If something broke, the columns and rows wouldn't sum up correctly,
so people could tell that something had gone wrong. An unintentional
and detectable error due to physical failure has to be much better
than an intentional and undetectable error due to fraud.
As to breakage, metallurgically I don't know what kind of gears
are used in the lever machines, but if gears in printing presses
and helicopters can be made trustworthy at thousands of revolutions
per minute, I'm sure gears can be made that won't break off at
a maximum of three 15-degree increments per minute. Hell, gears could
be made of cheap plastic that would never break under these conditions.
... but I prefer the mechanical lever machines we use in the Northeast.
I consider them trustworthy, and I'll tell you why.
In 1992 I worked an election as an inspector. Each step of the
inspection was signed off by a Republican and a Democratic inspector,
after both of us saw and confirmed each step of the procedure. I think it
would be much easier to make a mechanical clock run fast after the
back was sealed on than it would be for anyone to cheat by manipulating
one of these machines.
These are the steps, as I recall:
The machines are shown with both backs removed. This shows a
matrix of mechanical counters, all of which are shown to read 0. There
are "total for office" and "total for candidate" columns at the top
and right. These also read zero.
The inner back is fastened on. This covers all but the summary
row and column. These are checked to still read all zeros.
The outer back is fastened on. This covers the summary numbers.
The election begins. As each voter comes in, he or she is checked
off, so the number of votes can be compared against the machines.
Inspectors from both parties are sitting with a view of the back of the machines at all times, to further guard against tampering.
After the election, the outer cover is removed and the summary
totals recorded on paper. The total voters for each office should be less than or equal to the number recorded at the door.
Next the inner back is removed and the matrix is recorded on paper.
The totals are checked against the numbers recorded in the previous step. All inspectors sign off on this as well.
I just don't see where such a system leaves any room for cheating.
Of course, it also couldn't handle an election among 135 candidates,
but that's got to be a first anyway.
For anyone who hasn't used these machines, they have mechanical
safeguards against voting for more than the correct number of candidates
for any office. No hanging chads, no votes for too many candidates,
no butterfly ballot confusion, and there's a paper trail that can
be verified quickly rather than in a vague and subjective way.
Isn't it easier to trust clockwork you can inspect than code you
can't? For one thing, no one's going to "download" you new clockwork
when you aren't looking at it... and it's 100 years easier to audit.
supposedly it actually matter where you physically do the work, not where you live.
My old company used to send me all over on business -- to India,
Brazil, and other places, for extended stays, yet never had any
trouble with simply continuing my pay and benefits as usual.
Granted that I'm not in California, but surely Californians
face the same situation all the time? I've never run into anyone
who stopped getting paid over a business trip.
You're going over, and you're going to do business, right? So it could be a business trip of unusual duration.
This also provides incentives for spammers to provide a link to an unsubscribe page that works[...]
Maybe. But I don't see where they get a disincentive to also
add that email to a list of addresses not to sell to other
nasty clueless spamming scum. Any given spammer is just in it for
the money, not his reputation among other spammers. If an automated
remove from one list reduces his bandwidth costs, but he can sell it
to other spammers as a confirmed valid address, then from the spam
victim's point of view, the spam just keeps increasing, even though
the sources keep changing.
As an aside, the thing that most scares me lately is some mortgage spam
I've been getting which has all my personal information embedded in
the URLs. Name, address, zip code, personal code numbers... how they
got all this I don't know. But I really wouldn't want an automated
system to click on one of those links and confirm that I'm
receiving all their s*it. I get like 5 a day just from this one
group. How many times could I possibly refinance?
Oh, and this is kind of funny... they are asking me to get a great
new mortgage rate on my P.O. box. Where'd I leave my cluebat?
The one caveat is if the seller lives in a state where UCITA has been enacted, in which case he is bound by the shrinkwrap license agreement inlcuded with the software.
I have a hypothetical question for you. Let's say we're talking
about a CISCO router bought 4 years ago, and the seller is in a state
which enacted UCITA 2 years ago. Is that seller retroactively bound
to that license agreement?
I agree with you that First Sale ought to apply to this sort of thing.
The VAX may technically be a minicomputer, but when I entered the
machine room for the first time, it was awfully big and impressive.
I went on to work with them in college, and after.
One day at work the hardware croaked. I was working as a sort of
liazon to IT, and my department depended more on that VAX than
any other department, or IT itself, so I was investigating
replacements such as MicroVAXen.
What I found was an emulator called charon-vax. Test versions
were available for Windows and Linux; a commercial version only
for Windows. It is with some sense of accomplishment that I
can report that I convinced the company to sell the Linux version
commercially, on the strength of my company's order, which we delivered.
To use the emulator (evaluation or commercial) with VMS, you need a
copy of the OS, which at the time was available for $20 to members
of DECUS under a hobbyist license. DECUS membership was free,
but they've since renamed themvelves, and I've lost touch.
You know, if the questioner hadn't specifically said Grimaldi was no help,
it would have been my recommendation. But it could be that it was
more accessible to me after having digested Godel, Escher, Bach
by Hofstaeder in high school. That covers much of the same subject
area in a more conversational, but yet rigorous, way. I'm only the 94,161th person to recommend GEB, but I would suggest trying some of
the included exercises as you read through it; they really help build an understanding for
discrete mathematics, which helps in understanding everything from
regular expressions on up. And it won the Pulitzer.
Makes you wonder if they can listen when the phone is on-hook (i.e. hung up).
What you're describing is known as an "infinity microphone" or
"infinity transmitter." I'm not certain whether it can be done
through unmodified handsets at the target location, but it's not easy
to rule out the possibility that one's local office couldn't hook
up some equipment and acheive just that.
But I'd bet such equipment isn't routinely hooked up to all lines
in such a way that it could be remotely activated via a computer hack.
Solution: Your wireless has its own subnet(s).
There's no better way... VPN is THE way to secure wireless.
Is it? This is an honest question; Ive avoided all 802.* over concerns
that WEP is weak encryption, so I dont really know. Please consider
the following scenarios:
You implement a WEP strategy
Everyone uses SSH or VPN to reach your network
Your network is secure
Or:
You implement a WEP strategy
You have a policy requiring everyone to use the network via
SSH or VPN
Maybe everybody complies and maybe some people dont, but
either way, crackers can sniff out the WEP sequence numbers,
and access your network through ways other than SSH and VPN
Am I mistaken, or can 802.whatever actually be made secure?
I agree. There's a need to know how to read it, but frankly the only
thing I use it for now is my signature. I don't think I ever used
it for anything but school assignments where it was specifically required.
Speed advantages to writing cursive? Not here. I could always
print faster (and more legibly.) The article seems to
be saying that the ability to use pencil and paper will die out
if cursive goes away, which is obviously untrue. There's
something about this article that sounds too much like,
Buggy whip manufacturers predict autos to lead to extinction of horses.
My typing is faster than both, but I'll still use pens gladly.
I'll also claim that printing is more important than writing.
Have you ever seen a form asking, please write legibly?
Note, there still is, to my knowledge, nothing slower then kermit.
At the risk that you're trolling, Kermit is actually very
good indeed (after 1990 or so,) assuming you set your options
correctly.
The defaults are slow, but they work; that's Kermit's raison
d'etre and why it's still around. But Kermit was probably
also the first protocol to implement sliding windows and
configurable blocksizes; Zmodem probably got that idea from
Kermit. Set your options correctly, and Kermit's damn good.
The age of the BBS is over (I ran one for about 12 years)
but I'm pretty sure I'll use Kermit again before I have cause
to use Zmodem again.
Re:Not 41.8 or 43.8 . . .
on
PeltierBeer
·
· Score: 1
GUINNESS® Draught is best served at 42.8F.
While that may look like absurd precision, it's just what you
get when you convert 6 C to Fahrenheit.
I seriously will not buy something that I am forbidden to see before I've paid.
So, when you go to the theater, you pay for your films on the
way out? Also with concerts, plays, rock tours, etc?
Or do you just not go out? Maybe you rent movies but only
pay for them at the time of return?
Not trolling; sometimes we just have to buy things sight unseen.
Do you have a telephone? Have you "seen" your telephone service
with your eyes? (What's it look like?)
I'm assuming the disc reacts with gasses in the air, so all you have to do to get unlimited viewing time is keep the dvd in a vacuum, nothing major.
The story I saw this morning seemed to imply that there were two color
changes involved. One, when you removed it from the envelope, to
make it readable, and another 48 hours later making it unreadable again.
(On rereading it, they may have meant "undecypherable to the laser"
where they wrote "impenetrable to the laser"; you know how those
non-techies are with language: so there may be only one color change.)
That said, maybe you could extend the life somewhat by keeping the
disk in the freezer between plays. But you know people will just
copy 'em to the hard drive instead of bothering.
I'd be more worried about the device being able to
withstand that pressure [...] prevent the weight of the planet
from squishing it like a bug.
That's an interesting point, but perhaps not a fatal one.
The pressure at one mile down is quite high, but we have mines that go
that deep and deeper, so therefore we can build supports that can
withstand the load. On the other hand, pressure at the center is
exactly zero, so there must be some penetration depth of maximum
pressure, with pressure diminishing below that. (Does anybody know at
what depth the pressure starts to decrease?)
Still, I'd guess the pressure at that maximum point would be quite high,
and probably not sustainable with current materials and engineering.
Can you make zoomed out jpeg of the region to find it?
Not sure what you mean. If you're asking, where in the original
picture is this subimage, it's in the top slice, and almost all the
way to the right, at least at my screen's resolution. At any
resolution, it's bound to be pretty near the top right corner.
[coding for leap-seconds] requires a lookup table and
regular (like every two weeks) network connections to the Navy's
leap second table server to detect updates
Sorry, but that would be overkill. Leap seconds can only be
inserted (or subtracted!) at two points in the year: just before
January 1 and just before July 1st. Checking every fortnight would
be drastic overengineering.
Incidentally I don't think there's ever been a negative leap-second
declared, but the rules allow for the possibility.
By the way, I find it curious that leap-seconds involve the
insertion or removal of a second, while leap-years don't involve
the insertion of a year. Never noticed that before this thread.
Re:The Internet has given spam a bad name
on
A Conference About Spam
·
· Score: 5, Informative
ill probably get mod'ed offtopic for this...
Only because there's not a -1, Wrong moderation type...
Ever since the internet came along spam has been a problem.
Not even remotely; you must be new to the 'Net. (Do you remember when it was called the Arpanet?)
As recently as back around 1990, commercial use of the net
for any purpose was strictly prohibited and staunchly enforced. Anyone violating this principle was likely to
be summarily removed from the network.
Vestiges of this old anti-commercialism can still be seen
in poster's messages saying things like, I have no connection to this company, but am merely a satisfied customer.
Spam was really not a serious problem in the first 20+ years of the 'Net. Quite unlike now.
Slashdot Mirror
As to breakage, metallurgically I don't know what kind of gears are used in the lever machines, but if gears in printing presses and helicopters can be made trustworthy at thousands of revolutions per minute, I'm sure gears can be made that won't break off at a maximum of three 15-degree increments per minute. Hell, gears could be made of cheap plastic that would never break under these conditions.
In 1992 I worked an election as an inspector. Each step of the inspection was signed off by a Republican and a Democratic inspector, after both of us saw and confirmed each step of the procedure. I think it would be much easier to make a mechanical clock run fast after the back was sealed on than it would be for anyone to cheat by manipulating one of these machines.
These are the steps, as I recall:
- The machines are shown with both backs removed. This shows a
matrix of mechanical counters, all of which are shown to read 0. There
are "total for office" and "total for candidate" columns at the top
and right. These also read zero.
- The inner back is fastened on. This covers all but the summary
row and column. These are checked to still read all zeros.
- The outer back is fastened on. This covers the summary numbers.
- The election begins. As each voter comes in, he or she is checked
off, so the number of votes can be compared against the machines.
- Inspectors from both parties are sitting with a view of the back of the machines at all times, to further guard against tampering.
- After the election, the outer cover is removed and the summary
totals recorded on paper. The total voters for each office should be less than or equal to the number recorded at the door.
- Next the inner back is removed and the matrix is recorded on paper.
The totals are checked against the numbers recorded in the previous step. All inspectors sign off on this as well.
I just don't see where such a system leaves any room for cheating. Of course, it also couldn't handle an election among 135 candidates, but that's got to be a first anyway.For anyone who hasn't used these machines, they have mechanical safeguards against voting for more than the correct number of candidates for any office. No hanging chads, no votes for too many candidates, no butterfly ballot confusion, and there's a paper trail that can be verified quickly rather than in a vague and subjective way.
Isn't it easier to trust clockwork you can inspect than code you can't? For one thing, no one's going to "download" you new clockwork when you aren't looking at it... and it's 100 years easier to audit.
My old company used to send me all over on business -- to India, Brazil, and other places, for extended stays, yet never had any trouble with simply continuing my pay and benefits as usual. Granted that I'm not in California, but surely Californians face the same situation all the time? I've never run into anyone who stopped getting paid over a business trip.
You're going over, and you're going to do business, right? So it could be a business trip of unusual duration.
Maybe. But I don't see where they get a disincentive to also add that email to a list of addresses not to sell to other nasty clueless spamming scum. Any given spammer is just in it for the money, not his reputation among other spammers. If an automated remove from one list reduces his bandwidth costs, but he can sell it to other spammers as a confirmed valid address, then from the spam victim's point of view, the spam just keeps increasing, even though the sources keep changing.
As an aside, the thing that most scares me lately is some mortgage spam I've been getting which has all my personal information embedded in the URLs. Name, address, zip code, personal code numbers... how they got all this I don't know. But I really wouldn't want an automated system to click on one of those links and confirm that I'm receiving all their s*it. I get like 5 a day just from this one group. How many times could I possibly refinance?
Oh, and this is kind of funny... they are asking me to get a great new mortgage rate on my P.O. box. Where'd I leave my cluebat?
I have a hypothetical question for you. Let's say we're talking about a CISCO router bought 4 years ago, and the seller is in a state which enacted UCITA 2 years ago. Is that seller retroactively bound to that license agreement?
I agree with you that First Sale ought to apply to this sort of thing.
One day at work the hardware croaked. I was working as a sort of liazon to IT, and my department depended more on that VAX than any other department, or IT itself, so I was investigating replacements such as MicroVAXen.
What I found was an emulator called charon-vax. Test versions were available for Windows and Linux; a commercial version only for Windows. It is with some sense of accomplishment that I can report that I convinced the company to sell the Linux version commercially, on the strength of my company's order, which we delivered.
To use the emulator (evaluation or commercial) with VMS, you need a copy of the OS, which at the time was available for $20 to members of DECUS under a hobbyist license. DECUS membership was free, but they've since renamed themvelves, and I've lost touch.
You know, if the questioner hadn't specifically said Grimaldi was no help, it would have been my recommendation. But it could be that it was more accessible to me after having digested Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstaeder in high school. That covers much of the same subject area in a more conversational, but yet rigorous, way. I'm only the 94,161th person to recommend GEB, but I would suggest trying some of the included exercises as you read through it; they really help build an understanding for discrete mathematics, which helps in understanding everything from regular expressions on up. And it won the Pulitzer.
What you're describing is known as an "infinity microphone" or "infinity transmitter." I'm not certain whether it can be done through unmodified handsets at the target location, but it's not easy to rule out the possibility that one's local office couldn't hook up some equipment and acheive just that.
But I'd bet such equipment isn't routinely hooked up to all lines in such a way that it could be remotely activated via a computer hack.
Is it? This is an honest question; Ive avoided all 802.* over concerns that WEP is weak encryption, so I dont really know. Please consider the following scenarios:
Or:
Am I mistaken, or can 802.whatever actually be made secure?
Speed advantages to writing cursive? Not here. I could always print faster (and more legibly.) The article seems to be saying that the ability to use pencil and paper will die out if cursive goes away, which is obviously untrue. There's something about this article that sounds too much like, Buggy whip manufacturers predict autos to lead to extinction of horses.
My typing is faster than both, but I'll still use pens gladly.
I'll also claim that printing is more important than writing. Have you ever seen a form asking, please write legibly?
Democrat?
At the risk that you're trolling, Kermit is actually very good indeed (after 1990 or so,) assuming you set your options correctly.
The defaults are slow, but they work; that's Kermit's raison d'etre and why it's still around. But Kermit was probably also the first protocol to implement sliding windows and configurable blocksizes; Zmodem probably got that idea from Kermit. Set your options correctly, and Kermit's damn good.
The age of the BBS is over (I ran one for about 12 years) but I'm pretty sure I'll use Kermit again before I have cause to use Zmodem again.
While that may look like absurd precision, it's just what you get when you convert 6 C to Fahrenheit.
Space.com has the pictures, and is not (yet) slashdotted.
So, when you go to the theater, you pay for your films on the way out? Also with concerts, plays, rock tours, etc? Or do you just not go out? Maybe you rent movies but only pay for them at the time of return?
Not trolling; sometimes we just have to buy things sight unseen. Do you have a telephone? Have you "seen" your telephone service with your eyes? (What's it look like?)
The story I saw this morning seemed to imply that there were two color changes involved. One, when you removed it from the envelope, to make it readable, and another 48 hours later making it unreadable again. (On rereading it, they may have meant "undecypherable to the laser" where they wrote "impenetrable to the laser"; you know how those non-techies are with language: so there may be only one color change.)
That said, maybe you could extend the life somewhat by keeping the disk in the freezer between plays. But you know people will just copy 'em to the hard drive instead of bothering.
Like that's so tricky. It's merely 10 in base pi.
That's an interesting point, but perhaps not a fatal one.
The pressure at one mile down is quite high, but we have mines that go that deep and deeper, so therefore we can build supports that can withstand the load. On the other hand, pressure at the center is exactly zero, so there must be some penetration depth of maximum pressure, with pressure diminishing below that. (Does anybody know at what depth the pressure starts to decrease?)
Still, I'd guess the pressure at that maximum point would be quite high, and probably not sustainable with current materials and engineering.
Not sure what you mean. If you're asking, where in the original picture is this subimage, it's in the top slice, and almost all the way to the right, at least at my screen's resolution. At any resolution, it's bound to be pretty near the top right corner.
Unretouched excerpt from full-resolution image.
Yes, your new .torrent works. Earlier comment partially retracted.
grep -v -w cats ?
sed 's/cats//g' ?
Sorry, but that would be overkill. Leap seconds can only be inserted (or subtracted!) at two points in the year: just before January 1 and just before July 1st. Checking every fortnight would be drastic overengineering.
Incidentally I don't think there's ever been a negative leap-second declared, but the rules allow for the possibility.
By the way, I find it curious that leap-seconds involve the insertion or removal of a second, while leap-years don't involve the insertion of a year. Never noticed that before this thread.
Only because there's not a -1, Wrong moderation type...
Not even remotely; you must be new to the 'Net. (Do you remember when it was called the Arpanet?)
As recently as back around 1990, commercial use of the net for any purpose was strictly prohibited and staunchly enforced. Anyone violating this principle was likely to be summarily removed from the network.
Vestiges of this old anti-commercialism can still be seen in poster's messages saying things like, I have no connection to this company, but am merely a satisfied customer.
Spam was really not a serious problem in the first 20+ years of the 'Net. Quite unlike now.