Vote Early and Often

Living in a perfect world is not an option. The article “The Next Voting Debacle?” [News, October] does not address the tradeoffs this fact makes necessary.

For example, the government has to make certain tradeoffs between never dropping any legal voter erroneously—this is the “perfect world” scenario, and thus not possible—and its overall responsibility to ensure a generally secure and fair election.

If 3000 ex-felons are illegally prevented from ­voting but the far larger numbers of 29 000 deceased voters and 290 000 duplicates allow for fraud on a scale that is orders of magnitude greater, the logical response is to close the larger hole at the expense of the unattainable perfection.

To really analyze this issue would also require an in-depth study of how much voter fraud actually occurs. Of course, people are free to advocate a standard that allows 29 000 dead people to “vote” rather than disenfranchising even one ex-felon, but it is better to be explicit about such assumptions up front. Also, it is worth applying to such a policy the age-old question “Cui bono?” [To whose advantage?].

Mitchell J. McConnell

IEEE Member

Brookline, N.H.

Fuel Efficiency

Reading “Stricter U.S. Gas Standards Stalled” [News, September], I was reminded of a friend who bought a Volkswagen CGI, a car that gets about 4.7 liters per 100 kilometers (50 miles per gallon) of diesel fuel on the highway. That’s 80 km (50 miles) of travel for about $3 in the United States. In addition, because it is a diesel, it can also run on vegetable oil, which will probably be increasingly available for cheaper prices in the future.

Biodiesel engines, mixed with hybrid technology, are the quickest way to evolve beyond petroleum. They can be a big part of a bridge strategy that gets us past fossil fuels to hydrogen and fusion. As the politicians continue to drag their feet on fuel efficiency, the market may well save us from the combustible abyss.

Jeff Robertson

Yellow Springs, Ohio

Living with Data

Your article “Dying for Data” [October] missed what was done several years ago at Harvard Health. My wife and I were members when we lived in the Boston area, and we saw the benefits of an online system. When we left the area three years ago, each of us received a thick printout of all the files that were accumulated during our time at Harvard Health.

John Densler

IEEE Life Member

North Falmouth, Mass.

Software Radio

I’ve been watching the GNU software radio project grow for a couple of years and am heartened to see that its open and collaborative development process is getting press in respected magazines like IEEE Spectrum [Tools & Toys, October].

You might be interested to know that Matt Ettus, mentioned in your article, is also involved with the open-source printed-circuit-board design suite available under the “gEDA” moniker.

The gEDA project is based on open-source software and aims to provide a full set of free electronic design automation tools—from schematic capture to attribute management, netlisting, printed-­circuit-board layout, and Gerber inspection. It also includes two different fully featured analog simulators, as well as a compiler and several other goodies.

The project Web page is at http://geda.seul.org. All the tools operate at a level that enables professional designs.

Of course, as a developer for gEDA, I am doing a little shameless promotion here. You are evidently open-source savvy, so perhaps it’s time for you to write a similar story about the gEDA project.

Stuart Brorson

Boston

Law Man

Benjamin Tilly [in the IEEE Spectrum Online blog Tech Talk at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep06/comments/1595] says I made a “big factual mistake” by writing that Al Gore claimed to have “invented” the Internet.

Calling Tilly’s bluff, I followed his reference and found that what Gore actually said on TV once was that he had “initiated the creation of the Internet.” So I stand corrected, I guess. By the way, I still think the value of a network is proportional to its number of users, squared.

Bob Metcalfe

IEEE Medal of Honor Recipient

Boston

Corrections

The feature “Goodbye, CRT” [November] misstated the size of the micromirrors used in Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology. They each measure about 20 square micrometers.

In the October News story “Europe Dithers Over Digital Radio,” the number of subscribers to XM and Sirius satellite radio was incorrect. Together, the two networks have more than 12 million subscribers.