That's unnecessary. The machines are expensive, pencils are not.
Also, machines are unnecessary. The readers are REALLY GOOD. If there is any question of marked or not, the machine will not take the ballot, and you'll have to get a fresh ballot and try again.
A few years ago, I accidentally marked the wrong oval. I erased it to the point where I really couldn't see a mark there anymore then filled in the one I wanted, but the machine would not take it; it kicked it out as an overvote. I don't think it's actually possible to have an unclear ballot with these machines (Diebold accu-vote).
Think about what you're saying. With the system as it stands now, you need a box of pencils, total cost $5. You're talking about buying, programming, and maintaining a half dozen PCs even for the tiny voting location that I vote in. That's at least a thousand bucks up front, and probably another few hundred a year to maintain, each. That's a huge investment, and IMHO completely unnecessary. The cost of such machines would exceed the cost of all the rest of the equipment needed to run the polling station.
Our polling station actually does have a machine that can be used by disabled people to help them mark their ballots. It's been there for the last 6 elections. I know a guy that works all the elections at that polling location. He says nobody has EVER used that machine, not once, but they have to have it by law. He also says that they always do a 100% re-tally at this location (it's a small location, they can do that and still meet the deadline) and occasionally they've done hand counts. They've never had a single vote change. They use the mark/sense machines.
Everyone I know has no set cap, other than bandwidth. If I'm not saturating my connection (1.5 Mbps) then it doesn't hurt me at all for you to use up some of the difference. Sometimes I'll saturate it for a few days at a time, but most of the time there's plenty of room. I have never talked to anyone around here who has a bytes per month limit or anything like that, just a bandwidth cap.
I really don't care if someone uses my bandwidth, but I lock down my WAP because I've gotten a C&D for torrent use before, and if someone sponging on the WAP starts grabbing Simpsons eps from Pirate Bay or something, I could get my 2nd C&D, which my ISP says will cause me to lose my connect, and I have no other options for broadband, which I need for work.
The US isn't civilized MANY (maybe most) AREAS of the US aren't civilized. I don't lock my car, my house, or my bike. At least one or two mornings a week, I wake up and realize that I forgot to close my garage door. There are several thousand dollars worth of tools, bikes, and equipment in there. The only thing that's ever happened is that woodchucks get in there. I park my bike in front of stores and leave it there while I shop; it's never been touched, and it's not a beater.
I've found two wallets on the side of the road in the last few years. I opened them only to find the ID; dropped one in the owner's mailbox, took the other to the police station because the owner's address was a couple hundred miles away, which is a bit of a long bike ride. It never occurred to me to take anything from the wallet.
There are areas in the US (probably everywhere, really) where people treat each other like people. Please don't paint entire countries with that brush.
IMHO optical mark/sense is currently the best voting technology around. When coupled with a machine to assist disabled people mark theirs, I don't think it can easily be improved upon. It's been working for many years and doesn't have any of the problems of hanging chad or unclear voting that have plagued punch cards and the like in past years.
What you describe is what happens here in my area of Michigan as well.
Which Ubuntu? I started with Edgy, and Feisty is even better, and apparently before that it wasn't very good.
I've had a couple of friends who are long-time windows devotees load up Feisty, and they both were really kind of amazed at how easy it was. Machines that required lots of fiddling to get XP running with drivers for everything, when they installed Feisty, they just whacked enter a few times, let it spin, and had a working machine.
Heck, it even has a working driver for the Winmodem in my laptop. I can't even find drivers for it for Windows; I have to install the image that my machine came with if I want to use it under Windows.
I'm sure you're right that by the time they make all those generations, there's not that much info there. So where does that leave us? I think with making the scans closer to the source. The theaters won't like that, because that means the resolution of the disc you rent at blockbuster has more resolution and looks better than the print they're showing. But they're upgrading to digital as well (slowly).
I don't think it's going to be very long before studios aren't shooting on film anymore, either. Already some directors are shooting digital. The film needs to be digitized for editing anyway; film is just the initial medium and the mass copy medium.
As pro film quality movie cameras (I don't know anything about these, but I assume these are more 24 fps still cameras than video cameras) get cheaper, film will be pushed out, and eventually the only people using it will be art house films that are using it because it's so retro.
Once they're shooting digital, they're not limited by the grain of film anymore, and there's lots of room to move the resolution of the consumer level copy up.
As I said myself, I'm pretty much OK with DVD. I've got a 720p projector, and I'll eventually get a native source for it. I may even move to 1080p someday but I'm in no hurry.
1080p is nowhere NEAR film grain quality. That's still only in the 2 megapixel range. When you start seeing video where each frame is in the 10-20 megapixel range, then you might be talkin'.
I held off on LaserDisc way before the DVD even began development, because I was certain that within a few years someone would come out with a format that put LaserDisc quality on something the size of a CD. That was a good decision. However, I'm actually pretty happy with DVD. Yeah, I can see artifacts on my 100" projector, but I don't have any problems ignoring them and just watching the movie.
I'll get an HD player at some point but it won't bother me in the least if it's 5 or 10 years from now. I probably won't bother until I can buy an HD-R drive for my computer for $50.
Really? I have never gotten Windows to connect reliably to a WPA connection. I have to keep reconnecting, it often won't autoconnect, I have to manually connect on bootup. Sometimes I even have to physically remove and re-plug the wireless card/dongle to make it connect properly. I've had the same problem with multiple machines.
With Ubuntu, OTOH, I slapped a wireless card into my laptop, it autodetected the card, installed the drivers in a few seconds, popped up a window showing the networks it could detect, I clicked on mine, it popped up and asked for the password, I provided it, and from then on it just worked.
Sometimes if I know a website is tracking these things, I like to browse there with my user agent set to something ludicrous, like Mozilla (compatible, Intertube wanderer 0.25b; TRS-80 NEWDOS 5.2; 4GB RAM)
Agree, that works very well and is much faster for both me and them than if I had to write an email and they had to read it.
I used Netflix for a few years, and in the winter when the discs were being delivered in subzero weather they would crack a LOT. I just reported the disc bad, told them to ship another, and shipped the broken one back. Fast and easier than either email or phone.
From what I understand, all the patch procedures stand a significant chance of causing direct damage to surrounding tiles. Also they may leave a bump and that may cause the tile to be completely ripped out. Also there's a danger involved with any EVA.
I don't think they'd be "fools" not to use it in any case at all; it depends on what the chances are.
You're not a fool to get out of bed and drive to work in the morning even though it increases your chance of getting killed. But you'd be a fool to decide one day to swim across the atlantic without training, because that VASTLY increases your chances of getting killed.
In my opinion, this company has already been punished for their mistake. They exist no more. The employees who made the mistake have already lost their jobs. What would be the purpose of suing? Revenge?
It's not at all clear that they've been punished. And there has been no restitution to the injured parties.
Hypothetically; a company makes a program that makes it super easy to do stock transactions, and makes a billion dollars selling it. Then one day it's discovered that there's a vulnerability that allows a black hat to get your account data, and billions of of dollars worth of stocks and cash are drained from tens of thousands of personal accounts.
The company folds the next day and the owners and employees walk to their next job with money in the bank.
Have they "been punished" for their mistake? Would you think so if you'd had your entire retirement fund stolen by their software at age 64?
Yup, and they'd proceed to ignore the information. A few years back, a neighbor was getting broadband installed. They "called miss dig" and the yard got flagged for the underground electrical - however, it was old so the depth was not normal, so they flagged it clearly as "hand dig only".
The contractor showed up and proceeded to run his horizontal boring rig straight into the power feed and fried every piece of electrical equipment in the house.
If they're typical tiles and they haven't drastically changed things from the demo they have down in Florida that I looked at 10 years ago, they're 3 or 4 inches on a side. The NPR story this morning said the gouge was 3" long.
It looks borderline to me. I think they've successfully landed with much bigger gouges or missing tiles in the past, but it probably depends on WHERE the gouge is. If it's in a flat part of the belly, it's probably not a problem. If it's near a leading edge, more of a problem.
There is no one easy solution to energy supply issues and wishing/complaining doesn't make things happen.
I'm not just wishing, I'm personally doing more to cut energy consumption and CO2 emission than almost anyone else I know, but I wish the government wouldn't push the most hype and dollars towards one of the less promising technologies.
Thankfully there's at least a LITTLE sense creeping back in; they're at least TALKING about building new nuke plants again. I'll believe it when I see it though; the same NIMBY idiots that have been stopping wind development will certainly try to stop nukes.
Just before they finally started shipping Vista, I built a full slipstreamed copy of Windows 2000. It's still all I need, and I can install it without activation. It seems like almost all MS has done since Windows 2000 is add useless crap and generate a lot of hype to sell unnecessary upgrades. There have been a FEW things; finally including a firewall (just about in time to meet the curve where most people buy a hardware firewall anyway) and Remote Desktop Server are about all they've done in the last 7 years that I care about. not that I use their firewall, but I'm glad most people have it.
It's not HARD to produce hydrogen, but it consumes energy. A fair amount. In fact, by the time you make hydrogen, and then transport it, store it in various locations, then convert it back to energy, you would have been lots better off just using the electricity to charge a battery and then using that power directly.
Hydrogen is only being pushed because if we go to hydrogen, the companies that own the infrastructure of refining and transporting fuels get to stay in business. If we eventually go to batteries, they're largely out of business. They're not stupid, they know they only have a few decades of fossil fuel absolute dominance left, and it takes that long to develop an entire new economy and fleet of vehicles, so they're funding research on something that looks like it will keep them in business.
I'll second this. I've been using linux since slackware 0.9, and I never could get Myth working right (even though I went out and bought parts per Myth HowTo recommendations) until I used KnoppMyth.
Having played with the cable company's DVR, and having used Myth at home for a couple of months now, I'd happily pay double what the cable company is charging to use Myth instead. Myth gives me what I want, the cable company gives me what they want me to have. There's a large difference between the two.
I don't necessarily want a little PC for just the internet. In fact, I want one for in the car, where there isn't any internet accessibility anyway. I like to do a little programming, a little reading of books, some writing, etc. Maybe a little working with some media files, which would be easily doable on the Asus with an external drive plugged in. The Asus laptop seems fine for all that. The Nokia, not at all.
I will need that serial port, for doing microcontroller programming, but I can get that via a USB adaptor. I want ethernet because, honestly, a lot of the time wireless just doesn't work that well. I want dialup because I find myself in areas with no broadband whatsoever a fair amount.
I don't own any bluetooth stuff, and have no intention of having any. My cell phone is off 99% of the time; it's an emergency only phone, I put about 30 minutes a YEAR on it. And at that, I feel personally that one of the things I have to work on personally is spending less time with technology and more with people.
Also, there's barely cell service at my house; you have to go outside to get a signal good enough to make a voice call. There's no data service.
I'm not avoiding Vista due to driver or compatibility problems. I'm avoiding it a little because I don't like the built-in DRM, but mostly because it's COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY.
There's hardly anything substantial in Vista that's not in XP, or for that matter in Windows 2000. I use XP and 2K, and have used some Vista machines at work, and I could replace all my XP and Vista installs with Windows 2000, and the only result would be that the machines would be faster, and the software in general better behaved.
Cool. Now what OS does it run? I like to goof around with programming while traveling. Can it run gcc? Cross compile for the AVR microcontroller families? Does it have an even remotely usable keyboard? How many USB ports? Ethernet? Dialup?
Does it run SSH? How about remote desktop for when things go badly at work while I'm away?
Honestly, it's twice the cost and wouldn't be in any way useful to me for what I need a portable PC for. It's a toy.
No need to even use a USB drive. It has a card reader; wedge an 8GB SD card in there and it's not even sticking out the side (at least, not much). I bought an 8G SD for about $55 and that was several months ago. Hopefully the reader supports SDHC.
Slashdot Mirror
That's unnecessary. The machines are expensive, pencils are not.
Also, machines are unnecessary. The readers are REALLY GOOD. If there is any question of marked or not, the machine will not take the ballot, and you'll have to get a fresh ballot and try again.
A few years ago, I accidentally marked the wrong oval. I erased it to the point where I really couldn't see a mark there anymore then filled in the one I wanted, but the machine would not take it; it kicked it out as an overvote. I don't think it's actually possible to have an unclear ballot with these machines (Diebold accu-vote).
Think about what you're saying. With the system as it stands now, you need a box of pencils, total cost $5. You're talking about buying, programming, and maintaining a half dozen PCs even for the tiny voting location that I vote in. That's at least a thousand bucks up front, and probably another few hundred a year to maintain, each. That's a huge investment, and IMHO completely unnecessary. The cost of such machines would exceed the cost of all the rest of the equipment needed to run the polling station.
Our polling station actually does have a machine that can be used by disabled people to help them mark their ballots. It's been there for the last 6 elections. I know a guy that works all the elections at that polling location. He says nobody has EVER used that machine, not once, but they have to have it by law. He also says that they always do a 100% re-tally at this location (it's a small location, they can do that and still meet the deadline) and occasionally they've done hand counts. They've never had a single vote change. They use the mark/sense machines.
Everyone I know has no set cap, other than bandwidth. If I'm not saturating my connection (1.5 Mbps) then it doesn't hurt me at all for you to use up some of the difference. Sometimes I'll saturate it for a few days at a time, but most of the time there's plenty of room.
I have never talked to anyone around here who has a bytes per month limit or anything like that, just a bandwidth cap.
I really don't care if someone uses my bandwidth, but I lock down my WAP because I've gotten a C&D for torrent use before, and if someone sponging on the WAP starts grabbing Simpsons eps from Pirate Bay or something, I could get my 2nd C&D, which my ISP says will cause me to lose my connect, and I have no other options for broadband, which I need for work.
The US isn't civilized
MANY (maybe most) AREAS of the US aren't civilized.
I don't lock my car, my house, or my bike. At least one or two mornings a week, I wake up and realize that I forgot to close my garage door. There are several thousand dollars worth of tools, bikes, and equipment in there. The only thing that's ever happened is that woodchucks get in there. I park my bike in front of stores and leave it there while I shop; it's never been touched, and it's not a beater.
I've found two wallets on the side of the road in the last few years. I opened them only to find the ID; dropped one in the owner's mailbox, took the other to the police station because the owner's address was a couple hundred miles away, which is a bit of a long bike ride. It never occurred to me to take anything from the wallet.
There are areas in the US (probably everywhere, really) where people treat each other like people. Please don't paint entire countries with that brush.
IMHO optical mark/sense is currently the best voting technology around. When coupled with a machine to assist disabled people mark theirs, I don't think it can easily be improved upon. It's been working for many years and doesn't have any of the problems of hanging chad or unclear voting that have plagued punch cards and the like in past years.
What you describe is what happens here in my area of Michigan as well.
Which Ubuntu? I started with Edgy, and Feisty is even better, and apparently before that it wasn't very good.
I've had a couple of friends who are long-time windows devotees load up Feisty, and they both were really kind of amazed at how easy it was. Machines that required lots of fiddling to get XP running with drivers for everything, when they installed Feisty, they just whacked enter a few times, let it spin, and had a working machine.
Heck, it even has a working driver for the Winmodem in my laptop. I can't even find drivers for it for Windows; I have to install the image that my machine came with if I want to use it under Windows.
I'm sure you're right that by the time they make all those generations, there's not that much info there.
So where does that leave us? I think with making the scans closer to the source. The theaters won't like that, because that means the resolution of the disc you rent at blockbuster has more resolution and looks better than the print they're showing. But they're upgrading to digital as well (slowly).
I don't think it's going to be very long before studios aren't shooting on film anymore, either. Already some directors are shooting digital. The film needs to be digitized for editing anyway; film is just the initial medium and the mass copy medium.
As pro film quality movie cameras (I don't know anything about these, but I assume these are more 24 fps still cameras than video cameras) get cheaper, film will be pushed out, and eventually the only people using it will be art house films that are using it because it's so retro.
Once they're shooting digital, they're not limited by the grain of film anymore, and there's lots of room to move the resolution of the consumer level copy up.
As I said myself, I'm pretty much OK with DVD. I've got a 720p projector, and I'll eventually get a native source for it. I may even move to 1080p someday but I'm in no hurry.
1080p is nowhere NEAR film grain quality. That's still only in the 2 megapixel range. When you start seeing video where each frame is in the 10-20 megapixel range, then you might be talkin'.
I held off on LaserDisc way before the DVD even began development, because I was certain that within a few years someone would come out with a format that put LaserDisc quality on something the size of a CD. That was a good decision. However, I'm actually pretty happy with DVD. Yeah, I can see artifacts on my 100" projector, but I don't have any problems ignoring them and just watching the movie.
I'll get an HD player at some point but it won't bother me in the least if it's 5 or 10 years from now. I probably won't bother until I can buy an HD-R drive for my computer for $50.
Really? I have never gotten Windows to connect reliably to a WPA connection. I have to keep reconnecting, it often won't autoconnect, I have to manually connect on bootup. Sometimes I even have to physically remove and re-plug the wireless card/dongle to make it connect properly. I've had the same problem with multiple machines.
With Ubuntu, OTOH, I slapped a wireless card into my laptop, it autodetected the card, installed the drivers in a few seconds, popped up a window showing the networks it could detect, I clicked on mine, it popped up and asked for the password, I provided it, and from then on it just worked.
Sometimes if I know a website is tracking these things, I like to browse there with my user agent set to something ludicrous, like Mozilla (compatible, Intertube wanderer 0.25b; TRS-80 NEWDOS 5.2; 4GB RAM)
Agree, that works very well and is much faster for both me and them than if I had to write an email and they had to read it.
I used Netflix for a few years, and in the winter when the discs were being delivered in subzero weather they would crack a LOT. I just reported the disc bad, told them to ship another, and shipped the broken one back. Fast and easier than either email or phone.
From what I understand, all the patch procedures stand a significant chance of causing direct damage to surrounding tiles. Also they may leave a bump and that may cause the tile to be completely ripped out. Also there's a danger involved with any EVA.
I don't think they'd be "fools" not to use it in any case at all; it depends on what the chances are.
You're not a fool to get out of bed and drive to work in the morning even though it increases your chance of getting killed. But you'd be a fool to decide one day to swim across the atlantic without training, because that VASTLY increases your chances of getting killed.
In my opinion, this company has already been punished for their mistake. They exist no more. The employees who made the mistake have already lost their jobs. What would be the purpose of suing? Revenge?
It's not at all clear that they've been punished. And there has been no restitution to the injured parties.
Hypothetically; a company makes a program that makes it super easy to do stock transactions, and makes a billion dollars selling it. Then one day it's discovered that there's a vulnerability that allows a black hat to get your account data, and billions of of dollars worth of stocks and cash are drained from tens of thousands of personal accounts.
The company folds the next day and the owners and employees walk to their next job with money in the bank.
Have they "been punished" for their mistake? Would you think so if you'd had your entire retirement fund stolen by their software at age 64?
Yup, and they'd proceed to ignore the information.
A few years back, a neighbor was getting broadband installed. They "called miss dig" and the yard got flagged for the underground electrical - however, it was old so the depth was not normal, so they flagged it clearly as "hand dig only".
The contractor showed up and proceeded to run his horizontal boring rig straight into the power feed and fried every piece of electrical equipment in the house.
If they're typical tiles and they haven't drastically changed things from the demo they have down in Florida that I looked at 10 years ago, they're 3 or 4 inches on a side. The NPR story this morning said the gouge was 3" long.
It looks borderline to me. I think they've successfully landed with much bigger gouges or missing tiles in the past, but it probably depends on WHERE the gouge is. If it's in a flat part of the belly, it's probably not a problem. If it's near a leading edge, more of a problem.
There is no one easy solution to energy supply issues and wishing/complaining doesn't make things happen.
I'm not just wishing, I'm personally doing more to cut energy consumption and CO2 emission than almost anyone else I know, but I wish the government wouldn't push the most hype and dollars towards one of the less promising technologies.
Thankfully there's at least a LITTLE sense creeping back in; they're at least TALKING about building new nuke plants again. I'll believe it when I see it though; the same NIMBY idiots that have been stopping wind development will certainly try to stop nukes.
Only 1.5 TB of porn ? That's like what, 350 DVDs worth ?
Yeah really. Get out the RAID controller and a few of these to hold the WHOLE collection.
Hmm, entire collection, set on shuffle play, playing 30 randomly choosen seconds of video at a time...
Just before they finally started shipping Vista, I built a full slipstreamed copy of Windows 2000. It's still all I need, and I can install it without activation. It seems like almost all MS has done since Windows 2000 is add useless crap and generate a lot of hype to sell unnecessary upgrades. There have been a FEW things; finally including a firewall (just about in time to meet the curve where most people buy a hardware firewall anyway) and Remote Desktop Server are about all they've done in the last 7 years that I care about. not that I use their firewall, but I'm glad most people have it.
It's not HARD to produce hydrogen, but it consumes energy. A fair amount. In fact, by the time you make hydrogen, and then transport it, store it in various locations, then convert it back to energy, you would have been lots better off just using the electricity to charge a battery and then using that power directly.
Hydrogen is only being pushed because if we go to hydrogen, the companies that own the infrastructure of refining and transporting fuels get to stay in business. If we eventually go to batteries, they're largely out of business. They're not stupid, they know they only have a few decades of fossil fuel absolute dominance left, and it takes that long to develop an entire new economy and fleet of vehicles, so they're funding research on something that looks like it will keep them in business.
I'll second this. I've been using linux since slackware 0.9, and I never could get Myth working right (even though I went out and bought parts per Myth HowTo recommendations) until I used KnoppMyth.
Having played with the cable company's DVR, and having used Myth at home for a couple of months now, I'd happily pay double what the cable company is charging to use Myth instead. Myth gives me what I want, the cable company gives me what they want me to have. There's a large difference between the two.
I don't necessarily want a little PC for just the internet. In fact, I want one for in the car, where there isn't any internet accessibility anyway. I like to do a little programming, a little reading of books, some writing, etc. Maybe a little working with some media files, which would be easily doable on the Asus with an external drive plugged in. The Asus laptop seems fine for all that. The Nokia, not at all.
I will need that serial port, for doing microcontroller programming, but I can get that via a USB adaptor. I want ethernet because, honestly, a lot of the time wireless just doesn't work that well. I want dialup because I find myself in areas with no broadband whatsoever a fair amount.
I don't own any bluetooth stuff, and have no intention of having any. My cell phone is off 99% of the time; it's an emergency only phone, I put about 30 minutes a YEAR on it. And at that, I feel personally that one of the things I have to work on personally is spending less time with technology and more with people.
Also, there's barely cell service at my house; you have to go outside to get a signal good enough to make a voice call. There's no data service.
I'm not avoiding Vista due to driver or compatibility problems. I'm avoiding it a little because I don't like the built-in DRM, but mostly because it's COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY.
There's hardly anything substantial in Vista that's not in XP, or for that matter in Windows 2000. I use XP and 2K, and have used some Vista machines at work, and I could replace all my XP and Vista installs with Windows 2000, and the only result would be that the machines would be faster, and the software in general better behaved.
Screen too small, no keyboard, no standard ports (USB, ethernet, dialup)
I've got a PDA. I never use it. I'm not looking for a PDA, I'm looking for a modest, small, light PC. The Zaurus is not it.
I don't see a price easily available, but I'm betting it's more than $199.
Cool. Now what OS does it run? I like to goof around with programming while traveling. Can it run gcc? Cross compile for the AVR microcontroller families? Does it have an even remotely usable keyboard? How many USB ports? Ethernet? Dialup?
Does it run SSH? How about remote desktop for when things go badly at work while I'm away?
Honestly, it's twice the cost and wouldn't be in any way useful to me for what I need a portable PC for. It's a toy.
No need to even use a USB drive. It has a card reader; wedge an 8GB SD card in there and it's not even sticking out the side (at least, not much). I bought an 8G SD for about $55 and that was several months ago. Hopefully the reader supports SDHC.