No, I'm sorry, but an 8-mile range without AC on flat ground isn't "spot on" for any car.
The car doesn't have an 8 mile range. It has an 8-mile pure electric range, and when that is exhausted it operates as a normal hybrid.
The non mass produced, high end market Tesla's price is irrelevant; the point was 8 miles range and squirrel power are not the standard du jour for electric vehicles
This isn't an "electric vehicle". Its a plug-in hybrid. Its essentially a hybrid that boosts its mileage (particularly on shorter trips) with stored power drawn from the grid (which in most cases is cleaner, and can expected to increasingly be cheaper, than gasoline).
Whilst most driving is well within range - most people can't buy a car for holidays, and a car for the city.
Most people could buy a vehicle for normal driving and rent an appropriate vehicle for occasional special needs. They don't now, because a lot of the costs of having more car than you need is currently externalized and thus born by other people than those making the decision of what to buy.
8 miles? under ideal conditions, flat road, no a/c... very disappointing. Toyota's engineering is very good. If this is all such great engineers can manage, it shows that batteries have a long way to go.
Toyota (and others) have done battery powered cars with much better range than that (Toyota's RAV4 EV, GMs EV-1, Honda EVplus, etc.). 8 mile pure battery range on a plug-in hybrid, though (which still has a gasoline engine and fuel tank, and the range that provides for long trips) is fairly decent. It makes it gasoline-free for many local errands, etc., while still being able to make longer trips with the efficiency of a hybrid while relying on the existing gasoline infrastructure, unlike a pure electric, is a lot more practical for most people than an electric car with a 30-100 mile pure battery range, but no capacity for longer trips without a time consuming recharge that may not even be practical due to the absence of convenient recharging stations.
The only lasting physical or mental damage that comes from using opiates are things which are not directly caused by the drug, i.e. one might neglect dental hygiene, proper nutrition, safe sex practices, etc. due to being preoccupied with obtaining more heroin.
This is quite wrong. Prolonged use of opiates has an increasing risk of permanently seriously depressing the natural production of endorphin such that it will not recover even in the absence of the drug. This has serious consequences, and is one of the major contributors to relapse to opiate use, which is why ongoing opiate replacement therapies using drugs like methadone or buprenorphine are used.
The tests were ordered by Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who has until Friday of next week to decide whether to decertify any of the machines for use in the upcoming Presidential primary election."
Looks like she won't need to decertify any, then. They'll all be able to deliver the Republicans the next election.:-P
That line would work better if Debra Bowen was a Republican.
Ok Slashdot people, How would YOU implement electronic voting?
If you need electronic ballot creation and automatic ballot counting (the two are both conceptually and often in practice separate, though "voting machine" and "electronic voting" are often used to refer to either or both), I'd have the voting machine print a machine and human readable ballot that would then be counted by a separate machine, with random-sample confirmation of the mechanical counts and the physical ballots available for public inspection including independent full recounts. With this system, the "voting machine" (the one that creates the ballot), could even be available (for absentee ballot users, etc.) as a freely available downloadable software package that could be used with personally commodity hardware; you still, of course, want secure, reliable, tamper-proof hardware for regular voting, since a security breach there, even though the ballots would be reviewed by the voter before being officially deposited, could cause differential difficulty in casting ballots for particular candidates, which would still be problematic.
But you probably don't need automatic ballot counting as opposed to manual counts, no matter how ballots are cast, unless you are using a preference voting system that needs a complex counting methodology (like a Single Transferrable Vote in multiseat districts, or a Condorcet method in a single-winner system), so the first thing is to evaluate whether and in what form "electronic voting" is really necessary.
The problem with paper is...it's slow. Don't get me wrong, I don't see that as a problem; I am of the school of thought that it is no disadvantage to take a week or so to count ballots by hand.
That's not a disadvantage of paper ballots, its a disadvantage of doing a full hand count rather than a mechanical count with random-sample manual audit. Many jurisdictions that currently use manual or mechanical (that is, not electronic) "paper ballot" systems are already using ballot counting machines, with or without random-sample audits.
Considering how strong the push for voting machines is, you'd think there's something terribly wrong with paper ballots. What is it?
Almost every form of manually and non-electronic mechanically-marked paper ballots has some type of accessibility problem with regard to the handicapped, and many of the ones commonly used until recently also have problems in terms of reading them (i.e., the "hanging chad" problem of punch card ballots). Machines with a common output (whether its digital or printed ballots that are then counted by any of the means available for paper ballots) can be both more accessible (by supporting different input methods) and produce clearer ballots, whether physical or electronic.
There is virtually no additional risk, provide similar counting methods are used, of using an electronic voting machine to produce a paper ballot and then counting that paper ballot compared to using other means to produce paper ballots, and very little additional risk if paper ballot "receipts" are kept but an electronic count is done with only random sample confirmation of the counts unless the sample shows an error.
Of course, a "pure electronic" election of the type most current voting machines provide is vastly more vulnerable to fraud, and there can be no justification for that vulnerability, since it is easily avoidable without sacrificing any of the advantages voting machines provide.
Perhaps it's time to introduce a system of rating of article veracity [...]
Such systems are generally part of various Wikiprojects, not general Wikipedia policies. There might be some areas where such a rating system is useful, OTOH, in any of the controversial areas where problems exist, any attempt to assign such ratings runs into the same problems as the main articles themselves have. Either the ratings are applied by selected "admins", in which case the selection of admins and policing of them is problematic, or the ratings are assigned by the community with appropriate support posted in a Wiki fashion, in which case the accuracy and verifiability of the ratings and their support is problematic.
How is propaganda from any democratic government ever legal?
By not being outlawed under the laws of that government.
Proper decision-making in a democracy requires access to the truth.
Proper decision-making, period, requires access to the truth. Which is why propaganda has always been important in war: denying the enemy the ability to make decisions well. Of course, domestic propaganda by a regime is undesirable from a democratic perspective. And, in the modern age where information is fairly globalized, its very hard to engage in propaganda directed at an enemy without simultaneously engaging in domestic propaganda.
Realistically, that's a naive view of how things actually work on Wikipedia. In reality, certain contributors earn or grab authority and their views are given more weight than those who are newer, less experienced, or who hold unpopular views.
In reality, your view might be valid as a description of how Wikipedia works in a few highly controversial areas where people expend lots of energy. Much of Wikipedia works more like this: someone posts material without adequate references and with clear inaccuracies, and over time it gets progressively edited to better compliance with Wikipedia's stated policies, improving in quality.
In the end, Wikipedia will fail through it's lack of a traditional authority structure, however much not having one has certain advantages.
In the end, we're all dead, and every business (even nonprofits) will fail, because every business is subject to risk at all times, and has finite, exhaustible resources, and thus every business is subject to gambler's ruin. So, really, prognostication that "in the end" Wikipedia will fail is not all that substantial.
How does Wikipedia handle topics (like certain forms of proprietary technology) where the only published data sources might only exist in non-public forms (e.g., vendor manuals), or may not exist in published form at all anymore (e.g., out of print vendor manuals)?
As I understand it, that a source is no longer in print does not prevent it from being a citable source that would satisfy WP:V, though obviously, where they are available, more accessible sources for the same information would be good. Non-public forms are a bit trickier; if they are essentially inaccessible (the de facto equivalent of unpublished works or internal memoranda), I would imagine they aren't suitable sources and thus, if they are the only support for a fact claim, that claim cannot (under policy) be made on Wikipedia; if they are merely hard to find, I think the situation is similar to what I suggest for an out-of-print source, acceptable but perhaps not preferred if there is an alternative.
Enterprise, as far as I am concerned, was by far the best of the bunch. That doesn't seem to be the consensus here, but still, that's my take. I'm not saying it was perfect, not by a long shot, but it was better than any of the other series.
Enterprise, like any new series, was a bit rocky, but seemed at the outset to have the potential to become the best. The temporal cold war running plot was, to me, an early sign of trouble (time travel having too big of a footprint on the series makes it hard to hold together—a great writer might be able to do it), and then the whole radical shift of tone to deal with the destruction of the Earth really, to me, was the end.
Am I the only person who thought that the first Star Trek film was actually quite good?
I liked it when I first saw it in the theater, and I like it now. In my late teens and early 20s, I thought it was one of the worst of the series.
OTOH, I'm not that big a fan of the original Star Trek, or the Star Trek films, and it's notable that ST:TMP doesn't feel as much like Star Trek as the other films.
I dunno; it doesn't feel as much like the Star Trek of the following movies (good and bad) and ST:TNG as the other movies do, but I don't think has any less of the TOS feel than those later movies or TNG.
CentCom I remember from the film "Control Room", they are the people trying to spin the Iraq war for the world (and especially the US) media.
While, certainly, there are people in the PR arm of Centcom (and the Pentagon itself, and the White House) doing that, Centcom is the United States "Central Command", the regional combatant command in whose area of operations both the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan are being fought, not simply a special-purpose spin shop.
This is CENTCOM's job - US taxpayer's dollars to rewrite history, so that the US can keep going overseas militarily.
being the part of the US military that is (in one particular area) overseas. Their job is fighting and winning wars, and preventing wars by having the capacity to fight and win them. Propaganda is part of that, of course, and no doubt they engage in some practices in the course of that against which there are legitiamte objections.
So maybe the question becomes, should those who contribute more (I don't know what the threshold would be) be required to reveal more personal identification details in order to ensure some level of transparency?
I have a better idea. Rather than an appeal-to-personal-authority based approach, maybe Wikipedia could adopt some policies regarding verifiability of claims, so as not to rely on the personal credibility of the submitter.
Of course it will suck. It's "Teenage Starfleet Cadets". Maybe they won't have exploding toilet seats, but I'm not even that hopeful.
I know they're hoping this can resurrect the franchise, but it was a moronic idea when it was first floated in the early 90s, and it's still a moronic idea.
The idea was first floated in the 70s, and was, IIRC, the first idea for the first Star Trek movie, and the only reason it hasn't happened before is that there was an existing cast that the idea didn't work with and that was more bankable than something completely new like the "academy movie" would entail.
(Whether its a "moronic" idea is, I think, something that isn't apparent at the broad brush level; there are ways it could be executed well, and, as usual with any broad film concept, many more ways that it could suck.)
The utopian notions of Star Trek were dumped after ST:NG. There may have been a bit of lip-service paid to it, but by the time of Star Trek: Insurrection, the Federation as the goody-goody government had been ripped out of the plot line.
Was Star Trek all that utopian even in TOS? It seems to me to be not as much utopian as heroic. The ST:TOS Federation, like most countries of the real world, is a nation whose identity certainly involves ideals that, were they fully realized, would characterize a utopia. And, sure, the main (protagonist) characters of TOS are portrayed in a way that mostly shows them a fine embodiments of those ideals. But, despite all the technology and economic plenty of TOS, the rest of the Federation government, and numerous of its citizens, portrayed in TOS exhibit the full range negative attributes of societies throughout time, overwhelming bureaucracy, self-promotion, greed, prejudice, etc. Sure, the crew always wins out, but the crew is also portrayed as being something rather special even within their setting in terms both of their idealism and their competence.
Ubuntu gets quite a bit of publicity these days. I was just thinking - if all the major vendors start offering only Ubuntu as an alternative to Windows, doesn't that kind of conflict with the whole "Linux being about freedom to choose" idea?
Not really. As long as it is Free software, and there are needs not met by the "popular" version, there will be alternatives out there to choose. It might reduce the number of "complete" major distros, and some might reconfigure as package collections designed to be layered on top of a standard Ubuntu install rather than installed from scratch, but as long as there is an interested community of users and developers, there will be alternatives with Linux. And anything a new distro could change could be changed through packages, so there is no loss of freedom to choose there, just a change in mechanisms.
That massive discount Microsoft gives them over smaller OEMs is Dell's biggest competitive advantage.
And, with Linux, their size and ability to shoulder the cost of making sure everything works together, and to work with manufacturers to get the components they want supported if they aren't already, and to thereby provide a reliable experience will be a big competitive advantage. While support costs might scale by number of units sold, the cost of making sure it works for the average user is probably more like a fixed cost per computer model. Dell can sell a lot more of any one configuration than a local storefront assembler.
Plus, it gives them more leverage with Microsoft in negotiations, and some security in the event that Microsoft ever stumbles.
Plus, as they gain experience with Linux, they have a lot more freedom to customize than they do with Windows, since they can modify essentially anything in the distribution so long as the source is available, rather than having to negotiate permissions to anything beyond MS's standard permissions with Windows. And here, again, scale compared to other PC manufacturers works in their favor, since the cost of that customization scales with the degree of customization, not the number of units sold.
But if the policeman has got a simple non-lethal weapon like this, he's got a strong motivation for "subduing" anyone who happens to disagree with him or who doesn't instantly obey his orders.
As the company rep says, "With this, they don't have to understand English to comply." So, the manufacturer's overt selling point is that the device frees law enforcement from needing to be understood, since they can just "flash" people with it and deal with them however they choose.
The thing is, a superficially "safer" subdual method always means lowering the bar on the use of coercion. In fact, the summary itself, quoting the article, shows that's part of the thinking with this. While its phrased in sugary language as "they don't have to understand English to comply", the clear message is "Someone doesn't have to be a threat in any way which would traditionally justify anything beyond verbal directions for us to use this, if our officers directions aren't immediately understood and complied with, we'll just zap first and talk later."
Slashdot Mirror
The car doesn't have an 8 mile range. It has an 8-mile pure electric range, and when that is exhausted it operates as a normal hybrid.
This isn't an "electric vehicle". Its a plug-in hybrid. Its essentially a hybrid that boosts its mileage (particularly on shorter trips) with stored power drawn from the grid (which in most cases is cleaner, and can expected to increasingly be cheaper, than gasoline).
Most people could buy a vehicle for normal driving and rent an appropriate vehicle for occasional special needs. They don't now, because a lot of the costs of having more car than you need is currently externalized and thus born by other people than those making the decision of what to buy.
Toyota (and others) have done battery powered cars with much better range than that (Toyota's RAV4 EV, GMs EV-1, Honda EVplus, etc.). 8 mile pure battery range on a plug-in hybrid, though (which still has a gasoline engine and fuel tank, and the range that provides for long trips) is fairly decent. It makes it gasoline-free for many local errands, etc., while still being able to make longer trips with the efficiency of a hybrid while relying on the existing gasoline infrastructure, unlike a pure electric, is a lot more practical for most people than an electric car with a 30-100 mile pure battery range, but no capacity for longer trips without a time consuming recharge that may not even be practical due to the absence of convenient recharging stations.
This is quite wrong. Prolonged use of opiates has an increasing risk of permanently seriously depressing the natural production of endorphin such that it will not recover even in the absence of the drug. This has serious consequences, and is one of the major contributors to relapse to opiate use, which is why ongoing opiate replacement therapies using drugs like methadone or buprenorphine are used.
That line would work better if Debra Bowen was a Republican.
The office of Clerk-Recorder in Contra Costa County is an elected county office.
If you need electronic ballot creation and automatic ballot counting (the two are both conceptually and often in practice separate, though "voting machine" and "electronic voting" are often used to refer to either or both), I'd have the voting machine print a machine and human readable ballot that would then be counted by a separate machine, with random-sample confirmation of the mechanical counts and the physical ballots available for public inspection including independent full recounts. With this system, the "voting machine" (the one that creates the ballot), could even be available (for absentee ballot users, etc.) as a freely available downloadable software package that could be used with personally commodity hardware; you still, of course, want secure, reliable, tamper-proof hardware for regular voting, since a security breach there, even though the ballots would be reviewed by the voter before being officially deposited, could cause differential difficulty in casting ballots for particular candidates, which would still be problematic.
But you probably don't need automatic ballot counting as opposed to manual counts, no matter how ballots are cast, unless you are using a preference voting system that needs a complex counting methodology (like a Single Transferrable Vote in multiseat districts, or a Condorcet method in a single-winner system), so the first thing is to evaluate whether and in what form "electronic voting" is really necessary.
That's not a disadvantage of paper ballots, its a disadvantage of doing a full hand count rather than a mechanical count with random-sample manual audit. Many jurisdictions that currently use manual or mechanical (that is, not electronic) "paper ballot" systems are already using ballot counting machines, with or without random-sample audits.
Almost every form of manually and non-electronic mechanically-marked paper ballots has some type of accessibility problem with regard to the handicapped, and many of the ones commonly used until recently also have problems in terms of reading them (i.e., the "hanging chad" problem of punch card ballots). Machines with a common output (whether its digital or printed ballots that are then counted by any of the means available for paper ballots) can be both more accessible (by supporting different input methods) and produce clearer ballots, whether physical or electronic.
There is virtually no additional risk, provide similar counting methods are used, of using an electronic voting machine to produce a paper ballot and then counting that paper ballot compared to using other means to produce paper ballots, and very little additional risk if paper ballot "receipts" are kept but an electronic count is done with only random sample confirmation of the counts unless the sample shows an error.
Of course, a "pure electronic" election of the type most current voting machines provide is vastly more vulnerable to fraud, and there can be no justification for that vulnerability, since it is easily avoidable without sacrificing any of the advantages voting machines provide.
Such systems are generally part of various Wikiprojects, not general Wikipedia policies. There might be some areas where such a rating system is useful, OTOH, in any of the controversial areas where problems exist, any attempt to assign such ratings runs into the same problems as the main articles themselves have. Either the ratings are applied by selected "admins", in which case the selection of admins and policing of them is problematic, or the ratings are assigned by the community with appropriate support posted in a Wiki fashion, in which case the accuracy and verifiability of the ratings and their support is problematic.
By not being outlawed under the laws of that government.
Proper decision-making, period, requires access to the truth. Which is why propaganda has always been important in war: denying the enemy the ability to make decisions well. Of course, domestic propaganda by a regime is undesirable from a democratic perspective. And, in the modern age where information is fairly globalized, its very hard to engage in propaganda directed at an enemy without simultaneously engaging in domestic propaganda.
In reality, your view might be valid as a description of how Wikipedia works in a few highly controversial areas where people expend lots of energy. Much of Wikipedia works more like this: someone posts material without adequate references and with clear inaccuracies, and over time it gets progressively edited to better compliance with Wikipedia's stated policies, improving in quality.
In the end, we're all dead, and every business (even nonprofits) will fail, because every business is subject to risk at all times, and has finite, exhaustible resources, and thus every business is subject to gambler's ruin. So, really, prognostication that "in the end" Wikipedia will fail is not all that substantial.
As I understand it, that a source is no longer in print does not prevent it from being a citable source that would satisfy WP:V, though obviously, where they are available, more accessible sources for the same information would be good. Non-public forms are a bit trickier; if they are essentially inaccessible (the de facto equivalent of unpublished works or internal memoranda), I would imagine they aren't suitable sources and thus, if they are the only support for a fact claim, that claim cannot (under policy) be made on Wikipedia; if they are merely hard to find, I think the situation is similar to what I suggest for an out-of-print source, acceptable but perhaps not preferred if there is an alternative.
Enterprise, like any new series, was a bit rocky, but seemed at the outset to have the potential to become the best. The temporal cold war running plot was, to me, an early sign of trouble (time travel having too big of a footprint on the series makes it hard to hold together—a great writer might be able to do it), and then the whole radical shift of tone to deal with the destruction of the Earth really, to me, was the end.
`
I liked it when I first saw it in the theater, and I like it now. In my late teens and early 20s, I thought it was one of the worst of the series.
I dunno; it doesn't feel as much like the Star Trek of the following movies (good and bad) and ST:TNG as the other movies do, but I don't think has any less of the TOS feel than those later movies or TNG.
While, certainly, there are people in the PR arm of Centcom (and the Pentagon itself, and the White House) doing that, Centcom is the United States "Central Command", the regional combatant command in whose area of operations both the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan are being fought, not simply a special-purpose spin shop.being the part of the US military that is (in one particular area) overseas. Their job is fighting and winning wars, and preventing wars by having the capacity to fight and win them. Propaganda is part of that, of course, and no doubt they engage in some practices in the course of that against which there are legitiamte objections.
I have a better idea. Rather than an appeal-to-personal-authority based approach, maybe Wikipedia could adopt some policies regarding verifiability of claims, so as not to rely on the personal credibility of the submitter.
...that influences popular perceptions, and anyone can contribute to it. Of course government agents are using it.
OTOH, compared to what covert agents do outside of Wikipedia, I can hardly see much reason for alarm.
The idea was first floated in the 70s, and was, IIRC, the first idea for the first Star Trek movie, and the only reason it hasn't happened before is that there was an existing cast that the idea didn't work with and that was more bankable than something completely new like the "academy movie" would entail.
(Whether its a "moronic" idea is, I think, something that isn't apparent at the broad brush level; there are ways it could be executed well, and, as usual with any broad film concept, many more ways that it could suck.)
Was Star Trek all that utopian even in TOS? It seems to me to be not as much utopian as heroic. The ST:TOS Federation, like most countries of the real world, is a nation whose identity certainly involves ideals that, were they fully realized, would characterize a utopia. And, sure, the main (protagonist) characters of TOS are portrayed in a way that mostly shows them a fine embodiments of those ideals. But, despite all the technology and economic plenty of TOS, the rest of the Federation government, and numerous of its citizens, portrayed in TOS exhibit the full range negative attributes of societies throughout time, overwhelming bureaucracy, self-promotion, greed, prejudice, etc. Sure, the crew always wins out, but the crew is also portrayed as being something rather special even within their setting in terms both of their idealism and their competence.
Isn't Mandriva the default distro for the Asus EEE series?
Not really. As long as it is Free software, and there are needs not met by the "popular" version, there will be alternatives out there to choose. It might reduce the number of "complete" major distros, and some might reconfigure as package collections designed to be layered on top of a standard Ubuntu install rather than installed from scratch, but as long as there is an interested community of users and developers, there will be alternatives with Linux. And anything a new distro could change could be changed through packages, so there is no loss of freedom to choose there, just a change in mechanisms.
And, with Linux, their size and ability to shoulder the cost of making sure everything works together, and to work with manufacturers to get the components they want supported if they aren't already, and to thereby provide a reliable experience will be a big competitive advantage. While support costs might scale by number of units sold, the cost of making sure it works for the average user is probably more like a fixed cost per computer model. Dell can sell a lot more of any one configuration than a local storefront assembler.
Plus, it gives them more leverage with Microsoft in negotiations, and some security in the event that Microsoft ever stumbles.
Plus, as they gain experience with Linux, they have a lot more freedom to customize than they do with Windows, since they can modify essentially anything in the distribution so long as the source is available, rather than having to negotiate permissions to anything beyond MS's standard permissions with Windows. And here, again, scale compared to other PC manufacturers works in their favor, since the cost of that customization scales with the degree of customization, not the number of units sold.
As the company rep says, "With this, they don't have to understand English to comply." So, the manufacturer's overt selling point is that the device frees law enforcement from needing to be understood, since they can just "flash" people with it and deal with them however they choose.
The thing is, a superficially "safer" subdual method always means lowering the bar on the use of coercion. In fact, the summary itself, quoting the article, shows that's part of the thinking with this. While its phrased in sugary language as "they don't have to understand English to comply", the clear message is "Someone doesn't have to be a threat in any way which would traditionally justify anything beyond verbal directions for us to use this, if our officers directions aren't immediately understood and complied with, we'll just zap first and talk later."