If you send a probe there, it will not be able to find a cool surface on any of the larger planetesimals (growing proto-planets).
Hm, given that Vega is 2.3935E14 km away and that Voyager I is travelling at 62500 km/h, a probe sent there will be travelling for about 437169 years. So maybe, by the time it gets there the planet will be ready:-)
OK, but for Australia, then, it may only make sense to build a computer based interface simply because it's an easier interface. But there's still no reason whatsoever to make this vote electronic. I.e., use an electronic voting system to decide who to vote for, but let that system only print out your result in human-readable form.
Germany has a simple "make two crosses, one per column" rule for most elections (see an example here), and "make up to three crosses, distributing them for different candidates or all for the same candidate, etc." for communal elections. Ballots are then counted manually by the helpers in each precinct, which makes rigging the vote on a greater scale fairly difficult. That, admittedly, makes it fairly easy, and it also works well enough in most cases.
If preferential voting can actually be explained easier with a computer interface than with a paper-based interface, OK. If results can be calculated much easier, then OK too. But that's a different issue. For this we only need local machines with no networked setup whatsoever, and a simple verifiable counting system, meaning that if necessary, the printed ballots can be hand-counted if the results seem shady.
But, I repeat, this has nothing to do with E-Voting as most people perceive it (and as planned, e.g., in the US), where voting systems are, to quite some extent, software-only, and results may be collected via a network, again, software-only. And that is just too dangerous.
...which brings you back to the question, "what advantage is the electronic system then?" Right now we have a paper trail, and it works well. (OK, maybe you Americans should work on the Usability of your forms:-))
That we will be able to get voting results faster? Well, let's see. In Germany, polls are always on Sunday and the booths close at 6pm. By that time, you already get projected results that usually differ from the final results by less than one percent. By 11pm the final results ("Vorlaufiges amtliches Endergebnis", "preliminary official results") are available. Is it worth spending millions of dollars just to get the results, say, four hours earlier? OK, there's one advantage if the results can be seen in "real time," e.g. over the day, while elections are still running. Because then the knowledge that the current results are very close to each other (think Gore-Bush) might have an influence on who decides to actually go voting later in the day.
And then there's the argument that E-Voting will make it easier for people to vote and thus more people will vote. But on the other hand there have been studies showing that when people had to make more of an effort to go cast their vote, turnouts actually increased.
That being said, www.free-project.org is a good source of pro and contra arguments regarding E-Voting.
Well, CSS2 can actually handle tables. For that you have "display: table-cell" and friends. The only problem is, Mozilla supports the table display styles fairly well, but IE doesn't. Which brings you back to the sad reality that you actually have to code for "Browser 'standards'", not for "HTML or CSS standards".
Another problem with tabular layout (which doesn't so much apply here) is that it's not too usable if you want to build a site readable by people with disabilities. For instance, if you were using a screen reader, you might want it to read the table column containing the menu (like the stuff in the left column in the/. layout)/after/ reading the main content. But if that menu column is on the left, its HTML code has to appear/before/ the main content, and is thus read before the main content as well.
Another meaning of "article" is any of the interesting pages linked to in the story at the top of a Slashdot article.pl page. In this case, Slashdot users would call this page "the article".
Hmmmm... well, normal people would call it "the article". Slashdot users would probably call it "a DoS target".
No, it should in fact be "reversible". Energy is used mostly when information is destroyed, so to speak. If you do not destroy information, you re-use the energy (yes, that's a little oversimplified). Currently, every time you calculate aXORb for two bits a and b, you produce exactly one result bit, destroying one bit worth of information. Now, if you instead calculate, for example, (c, d) <- (a, a XOR b) (also known as a CNOT gate), you can reverse the operation (by simply applying CNOT twice to get (a, aXOR (aXORb)) = (a, b) ). If information is reused as much as possible, you save energy.
Reversible computing also has a lot to do with quantum computation, since all QC operations (except for measurements, of course) are described with unitary matrices, i.e. reversible.
Turnout (the number of people who vote in an election) has been steadily decreasing across most of the Western world. People are living increasingly busy lives with growing work and family commitments. Having to go to an old school or church hall to vote is difficult to fit into the day and seems anachronistic in this modern day. The younger generations, who vote even less than the rest, are probably turned off by the idea of voting with a stubby pencil and piece of paper when their lives revolve around the digital world of mobiles and consoles. If we make voting easier and more modern a greater number of people are likely to vote.
Rebuttal:
While some people do find it difficult to vote the traditional way, most people don't choose to not vote because of the hassle or its dated image. Surveys generally indicate that they feel their votes don't count, all the options are the same or they simply don't feel they know enough to make an educated choice. Jeremy Paxman has shown that turnout is significantly lower in areas where polling stations are within walking distance, when it's a trek people actually make the effort - convenience isn't the problem in the vast majority of cases.
Voting is important but by focussing on increasing turnout we miss the broader point that to re-invigorate participation in democracy we need to fundamentally reform our constitutional institutions and processes, not fiddle with the method of voting. With a strong representative democracy turnout will naturally rise. Give voters some credit, they aren't lazy couch potatoes who will only vote if it consists of pressing the red button on the TV remote.
In short, most likely electronic voting will not have much influence on the turnout. And considering the risks of electronic voting as opposed to 'classic' voting, why bother? Pencil-On-Paper voting works, and it works well. And, most importantly, it guarantees more security than what can possibly provided by an electronic system. See the rest of that article at the link above, it's a good read.
We shouldn't do everything with computers just because it's possible. I, for one, would prefer to avoid any type of electronic election whenever something is at stake.
I have a LifeBook P-2120, which has a built-in Prism 2.5 chipset. Works fine with the orinoco_pci kernel module. I would've bought a Centrino notebook, but I didn't want to wait for a Linux driver, and, frankly, I don't see a binary driver wrapper as a good solution that I would trust. The P-2120 works fine for me and gives me five hours with its extended battery (even more with the modular bay battery).
The computer should be powered by solar energy, which could be from any source, not only the sun, so that even the illumination of the screen could keep it going.
Oh, and I'd like a Perpetuum Mobile, please. And while we're at it, X-ray glasses and God-like powers.
True. I'd be for an upward one, and without the tic-tac-toe raster. Maybe a little more dynamic as well. Maybe a little bit like this.
But, in any case, by branding yourself with a single logo you promote stereotypes and generalizations. Which I'm not so sure we'd want. You'd have to fight one hell of a fight to get people to associate the right things with your logo (i.e., with You)... that may work for, say, Nike and the Swoosh (unfortunately), but Hackers just don't have a marketing department. By the time we'd all be equipped with that logo somewhere, it might already have been picked up by the media the wrong way, marking us all with an image we don't want.
I know. I've read "No logo". But that, my friend, calls for The People to defend themselves. And MS is just a small player when it comes to optimizing the use of humans to raise profits. Next to MS, there's Wal-Mart, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Borders, Starbucks, and many more, following the same principles.
In short: I do agree with you that temp jobs are a load of crap to manoeuver past laws that protect employees. But I do also think that that is a bit off-topic within this discussion.
The moral of the story is don't get temp jobs anywhere, fight for better jobs instead. Contact the ACLU or whoever.
I don't think there is that much OS discrimination within the company, with the exception that each developer needs to have a windows machine for obvious reasons. I think MS fired him because he was blatently trying to embarrass the company.
Good point. I don't even see any kind of issue here. First, what's so spectacular about MS buying Macs? Umm, I mean, they do produce software for Macs. In other words, "Evil-MS-doesn't-want-you-to-see-this" MS bashing is not appropriate here.
Secondly, he even says himself:
It seems that my post is seen by Microsoft Security as being a security violation. The picture itself might have been permissible, but because I also mentioned that I worked at the MSCopy print shop, and which building it was in, it pushed me over the line.
Additionally, he was just a temp (apparently, since he claims to still be on the roster of his temp agency), and thus couldn't expect too much from the company he worked for. So, sorry, no Microsoft bashing here -- someone just messed up and paid for it. You can turn a lot against Microsoft, but this, I don't think so. Please move along.
Hmm, it would be pretty cool to have Kimball in for a Slashdot interview... that would even allow us to get our opinion involved. Unfortunately, his being wound up in the case would probably forbid him to join a discussion on/., I suppose.
There's a mapping service for Germany and most of Europe here. I like their interactive map display using a JAVA applet. Works well on Linux as on Windows, and allows you to zoom around very freely. Worked well for all routes I needed recently. Don't know about your other points of critique, but at least I find the interface usable enough to get good results, and mostly exact enough to get a decent enough description.
Yep, I kinda stopped trusting Reiserfs after my notebook was visited by Colonel Panic due to a USB driver bug, and afterwards the file system was gone and could only be restored by 'reiserfsck --rebuild-tree', resulting in me manually moving back files from lost+found:
# ls 12387_55467 18392_22923... #./12387_55467 ./12387_55467: missing file argument Try `./12387_55467 --help' for more information. #./12387_55467 --help (lots of output... ah! seems to have been cp once...) # mv./12387_55467/bin/cp
...and so on for about a hundred files before I was able to boot my system again. The fact that reiser totally lost its tree here made me convert to ext3 just for reasons of stability. I reproduced the USB driver bug several times with ext3 on my hard disk and never had this kind of trouble again...
In short, I couldn't care less how many megs per second my notebook can write or read if the file system is unstable. For this kind of situation, I'd rather like to see a reliability benchmark.
Lots of uses for me under Linux. I use the left Win key (Super_L in X) as a prefix for all my window manager keyboard shortcuts (Win+F1...F8 or Win+Cursor for different virtual desktops, Win+PgUp to maximize etc.), and since I write German and my Notebook has a US keyboard, the right Win key works as Compose. The Menu key is rather stupid, but I use it in X to bring up the window manager's app menu, and on the console it switches between the current console and the one last selected. Quite useful, I think. Using the Windows key for window manager shortcuts has the benefit that your X apps can get all the shortcuts with Ctrl/Alt that they want, and there are no collisions.
No, because "kilo" is, in fact, a metric prefix. So a simple kilobyte should have its standard meaning as the SI unit prefix implies. You might however call the other one "non-metric," "binary," or "bastard":-)... problem is, no one will use such terms. It is understood as an unwritten rule that anything suffixed with "byte" implies that the prefixes "kilo," "mega" etc. refer to 2^10, 2^20 etc. factors. Even more interesting, I suppose the "general public" doesn't even know how much a gigabyte is anyway, you might as well call it a hogshead - the simple rule is that 20 Quux is less than 40 Quux, whatever the unit may be... so, since people will only compare the size of their hard drive (please, spare the obvious jokes here...) to that of other hard drives (and not memory or whatever), it would be good enough to ensure that at least for a given type of storage medium, all manufacturers calculate their unit prefixes the same way.
I would think that any greater change (like writing MiB or MMB vs. MB) will only create more confusion. I just remember when, a couple of years back, German computer manufacturers were forced to specify things like floppy disk sizes and screen diagonals not only in inches, but in centimeters - ever tried to buy an 8.3 cm floppy? That just doesn't work. The computer business just has its own weird set of units, but in fact no one really cares (except for maybe some nit-pickers going for the law suit), and a change of prefixing would, while being scientifically correct, not serve any good purpose. (Before you say "then we Americans can continue using pounds and miles too!" - that's a totally different question in my opinion that bears issues of "compatibility" and "ease of use" etc. etc.)
...another article at TP which fits as a follow-up. "The Virtual power station" (German only, Babelfish to the rescue) describes a possible solution. Since more and more power (at least in Europe) is planned to be coming from smaller plants (photovoltaic/wind energy etc.), there need to be more flexible methods of directing and diverting power, routing around failures and preventing overloads. Since the Great Vision is to connect any hoousehold appliance to the Internet, your fridge could, instead of automatically ordering food on-line, receive feedback about the state of the power network and more flexible rates per kWh -- and appliances could adjust their power consumption according to availability. All that is needed, according to that article: "intelligent, decentralized energy management."
Really gets on my nerves when such gadgets don't simply act as a standard USB storage device... I mean, all you want to do is upload your music... I'm having the same kind of trouble with my digital camera (canon powershot A70). gphoto2 is not there yet, and I can only deal with it corectly using Canon's proprietary windows software. OK, if I want extra functionality, then such a software is OK. But for merely uploading/downloading data?
That also kind of reminds me of this drive bay internal USB 6-in-1 card reader I tested... USB Storage, but only worked with certain motherboards (it was sold bundled with them... but also separately).
Soo...umm, why did we have the USB Storage standard again?
SCO's binary runtime license says nothing about source code nor distribution.
Maybe not, but SCO imposes further restrictions on the kernel source and code, and that too is not allowed by the GPL. You can not add any further restrictions to GPLed code.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm, given that Vega is 2.3935E14 km away and that Voyager I is travelling at 62500 km/h, a probe sent there will be travelling for about 437169 years. So maybe, by the time it gets there the planet will be ready :-)
OK, but for Australia, then, it may only make sense to build a computer based interface simply because it's an easier interface. But there's still no reason whatsoever to make this vote electronic. I.e., use an electronic voting system to decide who to vote for, but let that system only print out your result in human-readable form.
Germany has a simple "make two crosses, one per column" rule for most elections (see an example here), and "make up to three crosses, distributing them for different candidates or all for the same candidate, etc." for communal elections. Ballots are then counted manually by the helpers in each precinct, which makes rigging the vote on a greater scale fairly difficult. That, admittedly, makes it fairly easy, and it also works well enough in most cases.
If preferential voting can actually be explained easier with a computer interface than with a paper-based interface, OK. If results can be calculated much easier, then OK too. But that's a different issue. For this we only need local machines with no networked setup whatsoever, and a simple verifiable counting system, meaning that if necessary, the printed ballots can be hand-counted if the results seem shady.
But, I repeat, this has nothing to do with E-Voting as most people perceive it (and as planned, e.g., in the US), where voting systems are, to quite some extent, software-only, and results may be collected via a network, again, software-only. And that is just too dangerous.
...which brings you back to the question, "what advantage is the electronic system then?" Right now we have a paper trail, and it works well. (OK, maybe you Americans should work on the Usability of your forms :-))
That we will be able to get voting results faster? Well, let's see. In Germany, polls are always on Sunday and the booths close at 6pm. By that time, you already get projected results that usually differ from the final results by less than one percent. By 11pm the final results ("Vorlaufiges amtliches Endergebnis", "preliminary official results") are available. Is it worth spending millions of dollars just to get the results, say, four hours earlier? OK, there's one advantage if the results can be seen in "real time," e.g. over the day, while elections are still running. Because then the knowledge that the current results are very close to each other (think Gore-Bush) might have an influence on who decides to actually go voting later in the day.
And then there's the argument that E-Voting will make it easier for people to vote and thus more people will vote. But on the other hand there have been studies showing that when people had to make more of an effort to go cast their vote, turnouts actually increased.
That being said, www.free-project.org is a good source of pro and contra arguments regarding E-Voting.
Well, CSS2 can actually handle tables. For that you have "display: table-cell" and friends. The only problem is, Mozilla supports the table display styles fairly well, but IE doesn't. Which brings you back to the sad reality that you actually have to code for "Browser 'standards'", not for "HTML or CSS standards".
/. layout) /after/ reading the main content. But if that menu column is on the left, its HTML code has to appear /before/ the main content, and is thus read before the main content as well.
Another problem with tabular layout (which doesn't so much apply here) is that it's not too usable if you want to build a site readable by people with disabilities. For instance, if you were using a screen reader, you might want it to read the table column containing the menu (like the stuff in the left column in the
Hmmmm... well, normal people would call it "the article". Slashdot users would probably call it "a DoS target".
No, it should in fact be "reversible". Energy is used mostly when information is destroyed, so to speak. If you do not destroy information, you re-use the energy (yes, that's a little oversimplified). Currently, every time you calculate a XOR b for two bits a and b, you produce exactly one result bit, destroying one bit worth of information. Now, if you instead calculate, for example, (c, d) <- (a, a XOR b) (also known as a CNOT gate), you can reverse the operation (by simply applying CNOT twice to get (a, a XOR (a XOR b)) = (a, b) ). If information is reused as much as possible, you save energy.
Reversible computing also has a lot to do with quantum computation, since all QC operations (except for measurements, of course) are described with unitary matrices, i.e. reversible.
As for the turnout, this excerpt from the Free E-Democracy Project explains it best:
In short, most likely electronic voting will not have much influence on the turnout. And considering the risks of electronic voting as opposed to 'classic' voting, why bother? Pencil-On-Paper voting works, and it works well. And, most importantly, it guarantees more security than what can possibly provided by an electronic system. See the rest of that article at the link above, it's a good read.
We shouldn't do everything with computers just because it's possible. I, for one, would prefer to avoid any type of electronic election whenever something is at stake.
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving...
http://wuzzle.org/python/galaxysong.html
I have a LifeBook P-2120, which has a built-in Prism 2.5 chipset. Works fine with the orinoco_pci kernel module. I would've bought a Centrino notebook, but I didn't want to wait for a Linux driver, and, frankly, I don't see a binary driver wrapper as a good solution that I would trust. The P-2120 works fine for me and gives me five hours with its extended battery (even more with the modular bay battery).
What(R) a(R) really(R) nice(R) and(R) readable(R) reply(R). :-)
Then you better make sure nobody can enter that room... maybe construct a firewall around it? ;-)
Oh, and I'd like a Perpetuum Mobile, please. And while we're at it, X-ray glasses and God-like powers.
True. I'd be for an upward one, and without the tic-tac-toe raster. Maybe a little more dynamic as well. Maybe a little bit like this.
But, in any case, by branding yourself with a single logo you promote stereotypes and generalizations. Which I'm not so sure we'd want. You'd have to fight one hell of a fight to get people to associate the right things with your logo (i.e., with You)... that may work for, say, Nike and the Swoosh (unfortunately), but Hackers just don't have a marketing department. By the time we'd all be equipped with that logo somewhere, it might already have been picked up by the media the wrong way, marking us all with an image we don't want.
I know. I've read "No logo". But that, my friend, calls for The People to defend themselves. And MS is just a small player when it comes to optimizing the use of humans to raise profits. Next to MS, there's Wal-Mart, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Borders, Starbucks, and many more, following the same principles.
;-)
In short: I do agree with you that temp jobs are a load of crap to manoeuver past laws that protect employees. But I do also think that that is a bit off-topic within this discussion.
The moral of the story is don't get temp jobs anywhere, fight for better jobs instead. Contact the ACLU or whoever.
Oh, and read the book I mentioned.
</offtopic>
Good point. I don't even see any kind of issue here. First, what's so spectacular about MS buying Macs? Umm, I mean, they do produce software for Macs. In other words, "Evil-MS-doesn't-want-you-to-see-this" MS bashing is not appropriate here.
Secondly, he even says himself:
Additionally, he was just a temp (apparently, since he claims to still be on the roster of his temp agency), and thus couldn't expect too much from the company he worked for. So, sorry, no Microsoft bashing here -- someone just messed up and paid for it. You can turn a lot against Microsoft, but this, I don't think so. Please move along.
Hmm, it would be pretty cool to have Kimball in for a Slashdot interview... that would even allow us to get our opinion involved. Unfortunately, his being wound up in the case would probably forbid him to join a discussion on /., I suppose.
Hmm, he doesn't get paid by your taxes... but potentially by your movie theater expenses.
There's a mapping service for Germany and most of Europe here. I like their interactive map display using a JAVA applet. Works well on Linux as on Windows, and allows you to zoom around very freely. Worked well for all routes I needed recently. Don't know about your other points of critique, but at least I find the interface usable enough to get good results, and mostly exact enough to get a decent enough description.
Yep, I kinda stopped trusting Reiserfs after my notebook was visited by Colonel Panic due to a USB driver bug, and afterwards the file system was gone and could only be restored by 'reiserfsck --rebuild-tree', resulting in me manually moving back files from lost+found:
...and so on for about a hundred files before I was able to boot my system again. The fact that reiser totally lost its tree here made me convert to ext3 just for reasons of stability. I reproduced the USB driver bug several times with ext3 on my hard disk and never had this kind of trouble again...
In short, I couldn't care less how many megs per second my notebook can write or read if the file system is unstable. For this kind of situation, I'd rather like to see a reliability benchmark.
Lots of uses for me under Linux. I use the left Win key (Super_L in X) as a prefix for all my window manager keyboard shortcuts (Win+F1...F8 or Win+Cursor for different virtual desktops, Win+PgUp to maximize etc.), and since I write German and my Notebook has a US keyboard, the right Win key works as Compose. The Menu key is rather stupid, but I use it in X to bring up the window manager's app menu, and on the console it switches between the current console and the one last selected. Quite useful, I think. Using the Windows key for window manager shortcuts has the benefit that your X apps can get all the shortcuts with Ctrl/Alt that they want, and there are no collisions.
No, because "kilo" is, in fact, a metric prefix. So a simple kilobyte should have its standard meaning as the SI unit prefix implies. You might however call the other one "non-metric," "binary," or "bastard" :-)... problem is, no one will use such terms. It is understood as an unwritten rule that anything suffixed with "byte" implies that the prefixes "kilo," "mega" etc. refer to 2^10, 2^20 etc. factors. Even more interesting, I suppose the "general public" doesn't even know how much a gigabyte is anyway, you might as well call it a hogshead - the simple rule is that 20 Quux is less than 40 Quux, whatever the unit may be... so, since people will only compare the size of their hard drive (please, spare the obvious jokes here...) to that of other hard drives (and not memory or whatever), it would be good enough to ensure that at least for a given type of storage medium, all manufacturers calculate their unit prefixes the same way.
I would think that any greater change (like writing MiB or MMB vs. MB) will only create more confusion. I just remember when, a couple of years back, German computer manufacturers were forced to specify things like floppy disk sizes and screen diagonals not only in inches, but in centimeters - ever tried to buy an 8.3 cm floppy? That just doesn't work. The computer business just has its own weird set of units, but in fact no one really cares (except for maybe some nit-pickers going for the law suit), and a change of prefixing would, while being scientifically correct, not serve any good purpose. (Before you say "then we Americans can continue using pounds and miles too!" - that's a totally different question in my opinion that bears issues of "compatibility" and "ease of use" etc. etc.)
...another article at TP which fits as a follow-up. "The Virtual power station" (German only, Babelfish to the rescue) describes a possible solution. Since more and more power (at least in Europe) is planned to be coming from smaller plants (photovoltaic/wind energy etc.), there need to be more flexible methods of directing and diverting power, routing around failures and preventing overloads. Since the Great Vision is to connect any hoousehold appliance to the Internet, your fridge could, instead of automatically ordering food on-line, receive feedback about the state of the power network and more flexible rates per kWh -- and appliances could adjust their power consumption according to availability. All that is needed, according to that article: "intelligent, decentralized energy management."
Really gets on my nerves when such gadgets don't simply act as a standard USB storage device... I mean, all you want to do is upload your music... I'm having the same kind of trouble with my digital camera (canon powershot A70). gphoto2 is not there yet, and I can only deal with it corectly using Canon's proprietary windows software. OK, if I want extra functionality, then such a software is OK. But for merely uploading/downloading data?
That also kind of reminds me of this drive bay internal USB 6-in-1 card reader I tested... USB Storage, but only worked with certain motherboards (it was sold bundled with them... but also separately).
Soo...umm, why did we have the USB Storage standard again?
Wouldn't that be called Grid?
Maybe not, but SCO imposes further restrictions on the kernel source and code, and that too is not allowed by the GPL. You can not add any further restrictions to GPLed code.