Having been a "real time software" developer way back when that was what we were called, and called an "embedded developer" today, and having been a poll worker, I have a few observations:
* Voting is much like a real time data acquisition application: There is exactly one chance to record the transition from private vote to public count. It's deceptively easy to say and deceptively hard to get right. * Voters MUST have the ability to see that the legal record of their votes is recorded as they intended, without "translation" or "electronic" conversion out of their sight or control. * In close elections, it MUST be possible for recounts to be performed in full view of unaugmented interested observers. * It is entirely reasonable for the paper ballot to be scanned to provide early but informal estimates of the aggregated vote through election evenings. * It is entirely reasonable to use technological means, including touchscreen voting machines to help voters make their choices, to produce legible printed ballots that constitute the legal record of the voters' choices.
So: Machines are fine, as long as the true legal record is visible, recountable and auditable.
It takes more people in more places to conspire to fix an election recorded on individually recorded media, in contrast with voting systems where single programs/computers/subsystems that may be hacked are replicated throughout many precincts. The naturally distributed nature of paper ballots makes them surprisingly more robust against tampering.
I suspect that many of the people who are going to stand there and beat the drum on this one will also oppose requirements for voter ID. This despite the fact that every US state offers non-driver license state issued ID cards for a nominal fee or free in the case of financial hardship. At least, I am not aware of a state where that isn't the case.
It's easy for "us" and too often, not so much for "them". I've found precious few cases where the states requiring photo ID also providing a mechanism or set of mechanisms for helping to make it possible. I specifically remember the Alabama story:
As a lapsed poll-worker (too busy working overtime these days to volunteer), and whose assignments were in mixed-to-majority-minority precincts, I have found that out of 250-400 people voting, all but 2-5 of them people have photo ID. The fraction of the population that doesn't have photo IDs is so tiny that the focus on such IDs is statistically bogus. However, it would make sense in the context of whipping up "concern" in a particular subset of our population.
Ironically, one of the first times a book was revoked from kindle owners was Orwell's *1984*, due to a contract dispute between Amazon and the publisher. It was quickly resolved (a few weeks? I don't remember).
The ideas of mass re-editing (mentioned upthread) and revocation is a very very big deal. These capabilities give someone whose priorities are theirs alone a greater degree of control over information flow than we are accustomed to, and I do not think the implications have been fully understood.
Similar in concept to the "cashless society": Dramatically improved tracking of individual choices, and dramatically easier revocation of one's privilege to participate in society doing things like buying food, etc. Those who do the tracking have already established the idea that records of our activities (accurately recorded or not) are not for us to see, validate, or argue about in any meaningful way.
Oil, gas and to a decreasing extent, coal companies have a sweet deal: Ongoing revenue from drilling, fracking, digging and processing to convert raw material into convenient packaged products (gas, gasoline, electricity, etc.). All that increasingly automated "work" is crazy profitable.
Renewable sources do not have that benefit. Other than equipment maintenance and fees charged for managing storage, there is no charge for the inbound energy. All those watts are streaming into the the PV cells or through the turbines without digging or processing.
The incumbent energy "providers" understand this economic reality and will kill to preserve their hold on it.
Capitalism is a tool just like socialism or totalitarianism masquerading as "socialism" or "communism". As with any tool (especially the sharp tools) it can cut deeply if mis-handled. I agree with several upthread posts that "capitalism" is not inevitably good or bad.
What is absolutely bad in all cases for all times is concentration of power.
The way capitalism is practiced in the U.S. and in several illiberal "democracies" these days has led to excessive concentration of power in the hands of a few players. I am old enough to remember "antitrust enforcement", a concept that appears weakly now and then (FCC and Sinclair/Tribune, of all things...). Antitrust fell by the wayside during the late 70's and was all but dismantled during the 1980's. Limiting monopoly (or more commonly oligopoly) power would be a great start toward leveling out the current inequality.
On the "socalism" front: I was able to attend a state school back when it was affordable, and taxes paid based on my income since then has resulted in a major return on the public investment. B.S.E.E., not political science or basket weaving BTW.
From some reading I did two years ago, Monsanto is Very Careful to state that _glyphosphate_ has been tested for toxicity in harvested agricultural products and has at most a very weak link to cancer in some test animals.
That said, the other ingredients in the Roundup product which are intended to optimize its effects are a closely held secret, and (as of my reading two years ago) no entity, scientific or government regulatory agency has been able to study their health effects properly.
So _glyphosphate_ is reported by its manufacturer to be safe for its intended application, and leave the question about Roundup unanswered. Given the known behavior patterns of corporate managers throughout history, they are probably telling half the truth and making sure it's impossible to know the whole truth, whatever it may be.
I've worked with Ph.D.'s in Math, EE, CS, Nuclear Engineering, Marketing, and their attitudes and capabilities are as diverse as any other human population, though strongly biased toward being very good at what they do. Most are confident, comfortable in their roles, and entirely OK with learning from their co-workers.
Then again there are exceptions, fortunately (in my experience) not many. I've met a few who were indistinguishable from total dunces and terrifically insecure. It was unfortunate, as it was clear that they *could* know what they were doing, but couldn't get past their issues to really shine as they should have been able to.
Yes, ideas such as the ones you describe have been in the plans for years. Dynamic price signaling has been considered as a primary mechanism (from the power company perspective) and information source (from the load perspective) for automated, distributed decisionmaking.
The company I worked for 6-10 years ago was one of many studying the logic of using electric vehicles for load leveling, including pulling from the vehicles during peak loads. I believe every grid operator has had plans on the drawing board for at least a decade. From a grid perspective, development has had a tendency to plan for smart solutions leading to broad distribution rather then yet more high loading of existing infrastructure or capital-intensive new infrastructure.
Electric vehicles have been seen as a potentially important way to offset the variability of alternative sources, and to move peak supply closer to peak loads, essentially augmenting existing time-leveling ideas with spatially distributed leveling.
They deliberately perpetrated fraud. If the tobacco companies are the standard (which seems reasonable) then they are precisely as guilty, and for all of the same reasons.
This. It's not really the CO2, as much as it's the endless lying about it.
And *nobody* suggested turning off the tap "immediately", at least not back when it made sense to start researching improvements to the overall architecture of energy policy.
As far as I am concerned, fossil fuel executives know that as long as they keep their revenue streams from digging and drilling, they have a sweet deal. It's the digging, drilling and purifying that provide the greatest profit.
Alternative / renewable sources do not have the same ongoing revenue stgream character, and it's my opinion that is why the executives are putting up such a fight: Wind, solar, hydro, etc. are ongoing inputs not requiring all that work. Once the capital is invested, the rest is just maintenance. No ongoing revenue stream for the executives.
No link, no reference, no hints, no swoosh. Europe the musical group and "Final Countdown" the song came and went quickly. It peaked at #18 and lasted 13 weeks on the Billboard pop chart. I do admit to never being a hair metal fan.... The link you finally deigned to provide in your smugly superior half-assed cultural reference was the only way to recall the song.
Yes, the way I see it, the Germans attacked the Russians in their own land, sapping their strength. If the Germans had tasked competent general officers and manpower to western Europe, the Allied invasion would certainly be slowed dramatically and possibly stopped.
America's logistical contributions are not to be underestimated, though. My mother was a little girl living in Yonkers New York and told me about times when the sky was blackened by flights of B-17s.
The Final Countdown is a 1980 alternate history science fiction film about a modern aircraft carrier that travels through time to the day before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
Luxury... PDP-8/L, paper tape only and no disk. (Well, several months later, we got an RK05. 2.3 million words... It was huge and lightning fast.)
I still remember the wonderment upon first learning of the -11 and its stack. Reentrant code!
I still have the first programmed output of the decaying sine from the FOCAL example, glued to the inside cover of my CRC math tables book. It's a bit faded but still visible.
The builder set up a prototyping area, and my thought would be to install an audio amp and speakers to replicate the 12 (? it's been 40 years for me...) fans it needed for cooling. To say nothing of the RK-05. Of course an organization that could afford a/70 could probably afford the RP06 drives to go with it.
I remember wishing that someday if I could get really rich, I could someday have an 11/45.
..This comment was typed on a 2016-vintage Intel NUC with 16 gig RAM, 1 TB NVMe SSD and a 40-inch 4k monitor. Total "investment": $1500, having splurged on the entirely unnecessary NVMe... Nothing fancy but so many orders of magnitude more powerful than the 11/70 that the systems are incomparable.
Several years living in Willingboro NJ, near the Rancocas creek... I remember that the river there had a visible tide. (It's been 47 years, but...) I remember its amplitude being far less than the effect at the beach. This is about 4 miles up the creek from the Delaware river, about 40 miles from the mouth of the Delaware.
I'm guessing that doesn't count as "coastline"....
Off-topic: The specific place where I saw the effect was at what is now the end of Bridge Street but at the time had a bridge that had at one time been a gear-driven "draw" bridge, rotating to allow water-borne traffic to pass.
I'll be damned... They're still using Power! Interesting link.
I thought Freescale/NXP were pushing designers toward the Kinetis series. I proposed using K60 and K64 parts for my company's new industrial DAQ project based on the long-term product life that comes with being used in the high-volume automotive world.
I'm an electrical engineer, and maybe a "doofus" but... The concepts of PLC and RISC are apples and oranges, completely orthogonal. RISC vs CISC was basically settled by the research that led to Hennesy and Patterson in "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" https://www.amazon.com/Compute... while PLC is pretty much a "language" used to express industrial data acquisition and control, but at a fairly high level and with what I consider to be limited resolution.
Try https://quantamagazine.org/ for some nice reading. Interestingly, they are supported by a Foundation that largely depends on contributions, and are not profit-making.
Not to put a fine point on it... Truth Hating Freaks breed. And unfortunately, the evolutionary definition of fitness is about reproduction, not quality of life.
The green jihad against nuclear power, a safe and generally cheap source of reliable low-carbon energy, is especially counterproductive.
This is true, you know. We could solve our energy problems effectively, cheaply, and without huge cost to our landscape. If we were to replace all of our existing coal powered reactors by modern, reliable nuclear reactors, the world would be far better off. Moreover, abundant energy would make it possible to desalinate water on a very large scale as well.
Is there a risk? Yes, there is a risk. Is the risk beyond our ability to contain? No, it isn't. Safe, modern reactor designs exist. By and large we don't need the ability to create plutonium for nuclear weapons; most countries would be well-served by thorium reactors that produce far less radioactivity, and simply fizzle out in case of accident. And the only reason we aren't doing that is because of constant, utterly unnecessary scaremongering from so-called 'green groups'. Funny name, that: by opposing further development of safe nuclear energy they have probably done more to harm the environment than any other group on the planet...
I beg to agree but only technically. I am confident that with proper engineering, design and manageme... Oh fuck. That's the problem right there. It is ALWAYS management, isn't it? Answering my own rhetorical question: It is indeed. The problem with any technology is not the technology, it's the rabid greed-soaked fuckheads that "manage" it. And they have an essentially perfect record of going on the cheap now and fuck the future or anyone that is not empowered to hold their balls to the fire.
So I'll disagree: The greenies, the hippies, all those SJWs have had it with shitheads fucking over the lives of anyone not in their god damned club. And the result is the sort of irresposibility that sets rivers on fire. And kills children. I am old enough to remember the Cuyahoga river, my father took a clean shirt to change into over lunch (Pittsburgh) and was given dogtags in second grade (Pittsburgh being a first or second strike target), largely because people with power are sick fucks who could not give one good goddamn about the people in their countries.
Nuclear could be safe. But not in their hands. And they are very grabby.
Slashdot Mirror
Having been a "real time software" developer way back when that was what we were called, and called an "embedded developer" today, and having been a poll worker, I have a few observations:
* Voting is much like a real time data acquisition application: There is exactly one chance to record the transition from private vote to public count. It's deceptively easy to say and deceptively hard to get right.
* Voters MUST have the ability to see that the legal record of their votes is recorded as they intended, without "translation" or "electronic" conversion out of their sight or control.
* In close elections, it MUST be possible for recounts to be performed in full view of unaugmented interested observers.
* It is entirely reasonable for the paper ballot to be scanned to provide early but informal estimates of the aggregated vote through election evenings.
* It is entirely reasonable to use technological means, including touchscreen voting machines to help voters make their choices, to produce legible printed ballots that constitute the legal record of the voters' choices.
So: Machines are fine, as long as the true legal record is visible, recountable and auditable.
It takes more people in more places to conspire to fix an election recorded on individually recorded media, in contrast with voting systems where single programs/computers/subsystems that may be hacked are replicated throughout many precincts. The naturally distributed nature of paper ballots makes them surprisingly more robust against tampering.
I suspect that many of the people who are going to stand there and beat the drum on this one will also oppose requirements for voter ID. This despite the fact that every US state offers non-driver license state issued ID cards for a nominal fee or free in the case of financial hardship. At least, I am not aware of a state where that isn't the case.
It's easy for "us" and too often, not so much for "them". I've found precious few cases where the states requiring photo ID also providing a mechanism or set of mechanisms for helping to make it possible. I specifically remember the Alabama story:
https://www.al.com/opinion/ind...
As a lapsed poll-worker (too busy working overtime these days to volunteer), and whose assignments were in mixed-to-majority-minority precincts, I have found that out of 250-400 people voting, all but 2-5 of them people have photo ID. The fraction of the population that doesn't have photo IDs is so tiny that the focus on such IDs is statistically bogus. However, it would make sense in the context of whipping up "concern" in a particular subset of our population.
You paid the phone company a monthly fee for its use.
Many of us were glad when the CarterFone decision put an end to that bullshit.
With respect to "this shift is no big deal"...
Ironically, one of the first times a book was revoked from kindle owners was Orwell's *1984*, due to a contract dispute between Amazon and the publisher. It was quickly resolved (a few weeks? I don't remember).
The ideas of mass re-editing (mentioned upthread) and revocation is a very very big deal. These capabilities give someone whose priorities are theirs alone a greater degree of control over information flow than we are accustomed to, and I do not think the implications have been fully understood.
Similar in concept to the "cashless society": Dramatically improved tracking of individual choices, and dramatically easier revocation of one's privilege to participate in society doing things like buying food, etc. Those who do the tracking have already established the idea that records of our activities (accurately recorded or not) are not for us to see, validate, or argue about in any meaningful way.
Oil, gas and to a decreasing extent, coal companies have a sweet deal: Ongoing revenue from drilling, fracking, digging and processing to convert raw material into convenient packaged products (gas, gasoline, electricity, etc.). All that increasingly automated "work" is crazy profitable.
Renewable sources do not have that benefit. Other than equipment maintenance and fees charged for managing storage, there is no charge for the inbound energy. All those watts are streaming into the the PV cells or through the turbines without digging or processing.
The incumbent energy "providers" understand this economic reality and will kill to preserve their hold on it.
Capitalism is a tool just like socialism or totalitarianism masquerading as "socialism" or "communism". As with any tool (especially the sharp tools) it can cut deeply if mis-handled. I agree with several upthread posts that "capitalism" is not inevitably good or bad.
What is absolutely bad in all cases for all times is concentration of power.
The way capitalism is practiced in the U.S. and in several illiberal "democracies" these days has led to excessive concentration of power in the hands of a few players. I am old enough to remember "antitrust enforcement", a concept that appears weakly now and then (FCC and Sinclair/Tribune, of all things...). Antitrust fell by the wayside during the late 70's and was all but dismantled during the 1980's. Limiting monopoly (or more commonly oligopoly) power would be a great start toward leveling out the current inequality.
On the "socalism" front: I was able to attend a state school back when it was affordable, and taxes paid based on my income since then has resulted in a major return on the public investment. B.S.E.E., not political science or basket weaving BTW.
From some reading I did two years ago, Monsanto is Very Careful to state that _glyphosphate_ has been tested for toxicity in harvested agricultural products and has at most a very weak link to cancer in some test animals.
That said, the other ingredients in the Roundup product which are intended to optimize its effects are a closely held secret, and (as of my reading two years ago) no entity, scientific or government regulatory agency has been able to study their health effects properly.
So _glyphosphate_ is reported by its manufacturer to be safe for its intended application, and leave the question about Roundup unanswered. Given the known behavior patterns of corporate managers throughout history, they are probably telling half the truth and making sure it's impossible to know the whole truth, whatever it may be.
Individual differences are critical.
I've worked with Ph.D.'s in Math, EE, CS, Nuclear Engineering, Marketing, and their attitudes and capabilities are as diverse as any other human population, though strongly biased toward being very good at what they do. Most are confident, comfortable in their roles, and entirely OK with learning from their co-workers.
Then again there are exceptions, fortunately (in my experience) not many. I've met a few who were indistinguishable from total dunces and terrifically insecure. It was unfortunate, as it was clear that they *could* know what they were doing, but couldn't get past their issues to really shine as they should have been able to.
If you want to be happy the rest of your life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Yes, ideas such as the ones you describe have been in the plans for years. Dynamic price signaling has been considered as a primary mechanism (from the power company perspective) and information source (from the load perspective) for automated, distributed decisionmaking.
The company I worked for 6-10 years ago was one of many studying the logic of using electric vehicles for load leveling, including pulling from the vehicles during peak loads. I believe every grid operator has had plans on the drawing board for at least a decade. From a grid perspective, development has had a tendency to plan for smart solutions leading to broad distribution rather then yet more high loading of existing infrastructure or capital-intensive new infrastructure.
Electric vehicles have been seen as a potentially important way to offset the variability of alternative sources, and to move peak supply closer to peak loads, essentially augmenting existing time-leveling ideas with spatially distributed leveling.
Agreed on the distractions.
My preferred arrangement is 2-4 person spaces in which the office-mates have a shared project interest and a shared interest in concentration.
Sue the liars.
They deliberately perpetrated fraud. If the tobacco companies are the standard (which seems reasonable) then they are precisely as guilty, and for all of the same reasons.
This. It's not really the CO2, as much as it's the endless lying about it.
And *nobody* suggested turning off the tap "immediately", at least not back when it made sense to start researching improvements to the overall architecture of energy policy.
As far as I am concerned, fossil fuel executives know that as long as they keep their revenue streams from digging and drilling, they have a sweet deal. It's the digging, drilling and purifying that provide the greatest profit.
Alternative / renewable sources do not have the same ongoing revenue stgream character, and it's my opinion that is why the executives are putting up such a fight: Wind, solar, hydro, etc. are ongoing inputs not requiring all that work. Once the capital is invested, the rest is just maintenance. No ongoing revenue stream for the executives.
No link, no reference, no hints, no swoosh. Europe the musical group and "Final Countdown" the song came and went quickly. It peaked at #18 and lasted 13 weeks on the Billboard pop chart. I do admit to never being a hair metal fan.... The link you finally deigned to provide in your smugly superior half-assed cultural reference was the only way to recall the song.
Yes, the way I see it, the Germans attacked the Russians in their own land, sapping their strength. If the Germans had tasked competent general officers and manpower to western Europe, the Allied invasion would certainly be slowed dramatically and possibly stopped.
America's logistical contributions are not to be underestimated, though. My mother was a little girl living in Yonkers New York and told me about times when the sky was blackened by flights of B-17s.
Song, yes. Movie setting, no.
...I am so old that I saw it in a theater... :-)
The Final Countdown is a 1980 alternate history science fiction film about a modern aircraft carrier that travels through time to the day before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It was Japan, and the joke was that the Zero pilots tried hard, but they didn't have a snoball's chance... My favorite line from the flick:
"Splash the Zero..."
Luxury... PDP-8/L, paper tape only and no disk. (Well, several months later, we got an RK05. 2.3 million words... It was huge and lightning fast.)
I still remember the wonderment upon first learning of the -11 and its stack. Reentrant code!
I still have the first programmed output of the decaying sine from the FOCAL example, glued to the inside cover of my CRC math tables book. It's a bit faded but still visible.
The builder set up a prototyping area, and my thought would be to install an audio amp and speakers to replicate the 12 (? it's been 40 years for me...) fans it needed for cooling. To say nothing of the RK-05. Of course an organization that could afford a /70 could probably afford the RP06 drives to go with it.
I remember wishing that someday if I could get really rich, I could someday have an 11/45.
Several years living in Willingboro NJ, near the Rancocas creek... I remember that the river there had a visible tide. (It's been 47 years, but...) I remember its amplitude being far less than the effect at the beach. This is about 4 miles up the creek from the Delaware river, about 40 miles from the mouth of the Delaware.
I'm guessing that doesn't count as "coastline"....
Off-topic: The specific place where I saw the effect was at what is now the end of Bridge Street but at the time had a bridge that had at one time been a gear-driven "draw" bridge, rotating to allow water-borne traffic to pass.
I'll be damned... They're still using Power! Interesting link.
I thought Freescale/NXP were pushing designers toward the Kinetis series. I proposed using K60 and K64 parts for my company's new industrial DAQ project based on the long-term product life that comes with being used in the high-volume automotive world.
I'm an electrical engineer, and maybe a "doofus" but... The concepts of PLC and RISC are apples and oranges, completely orthogonal. RISC vs CISC was basically settled by the research that led to Hennesy and Patterson in "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" https://www.amazon.com/Compute... while PLC is pretty much a "language" used to express industrial data acquisition and control, but at a fairly high level and with what I consider to be limited resolution.
Yeah, me too.
Try https://quantamagazine.org/ for some nice reading. Interestingly, they are supported by a Foundation that largely depends on contributions, and are not profit-making.
Not to put a fine point on it... Truth Hating Freaks breed. And unfortunately, the evolutionary definition of fitness is about reproduction, not quality of life.
The green jihad against nuclear power, a safe and generally cheap source of reliable low-carbon energy, is especially counterproductive.
This is true, you know. We could solve our energy problems effectively, cheaply, and without huge cost to our landscape. If we were to replace all of our existing coal powered reactors by modern, reliable nuclear reactors, the world would be far better off. Moreover, abundant energy would make it possible to desalinate water on a very large scale as well.
Is there a risk? Yes, there is a risk. Is the risk beyond our ability to contain? No, it isn't. Safe, modern reactor designs exist. By and large we don't need the ability to create plutonium for nuclear weapons; most countries would be well-served by thorium reactors that produce far less radioactivity, and simply fizzle out in case of accident. And the only reason we aren't doing that is because of constant, utterly unnecessary scaremongering from so-called 'green groups'. Funny name, that: by opposing further development of safe nuclear energy they have probably done more to harm the environment than any other group on the planet...
I beg to agree but only technically. I am confident that with proper engineering, design and manageme... Oh fuck. That's the problem right there. It is ALWAYS management, isn't it? Answering my own rhetorical question: It is indeed. The problem with any technology is not the technology, it's the rabid greed-soaked fuckheads that "manage" it. And they have an essentially perfect record of going on the cheap now and fuck the future or anyone that is not empowered to hold their balls to the fire.
So I'll disagree: The greenies, the hippies, all those SJWs have had it with shitheads fucking over the lives of anyone not in their god damned club. And the result is the sort of irresposibility that sets rivers on fire. And kills children. I am old enough to remember the Cuyahoga river, my father took a clean shirt to change into over lunch (Pittsburgh) and was given dogtags in second grade (Pittsburgh being a first or second strike target), largely because people with power are sick fucks who could not give one good goddamn about the people in their countries.
Nuclear could be safe. But not in their hands. And they are very grabby.