Not quite. Votesmart.org is more on the technical side - what bills were voted for, biography, history of employment, etc. I'm hoping that this will be the why and how to votesmart.org's what.
Forget documenting what politicians do and have done. When is someone going to make a forum for discussing what should be? There's a real challenge for the wiki... creating tools for collaborating on a common view of the future rather than the past.
Rome wasn't built in a day. And neither will a tool that changes our political process.
You gotta learn to crawl before you run... and this is the crawl. Whether we get to the run stage is open for discussion, but this is a crucial step in getting there. Don't dismiss the first steps just because you can't see the destination yet.
Yes, I know. It will be full of propaganda and one-sided views. Even the most OCD-addled citizen editors will have a hard time competing with the attention of someone who gets paid to do the "right" edits.
However, this will mean that every candidate will finally be in one place. If I want to know Ron Paul's position on abortion and compare it with Hillary Clinton's, I can go to one site (and edit the pages - nyuck nyuck nyuck). Combined with the integration with opensecrets.org, I can do actual, honest to god research on ALL candidates trying to represent me, and vote accordingly.
I welcome our new congress-critter overlords - me, you and everyone else.
A bit rosy? For sure. But it this is a significant development for citizens trying to cast an informed vote. We might be going from totally and utterly craptastic to slightly less craptastic, but it's progress - the first true progress I've seen in ages. Now if we could just get redistricting fixed....
Re:It doesn't "remotely shut down vehicles"
on
Stalling Cars Via OnStar
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sigh... looks like you're the Slashdot voice of "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."
Couple of (not so) minor quibbles: - There is a massive difference between passive safety features and active features activated by someone other than the driver of the car (and yes, it will be hacked - same way that all remote locks to date have been hacked) - Tasers did not simply replace guns as options for subduing suspects. They took over as option for the range of situations that sit between "suspect can be subdued by talking" and "suspect has a gun". As such, it de-escalated some situations, but escalated a whole other set of situations. So yes, they are actually more dangerous than some of the options it replaced. The end-effect is that your statistical harmlessness (seriously, only someone in the neo-con flavored spook business talks like that) causes harm in situation where no harm was done before. - It is irrelevant that only 1% of the PATRIOT ACT is controversial. What is relevant is the impact that that 1% can have on 99% of the population.
It is interesting that all examples that you have given so far merely reinforce my suspicion that you have an unnaturally rose-tinted vision of the government and government employees - particularly law-enforcement.
Government might be not all sinister, but I'll be damned before I let some asshole cop ruin my day because he (far more likely than she) thinks that I'm not stopping fast enough in traffic. I'm astounded that you fail to grasp the cost a few bad calls can make, and that you equate passive safety features with remotely activated loss of control.
Seriously, stay the fuck out of my life. You have no concept of privacy, no concept of government abuse, no concept of the cost and benefit of liberty, and absolutely no idea that the government is there to serve me, not the other way around. And you're about 30 years behind in your analysis of the China threat. Not that I expect anything else from Military intelligence schools.
Very much, thank you. I can smell the Freedom Fries from here, and I can sleep safe knowing that everything is being done to keep the Children free of fear. I know that Freedom isn't Free, and am willing to pay any price for it (so long as I don't have to open my check book).
Same here. I'm in the heart of Silicon Valley, and I'm 15000 feet from the nearest CO. The end result is that the best DSL connection I can get from anybody outside of Ma Bell... I mean, ATT, is a 1.5 Mbit connection scaled down (yes, scaled down) to 768 kbits. At least upload is still at 368 kbits.
... that we don't have multiple companies creating their own parallel toll-roads: it's a horribly inefficient use of a limited resource (space). And just like toll-roads, the initial investment is high and pays off best when there is no competition. The first one to gather the resources to build the first road/connection gets to enjoy advantages that anyone coming after them won't have, such as an existing revenue stream, sticky customers, mind-share, being the standard, etc.
Hey now - you ought to take the SAT first before talking about scores. You know, so you have a clue for once.
I'm sure you also thought that all jaggies would be forever banished, that visuals would be smooth, lifelike and of cinematic quality.... right? You really, honestly thought that that was true? As said, I can't help you with that. And considering your claim of gaming since Atari (you sure it wasn't Pong? or Spacewars?), I can only marvel at the fact that you still believe what certain people say, or even base your purchase decisions around those statements.
Hey.... come to think of it, I have a bridge that I'm selling. Interested?
I believe that the expression you're looking for is "reading comprehension."
Keep digging, son. The rock is looking mighty hard in your hole there, but your dedication to digging even further is exemplary. You think a game is shafting you? Don't buy it. All the crying about undelivered promises is nothing but the sign of a burned fanboy.
Snicker.... You've played since the 2600, and still haven't figured this out? You actually expected all games to be at 1080p and 60FPS? Sorry, then I can't help you. Apparently, 20 years of gaming still hasn't taught you anything. At this rate, I doubt you'll ever learn.
If you're obsessing about pixel count and frame rate, you shouldn't play games. You should actually develop them. In the meantime, I'm perfectly happy with my yardstick: fun games I can play with friends. I'll be over there having fun. Good luck with that 60 FPS apoplexy.
I'm guessing that you started gaming with the XBox and PS2? Otherwise you'd have experienced first-hand that the statement "it's next gen, so it should x at 60 FPS!" is as old as gaming in general. It used to be that things should be 60 FPS at 256 simultaneous colors or GTFO (no getoffmylawn jokes, please). I guess it's now 60 FPS at 1080p. This complaint is based on the complete lack of understanding how graphics technology and how game development works.
1. Just because hardware can output things at resolution x, color-depth y and z objects on screen doesn't mean that it'll draw things at a particular frequency. Maxing out a particular aspect of an architecture generally means that there's a cost that has to be paid elsewhere. There is no free 60FPS.
2. Developers will always focus on shiny pictures. Most PR material is still sent out as still-pictures, and most people judge beauty by still frames. As a result, developers tend to optimize for prettyness rather than smoothness.
Yeah, I know. The original poster is little more than an HD troll, and should be ignored. This complaint is still my major pet peeve anytime a new generation rolls around - invariably, tons of people will complain 6 months after launch that it doesn't do x, y, or z at 60 FPS. Then they blame it on developers, manufacturers or PR people, when the problem is simply that they don't understand the topic they're talking about.
Yeah, there is a problem with marketing promising the moon and delivering a shiny pebble. But if you don't know this by the time you see your second commercial.... that's your problem, and not the problem of the developers.
That's fairly irrelevant. What matters is whether the patent office will grant the patent. After that, it's simply a matter of waving the patent around and threatening people with expensive litigation.
This is why patents suck these days: the vast majority do nothing to improve society, and are merely giant clubs in lawsuit wars.
Wow. I must have pissed off someone who got mod points recently. This the third straight post that got modded down. Looks like I've ascended to slashdot exalted status - I've got my own nameless stalker! Wee!
Additional benefit of this post: someone will get to waste even more off-topic mod points.:)
How do you differentiate Beethoven's 5th from noise based on a 5 ms sample? You're dealing with a very, very small sample size that has had multiple data processing passes applied to it.
I'm inclined to agree. There are very few violent events in Astrophysics that last exactly 5 ms. Even if it's true that the cosmos is vast, and that it is not very likely that someone else was looking at the same exact patch (more like fraction of a pinhead) in the sky at the same exact time, I believe something else should have picked up something. A pure radio radio signal that completely saturates equipment for exactly 5ms? I expect neutrino showers, x-ray waves, visible light - anything, something - to go along with, precede or follow it. Events of that magnitude are messy, and they leave other traces behind.
There are two possibilities here: - Someone got too excited with their data processing software. Some of that stuff was written in the 70s and is held together with spit, duct tape and undergrad students who have never before seen a Fortran77 program, and probably never will again. I don't trust weird stuff that only shows up after heavy duty data processing. - Someone picked up a not-so-local radio signal. The atmosphere can do weird things to radio waves.
Or some aliens were messing around with their cell phones again. In any case, I'll file this under "Postprocessing is a bitch".
Just because I feel like nit-picking: it's spiel, not speil. It's derived from the German word "Spiel", i.e. "play". It's used most often in the context of games - board games, football games, etc. Hence our use of spiel in the context of someone engaging in a routine where the rules are well-known and completely artificial, and where stuff is for entertainment only.
Erm.... that's a bit different than what the original poster was implying.
This is gear that's designed to make people visible who would not be otherwise visible during night time activities. It's designed for anyone out at night who might be on paths used by motorized vehicles. It doesn't identify someone as a jogger, it makes sure that someone else can see them - whether they're joggers, or doing anything else. Why do you think construction workers wear reflective gear?
And I think you're thinking of Lexis-Nexis - which I doubt would help in this area. Local laws are notoriously hard to find online.
Erm.... if Chicago is like any big city, there are millions of people who are followed by millions of other people at all times of the day. It's called Pedestrians Walking On The Sidewalk. Even at three in the morning, there is a strong likelihood that people will walk behind other people without ill intent.
Let me repeat myself from another post: there is no way to make this system useful. It'll either be trivialized (hey - gunshots! get there, quickly!) or it'll be so swamped with false positives that no one will pay attention to it.
... and unless we've made astounding progress in the last 5 years (as in, someone created a strong AI), IBM is full of crap. Completely, utterly full of guano.
Here's how the system will work. head covered: check metal flash: check loud sound: check Result: sound warning
There's absolutely no way in hell that the system is going to be able to do a real-time analysis that goes beyond basic image and sound recognition that is coupled with a set of expert rules. Why? Because no will have the time to properly train the system. And even if someone would be insane enough to do that, it'll still fail, because context is utterly missing.
Example: someone runs out of a store in a hurry. Someone comes after him. Should the police be involved? Did someone steal something from the store, or did two people find out one of their friends is in trouble? Or are they late to a movie?
This system is doomed to complete failure and is nothing but a boondoggle for IBM. Kudos to the IBM salespeople who sold Chicago on this system. They're able to sell fridges to eskimos, I'm sure.
The only thing that really worries: the politicians who drank the kool-aid. For those of you who live in Chicago: vote them out, or move. This is a sign of serious trouble on the horizon.
The Economist and CNN have crystal clear pictures of the protests and the crackdown. Maybe the Beeb needs to invest in better reporters? Or is this a story on how major outlets are using pictures taken by the public, because they are cheaper and more immediate? In either case, I think the story of the protest and the crackdown are bigger stories than the graininess of the pictures thereof.
While you might get glowing reviews, I question the size of the projects you're working on. For projects that can be done by one person in the required time frame, there is no sense in putting more people on it. Overhead grows faster than the number of people involved.
However, most projects that are critical to a department cannot be accomplished by one person. As a result, a team is *needed*. If all you've worked on is projects that can be accomplished by a single person.... you've either not set your goals very high, or you're the magic silver bullet that will solve everyone's project problems.
Sorry to sound caustic, but I know the difference between a 1-man project and a team project. I also know that the value of a good manager lies partially in their ability to break up a large project into manageable chunks. Take that however you want.
No, they don't feel that they have destroyed VOIP as a threat. They've destroyed someone who was using VOIP to threaten their monopoly. I'm sure that we'll see Sprint, Verizon and ATT provide VOIP at some point as a legitimate alternate to a landline. And to some extent, they already do. But there will never, ever be a new company that will rely on VOIP to become a legitimate telco competitor. Because before that company will become a legitimate competitor, the incumbents will have sued it into the ground. $100 million verdicts are tough for an incumbent, but not a deal-breaker. $100 million verdicts are death sentences for anyone trying to start a competitor.
The only day that we will kick their corporate corpses is if we get rid of stupid patents and actually enforce anti-trust regulations (note to the FCC: cable and satellite providers are no more competitors to ATT than pencils and markers are competitors to Bic). And I don't see that coming anytime soon.
A six-on-one beatdown is a serious crime of violence, regardless of how much melanin anyone involved has in their skin, or what sort of discrimination they or they ancestors have undergone.
Agree completely.
However, dismissing the noose hangings and the beatings as unrelated is being a little too tied to a causal relationship. The people who hung the nooses on the school tree clearly escalated racial tensions to a new level. The school administrators then escalated the issue further when they decided to go easy on the white kids who hung the nooses. And no one managed to de-escalate it after this.
Yes, you're right. There's no causal relationship between these two events. However, they are linked together through the history of racism that is quite apparent in the town. De-linking those two will not allow you to actually get to the root cause of the beating.... in order to actually prevent further incidents like these, you need to address the racism in Jena. I'm sure it didn't start with the nooses, and there are plenty of issues on both sides of the fence. But you have to look at the beating as part of a larger context, or you'll be doomed to repeat the same events again and again.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. Votesmart.org is more on the technical side - what bills were voted for, biography, history of employment, etc. I'm hoping that this will be the why and how to votesmart.org's what.
Rome wasn't built in a day. And neither will a tool that changes our political process.
You gotta learn to crawl before you run... and this is the crawl. Whether we get to the run stage is open for discussion, but this is a crucial step in getting there. Don't dismiss the first steps just because you can't see the destination yet.
Yes, I know. It will be full of propaganda and one-sided views. Even the most OCD-addled citizen editors will have a hard time competing with the attention of someone who gets paid to do the "right" edits.
However, this will mean that every candidate will finally be in one place. If I want to know Ron Paul's position on abortion and compare it with Hillary Clinton's, I can go to one site (and edit the pages - nyuck nyuck nyuck). Combined with the integration with opensecrets.org, I can do actual, honest to god research on ALL candidates trying to represent me, and vote accordingly.
I welcome our new congress-critter overlords - me, you and everyone else.
A bit rosy? For sure. But it this is a significant development for citizens trying to cast an informed vote. We might be going from totally and utterly craptastic to slightly less craptastic, but it's progress - the first true progress I've seen in ages. Now if we could just get redistricting fixed....
Sigh... looks like you're the Slashdot voice of "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."
Couple of (not so) minor quibbles:
- There is a massive difference between passive safety features and active features activated by someone other than the driver of the car (and yes, it will be hacked - same way that all remote locks to date have been hacked)
- Tasers did not simply replace guns as options for subduing suspects. They took over as option for the range of situations that sit between "suspect can be subdued by talking" and "suspect has a gun". As such, it de-escalated some situations, but escalated a whole other set of situations. So yes, they are actually more dangerous than some of the options it replaced. The end-effect is that your statistical harmlessness (seriously, only someone in the neo-con flavored spook business talks like that) causes harm in situation where no harm was done before.
- It is irrelevant that only 1% of the PATRIOT ACT is controversial. What is relevant is the impact that that 1% can have on 99% of the population.
It is interesting that all examples that you have given so far merely reinforce my suspicion that you have an unnaturally rose-tinted vision of the government and government employees - particularly law-enforcement.
Government might be not all sinister, but I'll be damned before I let some asshole cop ruin my day because he (far more likely than she) thinks that I'm not stopping fast enough in traffic. I'm astounded that you fail to grasp the cost a few bad calls can make, and that you equate passive safety features with remotely activated loss of control.
Seriously, stay the fuck out of my life. You have no concept of privacy, no concept of government abuse, no concept of the cost and benefit of liberty, and absolutely no idea that the government is there to serve me, not the other way around. And you're about 30 years behind in your analysis of the China threat. Not that I expect anything else from Military intelligence schools.
Very much, thank you. I can smell the Freedom Fries from here, and I can sleep safe knowing that everything is being done to keep the Children free of fear. I know that Freedom isn't Free, and am willing to pay any price for it (so long as I don't have to open my check book).
Same here. I'm in the heart of Silicon Valley, and I'm 15000 feet from the nearest CO. The end result is that the best DSL connection I can get from anybody outside of Ma Bell... I mean, ATT, is a 1.5 Mbit connection scaled down (yes, scaled down) to 768 kbits. At least upload is still at 368 kbits.
... that we don't have multiple companies creating their own parallel toll-roads: it's a horribly inefficient use of a limited resource (space). And just like toll-roads, the initial investment is high and pays off best when there is no competition. The first one to gather the resources to build the first road/connection gets to enjoy advantages that anyone coming after them won't have, such as an existing revenue stream, sticky customers, mind-share, being the standard, etc.
Hey now - you ought to take the SAT first before talking about scores. You know, so you have a clue for once.
I'm sure you also thought that all jaggies would be forever banished, that visuals would be smooth, lifelike and of cinematic quality.... right? You really, honestly thought that that was true? As said, I can't help you with that. And considering your claim of gaming since Atari (you sure it wasn't Pong? or Spacewars?), I can only marvel at the fact that you still believe what certain people say, or even base your purchase decisions around those statements.
Hey.... come to think of it, I have a bridge that I'm selling. Interested?
I believe that the expression you're looking for is "reading comprehension."
Keep digging, son. The rock is looking mighty hard in your hole there, but your dedication to digging even further is exemplary. You think a game is shafting you? Don't buy it. All the crying about undelivered promises is nothing but the sign of a burned fanboy.
Snicker.... You've played since the 2600, and still haven't figured this out? You actually expected all games to be at 1080p and 60FPS? Sorry, then I can't help you. Apparently, 20 years of gaming still hasn't taught you anything. At this rate, I doubt you'll ever learn.
If you're obsessing about pixel count and frame rate, you shouldn't play games. You should actually develop them. In the meantime, I'm perfectly happy with my yardstick: fun games I can play with friends. I'll be over there having fun. Good luck with that 60 FPS apoplexy.
I'm guessing that you started gaming with the XBox and PS2? Otherwise you'd have experienced first-hand that the statement "it's next gen, so it should x at 60 FPS!" is as old as gaming in general. It used to be that things should be 60 FPS at 256 simultaneous colors or GTFO (no getoffmylawn jokes, please). I guess it's now 60 FPS at 1080p. This complaint is based on the complete lack of understanding how graphics technology and how game development works.
1. Just because hardware can output things at resolution x, color-depth y and z objects on screen doesn't mean that it'll draw things at a particular frequency. Maxing out a particular aspect of an architecture generally means that there's a cost that has to be paid elsewhere. There is no free 60FPS.
2. Developers will always focus on shiny pictures. Most PR material is still sent out as still-pictures, and most people judge beauty by still frames. As a result, developers tend to optimize for prettyness rather than smoothness.
Yeah, I know. The original poster is little more than an HD troll, and should be ignored. This complaint is still my major pet peeve anytime a new generation rolls around - invariably, tons of people will complain 6 months after launch that it doesn't do x, y, or z at 60 FPS. Then they blame it on developers, manufacturers or PR people, when the problem is simply that they don't understand the topic they're talking about.
Yeah, there is a problem with marketing promising the moon and delivering a shiny pebble. But if you don't know this by the time you see your second commercial.... that's your problem, and not the problem of the developers.
Rant off.
That's fairly irrelevant. What matters is whether the patent office will grant the patent. After that, it's simply a matter of waving the patent around and threatening people with expensive litigation.
This is why patents suck these days: the vast majority do nothing to improve society, and are merely giant clubs in lawsuit wars.
Direct current ought to work better. No silly thing like reversing the travel direction of electrons a few hundred times a second.
Wow. I must have pissed off someone who got mod points recently. This the third straight post that got modded down. Looks like I've ascended to slashdot exalted status - I've got my own nameless stalker! Wee!
:)
Additional benefit of this post: someone will get to waste even more off-topic mod points.
How do you differentiate Beethoven's 5th from noise based on a 5 ms sample? You're dealing with a very, very small sample size that has had multiple data processing passes applied to it.
I'm inclined to agree. There are very few violent events in Astrophysics that last exactly 5 ms. Even if it's true that the cosmos is vast, and that it is not very likely that someone else was looking at the same exact patch (more like fraction of a pinhead) in the sky at the same exact time, I believe something else should have picked up something. A pure radio radio signal that completely saturates equipment for exactly 5ms? I expect neutrino showers, x-ray waves, visible light - anything, something - to go along with, precede or follow it. Events of that magnitude are messy, and they leave other traces behind.
There are two possibilities here:
- Someone got too excited with their data processing software. Some of that stuff was written in the 70s and is held together with spit, duct tape and undergrad students who have never before seen a Fortran77 program, and probably never will again. I don't trust weird stuff that only shows up after heavy duty data processing.
- Someone picked up a not-so-local radio signal. The atmosphere can do weird things to radio waves.
Or some aliens were messing around with their cell phones again. In any case, I'll file this under "Postprocessing is a bitch".
Just because I feel like nit-picking: it's spiel, not speil. It's derived from the German word "Spiel", i.e. "play". It's used most often in the context of games - board games, football games, etc. Hence our use of spiel in the context of someone engaging in a routine where the rules are well-known and completely artificial, and where stuff is for entertainment only.
Erm.... that's a bit different than what the original poster was implying.
This is gear that's designed to make people visible who would not be otherwise visible during night time activities. It's designed for anyone out at night who might be on paths used by motorized vehicles. It doesn't identify someone as a jogger, it makes sure that someone else can see them - whether they're joggers, or doing anything else. Why do you think construction workers wear reflective gear?
And I think you're thinking of Lexis-Nexis - which I doubt would help in this area. Local laws are notoriously hard to find online.
"A lot of cities have laws against running and jogging can only be done if you are wearing the proper attire so that others know you are a jogger."
You're kidding, right? Can you point to the law? Because I sure would love to see the law that specifies what you need to wear to qualify as a jogger.
Erm.... if Chicago is like any big city, there are millions of people who are followed by millions of other people at all times of the day. It's called Pedestrians Walking On The Sidewalk. Even at three in the morning, there is a strong likelihood that people will walk behind other people without ill intent.
Let me repeat myself from another post: there is no way to make this system useful. It'll either be trivialized (hey - gunshots! get there, quickly!) or it'll be so swamped with false positives that no one will pay attention to it.
... and unless we've made astounding progress in the last 5 years (as in, someone created a strong AI), IBM is full of crap. Completely, utterly full of guano.
Here's how the system will work.
head covered: check
metal flash: check
loud sound: check
Result: sound warning
There's absolutely no way in hell that the system is going to be able to do a real-time analysis that goes beyond basic image and sound recognition that is coupled with a set of expert rules. Why? Because no will have the time to properly train the system. And even if someone would be insane enough to do that, it'll still fail, because context is utterly missing.
Example: someone runs out of a store in a hurry. Someone comes after him. Should the police be involved? Did someone steal something from the store, or did two people find out one of their friends is in trouble? Or are they late to a movie?
This system is doomed to complete failure and is nothing but a boondoggle for IBM. Kudos to the IBM salespeople who sold Chicago on this system. They're able to sell fridges to eskimos, I'm sure.
The only thing that really worries: the politicians who drank the kool-aid. For those of you who live in Chicago: vote them out, or move. This is a sign of serious trouble on the horizon.
The Economist and CNN have crystal clear pictures of the protests and the crackdown. Maybe the Beeb needs to invest in better reporters? Or is this a story on how major outlets are using pictures taken by the public, because they are cheaper and more immediate? In either case, I think the story of the protest and the crackdown are bigger stories than the graininess of the pictures thereof.
I guess no modding this story now...
While you might get glowing reviews, I question the size of the projects you're working on. For projects that can be done by one person in the required time frame, there is no sense in putting more people on it. Overhead grows faster than the number of people involved.
However, most projects that are critical to a department cannot be accomplished by one person. As a result, a team is *needed*. If all you've worked on is projects that can be accomplished by a single person.... you've either not set your goals very high, or you're the magic silver bullet that will solve everyone's project problems.
Sorry to sound caustic, but I know the difference between a 1-man project and a team project. I also know that the value of a good manager lies partially in their ability to break up a large project into manageable chunks. Take that however you want.
No, they don't feel that they have destroyed VOIP as a threat. They've destroyed someone who was using VOIP to threaten their monopoly. I'm sure that we'll see Sprint, Verizon and ATT provide VOIP at some point as a legitimate alternate to a landline. And to some extent, they already do. But there will never, ever be a new company that will rely on VOIP to become a legitimate telco competitor. Because before that company will become a legitimate competitor, the incumbents will have sued it into the ground. $100 million verdicts are tough for an incumbent, but not a deal-breaker. $100 million verdicts are death sentences for anyone trying to start a competitor.
The only day that we will kick their corporate corpses is if we get rid of stupid patents and actually enforce anti-trust regulations (note to the FCC: cable and satellite providers are no more competitors to ATT than pencils and markers are competitors to Bic). And I don't see that coming anytime soon.