I ran into the same problem with my Sunrocket VOIP on Comcast. That's what services like eFax and Trustfax are all about. Analog data transfer over phone phone lines is a legacy technology anyway.
I agree with you fully on the refueling issue. I would find it far more convenient to be able to plug in when I get home and have my car fully charged when I leave than have to go by a service station to fill up regularly. I often find myself leaving to go somewhere with little time to spare only to find that my wife left me an empty tank of gas and I have to go fill up. Charging overnight, at home, would save me a lot of trips to the gas station.
The problem, of course, comes when you try to take a road trip... having to stop for few hours to fill up every 200 mi would be a problem. Maybe if someone built an electric vehicle with a removable generator just for road trips. It could be all electric 99% of the time but, if you wanted to drive cross country it would allow you to do so without long recharge times.
As our ability to better store electricity, either through batteries, super-caps or some other medium improves, electric vehicles should begin to replace combustion based vehicles. Electricity is more flexible than almost any other fuel in that it can be produced many ways including solar, wind, hydro, nuclear (or nucular if you're GW), even switch-grass. As an added bonus there is already an infrastructure in place for transporting electricity almost anywhere.
What US is becoming is a Corporatocracy, which is just soviet style communism with a better marketing department.
I think what you are looking for is oligarchy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy which has all of the political power held by an elite few. With all of the lobbying money that a few big corporations throw at politicians these days that seems to be the direction we are heading.
I had a similar setup for a while but then I found out it was costing me ~$35/mo in electricity just to keep my PC running all the time. That's for a 400Watt system at $.12/KWh.
I have 2 computers at work, a laptop and a desktop at home, Blackberry, and I occasionally find the need to check my e-mail on a friend's computer. With my e-mail stored on a remote (GMail) server I can get to my current mail from anywhere.
All valid points... If it were easy though there would be no need for an X-Prize style contest. The whole point of the X-Prize is that it provides an incentive to overcome these kinds of hurdles.
A few years ago many would have said it would be impossible for a private enterprise to put a man into space and there certainly would be no way that they could repeat it in a couple of days yet they did and they are now working on a commercial implementation.
Why not an X-Prize for an electric car that can charge from standard electrical outlets and has a range of say 200-300 miles? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for efficiency but oil is a finite resource that is concentrated in hard to reach or politically turbulent parts of the world. Even as we improve on efficiency more and more people hit the road so we wind up treading water (or oil) and going no-where. As long as we depend on fossil fuels for energy the demand is going to increase faster than we can make efficiency improvements. Electricity can be produced through a number of means including but not limited to wind and solar and unlike hydrogen the distribution infrastructure is already there.
I had the same problem with Video on iTunes. After a little searching about I found someone that recommended playing them in QuickTime. It was a hundred times better. The same video on the same system played flawlessly. You might give it a shot.
The future of our democracy depends on people like you to speak out. Thank you for taking the risk you have by contacting the press on this and please keep pursuing whatever legal avenues you have available to you.
I think the real risk, since memory cards are not likely to be passed from machine to machine during an election, is an infected card passing it's payload to the central counting machine. If the person trying to steal an election knew which precints were likely to be counted earliest they could simply infect one machine in one of those precints and skew the results from every remaining precint.
Include a command for the virus to delete itself when it's done and there is no trail.
It is definitely a step in the right direction. The problem still remains that if a well written piece of malware maintains the integrity of the built-in audit then what would cause the paper recount?
Perhaps the paper ballots should be required to be counted regardless of the outcome of the electronic tally and require that this be done on machines from a different company.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus the 900Mhz band phones are generally older and therefore cheaper!
UCSC = UC Santa Cruz
I ran into the same problem with my Sunrocket VOIP on Comcast. That's what services like eFax and Trustfax are all about. Analog data transfer over phone phone lines is a legacy technology anyway.
I agree with you fully on the refueling issue. I would find it far more convenient to be able to plug in when I get home and have my car fully charged when I leave than have to go by a service station to fill up regularly. I often find myself leaving to go somewhere with little time to spare only to find that my wife left me an empty tank of gas and I have to go fill up. Charging overnight, at home, would save me a lot of trips to the gas station.
The problem, of course, comes when you try to take a road trip... having to stop for few hours to fill up every 200 mi would be a problem. Maybe if someone built an electric vehicle with a removable generator just for road trips. It could be all electric 99% of the time but, if you wanted to drive cross country it would allow you to do so without long recharge times.
As our ability to better store electricity, either through batteries, super-caps or some other medium improves, electric vehicles should begin to replace combustion based vehicles. Electricity is more flexible than almost any other fuel in that it can be produced many ways including solar, wind, hydro, nuclear (or nucular if you're GW), even switch-grass. As an added bonus there is already an infrastructure in place for transporting electricity almost anywhere.
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WP
They just need the industrial version of these...
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/wec.shtml
No wires needed.
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WP
400W PC for 1 hour is .4 KWH .4KWH * 24Hrs/Day * 30 Days/Mo * $0.12/KWH = $34.56
I can also see the difference in my bill.
Standby mode has never worked on my current desktop (cheap Motherboard) so it is running full power all the time. Maybe that makes the difference.
I had a similar setup for a while but then I found out it was costing me ~$35/mo in electricity just to keep my PC running all the time. That's for a 400Watt system at $.12/KWh.
Hosted GMail is free.
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WP
One word: Accessibility
I have 2 computers at work, a laptop and a desktop at home, Blackberry, and I occasionally find the need to check my e-mail on a friend's computer. With my e-mail stored on a remote (GMail) server I can get to my current mail from anywhere.
-----
WP
http://www.wperry.net/
All valid points... If it were easy though there would be no need for an X-Prize style contest. The whole point of the X-Prize is that it provides an incentive to overcome these kinds of hurdles. A few years ago many would have said it would be impossible for a private enterprise to put a man into space and there certainly would be no way that they could repeat it in a couple of days yet they did and they are now working on a commercial implementation.
Why not an X-Prize for an electric car that can charge from standard electrical outlets and has a range of say 200-300 miles? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for efficiency but oil is a finite resource that is concentrated in hard to reach or politically turbulent parts of the world. Even as we improve on efficiency more and more people hit the road so we wind up treading water (or oil) and going no-where. As long as we depend on fossil fuels for energy the demand is going to increase faster than we can make efficiency improvements. Electricity can be produced through a number of means including but not limited to wind and solar and unlike hydrogen the distribution infrastructure is already there.
-------------------
WP
http://blog.wperry.net/
[sarcasm] Don't you know that carbon dating is wholly inaccurate? As is the dating of layers of sediment etc...[/sarcasm]
I had the same problem with Video on iTunes. After a little searching about I found someone that recommended playing them in QuickTime. It was a hundred times better. The same video on the same system played flawlessly. You might give it a shot.
Will
The future of our democracy depends on people like you to speak out. Thank you for taking the risk you have by contacting the press on this and please keep pursuing whatever legal avenues you have available to you.
If it worked, wouldn't you know that it worked before you did the experiment?
I think the real risk, since memory cards are not likely to be passed from machine to machine during an election, is an infected card passing it's payload to the central counting machine. If the person trying to steal an election knew which precints were likely to be counted earliest they could simply infect one machine in one of those precints and skew the results from every remaining precint. Include a command for the virus to delete itself when it's done and there is no trail.
It is definitely a step in the right direction. The problem still remains that if a well written piece of malware maintains the integrity of the built-in audit then what would cause the paper recount?
Perhaps the paper ballots should be required to be counted regardless of the outcome of the electronic tally and require that this be done on machines from a different company.