the punishment, which is not what I am arguing.
Just the basic fact that people DO get caught, tried & punished for those crimes keeps most other people honest. The form of the punishment doesn't matter so much except that it just needs to be bad enough to make people think twice about doing the crime.
I'm sure you can imagine what most people would be like if they didn't have to suffer any bad consequences at all for any crime they might perform.
On an individual-by-individual basis perhaps, but if rule-breakers are regularly, visibly & effectively punished, then statistically speaking, an organization will have fewer rule breakers.
I think that's part of the sophistication of the eyeball tracking system, to "average" out the general movements of a typical set of eyeballs & give you a relatively steady target.
It doesn't seem all that different than a trackpad or an optical mouse; those jitter quite a bit too if your sensitivity is cranked up too high, or move like molasses if your sensitivity is way too low.
In addition, given the way the brain adapts new physical activities, once you get used to using the eye tracking system to control & activate things, I would imagine your "average eyeball movements" would be greatly attuned to getting the best behavior out of the eyeball tracking system.
I don't see what the issue is. Composers would have to get used to writing songs as a service, instead of as a product (or they might write songs for themselves so that they can use them in their own performances). If they want to keep getting paid (and make a living at it), then they have to keep composing, just like any other craftsperson. Expecting to get paid over and over for a single act of creation is just being greedy.
There will always be people willing to pay for 1) virtuoso performances, and 2) performances which enhance a "good time". The problem that the recording industry, and other copyright proponents, have is that they have gotten used to the concept of thinking of "music" as a concrete product in itself, rather than the physical medium being the product, and they're scared that they're not going to be able to maintain the same profit margins if they are forced to support a service-based industry rather than a product-based industry.
Uhhhhh...I guess that whole Iran vs. Iraq war must have been Iran attacking (and being attacked by) some OTHER neighbor then... (unless you were being sarcastic?)
There's lots of evidence that many law enforcement agents already have an "us versus them" viewpoint when it comes to the general populace. Is it really surprising that the general populace is starting to feel the same way?
True, the acrobatic stunts he pulls in the trailer would probably only be physically possible if he has some sort of inertial canceler. Unfortunately, that kind of technology goes up there into the pure science fiction realm, rather than the "possible with an infinite amount of energy" real.
With essentially infinite amounts of energy, you don't need rocket fuel - you just suck in some atmospheric gas, give it ridiculous amounts of directed kinetic energy, and you're on your way.
Also, when all you're pushing is a man & a tin suit (always assuming that magical infinite energy source that doesn't require matter for fuel), your engine doesn't need to be as big as what is required for a jet.
Almost all of that movie tech boils down to what he's using as a power source.
Actually, the Oregon Constitution has even stronger free speech protections than the Federal Constitution (the Wikipedia page a brief reference to the differences).
That's one of the reasons there are so many topless dancer joints & adult bookstores scattered around, despite the best efforts of the "family values" crowd to shut them down. That's also why Powells (and the other bookstores) will probably have a good chance of getting this law thrown out.
Actually, you could use machines to print out nice, easy-to-read ballots, which contain only your choices (no chance for confusing the "will of the voter"). Punch cards & bubbles both have their own ways of getting screwed up.
Counting shouldn't be done by machines though, since it's too hard to make sure the machine is reporting what it really counted.
Machines are fine for creating the ballots. Nice, easy-to-read ballots, with just your choices printed (no hanging chads, multi-marked checkboxes, or trying to guess the "will of the voter").
Counting is a whole 'nother issue, and needs to be carefully designed to make it hard to cheat. Unfortunately, using machines to count generally makes it EASIER to cheat, at least for the people who have the access necessary to manipulate the machines.
Actually, that's a good argument for disbanding the company, then pointing out to the next company what happened to the first one when they got a bit uppity with the legal threats.
Your "critical thinking" skills, if honestly considering all possibilities, should also allow for the possibility that lawyers might be LYING when they say they want smart people with critical thinking skills.
So you allowed your emotional reaction to people whose behavior you disliked to override your rational judgement about an important subject. It sounds like you share equal blame for being shortsighted with the people whose behavior was irritating you.
There are good reasons why there are so much hatred & vitriol on the part of anti-Bush folks. What he & his cronies have been doing to the country is much worse in terms of scale of corruption than anything that has been seen in our country in the past. (I can't say worse in magnitude, since parts of the country have certainly been ridiculously corrupt in the past, but the nationwide scale is new.) People who have good self-images about their country tend to react strongly once they realize what's happening, kind of like the immune system reacts strongly to a vicious disease suddenly attacking the body.
It's unfortunate that people like yourself chose to focus on the expressions of outrage as what was wrong with the pissed-off people, rather than actually trying to determine whether there was any real reasons for those expressions of outrage. If you had allowed yourself to get pissed-off as well, Bush & Co. might have been ousted from office before they had a chance to do much real damage. As it is, you will have to suffer through the consequences of your inaction along with the rest of us.
There's a difference between what YOU as an end user consider to be an open connection, and what the telecom equipment consider as a connection.
For all you know, your apparent always-on connection was actually a virtual connection being frequently switched & reswitched over many different real physical connections. That would be a fairly standard architecture for having a network infrastructure which can have components being worked on while data is still flowing through the network.
When the telecom provider is "waiting for active connections to go away" on a particular device only means that all of the virtual connections that are momentarily being switched that device have been successfully switched to another device. It doesn't mean that any of those virtual connections have to be terminated.
It's too expensive for the cruise ships to hire battleship groups to surround them so they aren't hijacked by pirates & their fissionable materials sold off for processing by some rogue nation.
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That is untrue.
All you need to do is 1) verify that each particular person is allowed to vote, and 2) each verified voter was able to use one and only one ballot.
There are at least a few robust voting protocols for meeting these two conditions without needing to match up each ballot with each voter.
The big problem is, most of the election officials seem either ignorant of, or unwilling to implement, those protocols.
Is this one of those Tandem paired-CPU fault-tolerant mainframe setups?
I remember working on one of those (had 8 pairs of CPUs). The standing joke around the department was that they NEEDED all those CPUs because the individual CPUs kept failing so frequently.
Not only that, but the company refused to upgrade the thing, so as the workload grew, we ended up pushing the machine WAY past its specs, so all of the CPUs were pegged most of the time. If one of the CPUs failed, it was often not possible for the other CPUs to take up the slack, so they all ended up failing one after the other, just like dominos.
At that point, it was up to the guy with the beeper to get everything up ASAP (so much for 24/7 availability). We passed the beeper around to keep any one person from getting burned out. We really hated that beeper.
For the price of ONE of those CPUs, we could've built a nice resilient cluster of PCs that would have been easy to swap individual units in and out.
Uh...for a verifiable system, don't you want to be able to STOP someone from reprogramming your devices in the field? I don't think using an FPGA is going to be the best choice for a system like that.
That's only changing the degree of the punishment, which is not what I am arguing.
Just the basic fact that people DO get caught, tried & punished for those crimes keeps most other people honest. The form of the punishment doesn't matter so much except that it just needs to be bad enough to make people think twice about doing the crime.
I'm sure you can imagine what most people would be like if they didn't have to suffer any bad consequences at all for any crime they might perform.
On an individual-by-individual basis perhaps, but if rule-breakers are regularly, visibly & effectively punished, then statistically speaking, an organization will have fewer rule breakers.
Rules are pretty damn useless at modifying behavior if violators aren't caught & punished.
I tried, and I'm blind now. There are many things you DON'T want to see in HD.
I think that's part of the sophistication of the eyeball tracking system, to "average" out the general movements of a typical set of eyeballs & give you a relatively steady target.
It doesn't seem all that different than a trackpad or an optical mouse; those jitter quite a bit too if your sensitivity is cranked up too high, or move like molasses if your sensitivity is way too low.
In addition, given the way the brain adapts new physical activities, once you get used to using the eye tracking system to control & activate things, I would imagine your "average eyeball movements" would be greatly attuned to getting the best behavior out of the eyeball tracking system.
I don't see what the issue is. Composers would have to get used to writing songs as a service, instead of as a product (or they might write songs for themselves so that they can use them in their own performances). If they want to keep getting paid (and make a living at it), then they have to keep composing, just like any other craftsperson. Expecting to get paid over and over for a single act of creation is just being greedy.
There will always be people willing to pay for 1) virtuoso performances, and 2) performances which enhance a "good time". The problem that the recording industry, and other copyright proponents, have is that they have gotten used to the concept of thinking of "music" as a concrete product in itself, rather than the physical medium being the product, and they're scared that they're not going to be able to maintain the same profit margins if they are forced to support a service-based industry rather than a product-based industry.
Uhhhhh...I guess that whole Iran vs. Iraq war must have been Iran attacking (and being attacked by) some OTHER neighbor then... (unless you were being sarcastic?)
There's lots of evidence that many law enforcement agents already have an "us versus them" viewpoint when it comes to the general populace. Is it really surprising that the general populace is starting to feel the same way?
True, the acrobatic stunts he pulls in the trailer would probably only be physically possible if he has some sort of inertial canceler. Unfortunately, that kind of technology goes up there into the pure science fiction realm, rather than the "possible with an infinite amount of energy" real.
With essentially infinite amounts of energy, you don't need rocket fuel - you just suck in some atmospheric gas, give it ridiculous amounts of directed kinetic energy, and you're on your way.
Also, when all you're pushing is a man & a tin suit (always assuming that magical infinite energy source that doesn't require matter for fuel), your engine doesn't need to be as big as what is required for a jet.
Almost all of that movie tech boils down to what he's using as a power source.
Actually, the Oregon Constitution has even stronger free speech protections than the Federal Constitution (the Wikipedia page a brief reference to the differences).
That's one of the reasons there are so many topless dancer joints & adult bookstores scattered around, despite the best efforts of the "family values" crowd to shut them down. That's also why Powells (and the other bookstores) will probably have a good chance of getting this law thrown out.
Actually, you could use machines to print out nice, easy-to-read ballots, which contain only your choices (no chance for confusing the "will of the voter"). Punch cards & bubbles both have their own ways of getting screwed up.
Counting shouldn't be done by machines though, since it's too hard to make sure the machine is reporting what it really counted.
Machines are fine for creating the ballots. Nice, easy-to-read ballots, with just your choices printed (no hanging chads, multi-marked checkboxes, or trying to guess the "will of the voter").
Counting is a whole 'nother issue, and needs to be carefully designed to make it hard to cheat. Unfortunately, using machines to count generally makes it EASIER to cheat, at least for the people who have the access necessary to manipulate the machines.
Actually, that's a good argument for disbanding the company, then pointing out to the next company what happened to the first one when they got a bit uppity with the legal threats.
Your "critical thinking" skills, if honestly considering all possibilities, should also allow for the possibility that lawyers might be LYING when they say they want smart people with critical thinking skills.
So you allowed your emotional reaction to people whose behavior you disliked to override your rational judgement about an important subject. It sounds like you share equal blame for being shortsighted with the people whose behavior was irritating you.
There are good reasons why there are so much hatred & vitriol on the part of anti-Bush folks. What he & his cronies have been doing to the country is much worse in terms of scale of corruption than anything that has been seen in our country in the past. (I can't say worse in magnitude, since parts of the country have certainly been ridiculously corrupt in the past, but the nationwide scale is new.) People who have good self-images about their country tend to react strongly once they realize what's happening, kind of like the immune system reacts strongly to a vicious disease suddenly attacking the body.
It's unfortunate that people like yourself chose to focus on the expressions of outrage as what was wrong with the pissed-off people, rather than actually trying to determine whether there was any real reasons for those expressions of outrage. If you had allowed yourself to get pissed-off as well, Bush & Co. might have been ousted from office before they had a chance to do much real damage. As it is, you will have to suffer through the consequences of your inaction along with the rest of us.
Well, since you don't actually take anything from anyone, and you don't actually hurt anyone, the only thing that is obviously wrong is YOUR analysis.
Don't let stuff like facts & definitions get in the way of your ideology though. That would be unAmerican.
There's a difference between what YOU as an end user consider to be an open connection, and what the telecom equipment consider as a connection.
For all you know, your apparent always-on connection was actually a virtual connection being frequently switched & reswitched over many different real physical connections. That would be a fairly standard architecture for having a network infrastructure which can have components being worked on while data is still flowing through the network.
When the telecom provider is "waiting for active connections to go away" on a particular device only means that all of the virtual connections that are momentarily being switched that device have been successfully switched to another device. It doesn't mean that any of those virtual connections have to be terminated.
Isn't it doing the equivalent of nuking us from orbit? Maybe it just wants to make sure?
It's too expensive for the cruise ships to hire battleship groups to surround them so they aren't hijacked by pirates & their fissionable materials sold off for processing by some rogue nation.