That's just not true in the US. Here a typical ballot may consistent of a hundred different races. Ballot initiatives, sheriff's races, county commissioners, mayor, treasurer, judges, state reps, etc. It adds up. Hand counting each and every one of those is infeasible. The solution is two fold:
...
No, you missed a third solution: don't put so much stuff on the ballot.
Having a hundred different things on the ballot does not make democracy more democratic, it makes democracy work less effectively. Voters aren't paid; there is zero chance that any substantial fraction will do the work required to analyze a hundred different races.
Ballots with a hundred issues and races is the voting equivalent of micromanagement.
Of course there is no need for machine voting. Time that is required to count the votes is relatively short, even if it takes a day. Computers should only be used to verify the human performed count.
The opposite works slightly better: humans used to verify the machine-performed count.
It works better because if there is a flaw, I would want to see humans in the loop doing the final count.
The response from The National Association of Secretaries of State was: "While it is undeniable websites are vulnerable to hackers, election night reporting websites are only used to publish preliminary, unofficial results for the public and the media. The sites are not connected to vote counting equipment and could never change actual election results."
I hate to say it, but that sure sounds like they just issued a challenge.
I'd be very interested in seeing somebody put this into print in a citeable source.
Just repeat after me: "there is no vote fraud, there is no vote fraud...". If you click your heels together while saying that, you'll awake to find yourself in bed and Auntie Em applying a cold compress to your forehead.
I'm not sure what you are responding to here. I would like to have a citable source.
Repeat after me: an anecdote posted anonymously on slashdot is not a citable source. An anecdote posted anonymously on slashdot is not a citable source.
It's a good reason to restrict absentee ballots to only people who actually are absent, or physically can't vote in person.
You missed the point, I think. In Oregon, and apparently in Washington, EVERY ballot is an absentee ballot. They mail the things out to every registered voter. And by registering everyone who gets a driver's license, they're mailing them to a lot of people who don't care enough to even register to vote. What happens to a ballot that you throw away? Does some nice person "recycle" it for you -- you know, "reuse"?
Then they're clearly not restricting absentee ballots to only people who actually are absent, or physically can't vote in person.
And our nice progressive Senator Wyden wants EVERY state to do it that way. Did I mention, he's a Democrat?
As I said: absentee ballots are a flaw in the system. They are a flaw in the system regardless of which parties the senators proposing them belong to.
In the case of elections, I'm worried about people actually hacking elections, not merely stuff people claim to be worried about which are problems that doesn't actually exist.
It would remove many of the traditional voter fraud issues.
Indeed, it would remove some minor flaws and things that don't actually happen, and replace them with major flaws and the possible of wholesale election theft.
Have to be a US citizen.
You have to be a U.S. citizen to register in the first place.
Have to have real photo ID and a real face to connect to that ID.
The belief that people vote under fake names has never been shown to have any basis in actual facts.
Address, age, birth date, place of birth, residence can then be discovered back into other state gov networks.
This is more easily done in the voter registration process, not in real-time during the voting.
A "hacked" ID would not match a person. A random person would not match any of the data on the ID with a photo. None of their other ID, face, tax, healthcare use, employment status, occupation, education, property tax, medical history, tax forms, any criminal/court history would match for that given "hacked" ID in that state. A random face does not give an extra vote as they would have not history in that state. The same face cant vote many times under new fake names. Fake ID and shared ID, created ID for the election would be fictional/not fit with any other data sets in the state. That would have to fit with one real human face of the same age on the ID.
All of these are better done during the voting registration process, not during the actual voting.
Election observers would see the count all over their state, so a later state wide computer hack would not work to create a new final tally.
Yes, it would require hackers to be somewhat clever. But hackers have shown that they are clever. A better solution: don't connect vote tallies to insecure networks in the first place
It's sad how many of my friends have said that happened to them. I had trouble believing that until my company asked us to bring our ballots to an all hands meeting. They put a filled out ballot up on the screen and suggested we copy what we saw on the screen. It was a really awkward meeting.
I'd be very interested in seeing somebody put this into print in a citeable source.
It's a good reason to restrict absentee ballots to only people who actually are absent, or physically can't vote in person.
But is it illegal to let someone else tell you who to vote for?
No: what's illegal is coercion, or attempts to intimidate or threaten a voter to vote a particular way. https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
We had a meeting yesterday where our CEO went over who to vote for. I think most people just did what they were told. Our ballots are due today. I think most people just did what they were told to
That might be a grey area; since the CEO presumably has hiring and firing authority over the workers, so you could see it as maybe edging toward coercion. I'd say that, given a secret ballot, it's not coercion, since they can't actually tell whether you vote as they suggest or not. But, of course, a non-secret ballot makes coercion a lot more practical.
since, for example, who is going to do the research to pick from 30 different senate primary candidates? Thirty!
If there's no doubt left that Tesla is a cult look at all the apologists celebrating the biggest loss in automotive history as "very good". Imagine if GM lost 700,000,000.00 in a quarter. I bet these ***SAME*** people would be calling it fraud, a scam, shut it down, etc.
Huh? In 2007, GM posted a loss of 38.7 billion dollars.
The following year they lost "only" 30.9 billion dollars. That is still forty times larger than the Tesla loss you are discussing.
Over and over again, fields of mathematics that were believed to have no possible application whatsoever have turned out to be critical to our understanding of some field of science. Group theory, for example, was once believed to be pure mathematics with no possible use, but now it's central to our understanding of physics.
Don't overlook the moon-- for somebody new to astronomy, the moon is AMAZING.
Pro tip: DON'T look at the moon when it's full-- the full-on sunlight washes out all the contrast. Look at it first or second quarter.
This is a great season to spot planets-- you can get Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in an evening without even staying up very late. Mars, unfortunately, although it's unusually close and bright right now, is in the middle of a hellacious dust storm, so you won't see much features. You should be able to spot the polar cap, though.
Pro tip: you don't have to wait for sunset to observe Venus. It's actually better to observe it with some skylight, because it's so bright.
Other than that, if there's light pollution you're not going to seem much in the way of nebulae, but double stars are still interesting. Mizar-- the star at the bend of the Big Dipper-- is easy to find. Some stars where the two components are different colors are interesting. Check this site: https://www.skyandtelescope.co...
Are you saying that's an argument for recycling theater?
I'm unable to figure out how you interpret a statement saying "use robots when they are available, until then, recycle the stuff that makes sense to recycle" into "an argument for recycling theatre."
Let me state it in clearer terms. Use robots when they are available, until then, recycle the stuff that makes sense to recycle.
The problem isn't the part that's in orbit, or the cables. It's the cargo that was being transported when some space trash cuts the wires near the top. Unless you want to argue that a space elevator would only be used to transport very light objects individually.
The statement was that it would be "infinitely more dangerous" than a rocket. No, it wouldn't. The space elevator itself is exceptionally light (or "impossibly light," in the words of anonymous coward above). The cargo would be like any other cargo dropping down from a high altitude, except unlike a rocket, not carrying a load of fuel.
Maybe burning plastic _is_ the appropriate way to handle that waste?
Landfill would be a better bet. Most packaging in recycling bins is either made from fossil-carbon sources like oil or natural gas or from trees and plants like paper and cardboard. Burying it sequesters that carbon and doesn't immediately add to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere whereas burning it does.
Burning it and generating energy from the process would offsets an equal mass of fossil fuel, so it wouldn't add CO2 to the atmosphere. That actually makes the most sense-- you get the value out of the oil in the form of plastic, and then get the energy out of the oil when you're done with using the plastic.
...The bastards do this, because the sorting time looks free to them.
That's why we have robots.
Not yet, but they're coming.
As for now, it makes sense to recycle the stuff that it makes sense to recycle. And incorporate the cost of landfill into the calculation-- landfill isn't free by any means, either, you know.
That's why i don't recycle because there safer in the landfill. At least its contained and cheaper for myself.
That doesn't make any sense. So, some fraction of the plastic sent to recycling doesn't actually get recycled... but it doesn't make sense to say it's "safer" to send it directly to landfill, instead of recycling some of it and then sending what's left to landfill.
Average lifetime for a mammalian species is 1 million years. A few mammalian species last as long as 10 million years.
About 300 million years from now the brightening of the sun will indeed mean "we" will have to do something, but the term "we" in that phrase means "some different future species that is related to us about as closely as we are related to the very first reptiloids that would, in the future, evolve into dinosaurs."
Space elevators are infinitely more dangerous than current systems. If a rocket explodes, the occupants die. If the self-destruct fails, a few people may die wherever the remnants fall. If a space elevator breaks, everybody dies.
No. That idea comes from people who haven't actually thought it out, and the idea of catastrophic space-elevator destruction got popularized by the dramatic but unrealistic space-elevator destruction scenes in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.
A good way of visualizing what space elevator would be made out of is to picture spider silk, but lighter. A space elevator can't be massive: it has to carry its own weight 40,000 km. If a space elevator breaks, the parts that are high up (and thus have high energy) disintegrate in the atmosphere; the parts that are lower down (and thus don't have much energy) sift down like dandelion fluff.
People have simulated this.
Of course, the material to make a space elevator does not yet exist. But if it did exist, we know it would have to be exceptionally light.
That's cool, and even arguably on-topic (since it is about balloons, although not 20-km altitude communications balloons)... but how is it that a trip from Maine to Newfoundland gets called a "trans-Atlantic expedition"?
"sic" can be used to indicate that the reporter disagrees with the preceding assumption.
Yes, I suppose. Roughly, it might be translated "yes, he really said exactly that", so I suppose you could infer that to include some modicum of disagreement.
the quote is: "I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP... and find that so many people despise (sic) my decisions."
The word "despise" seems to be correctly spelled, so it's not clear why it should marked sic. Technically, that's just Latin meaning "thus," (implying correct as written verbatim from the original)-- but since it is correct, there's no particular reason to point that out-- it's not a misspelling.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just not true in the US. Here a typical ballot may consistent of a hundred different races. Ballot initiatives, sheriff's races, county commissioners, mayor, treasurer, judges, state reps, etc. It adds up. Hand counting each and every one of those is infeasible. The solution is two fold:
...
No, you missed a third solution: don't put so much stuff on the ballot.
Having a hundred different things on the ballot does not make democracy more democratic, it makes democracy work less effectively. Voters aren't paid; there is zero chance that any substantial fraction will do the work required to analyze a hundred different races.
Ballots with a hundred issues and races is the voting equivalent of micromanagement.
Of course there is no need for machine voting. Time that is required to count the votes is relatively short, even if it takes a day. Computers should only be used to verify the human performed count.
The opposite works slightly better: humans used to verify the machine-performed count.
It works better because if there is a flaw, I would want to see humans in the loop doing the final count.
The response from The National Association of Secretaries of State was:
"While it is undeniable websites are vulnerable to hackers, election night reporting websites are only used to publish preliminary, unofficial results for the public and the media. The sites are not connected to vote counting equipment and could never change actual election results."
I hate to say it, but that sure sounds like they just issued a challenge.
I'd be very interested in seeing somebody put this into print in a citeable source.
Just repeat after me: "there is no vote fraud, there is no vote fraud...". If you click your heels together while saying that, you'll awake to find yourself in bed and Auntie Em applying a cold compress to your forehead.
I'm not sure what you are responding to here. I would like to have a citable source.
Repeat after me: an anecdote posted anonymously on slashdot is not a citable source. An anecdote posted anonymously on slashdot is not a citable source.
It's a good reason to restrict absentee ballots to only people who actually are absent, or physically can't vote in person.
You missed the point, I think. In Oregon, and apparently in Washington, EVERY ballot is an absentee ballot. They mail the things out to every registered voter. And by registering everyone who gets a driver's license, they're mailing them to a lot of people who don't care enough to even register to vote. What happens to a ballot that you throw away? Does some nice person "recycle" it for you -- you know, "reuse"?
Then they're clearly not restricting absentee ballots to only people who actually are absent, or physically can't vote in person.
And our nice progressive Senator Wyden wants EVERY state to do it that way. Did I mention, he's a Democrat?
As I said: absentee ballots are a flaw in the system. They are a flaw in the system regardless of which parties the senators proposing them belong to.
In the case of elections, I'm worried about people actually hacking elections, not merely stuff people claim to be worried about which are problems that doesn't actually exist.
The same people who whine about "voting barriers" are now whining about the removal of a voting barrier?
I'm not whining about voting barriers.
I am whining about voting integrity.
http://votingintegrity.org/
It would remove many of the traditional voter fraud issues.
Indeed, it would remove some minor flaws and things that don't actually happen, and replace them with major flaws and the possible of wholesale election theft.
Have to be a US citizen.
You have to be a U.S. citizen to register in the first place.
Have to have real photo ID and a real face to connect to that ID.
The belief that people vote under fake names has never been shown to have any basis in actual facts.
Address, age, birth date, place of birth, residence can then be discovered back into other state gov networks.
This is more easily done in the voter registration process, not in real-time during the voting.
A "hacked" ID would not match a person. A random person would not match any of the data on the ID with a photo. None of their other ID, face, tax, healthcare use, employment status, occupation, education, property tax, medical history, tax forms, any criminal/court history would match for that given "hacked" ID in that state. A random face does not give an extra vote as they would have not history in that state. The same face cant vote many times under new fake names. Fake ID and shared ID, created ID for the election would be fictional/not fit with any other data sets in the state. That would have to fit with one real human face of the same age on the ID.
All of these are better done during the voting registration process, not during the actual voting.
Election observers would see the count all over their state, so a later state wide computer hack would not work to create a new final tally.
Yes, it would require hackers to be somewhat clever. But hackers have shown that they are clever. A better solution: don't connect vote tallies to insecure networks in the first place
It's sad how many of my friends have said that happened to them. I had trouble believing that until my company asked us to bring our ballots to an all hands meeting. They put a filled out ballot up on the screen and suggested we copy what we saw on the screen. It was a really awkward meeting.
I'd be very interested in seeing somebody put this into print in a citeable source.
It's a good reason to restrict absentee ballots to only people who actually are absent, or physically can't vote in person.
But is it illegal to let someone else tell you who to vote for?
No: what's illegal is coercion, or attempts to intimidate or threaten a voter to vote a particular way. https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
We had a meeting yesterday where our CEO went over who to vote for. I think most people just did what they were told. Our ballots are due today. I think most people just did what they were told to
That might be a grey area; since the CEO presumably has hiring and firing authority over the workers, so you could see it as maybe edging toward coercion. I'd say that, given a secret ballot, it's not coercion, since they can't actually tell whether you vote as they suggest or not. But, of course, a non-secret ballot makes coercion a lot more practical.
since, for example, who is going to do the research to pick from 30 different senate primary candidates? Thirty!
If there's no doubt left that Tesla is a cult look at all the apologists celebrating the biggest loss in automotive history as "very good". Imagine if GM lost 700,000,000.00 in a quarter. I bet these ***SAME*** people would be calling it fraud, a scam, shut it down, etc.
Huh? In 2007, GM posted a loss of 38.7 billion dollars.
The following year they lost "only" 30.9 billion dollars. That is still forty times larger than the Tesla loss you are discussing.
If only higher math was useful.
Over and over again, fields of mathematics that were believed to have no possible application whatsoever have turned out to be critical to our understanding of some field of science. Group theory, for example, was once believed to be pure mathematics with no possible use, but now it's central to our understanding of physics.
Don't overlook the moon-- for somebody new to astronomy, the moon is AMAZING.
Pro tip: DON'T look at the moon when it's full-- the full-on sunlight washes out all the contrast. Look at it first or second quarter.
This is a great season to spot planets-- you can get Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in an evening without even staying up very late. Mars, unfortunately, although it's unusually close and bright right now, is in the middle of a hellacious dust storm, so you won't see much features. You should be able to spot the polar cap, though.
Pro tip: you don't have to wait for sunset to observe Venus. It's actually better to observe it with some skylight, because it's so bright.
Other than that, if there's light pollution you're not going to seem much in the way of nebulae, but double stars are still interesting. Mizar-- the star at the bend of the Big Dipper-- is easy to find. Some stars where the two components are different colors are interesting. Check this site: https://www.skyandtelescope.co...
ok, +1 funny.
Are you saying that's an argument for recycling theater?
I'm unable to figure out how you interpret a statement saying "use robots when they are available, until then, recycle the stuff that makes sense to recycle" into "an argument for recycling theatre."
Let me state it in clearer terms. Use robots when they are available, until then, recycle the stuff that makes sense to recycle.
If a space elevator breaks, the parts that are high up (and thus have high energy) disintegrate in the atmosphere
It's neat how you know absolutely everything about the physical properties of this not-yet-invented miracle material.
I'm a physicist. That's what we do.
The problem isn't the part that's in orbit, or the cables. It's the cargo that was being transported when some space trash cuts the wires near the top. Unless you want to argue that a space elevator would only be used to transport very light objects individually.
The statement was that it would be "infinitely more dangerous" than a rocket. No, it wouldn't. The space elevator itself is exceptionally light (or "impossibly light," in the words of anonymous coward above). The cargo would be like any other cargo dropping down from a high altitude, except unlike a rocket, not carrying a load of fuel.
Maybe burning plastic _is_ the appropriate way to handle that waste?
Landfill would be a better bet. Most packaging in recycling bins is either made from fossil-carbon sources like oil or natural gas or from trees and plants like paper and cardboard. Burying it sequesters that carbon and doesn't immediately add to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere whereas burning it does.
Burning it and generating energy from the process would offsets an equal mass of fossil fuel, so it wouldn't add CO2 to the atmosphere. That actually makes the most sense-- you get the value out of the oil in the form of plastic, and then get the energy out of the oil when you're done with using the plastic.
That's why we have robots.
Not yet, but they're coming.
As for now, it makes sense to recycle the stuff that it makes sense to recycle. And incorporate the cost of landfill into the calculation-- landfill isn't free by any means, either, you know.
That's why i don't recycle because there safer in the landfill. At least its contained and cheaper for myself.
That doesn't make any sense. So, some fraction of the plastic sent to recycling doesn't actually get recycled... but it doesn't make sense to say it's "safer" to send it directly to landfill, instead of recycling some of it and then sending what's left to landfill.
Average lifetime for a mammalian species is 1 million years. A few mammalian species last as long as 10 million years.
About 300 million years from now the brightening of the sun will indeed mean "we" will have to do something, but the term "we" in that phrase means "some different future species that is related to us about as closely as we are related to the very first reptiloids that would, in the future, evolve into dinosaurs."
Daily Kos-- which you can hardly call a pro-billionaire publicity rag-- had an article discussing exactly these points:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/5/29/1767826/-The-War-on-Tesla-Musk-and-the-Fight-for-the-Future
Space elevators are infinitely more dangerous than current systems. If a rocket explodes, the occupants die. If the self-destruct fails, a few people may die wherever the remnants fall. If a space elevator breaks, everybody dies.
No. That idea comes from people who haven't actually thought it out, and the idea of catastrophic space-elevator destruction got popularized by the dramatic but unrealistic space-elevator destruction scenes in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.
A good way of visualizing what space elevator would be made out of is to picture spider silk, but lighter. A space elevator can't be massive: it has to carry its own weight 40,000 km. If a space elevator breaks, the parts that are high up (and thus have high energy) disintegrate in the atmosphere; the parts that are lower down (and thus don't have much energy) sift down like dandelion fluff.
People have simulated this.
Of course, the material to make a space elevator does not yet exist. But if it did exist, we know it would have to be exceptionally light.
That's cool, and even arguably on-topic (since it is about balloons, although not 20-km altitude communications balloons)... but how is it that a trip from Maine to Newfoundland gets called a "trans-Atlantic expedition"?
Trans-Saint-Lawrence-Seaway, maybe.
"sic" can be used to indicate that the reporter disagrees with the preceding assumption.
Yes, I suppose. Roughly, it might be translated "yes, he really said exactly that", so I suppose you could infer that to include some modicum of disagreement.
"sic" isn't used in the summary, so I assume you are referring to the use in the actual article, https://www.zdnet.com/article/...
the quote is: "I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP ... and find that so many people despise (sic) my decisions."
The word "despise" seems to be correctly spelled, so it's not clear why it should marked sic. Technically, that's just Latin meaning "thus," (implying correct as written verbatim from the original)-- but since it is correct, there's no particular reason to point that out-- it's not a misspelling.
So, I don't know why the "sic" either.