Well, yes, but people objecting to presence of Palestine on the list are just stupid. Those people exist, they live in, according the UN, 'Occupied Palestine Territories', which is shortened, just like every other name on the list. (Have you ever seen 'The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' on a country list? (1)
How exactly should they be referred to? This isn't like Taiwan, where there's a debate over who the legitimate government is...Israel does not assert that they legally own Palestine and wants people there to be called Israelis. (2) They have to be called something.
And arguing about the technically sovereignty of a state, or the legitimate government, does not mean the state itself does not exist, for example, Iraq has been a 'State' this whole time, it just hasn't been a sovereign one for a short span.
Statehood does not require sovereignty. Americans often do no quite grasp this because our Federal government ran roughshod over the assumptions of states during the Civil War, but the rest of the world understands this.
Even the US makes a distinction between the government of a country, which may or may not be sovereign, and may or may not be recognized by us, and the existence of the country itself. We don't recognize the government of Cuba. We recognize the existence of the country of Cuba, though, or we could hardly ban business with that country.
Even if a place doesn't recognize the government of Palestine, Palestine itself still exists, and is still a country.
And the exclusion of Israel had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with a deliberate exclusion for fraudulent activities. Which was probably mentioned as default option in the documentation of the OSS project.
1) Ironically, speaking of Northern Ireland and names, there's a country officially named, simply, as 'Ireland', which is the rest of that island, which is often listed as 'Republic of Ireland' on country lists.
2) Also ironically, if Israel doesn't do something about Palestine soon, they will soon be risking the most hilarious solution to that whole mess...that Palestinians give up on their own state and demand the Israeli vote which, when combined with existing Arab Israelis, would make Jews a minority in the resulting country.
Palestine is a country, you dumbass. It's not a sovereign country, in that it is under the control of another country, but places don't stop being countries because of that. (Iraq, for example, continued to be a country during the invasion.)
If Palestine isn't a country I have to wonder who the hell signed the Oslo accords along with Israel?
If I leave my bike leaning on a shop window while I go inside, it's legally acceptable for you to pick it up for a ride until I need it back unless I chain it to something?
If you had some magical method of determining when the person would need it, yes.
As you do not have such a method, all removing of items from the place people found them is generally considered theft. (Unless they clearly do not belong there and are relocated somewhere safer, like a lost and found.)
It is not theft to sit on someone's bicycle and make vroom sounds. It is not theft to lean sticks against it and make a modern sculpture. It not theft to ride it around in tiny circles, as long as you can convince the courts you were not actually leaving with it. It is not theft to charge people money to have their picture taken on the bike. It is not theft to ride it to the owner to place it in their possession again, as long as you can convince the courts that's what you were doing.
It is only theft to remove the bike with the intent to deprive them of said bicycle. (And 'intent' doesn't mean 'purpose of your actions' under the law, it means 'as a knowing consequence of your actions', so don't go quibbling there.)
But I gave examples of those things, so I can only conclude you're trying to disagree with me while not actually disagreeing with me.
You can argue that those things should be theft if you want, but they are not. General theft is 'theft by taking', and you must, duh, actually take the thing to commit it, not just use it in place. (In fact, some places require that you permanently intend to deprive the owner of it.)
There are other forms of theft, such as theft by conversion, which would cover you damaging someone else's property. (Or, technically, turning it into any form that the owner cannot use it. Like eating it.) Sometimes that's also considered 'theft by taking' and conversion is just used for crimes where you were giving the goods specifically. (As in, 'hold this coat for me', and when you come back they've sold it.)
But there's no such thing as 'theft by using something'. There's 'theft of service', which you are probably going to argue applies to using open wifi, and I could debate you, but instead I'm going to argue it applies to you using this website and ask you to leave. (Did you get permission before you came here? I think not.)
If I drive off in a car that looks like mine, that started with my key, and it turns out it wasn't my car, I am not a car theft.
(This actually happened to a friend of my brother. My brother loaned his car to someone and they 'returned' the wrong car late at night, which unlocked and started with his key, resulting in search for my brother's car the next morning. Which ended when the police realized they were already looking for a different stolen car of the same make, model, and color, and quite logically decided to see if they could find each car at the other location.)
Or, if you were to connect a computer to a publicly accessible network and let people use it remotely, perhaps by connecting to a specific port and issuing commands to display files, should you be allowed to throw people in jail for that?
The whole thing is absurd and based on people, sometimes even judges, failing to understand what is meant by 'without authorization'. People have an inherent authorization to use any computer in the world that they can legally reach. (Without, for example, trespassing into back areas at a store.)
Authorization must be revoked for access to be unlawful. Either personally 'I order you to never access my systems again', by public notification 'This computer for employees only', or by connection prompts.
This is because you don't need permission to use things of other people. I know people think you do, but you really don't. It's only theft if you deprive people of the thing. It is not theft, or even criminal in way, if you sit on someone car, or pick up a book someone left laying around and read it. It's only theft if you remove the thing so they can't use it, or 'use up' or damage the thing so you can't give it back.
In fact, the most logical prosecutions of using a wifi signal have gone for 'theft of electricity', which at least makes some logical sense, although that's a bit like charging someone for 'theft of electricity' when they walk in a building and make an air conditioner work a bit harder.
Providing a poor product that is hard to use is hardly the fault of random passerbys who see a freely available resource and use it.
If you want someone to beheld liable for that behavior, try a class action suit against the companies that sold those products without bothering to inform their customers of how they behaved. I actually think one is a long time coming.
Child porn isn't the problem at all. Child abuse it. The amount of child abuse encouraged by a hypothetical child porn market demand is probably under a single percent...people do not generally sexually abuse children for money. (In much the same way that people don't tend to sexually assault other adults for money.)
Frankly, I suspect more good than harm would result from child porn becoming completely legal. Simply because it would be easier to find, and hence it would be easier for authorities to locate the children.
Of course, I've often wondered why the authorities don't enlist our help in that, and if this supposed phenominom that requires absurdly dangerous activity for no apparent gain actually exist at all or if it's something like 200 pictures of actual children that have been traded back and forth since the beginning of time, along with various mistakes where people lied about their ages and got photographed nude when 17.
I mean, taking pictures of criminal activities, especially ones that no one else even knows exists, has to be the stupidest thing ever. Even if it's not traceable to the criminal, it's traceable to the child!
If it does exist, surely the easiest way to stop this would be to give us pictures (Obviously cropped to just the head) of children in this supposed 'child porn' and ask if we know those children. (Or not even the general public...how about just grade school teachers?)
No, I'm actually about an inch away from declaring the whole damn thing a conspiracy of fear-mongers combined with 'child porn' charges that are actually 16 and 17 year old models that simply got photographed in Russia or Sweden and some poor sap had on his computer. Does anyone know of any child porn cases where they actually happen to mention the ages of the children?
Well, you can't, under any circumstances, fire someone for not doing something illegal, so the GP is a bit silly.
Incidentally, there's a reason I erase my caches and history and wipe all the free space on my computers every weekend...the government has apparently decided that possession of specific files on your computer are criminal, despite the fact that you are not in control of all documents on your computer. I'm not playing that absurd game.
A lot of people are saying you should tell him it's illegal. Nah. Why would he believe you over people selling spam software?
No, don't attempt to convince him not to spam at all. Instead, 'plan' for what will happen when it does happen.
I.e., go around asking for plans about what to do when the colo is disconnected and you can't get a new one. Is the company going to increase phone support? Send out more flyers? What's the plan?
Likewise, when email from the company is filtered, do sales people have telephone numbers for all customers? So everyone can operate with an indefinite email outage?
Pointing out what 'might' happen is pointless, and pointing out the illegality of it is pointless when spammers assert otherwise.
No, you decide what will happen and force the company to plan for it and watch as chaos happens as, for example, the sales people want to know what the hell an 'indefinite email outage' is about and why marketing appears to be about to cause one.
That's exactly right. Or, heck, you can still email them...one at a time, after spending ten minutes on each website and actually writing a message to the correct person at each business, that is actually relevant to them. And dont' forget snail mail.
I.e., forget the usernames. Drop all but the domains and treat it as a possibly list of businesses and market to each business using the appropriate channel. Just because someone wants to receive updates from the competitor about things doesn't mean they are the correct people to market to. Someone else at the company is probably better.
In fact, you probably already are marketing to half those people anyway. The other half...well, pretend you did a google search on 'companies that might be interested in my products' and got a list of domains, and follow up with person contact.
Presumable, businesses selling to other businesses already rules and processes about how to do this, with salespeople trained to be able to contact others without harassing them.
No, it's con men robbing thieves....which is what they do normally.
While, despite the expression, you can con an honest man, it's so much easy to con someone into a scheme that sounds dishonest, because they're unlike to run the scheme past anyone else or take normal precautions. So almost all cons require the mark to do something unethical, immoral, or illegal. As an added bonus, there's a good chance the person won't go to the police afterward.
The best cons are illegal but moral ones, because then you can suck non-dishonest people into them. Like some of the 'Nigerian' ones have people who morally should get the money, or at least are a better choice than the supposedly dishonest government that will end up with it, and you're just helping them defeat them. I.e., you're supposedly chaotic good. (Con men who can pass themselves off as children have it exceptionally easy, because pretending to be an articulate and intelligent child who needs to do something that is technically illegal for them is an easy scam. Like the lottery ticket scam in Matchstick Men, where a child has a 'winning lottery ticket' and gets an adult to buy it at less-than-prize value.)
Most non-organized-crime spam(1) itself isn't a con, because it's the thieves who've been conned into spamming, not the con men themselves. Most con men are thieves, but very few thieves are con men, and no stupid thieves are con men, and 95% of spammers are really really stupid.
The singular spam-fraud exception is 'Nigerian' advanced fee fraud, which interestingly doesn't follow the 'rules of spam' in that it's almost always done by the actual con men, without software, aimed at a few dozen people at a time. It's debatable if this honestly even counts as 'spam'. The problem is the fraud, not the few hundred messages each of those guys sends out a month...that's well below background noise on the internet.
1) Organized crime spam isn't a con either, but it's all counterfeit Viagra and porn and a logical outgrowth of the drug and sex trade they're already in.
Yes, and a reasonable accommodation is an audio voting system. I have no problems with those. Although I do suspect that a better accommodation might be a braille ballot, but whatever. (I'm not sure how blind people fill out forms, but I know that problem's already been solved.)
Sadly, instead of just adding one of those, which could be done fairly simply, the fact that one is needed has resulted in a push to replacing all voting with electronic machines.
My job -- one I take very seriously -- is to ensure that the ballots and equipment I am responsible for are secure from the moment I sign for them until the moment I sign them into someone else's care, and to make sure every voter who shows up at my precinct gets to vote.
If you take responsibility for an electronic voting machine, you're either ignorant or irresponsible. There's absolutely no way that you can know that the computer will record votes correctly.
I give poll workers the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are all simply ignorant and believe what they have been told about those machines and how computers work, but your holier-than-thou talk isn't impressing anyone who actually knows how computers work and who actually understand the inherent impossibility of 'certifying' that a computer does anything at all.
I know poll workers think they're outside all this, but you're not. You can certify that you saw people take a ballot, fill it out, drop it in a box, then you saw the box sealed up and sent. You cannot certify that you saw someone fill out a electronic ballot and it got recorded. You need to take a long look at the process and yourself and decide if you can actually sign, under penalty of perjury, that nothing has been tampered with, when you actually have no idea if it's happened.
Actually, that's not true. It would have been pathetically easy to deposit extra votes in the ballot box without anyone noticing.
Um, no. First you have to steal the ballots, which are sitting in full view of everyone. (No, you can't bring your own, because they do actually count the remaining ballots at the end.) Then you have mark them, which is easy, and then you have to put them in the ballot box, which would be difficult by yourself but not that hard without outside help. (Handing a dozen to different voters.)
But the real problem, of course, is that you have to mark off enough extra voters to get the tallies to match, and, as you don't want to risk doing that and then having the voter show up, you have to do it after the voting is over...but, of course, no one should be messing with that after the election is over.
And, to make it worse, there are often two official tallies being kept...there's someone writing down the names of people, and there's someone also marking them off a list or moving a card from one box to another. This is in addition to any unofficial tallies that observers are taking.
'Ballot box stuffing' hasn't happened in quite some time. Even the Chicago party machine that managed to rig elections for so long didn't manage it. (Instead, they put fake names on the voter rolls and had them loop through and vote repeatedly.)
We just have to trust that most poll workers are civically responsible, and are doing their best to mitigate fraud. Anyone who doesn't think that is the case in his precinct is more than welcome to step away from his busy day of posting on Slashdot and volunteer to work the polls. That's a little more work than writing snarky message board comments, however.
The problem is that electronic voting takes control completely away from the poll workers. They can't see inside the machines and they can't verify anything.
You know what might be really interesting? Using telephones. Not the actual phone system, but using one (with a headset so they don't have to keep holding it) as the interface device. They're cheap, and blind people, like every American except possibly deaf ones (Who luckily can use paper ballots), already know how to operate them. Have a little voice mail-type system.
I was actually thinking of using real telephones, and they'd be hooked to a computer somehow that would decode the tones, but realized right after posting that, thanks to VoIP, there are all sorts of 'fake phones' for the computer that are really just USB audio combined with USB input devices that send keystrokes in. So it would be very cheap, maybe 10-20 dollars to present a 'telephone keypad' with a headset hooked to it. (Which is, as I pointed out, much cheaper than having a damn touch-screen monitor.)
Also, why'd I get the traditional slashdot comment interface for the parent, but the AJAX one for this comment?
It's poor urban areas. I have lived in middle-class urban areas, lower-class urban areas, and lower-class rural areas.
In the first, the lines are maybe 30 minutes, because they have plenty of machines and whatnot.
In the middle, thanks to laws that say you have to have a voting precinct within walking distance (theoretically, it's about five miles I think), each precinct has only two machines, but it's only serving a few hundred people total, so there's no one in line at all.
It's the latter that has five machines and possibly a hundred people in line. I waited a damn four hours to vote in 2000 in Marietta, a poor, mostly minority suburb of Atlanta. During that time, at least 20 people ahead of me dropped out of line, and I imagine more left the second they saw how long it was. (I, luckily, was a college student, and could waste all day in line with a book.)
And I went through during the midday. I can just imagine how it went after five o'clock.
And no one's going to convince me that it's a coincidence that 'poor urban voter' normally means 'Democratic voter'.
Don't even try to sell it on that grounds, because there are people all over this country whose franchise would be a lot easier to exercise if they could just use a pencil and a piece of paper.
Exactly, you pro-'electronic voting' morons. If you want to install electronic voting machines for blind people, feel free, but you can fuck off and die for taking away pencil and paper so people in poor urban areas can actually vote.
Electronic voting, as stated, is a solution to the very minor problem of disenfranchised blind people. One that could be solved other ways, or just by giving them a single machine. Note, this machine could be a great deal simpler than existing electronic voting machines, because blind people do not need a screen or a touch pad. They can't even use those! They need a headset and a several switches. Or, hell, a joystick-like device to scroll through the names said through the headphone and pick the right one.(1)
But installing machines for everyone causes at least two serious problems...the one in this post, because machines are always limited, and the other, equally serious one of uncatchable vote tampering, which any computer scientist can see, as computers can easily lie. (Yes, in theory, this problem applies if anyone is using the machines, but in practice the number of blind voters is so small that any tampering would be easily noticed.)
1) You know what might be really interesting? Using telephones. Not the actual phone system, but using one (with a headset so they don't have to keep holding it) as the interface device. They're cheap, and blind people, like every American except possibly deaf ones (Who luckily can use paper ballots), already know how to operate them. Have a little voice mail-type system.
First of all, the law does say you're entitled to a person sworn to secrecy filling out your vote for you. I don't know why you just imagined it doesn't. Anyone who shows up at the voting booth is legally entitled to whatever help is needed to get them to vote, by people who are legally prohibited from disclosing their ballot.
Secondly, I'd actually like an explanation of how a visual touch screen helps blind or disabled people to vote? Oh, right, it doesn't.
The thing to help blind people vote is an entirely different system where they listen to a recording and touch the screen at specific times, which could be done much cheaper if we weren't also trying to do sighted voting with it also.
Thirdly, there are always going to be people so disabled they cannot operate a specific system in order to vote.
You can't 'straighten' it. It's built on a bog, and one side has thinner soil than the other, so it is always tilting in that one direction. It will continue to do so forever. Moreover, it's not built straight, so there is no 'upright' for it to be.
What they can do, and have to do every fifty years or so, is pull it the direction it's not leaning to, and attempt to put concrete or gravel under the side that's sinking.
Right that point, it is noticeably more upright at the bottom, however, as the tower is built crookedly, the end result is that the top is now leaning in the other direction, instead of correcting the of the bottom lean. So it's still 'leaning'.
A more descriptive name might be 'the crooked tower of Pisa, which either has the top or bottom not straight up'.
The house I grew up in, for the longest time, had a tree that was about 25 degree tilted in the front yard. A huge pine tree. (Well, the bottom was, but the top, of course, was less so.)
However, we were at the end of the road, and while you walked up the driveway and sidewalk to the front door (Which was on the side of the house...the road used to go past the house but got truncated) you'd walk straight towards the tree, and get very close, but not notice the tilt. Why?
Because it just so happened to be tilted almost directly towards the front yard/door/parking area/road. It was actually somewhat fun to take someone who'd been to the house repeatedly, but never continued past the front door, twenty feet further on, past the tree, and watch them realize just what was going on with that tree that they'd seen a dozen times but never notice just how crazy slanted it was.
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Well, yes, but people objecting to presence of Palestine on the list are just stupid. Those people exist, they live in, according the UN, 'Occupied Palestine Territories', which is shortened, just like every other name on the list. (Have you ever seen 'The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' on a country list? (1)
How exactly should they be referred to? This isn't like Taiwan, where there's a debate over who the legitimate government is...Israel does not assert that they legally own Palestine and wants people there to be called Israelis. (2) They have to be called something.
And arguing about the technically sovereignty of a state, or the legitimate government, does not mean the state itself does not exist, for example, Iraq has been a 'State' this whole time, it just hasn't been a sovereign one for a short span.
Statehood does not require sovereignty. Americans often do no quite grasp this because our Federal government ran roughshod over the assumptions of states during the Civil War, but the rest of the world understands this.
Even the US makes a distinction between the government of a country, which may or may not be sovereign, and may or may not be recognized by us, and the existence of the country itself. We don't recognize the government of Cuba. We recognize the existence of the country of Cuba, though, or we could hardly ban business with that country.
Even if a place doesn't recognize the government of Palestine, Palestine itself still exists, and is still a country.
And the exclusion of Israel had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with a deliberate exclusion for fraudulent activities. Which was probably mentioned as default option in the documentation of the OSS project.
1) Ironically, speaking of Northern Ireland and names, there's a country officially named, simply, as 'Ireland', which is the rest of that island, which is often listed as 'Republic of Ireland' on country lists.
2) Also ironically, if Israel doesn't do something about Palestine soon, they will soon be risking the most hilarious solution to that whole mess...that Palestinians give up on their own state and demand the Israeli vote which, when combined with existing Arab Israelis, would make Jews a minority in the resulting country.
The beatings will continue until morale improves!
Palestine is a country, you dumbass. It's not a sovereign country, in that it is under the control of another country, but places don't stop being countries because of that. (Iraq, for example, continued to be a country during the invasion.)
If Palestine isn't a country I have to wonder who the hell signed the Oslo accords along with Israel?
If I leave my bike leaning on a shop window while I go inside, it's legally acceptable for you to pick it up for a ride until I need it back unless I chain it to something?
If you had some magical method of determining when the person would need it, yes.
As you do not have such a method, all removing of items from the place people found them is generally considered theft. (Unless they clearly do not belong there and are relocated somewhere safer, like a lost and found.)
It is not theft to sit on someone's bicycle and make vroom sounds. It is not theft to lean sticks against it and make a modern sculpture. It not theft to ride it around in tiny circles, as long as you can convince the courts you were not actually leaving with it. It is not theft to charge people money to have their picture taken on the bike. It is not theft to ride it to the owner to place it in their possession again, as long as you can convince the courts that's what you were doing.
It is only theft to remove the bike with the intent to deprive them of said bicycle. (And 'intent' doesn't mean 'purpose of your actions' under the law, it means 'as a knowing consequence of your actions', so don't go quibbling there.)
But I gave examples of those things, so I can only conclude you're trying to disagree with me while not actually disagreeing with me.
You can argue that those things should be theft if you want, but they are not. General theft is 'theft by taking', and you must, duh, actually take the thing to commit it, not just use it in place. (In fact, some places require that you permanently intend to deprive the owner of it.)
There are other forms of theft, such as theft by conversion, which would cover you damaging someone else's property. (Or, technically, turning it into any form that the owner cannot use it. Like eating it.) Sometimes that's also considered 'theft by taking' and conversion is just used for crimes where you were giving the goods specifically. (As in, 'hold this coat for me', and when you come back they've sold it.)
But there's no such thing as 'theft by using something'. There's 'theft of service', which you are probably going to argue applies to using open wifi, and I could debate you, but instead I'm going to argue it applies to you using this website and ask you to leave. (Did you get permission before you came here? I think not.)
Dave, I need you to break the law on the company's behalf. No?
(Two weeks later)
(Dave is murdered and his body hidden so he's never found.)
Ergo, murder is legal!
Um, no. The fact it can be hard to prove that a crime occurred does not, in fact, make such activity legal.
Not knowing the law is no excuse.
Not knowing the facts is an excuse.
If I drive off in a car that looks like mine, that started with my key, and it turns out it wasn't my car, I am not a car theft.
(This actually happened to a friend of my brother. My brother loaned his car to someone and they 'returned' the wrong car late at night, which unlocked and started with his key, resulting in search for my brother's car the next morning. Which ended when the police realized they were already looking for a different stolen car of the same make, model, and color, and quite logically decided to see if they could find each car at the other location.)
Or, if you were to connect a computer to a publicly accessible network and let people use it remotely, perhaps by connecting to a specific port and issuing commands to display files, should you be allowed to throw people in jail for that?
The whole thing is absurd and based on people, sometimes even judges, failing to understand what is meant by 'without authorization'. People have an inherent authorization to use any computer in the world that they can legally reach. (Without, for example, trespassing into back areas at a store.)
Authorization must be revoked for access to be unlawful. Either personally 'I order you to never access my systems again', by public notification 'This computer for employees only', or by connection prompts.
This is because you don't need permission to use things of other people. I know people think you do, but you really don't. It's only theft if you deprive people of the thing. It is not theft, or even criminal in way, if you sit on someone car, or pick up a book someone left laying around and read it. It's only theft if you remove the thing so they can't use it, or 'use up' or damage the thing so you can't give it back.
In fact, the most logical prosecutions of using a wifi signal have gone for 'theft of electricity', which at least makes some logical sense, although that's a bit like charging someone for 'theft of electricity' when they walk in a building and make an air conditioner work a bit harder.
Providing a poor product that is hard to use is hardly the fault of random passerbys who see a freely available resource and use it.
If you want someone to beheld liable for that behavior, try a class action suit against the companies that sold those products without bothering to inform their customers of how they behaved. I actually think one is a long time coming.
Child porn isn't the problem at all. Child abuse it. The amount of child abuse encouraged by a hypothetical child porn market demand is probably under a single percent...people do not generally sexually abuse children for money. (In much the same way that people don't tend to sexually assault other adults for money.)
Frankly, I suspect more good than harm would result from child porn becoming completely legal. Simply because it would be easier to find, and hence it would be easier for authorities to locate the children.
Of course, I've often wondered why the authorities don't enlist our help in that, and if this supposed phenominom that requires absurdly dangerous activity for no apparent gain actually exist at all or if it's something like 200 pictures of actual children that have been traded back and forth since the beginning of time, along with various mistakes where people lied about their ages and got photographed nude when 17.
I mean, taking pictures of criminal activities, especially ones that no one else even knows exists, has to be the stupidest thing ever. Even if it's not traceable to the criminal, it's traceable to the child!
If it does exist, surely the easiest way to stop this would be to give us pictures (Obviously cropped to just the head) of children in this supposed 'child porn' and ask if we know those children. (Or not even the general public...how about just grade school teachers?)
No, I'm actually about an inch away from declaring the whole damn thing a conspiracy of fear-mongers combined with 'child porn' charges that are actually 16 and 17 year old models that simply got photographed in Russia or Sweden and some poor sap had on his computer. Does anyone know of any child porn cases where they actually happen to mention the ages of the children?
Well, you can't, under any circumstances, fire someone for not doing something illegal, so the GP is a bit silly.
Incidentally, there's a reason I erase my caches and history and wipe all the free space on my computers every weekend...the government has apparently decided that possession of specific files on your computer are criminal, despite the fact that you are not in control of all documents on your computer. I'm not playing that absurd game.
Obviously, I got a little carried away with myself. You clearly should inform your boss about any problems he is unaware of in his plan.
It's only if he refuses to listen that you then start planning for disaster.
I mean, that is, in fact, your job...planning for disaster. This time you're lucky in that you can see if before it happens.
A lot of people are saying you should tell him it's illegal. Nah. Why would he believe you over people selling spam software?
No, don't attempt to convince him not to spam at all. Instead, 'plan' for what will happen when it does happen.
I.e., go around asking for plans about what to do when the colo is disconnected and you can't get a new one. Is the company going to increase phone support? Send out more flyers? What's the plan?
Likewise, when email from the company is filtered, do sales people have telephone numbers for all customers? So everyone can operate with an indefinite email outage?
Pointing out what 'might' happen is pointless, and pointing out the illegality of it is pointless when spammers assert otherwise.
No, you decide what will happen and force the company to plan for it and watch as chaos happens as, for example, the sales people want to know what the hell an 'indefinite email outage' is about and why marketing appears to be about to cause one.
That's exactly right. Or, heck, you can still email them...one at a time, after spending ten minutes on each website and actually writing a message to the correct person at each business, that is actually relevant to them. And dont' forget snail mail.
I.e., forget the usernames. Drop all but the domains and treat it as a possibly list of businesses and market to each business using the appropriate channel. Just because someone wants to receive updates from the competitor about things doesn't mean they are the correct people to market to. Someone else at the company is probably better.
In fact, you probably already are marketing to half those people anyway. The other half...well, pretend you did a google search on 'companies that might be interested in my products' and got a list of domains, and follow up with person contact.
Presumable, businesses selling to other businesses already rules and processes about how to do this, with salespeople trained to be able to contact others without harassing them.
No, it's con men robbing thieves....which is what they do normally.
While, despite the expression, you can con an honest man, it's so much easy to con someone into a scheme that sounds dishonest, because they're unlike to run the scheme past anyone else or take normal precautions. So almost all cons require the mark to do something unethical, immoral, or illegal. As an added bonus, there's a good chance the person won't go to the police afterward.
The best cons are illegal but moral ones, because then you can suck non-dishonest people into them. Like some of the 'Nigerian' ones have people who morally should get the money, or at least are a better choice than the supposedly dishonest government that will end up with it, and you're just helping them defeat them. I.e., you're supposedly chaotic good. (Con men who can pass themselves off as children have it exceptionally easy, because pretending to be an articulate and intelligent child who needs to do something that is technically illegal for them is an easy scam. Like the lottery ticket scam in Matchstick Men, where a child has a 'winning lottery ticket' and gets an adult to buy it at less-than-prize value.)
Most non-organized-crime spam(1) itself isn't a con, because it's the thieves who've been conned into spamming, not the con men themselves. Most con men are thieves, but very few thieves are con men, and no stupid thieves are con men, and 95% of spammers are really really stupid.
The singular spam-fraud exception is 'Nigerian' advanced fee fraud, which interestingly doesn't follow the 'rules of spam' in that it's almost always done by the actual con men, without software, aimed at a few dozen people at a time. It's debatable if this honestly even counts as 'spam'. The problem is the fraud, not the few hundred messages each of those guys sends out a month...that's well below background noise on the internet.
1) Organized crime spam isn't a con either, but it's all counterfeit Viagra and porn and a logical outgrowth of the drug and sex trade they're already in.
Speaking of what farmers throw out for free, it sucks we don't already have this working for all the ruined-by-flood corn we've now got.
Jesus Christ
Thanks to that damn movie, we've got idiots correcting people who actually read and understand the book.
You probably live in a state with a state government that isn't trying to disenfranchise minority voters, then.
Yes, and a reasonable accommodation is an audio voting system. I have no problems with those. Although I do suspect that a better accommodation might be a braille ballot, but whatever. (I'm not sure how blind people fill out forms, but I know that problem's already been solved.)
Sadly, instead of just adding one of those, which could be done fairly simply, the fact that one is needed has resulted in a push to replacing all voting with electronic machines.
My job -- one I take very seriously -- is to ensure that the ballots and equipment I am responsible for are secure from the moment I sign for them until the moment I sign them into someone else's care, and to make sure every voter who shows up at my precinct gets to vote.
If you take responsibility for an electronic voting machine, you're either ignorant or irresponsible. There's absolutely no way that you can know that the computer will record votes correctly.
I give poll workers the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are all simply ignorant and believe what they have been told about those machines and how computers work, but your holier-than-thou talk isn't impressing anyone who actually knows how computers work and who actually understand the inherent impossibility of 'certifying' that a computer does anything at all.
I know poll workers think they're outside all this, but you're not. You can certify that you saw people take a ballot, fill it out, drop it in a box, then you saw the box sealed up and sent. You cannot certify that you saw someone fill out a electronic ballot and it got recorded. You need to take a long look at the process and yourself and decide if you can actually sign, under penalty of perjury, that nothing has been tampered with, when you actually have no idea if it's happened.
Actually, that's not true. It would have been pathetically easy to deposit extra votes in the ballot box without anyone noticing.
Um, no. First you have to steal the ballots, which are sitting in full view of everyone. (No, you can't bring your own, because they do actually count the remaining ballots at the end.) Then you have mark them, which is easy, and then you have to put them in the ballot box, which would be difficult by yourself but not that hard without outside help. (Handing a dozen to different voters.)
But the real problem, of course, is that you have to mark off enough extra voters to get the tallies to match, and, as you don't want to risk doing that and then having the voter show up, you have to do it after the voting is over...but, of course, no one should be messing with that after the election is over.
And, to make it worse, there are often two official tallies being kept...there's someone writing down the names of people, and there's someone also marking them off a list or moving a card from one box to another. This is in addition to any unofficial tallies that observers are taking.
'Ballot box stuffing' hasn't happened in quite some time. Even the Chicago party machine that managed to rig elections for so long didn't manage it. (Instead, they put fake names on the voter rolls and had them loop through and vote repeatedly.)
We just have to trust that most poll workers are civically responsible, and are doing their best to mitigate fraud. Anyone who doesn't think that is the case in his precinct is more than welcome to step away from his busy day of posting on Slashdot and volunteer to work the polls. That's a little more work than writing snarky message board comments, however.
The problem is that electronic voting takes control completely away from the poll workers. They can't see inside the machines and they can't verify anything.
You know what might be really interesting? Using telephones. Not the actual phone system, but using one (with a headset so they don't have to keep holding it) as the interface device. They're cheap, and blind people, like every American except possibly deaf ones (Who luckily can use paper ballots), already know how to operate them. Have a little voice mail-type system.
I was actually thinking of using real telephones, and they'd be hooked to a computer somehow that would decode the tones, but realized right after posting that, thanks to VoIP, there are all sorts of 'fake phones' for the computer that are really just USB audio combined with USB input devices that send keystrokes in. So it would be very cheap, maybe 10-20 dollars to present a 'telephone keypad' with a headset hooked to it. (Which is, as I pointed out, much cheaper than having a damn touch-screen monitor.)
Also, why'd I get the traditional slashdot comment interface for the parent, but the AJAX one for this comment?
Oh, no, it's not 'poor areas'.
It's poor urban areas. I have lived in middle-class urban areas, lower-class urban areas, and lower-class rural areas.
In the first, the lines are maybe 30 minutes, because they have plenty of machines and whatnot.
In the middle, thanks to laws that say you have to have a voting precinct within walking distance (theoretically, it's about five miles I think), each precinct has only two machines, but it's only serving a few hundred people total, so there's no one in line at all.
It's the latter that has five machines and possibly a hundred people in line. I waited a damn four hours to vote in 2000 in Marietta, a poor, mostly minority suburb of Atlanta. During that time, at least 20 people ahead of me dropped out of line, and I imagine more left the second they saw how long it was. (I, luckily, was a college student, and could waste all day in line with a book.)
And I went through during the midday. I can just imagine how it went after five o'clock.
And no one's going to convince me that it's a coincidence that 'poor urban voter' normally means 'Democratic voter'.
Don't even try to sell it on that grounds, because there are people all over this country whose franchise would be a lot easier to exercise if they could just use a pencil and a piece of paper.
Exactly, you pro-'electronic voting' morons. If you want to install electronic voting machines for blind people, feel free, but you can fuck off and die for taking away pencil and paper so people in poor urban areas can actually vote.
Electronic voting, as stated, is a solution to the very minor problem of disenfranchised blind people. One that could be solved other ways, or just by giving them a single machine. Note, this machine could be a great deal simpler than existing electronic voting machines, because blind people do not need a screen or a touch pad. They can't even use those! They need a headset and a several switches. Or, hell, a joystick-like device to scroll through the names said through the headphone and pick the right one.(1)
But installing machines for everyone causes at least two serious problems...the one in this post, because machines are always limited, and the other, equally serious one of uncatchable vote tampering, which any computer scientist can see, as computers can easily lie. (Yes, in theory, this problem applies if anyone is using the machines, but in practice the number of blind voters is so small that any tampering would be easily noticed.)
1) You know what might be really interesting? Using telephones. Not the actual phone system, but using one (with a headset so they don't have to keep holding it) as the interface device. They're cheap, and blind people, like every American except possibly deaf ones (Who luckily can use paper ballots), already know how to operate them. Have a little voice mail-type system.
First of all, the law does say you're entitled to a person sworn to secrecy filling out your vote for you. I don't know why you just imagined it doesn't. Anyone who shows up at the voting booth is legally entitled to whatever help is needed to get them to vote, by people who are legally prohibited from disclosing their ballot.
Secondly, I'd actually like an explanation of how a visual touch screen helps blind or disabled people to vote? Oh, right, it doesn't.
The thing to help blind people vote is an entirely different system where they listen to a recording and touch the screen at specific times, which could be done much cheaper if we weren't also trying to do sighted voting with it also.
Thirdly, there are always going to be people so disabled they cannot operate a specific system in order to vote.
You can't 'straighten' it. It's built on a bog, and one side has thinner soil than the other, so it is always tilting in that one direction. It will continue to do so forever. Moreover, it's not built straight, so there is no 'upright' for it to be.
What they can do, and have to do every fifty years or so, is pull it the direction it's not leaning to, and attempt to put concrete or gravel under the side that's sinking.
Right that point, it is noticeably more upright at the bottom, however, as the tower is built crookedly, the end result is that the top is now leaning in the other direction, instead of correcting the of the bottom lean. So it's still 'leaning'.
A more descriptive name might be 'the crooked tower of Pisa, which either has the top or bottom not straight up'.
The house I grew up in, for the longest time, had a tree that was about 25 degree tilted in the front yard. A huge pine tree. (Well, the bottom was, but the top, of course, was less so.)
However, we were at the end of the road, and while you walked up the driveway and sidewalk to the front door (Which was on the side of the house...the road used to go past the house but got truncated) you'd walk straight towards the tree, and get very close, but not notice the tilt. Why?
Because it just so happened to be tilted almost directly towards the front yard/door/parking area/road. It was actually somewhat fun to take someone who'd been to the house repeatedly, but never continued past the front door, twenty feet further on, past the tree, and watch them realize just what was going on with that tree that they'd seen a dozen times but never notice just how crazy slanted it was.