I agree. Completely! So if we all agree why the hell does every discussion about voting machines end up blaming Republicans for yet another Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (VRWC (tm))? Why, when a clearly biased and self-interested plaintiff bitches on a blog about what is very possibly his political manifesto get gagged by the court that ordered an independent review, does slashdot whip itself into a frenzy of moral outrage.
If, as you claim, the court gagged him because he was a biased and self-interested plaintiff with a "political manifesto," moral outrage is appropriate. If that were true, then the judge had forsworn his oath to uphold the constitution-- which incorporates a first amendment right to free speech-- and the judge should be reprimanded strongly and removed from the bench.
In America, courts do not have the right to put gag orders on political manifestos.
However, I actually did read the original article, and first, he's not the plaintiff; he's the expert witness; and second, nowhere in the article are Republicans blamed (nor even mentioned), nor is a "Vast Right Wind Conspiracy" discussed (or even mentioned), and third, the judge very likely did not order the gag order because it's a "political manifesto," but much more likely because the vendor is claiming that the report contains information that the vendor claims is trade secret. (Knowing a little bit about what corporations want to keep secret, this "trade secret" is most likely the fact that the code is filled with bugs and with poorly-worked-out patches.)
So, frankly, I'm at a loss to understand what you're commenting about.
Nevertheless, oddly enough, we both seem to agree on the basics; that voting machines should be accurate and verifiable. So I will quit bitching at this point, and say "yes, I agree with that, as well."
Trade secrets and patents are mutually exclusive concepts.
This is correct, and worth emphasizing.
Trade secrets and patents are opposites. A patent is, in essence, a contract with the government that, in exchange for the inventor disclosing the details of the invention in sufficient detail that an ordinary practicioner of the art could replicate it, the government agrees to a limited period in which the inventor (or assignee) has exclusive rights to liscence the invention.
In other words, the key element of a patent is disclosure, not secrecy.
...originally complained that his voting machine had an extra vote for Obama. Now that the primary is over his conspiracy theory has switched to focusing on an extra vote for Republicans. Andy would probably like the machine just fine if it had an extra vote for Clinton.
It doesn't make a damn bit of difference who the extra vote is for or against. An extra vote for any candidate is unacceptable. The issue is not Democrats versus Republicans, it's having a balloting system that accurately and verifiably counts the votes.
Whether the Democrats win, and the Republicans complain that the voting was flawed, or the Republicans win, and the Democrats complain that the voting was flawed, either one is bad. The voting should be accurate and verifiable. It should count every vote, and count every vote accurately, count no votes that weren't case, and should be capable of being verified that it counted every vote accurately. Anything else is unacceptable.
Hmm... This looks like a job for wikileaks. Couldn't be too hard to find. Has it been posted at all? If so, could a quick google archive search prove useful? I would be very interested to see the results of this study, and would be even more interested to know this judge's reasoning behind withholding it.
Violating the court order and posting the report to Wikileaks might soun good, but would be very counterproductive in the end.
First. it is very likely that the order may be lifted after arguments are heard. Violating a direct court order is going to extremely annoy the judge; judges do not take well to people disobeying direct court orders. The correct way to deal with it is to contest the order, and argue it out.
Second, Appel has been given access to the source code. The only way he was given this access was by the court having guaranteed to the vendor that they would not release trade secrets to the public. If Appel demonstrates that he does not consider himself bound by the court orders, do you think that he will ever be given the chance to examine source code, from any vendor, ever again? Do you think that anybody will ever be given the opportunity to examine source code? Consider the following conversation sometime in the future
"Your honor, you tell me that if we give the plaintiffs access to the source code of our voting machines, it will remain sealed under court order. However, in the case 'New Jersey versus Sequoia AVC' the court gave the vendor exactly that guarantee, but the plaintiffs recklessly disobeyed the court order. Why should you believe their promises, when they have demonstrated that they do not consider bound by promises they make in a court of law?"
The correct answer is, argue it out. Don't piss the judge off. Make it clear that the good guys are the ones who obey the rule of law, and the bad guys are the ones who are contemptuous of it.
Why would it be Greenpeace? That makes no sense if you actually think about it
You're correct, it doesn't make any sense... if you're looking for actual logic. Greenpeace singled out Apple for its press release criticizing the practices used in the computer industry for the simple reason-- which they freely admitted-- that they get more headlines by going after Apple than they get by criticizing the computer and semiconductor industry in general.
Exactly.
That's the problem in the internet age; an rumor comes up and spreads like lightning. The correct thing to do would be to investigate carefully and thoroughly, but doing that just means that the rumor mongers add "Apple has not denied the accusations!" to the rumor, as if "not denying" somehow substantiates the rumor.
The problem is, actually doing it right-- investigating the rumor with an open mind-- takes time. So they're really in a no-win situation.
Not according to the CERN theory division,...
They also point out that no other superfluid helium handling facility has mysteriously blown itself to pieces."
The CERN theory department is correct. They seem to be aware of conservation of energy, which is to say, you don't get more energy out of it than you put into it.
Science journalists, on the other hand, seem to be a little fuzzy on the concept.
Your PC is 200-300 watts (another 150-250 if your monitor is a CRT), but your laser printer is 2,000 watts.
If my laserprinter was 2kW, I wouldn't have to heat my home.
I think your number is a bit high. Wikianswers says a laser printer uses 400 to 750 watts.
(and, of course, we know that any website with the name "Wiki" in it has to be accurate, right?)
While I am impressed with the flight I found the video a bit scary...
When the 1st stage separated it looked like it (at least!) almost hit the nozzle of the 2nd stage on the right side.
Further, the 1st stage didn't just fall straight back but did so at quite an angle (implying the trajectory of the 2nd stage changed quite a bit after separation).
Then, the nozzle of the second stage glowed bright red in more and more placed as the flight progressed. Is that normal (to the degree observable)?
The red glow is normal, I believe-- it's a radiation-cooled nozzle.
Towards the end of the flight the whole vehicle started to swing back and forth quite a bit, with growing amplitude.
That part looked a little scary to me, too, especially since the control on the upper stage was exactly what went wrong on the second flight....
I'm also curious, but at what point would you consider SpaceX deserving of congratulations? Their first successful Falcon 9 launch? Their first manned launch? Their first launch to a private space station? Their first circumlunar navigation? Their first lunar landing? Their first Mars landing?
I, personally, will say that they're deserving of congratulations with their first successful launch to orbit.
I find it a bit weird that so many people bitch a blue streak all day long about how much "Apple sucks"until they have a chance to run OS X on a PC. Then it's like "kewl dewd, I can't wait to do that!". What's up with that?
They have insisted on relearning the lessons of the past 60 years the hard way.
Actually, it's more that they're starting from scratch, taking advantage of the lessons learned from the past 60 years. When mistakes have occurred, they've fixed the bug and tried again. Nothing that I've seen suggests any problems inherent to what they're doing.
To be fair, learning by doing really is the best way to learn, and as long as they are learning from each of their failures, they're doing good. If they can survive the bad PR, they're gaining experience that should, in the long run, be very very valuable.
If you're not free to fail, you're not free to learn. It's the learning the lessons and keeping on after failure that's hard, but they seem to be able to do that, so I'd say, good job; keep it up.
Don't even have to buy it. From doing a Google News search, it looks to me like the controversy over deleting the Deletionpedia entry is going to make it notable even if it didn't start out that way.
In fact, the fact that the controversy over deleting the deletionpedia page is itself notable makes me very tempted to write a Wikipedia article "Deletionpedia Deletion Controversy"...
On the other hand, I guess that might be pushing it a little too far, though.
Different people quote different numbers because they have been responding to different things.
My statement was specifically about the claim that the new cell improved the absorption by a factor of 500. Absorption is by definition 1-reflectivity; if you'd like references, feel free to check google, where you will find roughly two hundred thousand of them.
Solar panels with his 3D cells would provide 500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells and nine times more than cutting-edge 3D solar cells.
Since commercially-available solar cells in fact absorb more than 90% of the light in the usable bands-- and about fifty percent over the whole solar spectrum, including the non-usable wavelenghts-- that's pretty darn amazing.
My salary and benefits: @ $18/hr time used on backup: 0.067 hrs My cost per gigabyte of backup: $1
You haven't counted overhead. First, there is your personal overhead. Do you talk to your co-workers in the hall? Get coffee on company time? Go to the bathroom? Fill out time sheets to account for what you do all day? Read memos telling you that you have to fill out time sheets? Read your e-mail? Post comments to slashdot at 10:47AM on a workday? Only robots are 100% efficient in their use of time.
And then there is company overhead-- your computer, pens, paper, copy machine, office, lighting, secretaries, payroll, all that stuff. Even if you don't notice it, even if you don't use it, it's there.
$18/hour?? You'd be lucky if you cost the company less than $100/hour.
The problem is that it's easier to just archive the cruft stuff than it is to go through it all and figure out what's worth keeping or training staff to organize their data and retain only that which is necessary.
There, fixed that for you.
According to the original article, ("The average employee generates 10GB of data per year at a cost of $5 per gigabyte to back it up ") the cost of backups is fifty dollars a year per employee.
So if that an average employee costs the company $100 per hour (including overhead), then if "training training staff to organize their data and retain only that which is necessary" takes more than half an hour per year, it's more cost effective to archive the junk than it is to train the employees to sort it.
Though called as such for semantic ease, there's really no such thing as an editor who believes in deletion as a rule.
I put up an article yesterday, and it was marked for speedy deletion within sixty seconds of when it was posted.
I posted a reply stating that the article did not meet the criteria for speedy deletion, and within five minutes two different people marked it AfD.
Very obviously, there are people who camp on the list of new articles with the specific intent to delete new articles they don't like as soon as they appear. You may not like the word "deletionist" for these people, yet clearly they exist. Do you have a better word?
First of all, in order to qualify for speedy deletion, your article has to be completely incomprehensible, nauseatingly ad-like, or a work of fiction (in any sense of the word).
Wrong. In order to be speedy deleted, two Wikipedians-- that's it, two-- have to say it's qualified for speedy deletion: one to nominate it, and the second, an administrator, to do it. Speedy deletions are without appeal-- the article vanishes from Wikipedia without any record of its existence and without any discussion.
Speedy deletion is anything that two wikipedians say is speedy deletion.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Completely! So if we all agree why the hell does every discussion about voting machines end up blaming Republicans for yet another Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (VRWC (tm))? Why, when a clearly biased and self-interested plaintiff bitches on a blog about what is very possibly his political manifesto get gagged by the court that ordered an independent review, does slashdot whip itself into a frenzy of moral outrage.
If, as you claim, the court gagged him because he was a biased and self-interested plaintiff with a "political manifesto," moral outrage is appropriate. If that were true, then the judge had forsworn his oath to uphold the constitution-- which incorporates a first amendment right to free speech-- and the judge should be reprimanded strongly and removed from the bench.
In America, courts do not have the right to put gag orders on political manifestos.
However, I actually did read the original article, and first, he's not the plaintiff; he's the expert witness; and second, nowhere in the article are Republicans blamed (nor even mentioned), nor is a "Vast Right Wind Conspiracy" discussed (or even mentioned), and third, the judge very likely did not order the gag order because it's a "political manifesto," but much more likely because the vendor is claiming that the report contains information that the vendor claims is trade secret. (Knowing a little bit about what corporations want to keep secret, this "trade secret" is most likely the fact that the code is filled with bugs and with poorly-worked-out patches.)
So, frankly, I'm at a loss to understand what you're commenting about.
Nevertheless, oddly enough, we both seem to agree on the basics; that voting machines should be accurate and verifiable. So I will quit bitching at this point, and say "yes, I agree with that, as well."
Trade secrets and patents are mutually exclusive concepts.
This is correct, and worth emphasizing.
Trade secrets and patents are opposites. A patent is, in essence, a contract with the government that, in exchange for the inventor disclosing the details of the invention in sufficient detail that an ordinary practicioner of the art could replicate it, the government agrees to a limited period in which the inventor (or assignee) has exclusive rights to liscence the invention.
In other words, the key element of a patent is disclosure, not secrecy.
...originally complained that his voting machine had an extra vote for Obama. Now that the primary is over his conspiracy theory has switched to focusing on an extra vote for Republicans. Andy would probably like the machine just fine if it had an extra vote for Clinton.
It doesn't make a damn bit of difference who the extra vote is for or against. An extra vote for any candidate is unacceptable. The issue is not Democrats versus Republicans, it's having a balloting system that accurately and verifiably counts the votes.
Whether the Democrats win, and the Republicans complain that the voting was flawed, or the Republicans win, and the Democrats complain that the voting was flawed, either one is bad. The voting should be accurate and verifiable. It should count every vote, and count every vote accurately, count no votes that weren't case, and should be capable of being verified that it counted every vote accurately. Anything else is unacceptable.
Hmm... This looks like a job for wikileaks. Couldn't be too hard to find. Has it been posted at all? If so, could a quick google archive search prove useful? I would be very interested to see the results of this study, and would be even more interested to know this judge's reasoning behind withholding it.
Violating the court order and posting the report to Wikileaks might soun good, but would be very counterproductive in the end.
First. it is very likely that the order may be lifted after arguments are heard. Violating a direct court order is going to extremely annoy the judge; judges do not take well to people disobeying direct court orders. The correct way to deal with it is to contest the order, and argue it out.
Second, Appel has been given access to the source code. The only way he was given this access was by the court having guaranteed to the vendor that they would not release trade secrets to the public. If Appel demonstrates that he does not consider himself bound by the court orders, do you think that he will ever be given the chance to examine source code, from any vendor, ever again? Do you think that anybody will ever be given the opportunity to examine source code? Consider the following conversation sometime in the future
"Your honor, you tell me that if we give the plaintiffs access to the source code of our voting machines, it will remain sealed under court order. However, in the case 'New Jersey versus Sequoia AVC' the court gave the vendor exactly that guarantee, but the plaintiffs recklessly disobeyed the court order. Why should you believe their promises, when they have demonstrated that they do not consider bound by promises they make in a court of law?"
The correct answer is, argue it out. Don't piss the judge off. Make it clear that the good guys are the ones who obey the rule of law, and the bad guys are the ones who are contemptuous of it.
Why would it be Greenpeace? That makes no sense if you actually think about it
You're correct, it doesn't make any sense... if you're looking for actual logic. Greenpeace singled out Apple for its press release criticizing the practices used in the computer industry for the simple reason-- which they freely admitted-- that they get more headlines by going after Apple than they get by criticizing the computer and semiconductor industry in general.
The problem is, actually doing it right-- investigating the rumor with an open mind-- takes time. So they're really in a no-win situation.
Not according to the CERN theory division,... They also point out that no other superfluid helium handling facility has mysteriously blown itself to pieces."
The CERN theory department is correct. They seem to be aware of conservation of energy, which is to say, you don't get more energy out of it than you put into it.
Science journalists, on the other hand, seem to be a little fuzzy on the concept.
Your PC is 200-300 watts (another 150-250 if your monitor is a CRT), but your laser printer is 2,000 watts.
If my laserprinter was 2kW, I wouldn't have to heat my home.
I think your number is a bit high. Wikianswers says a laser printer uses 400 to 750 watts. (and, of course, we know that any website with the name "Wiki" in it has to be accurate, right?)
Fifteen million dollars is trivial.
While I am impressed with the flight I found the video a bit scary... When the 1st stage separated it looked like it (at least!) almost hit the nozzle of the 2nd stage on the right side. Further, the 1st stage didn't just fall straight back but did so at quite an angle (implying the trajectory of the 2nd stage changed quite a bit after separation). Then, the nozzle of the second stage glowed bright red in more and more placed as the flight progressed. Is that normal (to the degree observable)?
The red glow is normal, I believe-- it's a radiation-cooled nozzle.
Towards the end of the flight the whole vehicle started to swing back and forth quite a bit, with growing amplitude.
That part looked a little scary to me, too, especially since the control on the upper stage was exactly what went wrong on the second flight....
I'm also curious, but at what point would you consider SpaceX deserving of congratulations? Their first successful Falcon 9 launch? Their first manned launch? Their first launch to a private space station? Their first circumlunar navigation? Their first lunar landing? Their first Mars landing?
I, personally, will say that they're deserving of congratulations with their first successful launch to orbit.
Conrgratulations, Space-X!
I find it a bit weird that so many people bitch a blue streak all day long about how much "Apple sucks"until they have a chance to run OS X on a PC. Then it's like "kewl dewd, I can't wait to do that!". What's up with that?
Possibly it's different people?
They have insisted on relearning the lessons of the past 60 years the hard way.
Actually, it's more that they're starting from scratch, taking advantage of the lessons learned from the past 60 years. When mistakes have occurred, they've fixed the bug and tried again. Nothing that I've seen suggests any problems inherent to what they're doing.
To be fair, learning by doing really is the best way to learn, and as long as they are learning from each of their failures, they're doing good. If they can survive the bad PR, they're gaining experience that should, in the long run, be very very valuable.
If you're not free to fail, you're not free to learn. It's the learning the lessons and keeping on after failure that's hard, but they seem to be able to do that, so I'd say, good job; keep it up.
Good luck to them! Space-X has already won the stick-to-it award for persistence-- now let's hope they win the "great-success-after-hard-work" award.
www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/02/70179
But Joe Lieberman is a Democrat
This is sarcasm, right? You do know Lieberman isn't a Democrat, right? It's hard to tell.
Don't even have to buy it. From doing a Google News search, it looks to me like the controversy over deleting the Deletionpedia entry is going to make it notable even if it didn't start out that way.
In fact, the fact that the controversy over deleting the deletionpedia page is itself notable makes me very tempted to write a Wikipedia article "Deletionpedia Deletion Controversy"...
On the other hand, I guess that might be pushing it a little too far, though.
I just was too amused by the idea of an article on Deletionpedia, a listing of articles deleted from Wikipedia, in the Wikipedia
Although, actually, it really is notable enough to deserve an article.
My statement was specifically about the claim that the new cell improved the absorption by a factor of 500. Absorption is by definition 1-reflectivity; if you'd like references, feel free to check google, where you will find roughly two hundred thousand of them.
Other people have commented about the efficiency.
Solar panels with his 3D cells would provide 500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells and nine times more than cutting-edge 3D solar cells.
Since commercially-available solar cells in fact absorb more than 90% of the light in the usable bands-- and about fifty percent over the whole solar spectrum, including the non-usable wavelenghts-- that's pretty darn amazing.
My salary and benefits: @ $18/hr time used on backup: 0.067 hrs My cost per gigabyte of backup: $1
You haven't counted overhead. First, there is your personal overhead. Do you talk to your co-workers in the hall? Get coffee on company time? Go to the bathroom? Fill out time sheets to account for what you do all day? Read memos telling you that you have to fill out time sheets? Read your e-mail? Post comments to slashdot at 10:47AM on a workday? Only robots are 100% efficient in their use of time.
And then there is company overhead-- your computer, pens, paper, copy machine, office, lighting, secretaries, payroll, all that stuff. Even if you don't notice it, even if you don't use it, it's there.
$18/hour?? You'd be lucky if you cost the company less than $100/hour.
The problem is that it's easier to just archive the cruft stuff than it is to go through it all and figure out what's worth keeping or training staff to organize their data and retain only that which is necessary .
There, fixed that for you.
According to the original article, ("The average employee generates 10GB of data per year at a cost of $5 per gigabyte to back it up ") the cost of backups is fifty dollars a year per employee.
So if that an average employee costs the company $100 per hour (including overhead), then if "training training staff to organize their data and retain only that which is necessary" takes more than half an hour per year, it's more cost effective to archive the junk than it is to train the employees to sort it.
The problem is that it's easier to just archive the cruft stuff than it is to go through it all and figure out what's worth keeping.
Though called as such for semantic ease, there's really no such thing as an editor who believes in deletion as a rule.
I put up an article yesterday, and it was marked for speedy deletion within sixty seconds of when it was posted.
I posted a reply stating that the article did not meet the criteria for speedy deletion, and within five minutes two different people marked it AfD.
Very obviously, there are people who camp on the list of new articles with the specific intent to delete new articles they don't like as soon as they appear. You may not like the word "deletionist" for these people, yet clearly they exist. Do you have a better word?
First of all, in order to qualify for speedy deletion, your article has to be completely incomprehensible, nauseatingly ad-like, or a work of fiction (in any sense of the word).
Wrong. In order to be speedy deleted, two Wikipedians-- that's it, two-- have to say it's qualified for speedy deletion: one to nominate it, and the second, an administrator, to do it. Speedy deletions are without appeal-- the article vanishes from Wikipedia without any record of its existence and without any discussion.
Speedy deletion is anything that two wikipedians say is speedy deletion.
Better check it fast, though-- within one minute of writing it, I notice it's tagged for Speedy deletion!