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Comment Re:We can fix this. (Score 1) 159

This is a crude proposal. There are probably much better ones out there.

Yes, quite a few. They tend to run along the same lines, but with different approaches for ensuring, with high probability, that your ballot ID can't be tied to you.

See ThreeBallot (and variants), for example. Others include Scantegrity II, which has gotten a fair amount of attention recently.

Programming

Submission + - An Overview of Parallelism

Mortimer.CA writes: Hello,

Tim Bray points out a recently released report from Berkley entitled "The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley".

Generally they conclude that the 'evolutionary approach to parallel hardware and software may work from 2 or 8 processor systems, but is likely to face diminishing returns as 16 and 32 processor systems are realized, just as returns fell with greater instruction-level parallelism.' This assumes things stay "evolutionary" and that programming stays more or less how it has done in previous years (though languages like Erlang can probably help to change this view).

Some of the 'conventional wisdowms', and their replacements, that they list are:
    • Old CW: Power is free, but transistors are expensive.
    • New CW is the "Power wall": Power is expensive, but transistors are "free". That is, we can put more transistors on a chip than we have the power to turn on.
    • Old CW: Monolithic uniprocessors in silicon are reliable internally, with errors occurring only at the pins.
    • New CW: As chips drop below 65 nm feature sizes, they will have high soft and hard error rates.
    • Old CW: Multiply is slow, but load and store is fast.
    • New CW is the "Memory wall" [Wulf and McKee 1995]: Load and store is slow, but multiply is fast. [...]
    • Old CW: Don't bother parallelizing your application, as you can just wait a little while and run it on a much faster sequential computer.
    • New CW: It will be a very long wait for a faster sequential computer (see above).
The Courts

Journal Journal: No legal relief from spammers spoofing my domain name? 3

For a few years, spammers have been sending out spam pretending to be from my personal, vanity domain. I haven't seen many complaints recently, but it now costs me a considerable amount of time daily to delete hundreds of bounces from mail servers that don't recognized forged headers, etc. The recipients' mail filters are probably also down-rating my domain name as a result, too, further degrading the value of my domain name if I ever want to use it for a commercial venture. I am also concern

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