Elections were rigged, but in the majority of cases the thing that was rigged was the selection of who voted, not the ballots or ballot boxes.
When an election is based on paper ballot systems, it's far easier to manipulate an election using other means. For example, the number of dead people voting in such places as Chicago, etc.
The introduction of electronic voting brings in a brand new method of vote rigging, which is the content of the systems themselves.
So my counterargument is simple: "Oh great. With electronic voting, we have *yet another way* to rig elections."
The goal is to make vote-rigging and election manipulation more difficult, not easier. Unauditable, or difficult-to-audit e-voting systems are a step in the wrong direction by providing bad actors with a brand new tool for manipulating the democratic process.
I have been a "presiding judge" and let me tell you that where are multiple people watching what's going on all the time.
Which means that while manipulating paper-ballot systems is possible, it is by no means easy. Furthermore, paper ballot systems are intrinsically decentralized: To manipulate an election, one would need to manipulate the ballot boxes in multiple precincts, requiring the cooperation, or at least failure to observe suspicious activity by a much larger number of insiders.
Compare that to the implicit centralization of counting that occurs when a given county or state purchases its voting machines from a single vendor. A far smaller number of bad actors is required to do real damage with evoting systems, and worse yet, it's essentially impossible to recognize easter-egg or other malicious code, particularly with respect to proprietary systems.
This being slashdot, I assume you are already aware of the essential impossibility of detecting malicious easter eggs through classical black-box system testing techniques. Given that the proprietary vendors consider their code to be a State Secret (IMHO out of embarrassment over how piss-poor it tends to be given its criticality to democratic decisionmaking), black box testing is all the boards of election and their independent testers can use.
Consider further that boards of elections and secretaries of state have very limited time, funding to and technical skill to validate hardware and software systems that the vendors really don't want pried open for a look-see.
Re:Nope. Kinesis Freestyle is the best keyboard...
on
Review of Das Keyboard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Forgot to mention: Not having a separate numeric pad keeps the mouse within reaching distance of the part of the keyboard that I actually use.
Re:Nope. Kinesis Freestyle is the best keyboard...
on
Review of Das Keyboard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Mee too. I replaced an old GoldTouch with the FreeStyle and haven't looked back.
Nearly perfect keyboard for my ancient wrists and fingers. (I am 51; 38 years of typing, 33 years on wristbending keyboards, has *ruined* my wrists and hands.)
The desire for control over everything infests all of human nature. Feudal "stewards", Soviet "socialists", Chinese "communists", and a particular subset of American "capitalists" all share this infestation.
What happened to owning your own property? Why should central authority have the ability to override everything?
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
We will absolutely be fooled again (and again)*
I agree with your comment. Any temptation I have to get that new TV, or a PC running Vista etc., is easy to resist these days...
One more layer of indirection: The Fox News readers don't necessarily reflect the viewer IQ, they reflect their estimate of their viewers' IQs. And that, I think is a more egregious error.
I appreciate the Germans' acceptance of order in the autobahn, for that reason: You are in the right lane or passing those who are. Not complicated.
I used to live in an outlying town, commuting an hour on an interstate highway each way. In general, the other drivers were competent and just wanted to get to their destinations with minimal fuss.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas we had Grandmas and Grandpas on the freeway for the first time in a year, on shopping for Christmas. Between mid-June and late August, we had vacation drivers.
Those months were a basic pain in the ass. People just did not get it...
DO NOT FUCKING DRIVE EXACTLY THE SAME SPEED AS THE GUY IN THE OTHER LANE!!!!
But, We are all operating on the premise that the economic and social freedom we have today to pursue these new technologies will continue to exist. This is not true. Today's freedom is an aberration of history that is fragile and must be protected. From your keyboard to God's monitor...
Throughout history, and I expect throughout the future, the battle between good and evil will continue wherever life exists, material or virtual. That battle is, in my opinion, the same in all places and for all time: Between those who use others and those who would not be used.
I don't see Kurzweil describing post-singularity existence as utopian, however. Merely way different from the material existence we have today. It's as if he is simply warning us of changes to come, and to make a best effort to prepare for them.
To say that the advent of powerful AI will spell the end of human life is to misunderstand humanity. Kurzweil's conjecture includes the idea that evolution is progressing past the biological realm into the realm of computation. His belief is that biological evolution has a maximum rate of change significantly less than that of technological evolution.
Can you quote any links showing the idea of humanity evolving much in the last 40000 years? I think (with very little supporting evidence) that the last major change was the apparently sudden arrival of abstract/artistic/existential thinking and language about 40000 years ago. I would believe that further evolution may have occurred in Europe during the plague years (referring back to some of Jared Diamond's work here), but that doesn't feel like a major biological evolutionary event.
What does feel like a major evolutionary event is the amazing consistency of exponential growth in computing capacity during the last 35 years (which I have experience and commented on upthread).
I am sure a quick Google search will reveal some of the specifics of Kurzweil's conjectures. Very quickly though: We just saw the announcement of RoadRunner, a petaflop system. About 14 years ago, it was gigaflops. In 1976 (or so, it's been a while) it was megaflops. At each stage of development, an el cheapo desktop computer has essentially the performance of the fastest manmade system in existence about 14 years before. (Sorry if these figures are not exact. I don't have the references handy, and too lazy to do the necessary searching. I know that nobody would bother with a PDA whose performance is so poor as to be equivalent to the CRAY-1...)
As far as I can see, performance curves show the exponential growth required to support the conjecture. The only real question is whether architectural organization will provide the necessary connectivity, and I have been persuaded not to bet against it.
So while humans will continue to evolve, I believe that information processing systems not based on human biology will evolve much more quickly.
Wonderful question, considering the fraction of species/genera that have survived to the present! Perhaps I am optimistic?:-):-)
All kidding aside: I believe, perhaps a bit arrogantly, that humans are more like cockroaches than dinosaurs, from a population perspective. Due to the astonishing level of adaptability provided by that sapient brain, humans manage to survive just about *everywhere*.
Of course, what is the purpose of living in meat-space if you have the capabilities to simulate it? I do not have a good answer to that question. I used to be a serious uber-geek, but age is catching up with me. I've recently been more interested in my aerobic fitness, and in my relationships with my wife and friends than Second Life (this is true, even knowing that the virtual world offers much interesting experience). 35 years ago, the reverse would have surely been true.
Agreed that oil is likely to get more expensive to extract as the decades progress, and a replacement is necessary. Agreed further that there are very powerful interests that want to prevent that replacement.
Steel, copper, et cetera are not disappearing, they are not being transmuited into lead.:-) They have merely moved to places where we'll have to mine them all over again, possibly with much greater sophisticated tools of extraction: Garbage dumps worldwide, including the ones at the bottom of the seas.
The physical limits are real, which is why we still don't have those wonderful flying cars.
Researchers and engineers (the two sets may or may not be distinct depending on who you ask) are discovering lots of interesting tricks of physics, math and basic understanding that are expected to lead to dramatically improved computing efficiency (e.g. reversible computing).
I think it's also worth noting that whatever the limits are, physical limits are far more immediate than the computational limits that Kurzweil and company think are around the corner.
So while I agree that present technology does not appear to provide the necessary growth path, I think Kurzweil and company have some good points on where things may be headed.
One comment that Kurzweil makes repeatedly in Singularity is that everyone who tried to forecast the progress of technology failed to recognize that the (at least) exponential growth of information-processing capability of the existing entities in the world would continue past the present moment.
I admit it: I am old enough to be *very* aware of this exponential growth recently: When I was going to college, I could not have imagined in some rather fevered geek dreams that my local Micro Center would have a *TERABYTE* disk drive on sale for $198! I bought 4 Gig of 667 MHz RAM for my new MacBook Pro for $80 a few weeks ago...
I've seen times when a good computer system (IBM 370/168: 0.008 GHz CPU, 0.002 Gbyte.5 MHz RAM, 0.2 Gbyte disk [in about 25 spindles]) was worth 50 years of an engineer's annual income at my 1977 graduation. This year, we bought an average-performance quad 2.2 GHz Phenom, 3Gig RAM, 320 gig disk for $750. Also known as pocket change.
Kurzweil's conjecture has hit me upside the head. As far as I can tell, it's a real phenomenon.
I agree with Douglas, I expect I would be uncomfortably unfamiliar in a world shared with AI beings. Then again, based on my understanding of Kurzweil's Singularity, it's unlikely to affect me much: I plan to live out my life in meatspace, where things will go on much as before.
(Also according to my understanding of Kurzweil's projections,) It's worth noting however, that for those willing to make the leap, much of the real growth and advancement will occur in Matrix-space. It's an excellent way to keep "growing" in power and complexity without using more energy that can be supplied by the material world.
Here's my analogy explaining this apparent paradox: Amphibians are less "advanced" than mammals, but still live their lives as they always have, though they are now food for not only their traditional predators but mammals too....And pollution and loss of habitat, but through all that, they still live amphibian lives.
In fact, I can't help but wonder how many of us will even recognize when the first AI has arrived as a living being. Stretching the frog analogy probably too far: What is a frog's experience of a superior life form? I am guessing "not-frog". So I am guessing that my experience of an advanced AI life-form is "whatever it does, it/they does it bloody fast, massively parallel, and very very interesting...". Being in virtual space though, AI "beings" are likely only to be of passing interest to those who remain stuck in a material world, at least initially.
Another analogical question: Other than reading about the revolution in newspapers of the day, how many Europeans *really experienced* any change in their lives during the 10 years before or the 10 years after the American revolution? We know that eventually, arrival of the U.S. as a nation caused great differences in the shape of the international world, but life for most people went on afterward about the same as before. The real action was taking place on the boundary, not in the places left behind.
(Slightly off topic: This is why I think derivatives of Second Life type virtual worlds will totally *explode* in popularity: They let people get together without expending lots of jet fuel. I believe virtual world technology IS the "flying car" that was the subject of so many World's Fair Exhibits during the last century.)
I live in an area that has benefited from recent changes in microclimate. At 850 foot altitude, we are getting lots better annual precipitation than before, and the season formerly known as "winter" is so mild that I can get plenty of great bike rides all through the season.
So yes, by all means, keep it coming.
On the other hand, there's the nearly billion people who live at less than 80 feet altitude who will be looking for new homes.
Are you offering your land to the displaced people? That would be a nice sentiment, assuming that you have the resources to offer it! If you don't have the resources for those teeming masses, be prepared for some "adjustments" in your lifestyle.
No "alarmist" has ever claimed that CO2 will kill the planet. They claim that if we don't watch out, there will be resource wars that make WWI and WWII look like playground fistfights.
And after CO2 levels have decreased, there may be mass extinctions. Perhaps mass extinction is the preferred process to upgrade the biopshere to cope with new conditions? Wouldn't be the first time.
It's been said multiple times by people smarter than I: Life on earth will do just fine, pretty much with or without humans or global warming. You'll have the occasional extinction of dominant species and other adjustments along the way, but the biosphere will do just fine one way or the other,.
The question has always been whether the planet will support 6+ billion hungry thirsty space-occupying humans?
Something I recall... I think it was a news show... Poor quality sleep correlated with increased incidence of weight-related problems, such as diabetes.
I know that if I don't exercise properly in a given week, my sleep cycle suffers. This is so important that as I get older, I've taken to running steps at a local dam during winter. (Spring, summer and fall are easy: bike riding).
More seriously: I believe that obese people differ from trimmer people (generally) in being less active physically. Whether someone is trim and skinny or trim and large, the difference in my experience is that obese people just don't need to move around as much.
Slim people seem to tend to impatience and vibrate a lot...
Count me in as a skinny overeater. I was 45 before achieving the goal of my lifetime: Finally achieving 200 lb. This after an adult lifetime of eating as much as I could. (Favorite pastime: 14 inch pizza, 20 minutes.) I'm 51 now and still answer to the name "zoidberg": I'll eat just about anything, and often provide the "no leftovers today" service whenever asked.:-)
It's also the case that I am constantly in motion, cannot stay off my bike, and am also a prodigious generator of infrared energy..:-)
Hopefully this will change soon (or may be changing as we debate this), but the primary treatment for most autoimmune conditions such as lupus erythematosus, is steroid immune suppression.
My mother in her time, and my sister in hers were both ordinary, slim women until the lupus tore through their kidneys, causing all sorts of problems. But it was the prednisone treatment that overinflated these people nearly beyond their own skins.
My wife developed a raging case of sarcoidosis, whose treatment was also prednisone. She also ballooned up, despite being very disciplined in her eating. Relevant to the point of eating: While on steroid treatment, my wife stopped at a grocery store EVERY SINGLE TIME she came home from work. That's 100.0000 percent, an absolutely perfect score of food shopping. Eventually she was able to titrate down to zero steroids and remains (fortunately) in remission.
To anyone considering steroids 'voluntarily': Go for it. Then watch your body and your heart explode prematurely, and get nailed by the cancer that is likely to result from suppressed immune activity. It's a really interesting, slow, painful, degrading way to go.
I thought so too, until two weeks ago: $1749 for a 2.4 GHz core2duo, 2 Gbytes ram, 15.4" 1440x900 LCD, 512 Mbyte Nvidia 8600M GT. GLXgears in a standard 300x300 window runs at 8300 FPS. I bought a 4 Gbyte RAM upgrade for $80 on Thursday.
It is possible to get a less expensive machine, but the MacBook Pro has great thermal design, MacOS is straightforward for family use and surprisingly complete for geeks: SSH, Python, ruby, X, lots of standard open tools included in the retail distribution.
This unit is triple-booting macOS, 32-bit Linux and 64-bit Linux: Everything I've tried works.
I have not tried to get the Atheros WiFi going in Linux yet, but everything else is just great, so I have my customary development environment plus the ease of macOS for family computing, all in a nearly silent package. I must be getting picky in my old age, I *require* quiet operation...
Every credible study of electronic voting systems has revealed numerous security limitations, often the result of inadequate architectural understanding of what "voting" means. It's the very first assumption of any programmer (me included) to think voting is easy.
I studied the issues and got a real lesson in the process. It's way more interesting than I ever thought. I volunteered to be a poll worker for the primary election, and whatever I learned about voting before then, I got an entirely new set of lessons as an election worker.
I suggest you volunteer to work an election. The upcoming election in November promises to be interesting. Assuming that you put your time where your mouth is, be certain to pay very very close attention during the poll worker training process. On the day of the election, your capacity for thinking, doing and managing the process will be severely tested. I worked continuously, essentially without a break, for 17 hours.
Back to the electronic systems..... There are only three major manufacturers of electronic voting systems in the U.S. today. Effectively, this means that the process of actually voting is technologically centralized. After a bit of study, I discovered the myriad ways that voting can be hacked, whether it's on paper on electronic. The problem with electronic systems is the small number of manufacturers; hack one, and you've got elections in multiple states "covered". Once a hack is established, it doesn't take insiders to manipulate the systems.
As electronic voting is practiced in most communities today, audits are either minimal or nonexistent.
On the other hand, paper ballots are highly decentralized; hacking a paper system requires the cooperation of a large number of people with access to the polls, ballots et cetera. The result of this decentralization is that a concerted effort to hack a paper-based election through ballot stuffing, etc. involves a greater number of people.
A secret is safe with three people as long as two of them are dead... The more people are involved, the more likely an attempt to swing an election will be discovered.
is the big issue here. While we're waiting for judicial review, too many of our younger generation and their families are dying, getting maimed, or getting their minds blown so badly that they will be be recovering for years, if not decades.
Do you realize that Obama is a Harvard professor of Constitutional law? Close, but not quite.
Senator Obama is a graduate of the Harvard Law school; during his time there he was the president of the Harvard Law Review.
He was also a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law school, a non-full time, non-tenure track position that exists to allow busy people to have "full professor" status while not being a full time tenure track professor. The school has received so many inquiries about the senator's status that they have released a statement about it
Yup. I started with a Digital Equipment PDP-8/L and it will always be my first.
Beginning with FOCAL, no less! It's where I learned the value of "interrupt service". Wonderful experience. The results are, literally, history. I am sure that machine and nearly all others like it are long gone now.
I don't really miss it much, surprisingly. Life moves on, and technical life moves on ever more quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Elections were rigged, but in the majority of cases the thing that was rigged was the selection of who voted, not the ballots or ballot boxes.
When an election is based on paper ballot systems, it's far easier to manipulate an election using other means. For example, the number of dead people voting in such places as Chicago, etc.
The introduction of electronic voting brings in a brand new method of vote rigging, which is the content of the systems themselves.
So my counterargument is simple: "Oh great. With electronic voting, we have *yet another way* to rig elections."
The goal is to make vote-rigging and election manipulation more difficult, not easier. Unauditable, or difficult-to-audit e-voting systems are a step in the wrong direction by providing bad actors with a brand new tool for manipulating the democratic process.
I have been a "presiding judge" and let me tell you that where are multiple people watching what's going on all the time.
Which means that while manipulating paper-ballot systems is possible, it is by no means easy. Furthermore, paper ballot systems are intrinsically decentralized: To manipulate an election, one would need to manipulate the ballot boxes in multiple precincts, requiring the cooperation, or at least failure to observe suspicious activity by a much larger number of insiders.
Compare that to the implicit centralization of counting that occurs when a given county or state purchases its voting machines from a single vendor. A far smaller number of bad actors is required to do real damage with evoting systems, and worse yet, it's essentially impossible to recognize easter-egg or other malicious code, particularly with respect to proprietary systems.
This being slashdot, I assume you are already aware of the essential impossibility of detecting malicious easter eggs through classical black-box system testing techniques. Given that the proprietary vendors consider their code to be a State Secret (IMHO out of embarrassment over how piss-poor it tends to be given its criticality to democratic decisionmaking), black box testing is all the boards of election and their independent testers can use.
Consider further that boards of elections and secretaries of state have very limited time, funding to and technical skill to validate hardware and software systems that the vendors really don't want pried open for a look-see.
Forgot to mention: Not having a separate numeric pad keeps the mouse within reaching distance of the part of the keyboard that I actually use.
Mee too. I replaced an old GoldTouch with the FreeStyle and haven't looked back.
Nearly perfect keyboard for my ancient wrists and fingers. (I am 51; 38 years of typing, 33 years on wristbending keyboards, has *ruined* my wrists and hands.)
The desire for control over everything infests all of human nature. Feudal "stewards", Soviet "socialists", Chinese "communists", and a particular subset of American "capitalists" all share this infestation.
What happened to owning your own property? Why should central authority have the ability to override everything?
Meet the new boss.
Same as the old boss.
We will absolutely be fooled again (and again)*
I agree with your comment. Any temptation I have to get that new TV, or a PC running Vista etc., is easy to resist these days...
*Kleene closure: Repeat ad nauseam
One more layer of indirection: The Fox News readers don't necessarily reflect the viewer IQ, they reflect their estimate of their viewers' IQs. And that, I think is a more egregious error.
I appreciate the Germans' acceptance of order in the autobahn, for that reason: You are in the right lane or passing those who are. Not complicated.
I used to live in an outlying town, commuting an hour on an interstate highway each way. In general, the other drivers were competent and just wanted to get to their destinations with minimal fuss.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas we had Grandmas and Grandpas on the freeway for the first time in a year, on shopping for Christmas. Between mid-June and late August, we had vacation drivers.
Those months were a basic pain in the ass. People just did not get it...
DO NOT FUCKING DRIVE EXACTLY THE SAME SPEED AS THE GUY IN THE OTHER LANE!!!!
Throughout history, and I expect throughout the future, the battle between good and evil will continue wherever life exists, material or virtual. That battle is, in my opinion, the same in all places and for all time: Between those who use others and those who would not be used.
I don't see Kurzweil describing post-singularity existence as utopian, however. Merely way different from the material existence we have today. It's as if he is simply warning us of changes to come, and to make a best effort to prepare for them.
Yup I did misunderstand your comment. I interpreted it as meaning that humans would continue to evolve in the material world.
:-) Whatever happens, it promises to be interesting.
So we're in violent agreement!
Can you quote any links showing the idea of humanity evolving much in the last 40000 years? I think (with very little supporting evidence) that the last major change was the apparently sudden arrival of abstract/artistic/existential thinking and language about 40000 years ago. I would believe that further evolution may have occurred in Europe during the plague years (referring back to some of Jared Diamond's work here), but that doesn't feel like a major biological evolutionary event.
What does feel like a major evolutionary event is the amazing consistency of exponential growth in computing capacity during the last 35 years (which I have experience and commented on upthread).
I am sure a quick Google search will reveal some of the specifics of Kurzweil's conjectures. Very quickly though: We just saw the announcement of RoadRunner, a petaflop system. About 14 years ago, it was gigaflops. In 1976 (or so, it's been a while) it was megaflops. At each stage of development, an el cheapo desktop computer has essentially the performance of the fastest manmade system in existence about 14 years before. (Sorry if these figures are not exact. I don't have the references handy, and too lazy to do the necessary searching. I know that nobody would bother with a PDA whose performance is so poor as to be equivalent to the CRAY-1...)
As far as I can see, performance curves show the exponential growth required to support the conjecture. The only real question is whether architectural organization will provide the necessary connectivity, and I have been persuaded not to bet against it.
So while humans will continue to evolve, I believe that information processing systems not based on human biology will evolve much more quickly.
Wonderful question, considering the fraction of species/genera that have survived to the present! Perhaps I am optimistic? :-) :-)
All kidding aside: I believe, perhaps a bit arrogantly, that humans are more like cockroaches than dinosaurs, from a population perspective. Due to the astonishing level of adaptability provided by that sapient brain, humans manage to survive just about *everywhere*.
Agreed that oil is likely to get more expensive to extract as the decades progress, and a replacement is necessary. Agreed further that there are very powerful interests that want to prevent that replacement.
:-) They have merely moved to places where we'll have to mine them all over again, possibly with much greater sophisticated tools of extraction: Garbage dumps worldwide, including the ones at the bottom of the seas.
.5 MHz RAM, 0.2 Gbyte disk [in about 25 spindles]) was worth 50 years of an engineer's annual income at my 1977 graduation. This year, we bought an average-performance quad 2.2 GHz Phenom, 3Gig RAM, 320 gig disk for $750. Also known as pocket change.
Steel, copper, et cetera are not disappearing, they are not being transmuited into lead.
The physical limits are real, which is why we still don't have those wonderful flying cars.
Researchers and engineers (the two sets may or may not be distinct depending on who you ask) are discovering lots of interesting tricks of physics, math and basic understanding that are expected to lead to dramatically improved computing efficiency (e.g. reversible computing).
I think it's also worth noting that whatever the limits are, physical limits are far more immediate than the computational limits that Kurzweil and company think are around the corner.
So while I agree that present technology does not appear to provide the necessary growth path, I think Kurzweil and company have some good points on where things may be headed.
One comment that Kurzweil makes repeatedly in Singularity is that everyone who tried to forecast the progress of technology failed to recognize that the (at least) exponential growth of information-processing capability of the existing entities in the world would continue past the present moment.
I admit it: I am old enough to be *very* aware of this exponential growth recently: When I was going to college, I could not have imagined in some rather fevered geek dreams that my local Micro Center would have a *TERABYTE* disk drive on sale for $198! I bought 4 Gig of 667 MHz RAM for my new MacBook Pro for $80 a few weeks ago...
I've seen times when a good computer system (IBM 370/168: 0.008 GHz CPU, 0.002 Gbyte
Kurzweil's conjecture has hit me upside the head. As far as I can tell, it's a real phenomenon.
I agree with Douglas, I expect I would be uncomfortably unfamiliar in a world shared with AI beings. Then again, based on my understanding of Kurzweil's Singularity, it's unlikely to affect me much: I plan to live out my life in meatspace, where things will go on much as before.
...And pollution and loss of habitat, but through all that, they still live amphibian lives.
(Also according to my understanding of Kurzweil's projections,) It's worth noting however, that for those willing to make the leap, much of the real growth and advancement will occur in Matrix-space. It's an excellent way to keep "growing" in power and complexity without using more energy that can be supplied by the material world.
Here's my analogy explaining this apparent paradox: Amphibians are less "advanced" than mammals, but still live their lives as they always have, though they are now food for not only their traditional predators but mammals too.
In fact, I can't help but wonder how many of us will even recognize when the first AI has arrived as a living being. Stretching the frog analogy probably too far: What is a frog's experience of a superior life form? I am guessing "not-frog". So I am guessing that my experience of an advanced AI life-form is "whatever it does, it/they does it bloody fast, massively parallel, and very very interesting...". Being in virtual space though, AI "beings" are likely only to be of passing interest to those who remain stuck in a material world, at least initially.
Another analogical question: Other than reading about the revolution in newspapers of the day, how many Europeans *really experienced* any change in their lives during the 10 years before or the 10 years after the American revolution? We know that eventually, arrival of the U.S. as a nation caused great differences in the shape of the international world, but life for most people went on afterward about the same as before. The real action was taking place on the boundary, not in the places left behind.
(Slightly off topic: This is why I think derivatives of Second Life type virtual worlds will totally *explode* in popularity: They let people get together without expending lots of jet fuel. I believe virtual world technology IS the "flying car" that was the subject of so many World's Fair Exhibits during the last century.)
I live in an area that has benefited from recent changes in microclimate. At 850 foot altitude, we are getting lots better annual precipitation than before, and the season formerly known as "winter" is so mild that I can get plenty of great bike rides all through the season.
So yes, by all means, keep it coming.
On the other hand, there's the nearly billion people who live at less than 80 feet altitude who will be looking for new homes.
Are you offering your land to the displaced people? That would be a nice sentiment, assuming that you have the resources to offer it! If you don't have the resources for those teeming masses, be prepared for some "adjustments" in your lifestyle.
No "alarmist" has ever claimed that CO2 will kill the planet. They claim that if we don't watch out, there will be resource wars that make WWI and WWII look like playground fistfights.
Perhaps mass extinction is the preferred process to upgrade the biopshere to cope with new conditions? Wouldn't be the first time.
It's been said multiple times by people smarter than I: Life on earth will do just fine, pretty much with or without humans or global warming. You'll have the occasional extinction of dominant species and other adjustments along the way, but the biosphere will do just fine one way or the other,.
The question has always been whether the planet will support 6+ billion hungry thirsty space-occupying humans?
Something I recall... I think it was a news show... Poor quality sleep correlated with increased incidence of weight-related problems, such as diabetes.
I know that if I don't exercise properly in a given week, my sleep cycle suffers. This is so important that as I get older, I've taken to running steps at a local dam during winter. (Spring, summer and fall are easy: bike riding).
More seriously: I believe that obese people differ from trimmer people (generally) in being less active physically. Whether someone is trim and skinny or trim and large, the difference in my experience is that obese people just don't need to move around as much.
:-)
:-)
Slim people seem to tend to impatience and vibrate a lot...
Count me in as a skinny overeater. I was 45 before achieving the goal of my lifetime: Finally achieving 200 lb. This after an adult lifetime of eating as much as I could. (Favorite pastime: 14 inch pizza, 20 minutes.) I'm 51 now and still answer to the name "zoidberg": I'll eat just about anything, and often provide the "no leftovers today" service whenever asked.
It's also the case that I am constantly in motion, cannot stay off my bike, and am also a prodigious generator of infrared energy..
Hopefully this will change soon (or may be changing as we debate this), but the primary treatment for most autoimmune conditions such as lupus erythematosus, is steroid immune suppression.
My mother in her time, and my sister in hers were both ordinary, slim women until the lupus tore through their kidneys, causing all sorts of problems. But it was the prednisone treatment that overinflated these people nearly beyond their own skins.
My wife developed a raging case of sarcoidosis, whose treatment was also prednisone. She also ballooned up, despite being very disciplined in her eating. Relevant to the point of eating: While on steroid treatment, my wife stopped at a grocery store EVERY SINGLE TIME she came home from work. That's 100.0000 percent, an absolutely perfect score of food shopping. Eventually she was able to titrate down to zero steroids and remains (fortunately) in remission.
To anyone considering steroids 'voluntarily': Go for it. Then watch your body and your heart explode prematurely, and get nailed by the cancer that is likely to result from suppressed immune activity. It's a really interesting, slow, painful, degrading way to go.
I thought so too, until two weeks ago: $1749 for a 2.4 GHz core2duo, 2 Gbytes ram, 15.4" 1440x900 LCD, 512 Mbyte Nvidia 8600M GT. GLXgears in a standard 300x300 window runs at 8300 FPS. I bought a 4 Gbyte RAM upgrade for $80 on Thursday.
It is possible to get a less expensive machine, but the MacBook Pro has great thermal design, MacOS is straightforward for family use and surprisingly complete for geeks: SSH, Python, ruby, X, lots of standard open tools included in the retail distribution.
This unit is triple-booting macOS, 32-bit Linux and 64-bit Linux: Everything I've tried works.
I have not tried to get the Atheros WiFi going in Linux yet, but everything else is just great, so I have my customary development environment plus the ease of macOS for family computing, all in a nearly silent package. I must be getting picky in my old age, I *require* quiet operation...
Every credible study of electronic voting systems has revealed numerous security limitations, often the result of inadequate architectural understanding of what "voting" means. It's the very first assumption of any programmer (me included) to think voting is easy.
I studied the issues and got a real lesson in the process. It's way more interesting than I ever thought. I volunteered to be a poll worker for the primary election, and whatever I learned about voting before then, I got an entirely new set of lessons as an election worker.
I suggest you volunteer to work an election. The upcoming election in November promises to be interesting. Assuming that you put your time where your mouth is, be certain to pay very very close attention during the poll worker training process. On the day of the election, your capacity for thinking, doing and managing the process will be severely tested. I worked continuously, essentially without a break, for 17 hours.
Back to the electronic systems..... There are only three major manufacturers of electronic voting systems in the U.S. today. Effectively, this means that the process of actually voting is technologically centralized. After a bit of study, I discovered the myriad ways that voting can be hacked, whether it's on paper on electronic. The problem with electronic systems is the small number of manufacturers; hack one, and you've got elections in multiple states "covered". Once a hack is established, it doesn't take insiders to manipulate the systems.
As electronic voting is practiced in most communities today, audits are either minimal or nonexistent.
On the other hand, paper ballots are highly decentralized; hacking a paper system requires the cooperation of a large number of people with access to the polls, ballots et cetera. The result of this decentralization is that a concerted effort to hack a paper-based election through ballot stuffing, etc. involves a greater number of people.
A secret is safe with three people as long as two of them are dead... The more people are involved, the more likely an attempt to swing an election will be discovered.
Posse Comitatus should moot the question of fourth amendment applicability to military action within the borders of the U.S.
The fourth amendment should apply to law enforcement activity.
The fact that we are even discussing the fourth amendment in this context shows just how far down the shithole this nation has fallen.
is the big issue here. While we're waiting for judicial review, too many of our younger generation and their families are dying, getting maimed, or getting their minds blown so badly that they will be be recovering for years, if not decades.
Senator Obama is a graduate of the Harvard Law school; during his time there he was the president of the Harvard Law Review.
He was also a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law school, a non-full time, non-tenure track position that exists to allow busy people to have "full professor" status while not being a full time tenure track professor. The school has received so many inquiries about the senator's status that they have released a statement about it
Yup. I started with a Digital Equipment PDP-8/L and it will always be my first.
Beginning with FOCAL, no less! It's where I learned the value of "interrupt service". Wonderful experience. The results are, literally, history. I am sure that machine and nearly all others like it are long gone now.
I don't really miss it much, surprisingly. Life moves on, and technical life moves on ever more quickly.