From their paper:
"In addition, half the galaxies were randomly mirrored during scanning with no visual cues as to the mirroring, and precautions against left-right bias were taken in the web interface used by the scanners. "
I see a few advantages to computer based voting systems that could greatly improve the transparency and accessibility of the process.
The most obvious advantage is the privacy it offers visually impared people who would otherwise have to depend on others to follow they wishes. (Kinda uniformed about this so don't kill me if I'm wrong and they have simple usable brail forms)
A post above mentioned doing away with the secrecy aspect in the hope that they can audit their vote. I think this can be dangerous but is on the right track. I would envision an anonymous auditing system where you get a random id assigned to your vote allowing for online validation. Although this probably would just provide a false sense of security as their are countless of ways to subvert this.
Yeah enough of my idealistic crap. We do it because it allows our politicians to give out fat contracts to loyal friends who will return that money in the form of campaign contributions. It the cycle of life for these guys. They need to raise absurd amounts of cash to stay in office and have devise many a creative way to do so.
Many unscrupulous agents providing a service will do this sorta crap. Its where they make their cash. Think extended warranties on electronics.... There are some much more serious offenders using this pricing strategy to swindle our government as we speak. This journalist would rather toss a nurf ball around than deal with a real story like war profiteering.
It's much simpler but since none of us has been properly taught how our government works, this isn't quite as obvious as it should be.
Dems don't need a veto proof majority, they have control of the house and senate. They write the legislation. They don't have to send a bill granting Bush unconditional funding. Dems can block any bill they don't like too....
Bush can veto any bill he wants, but they don't have to give him unconditional funding either. This is how you force timetables upon an unwilling president. Either he signs the bills the Dems send him or he must use the remaining funds to bring our boys home. Chances are he will take the funds to buy a few more months to plunder.
Perhaps the gas doesn't lose much orbital energy as it orbits the hole. In addition, collisions happen at random sending many atoms away from the hole.
Perhaps its something like the random walk of a photon from the suns core which can take millions of years.
For airlines, the major barrier to entry is not equipment or personel. There are a limited number of landing slots per airport which the major carriers monopolize. This is the major barrier to entry in the airline industry.
I agree this is a major problem in user interfaces, I have been using Unix for many years and I occasinally learn new stuff, but mostly from other people. I had no clue there were multiple clipboard until this article, probably cause i dont use kde/gnome.... One of the most important things to a user interface is feedback. Unfortunatly this feedback is too often limited to single actions. User interface should suggest faster methods of doing things. If it sees you doing something with 4 actions that could have been done in 1, it should tell you. I have many things to do in a day, besides learning the subtlties of various everchanging software. If you made something easier to do and you see me doing it the stupid way, let me know. That's the UI's job. I know this is no simple task, but by no means impossible.
Anyone seen a card with DVI input? My cable box has a dvi output that I currently use to feed my tv. I noticed it looks much better than when I was using the component video cables. As far as I know DVI is an uncompressed digital video siginal so in theory should be rather simple to make.
If you are downloading a 90 minute movie in 30-45 minutes, you should be able to start watching it immediately. Buffer for a minute or two if you need to protect from network variation and your good to go. I believe movielink already started doing this.
Now I can finally login as root on OSX. Considering all my friends running OsX have no idea what their root password is, or for that matter what root is, this seems like a blessing.
Re:Limitations of broadband
on
Why Only Music?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Takes me about an hour to download a movie from Movielink on my cable broadband connection.
I tried 3 months ago to get my out of warrenty motherboard replaced and they flat out refused. Thats the last time Ill even build a machine with any abit hardware.
They have already pushed the release back more time than I can count. They even made wired's vaporware list at number 5. Its about time they actually went gold.
I certainly understand the position you are in, I used to live in the same region and have tried to bury the memories of trying to get broadband up there. As for trying to use the service on dial-up, I think we all know that would be insane unless you lived somewhere extremly inacessable(north pole). As for having the connection severed, they have a dl manager which can resume broken downloads.
Obviously you havent tried their system which blew me outta the water. I was expecting a daylong download and poor quality. This is most certainly not the case. With my cable modem, I was able to dl a movie in under 2 hours. Total size of the movie was about 450 megs. I don't know what kind of compression they are using but the quality was much better than vhs, which for the majority of this country is the standard.
As a pawn in Verizon's Domain I can provide my own story which proves their evil monopolisitic practices.
Trying to get any type of broadband to my home was a complete nightmare. I'll try to make the extremly and painful long story short.
I lived outside the workable range for dsl and was forced to try and get a 144/144 idsl connection which has a couple extra thousand feet of range.
Now of course verzion would not offer this service so I tried to go through some small isp.
Delay 1: 3 months after filing for a line and countless calls I find out why my isp hasnt been able to get a order through Covad's or np's(at this point not sure which) electronic system because verizon has my line incorrectly listed in the town over. This kind of thing could have been fixed in 10 mins with a simple phone call but my isp cant even speak to verizon due to some regulation, at least thats what i was told....
At this point I'm given an couple of installation dates and miss work to wait for the verizon guy who doesnt exist.
Delay 2: Several months later I'm able to get some secret phone number over at verzion and get someone who actually knows what they are talking about, or at least knows what the official story is supposed to be.... She tells me they couldnt install my line because there are no more pairs in my area. I know this is complete crap since I've seen verizon installing new lines on my street all the time.
So I do some reasearch and chat with my isp and figure out something that might work. Since we know verizon has no incentive to install a line for a competing service, why not ask them to install a line for their own serivce and then quickly have that lined swapped over for what i wanted.
Guess what ? It worked!
I called verizon and asked them to install a new phone line which only took about two weeks. I have no idea how my isp got verizon to do the hot swap, but they implied they had made a more cooperative contact at verizon recently.
Ive since moved out of that house and now have a TW cable modem which is a big step up for any verizon related dsl service ive seen.
This is only of my many stories of trying to get verizon to install dsl lines in the nyc area, now I tell people to get cable if possible.
Re:Who owns the moon?
on
Lunar Lasers
·
· Score: 1
Recently, a legal dispute has arisen between Mr. Dennis Hope, an American business man, who is selling estate on the moon after having filed a claim for ownership with his local United States authorities, and Mr. Martin Jorgens, a German pensioner who can show a certificate of the 17th-century Prussian King Frederick the Great, bestowing upon his ancestor the ownership of the moon as an award for services rendered.
Neither of these claims could possibly be honoured, however. You cannot give away what you do not possess yourself, and that holds good for an American municipal official as well as for a Prussian king. And apart from that, the most fundamental Article of space law, Article II of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 (often called the 'Magna Carta' of Space Law), expressly excludes the possibility that any state may incorporate any part of outer space, including the moon, into its territory.
Slashdot Mirror
From their paper: "In addition, half the galaxies were randomly mirrored during scanning with no visual cues as to the mirroring, and precautions against left-right bias were taken in the web interface used by the scanners. "
I see a few advantages to computer based voting systems that could greatly improve the transparency and accessibility of the process.
The most obvious advantage is the privacy it offers visually impared people who would otherwise have to depend on others to follow they wishes. (Kinda uniformed about this so don't kill me if I'm wrong and they have simple usable brail forms)
A post above mentioned doing away with the secrecy aspect in the hope that they can audit their vote. I think this can be dangerous but is on the right track. I would envision an anonymous auditing system where you get a random id assigned to your vote allowing for online validation. Although this probably would just provide a false sense of security as their are countless of ways to subvert this.
Yeah enough of my idealistic crap. We do it because it allows our politicians to give out fat contracts to loyal friends who will return that money in the form of campaign contributions. It the cycle of life for these guys. They need to raise absurd amounts of cash to stay in office and have devise many a creative way to do so.
Many unscrupulous agents providing a service will do this sorta crap. Its where they make their cash. Think extended warranties on electronics....
There are some much more serious offenders using this pricing strategy to swindle our government as we speak. This journalist would rather toss a nurf ball around than deal with a real story like war profiteering.
No I didn't rtfa, I have better things to do....
And neither can the republicans....so why give in?
It's much simpler but since none of us has been properly taught how our government works, this isn't quite as obvious as it should be.
Dems don't need a veto proof majority, they have control of the house and senate. They write the legislation. They don't have to send a bill granting Bush unconditional funding. Dems can block any bill they don't like too....
Bush can veto any bill he wants, but they don't have to give him unconditional funding either. This is how you force timetables upon an unwilling president. Either he signs the bills the Dems send him or he must use the remaining funds to bring our boys home. Chances are he will take the funds to buy a few more months to plunder.
Perhaps the gas doesn't lose much orbital energy as it orbits the hole. In addition, collisions happen at random sending many atoms away from the hole.
Perhaps its something like the random walk of a photon from the suns core which can take millions of years.
Just my midnight speculations...
....and now i feel like loading it up.
For airlines, the major barrier to entry is not equipment or personel. There are a limited number of landing slots per airport which the major carriers monopolize. This is the major barrier to entry in the airline industry.
it goes to 11
I agree this is a major problem in user interfaces, I have been using Unix for many years and I occasinally learn new stuff, but mostly from other people. I had no clue there were multiple clipboard until this article, probably cause i dont use kde/gnome....
One of the most important things to a user interface is feedback. Unfortunatly this feedback is too often limited to single actions. User interface should suggest faster methods of doing things. If it sees you doing something with 4 actions that could have been done in 1, it should tell you.
I have many things to do in a day, besides learning the subtlties of various everchanging software. If you made something easier to do and you see me doing it the stupid way, let me know. That's the UI's job.
I know this is no simple task, but by no means impossible.
Anyone seen a card with DVI input? My cable box has a dvi output that I currently use to feed my tv. I noticed it looks much better than when I was using the component video cables. As far as I know DVI is an uncompressed digital video siginal so in theory should be rather simple to make.
If you are downloading a 90 minute movie in 30-45 minutes, you should be able to start watching it immediately. Buffer for a minute or two if you need to protect from network variation and your good to go. I believe movielink already started doing this.
Now I can finally login as root on OSX. Considering all my friends running OsX have no idea what their root password is, or for that matter what root is, this seems like a blessing.
Takes me about an hour to download a movie from Movielink on my cable broadband connection.
I tried 3 months ago to get my out of warrenty motherboard replaced and they flat out refused. Thats the last time Ill even build a machine with any abit hardware.
They have already pushed the release back more time than I can count. They even made wired's vaporware list at number 5. Its about time they actually went gold.
I certainly understand the position you are in, I used to live in the same region and have tried to bury the memories of trying to get broadband up there.
As for trying to use the service on dial-up, I think we all know that would be insane unless you lived somewhere extremly inacessable(north pole). As for having the connection severed, they have a dl manager which can resume broken downloads.
Obviously you havent tried their system which blew me outta the water. I was expecting a daylong download and poor quality. This is most certainly not the case. With my cable modem, I was able to dl a movie in under 2 hours. Total size of the movie was about 450 megs.
I don't know what kind of compression they are using but the quality was much better than vhs, which for the majority of this country is the standard.
I wonder how long it will be before they sue Real and every similar product for copyright infringments.
As a pawn in Verizon's Domain I can provide my own story which proves their evil monopolisitic practices.
Trying to get any type of broadband to my home was a complete nightmare. I'll try to make the extremly and painful long story short.
I lived outside the workable range for dsl and was forced to try and get a 144/144 idsl connection which has a couple extra thousand feet of range.
Now of course verzion would not offer this service so I tried to go through some small isp.
Delay 1: 3 months after filing for a line and countless calls I find out why my isp hasnt been able to get a order through Covad's or np's(at this point not sure which) electronic system because verizon has my line incorrectly listed in the town over. This kind of thing could have been fixed in 10 mins with a simple phone call but my isp cant even speak to verizon due to some regulation, at least thats what i was told....
At this point I'm given an couple of installation dates and miss work to wait for the verizon guy who doesnt exist.
Delay 2: Several months later I'm able to get some secret phone number over at verzion and get someone who actually knows what they are talking about, or at least knows what the official story is supposed to be.... She tells me they couldnt install my line because there are no more pairs in my area. I know this is complete crap since I've seen verizon installing new lines on my street all the time.
So I do some reasearch and chat with my isp and figure out something that might work. Since we know verizon has no incentive to install a line for a competing service, why not ask them to install a line for their own serivce and then quickly have that lined swapped over for what i wanted.
Guess what ? It worked!
I called verizon and asked them to install a new phone line which only took about two weeks. I have no idea how my isp got verizon to do the hot swap, but they implied they had made a more cooperative contact at verizon recently.
Ive since moved out of that house and now have a TW cable modem which is a big step up for any verizon related dsl service ive seen.
This is only of my many stories of trying to get verizon to install dsl lines in the nyc area, now I tell people to get cable if possible.