What do you mean, Linux hasn't solved that? You don't run in editing code every time you want to enable SCSI.
You might have to edit code, or patch, if you want features that are not present, or to fix bugs, but you don't have to go in editing Linux because your 'rules' changed, because that's just silly and time-wasting. At worst you have to recompile...all the rules are already seperated out from the code, and you just choose which ones get built in.
Um, when did the assembly line improve product design? Did I miss something somewhere?
Design methodology has improved in the last century, but that's because of engineering advances, it has nothing to do with assembly lines, which usually result in worse products because of various constraints and having looser tolerance due to using interchangable parts, instead of custom fitted. And they're the reason that every plastic electronic device seems to be held together with stupid tabs and screws instead of just screws, and battery covers now slide in and out with easy-to-break covers instead of having well designed hinged covers....because machines can just snap the bits together.
OTOH, assembly lines produce much more consistent products, and the contraints they supply have resulted in many engineering advances out of necessity, which in turn resulted in better produces. But that's like calling the plague 'a great liberator' because the manpower shortages forced societal changes afterwards. (And it's not like you need to invent reasons that the assembly line is a good thing. Duh. They're in the top three innovations for giving us such a high standard of living. You don't need to start ascribing mythological properties to them.)
I swear, some people are living in an alternate universe. Programming does need to get better, and manufacturing has nothing to do with it. Programming needs to be treated like engineering, not fucking manufacturing. Treating it like manufacturing is what's wrong with it...you can't just stick program bits together and hope they work.
That's only true because of an original design error: Making non-customizable software.
You shouldn't have to change the software at all to specify business rules. It should all be in an understandable form that can be easily changed.
Now, whether or not Peoplesoft lets their end users do this, or builds these rules, unalterably, into the finished application is up to them. I predict the later.;) But regardless, they shouldn't, and I suspect they don't, require 'programmers' for this.
Not only is there a time and money issue, there's a support issue. Support's much easier if everyone has the same version of the software.
Heh. That's exactly what I was thinking. A factory assembly line is exactly the right metaphor, for the wrong thing. Programmers aren't assembly line workers, they're assembly line designers. For very large and complex assembly lines.
Sure, you can get unskilled laborers to hook the parts together and plug the things in afterwards, just like you can get non-programmers to build a GUI using Visual Studio or whatever. And you can buy off-the-shelf machines to hook together, just like good programmers know how to locate useful libraries.
But anyone who things programming is an assembly line process needs to read this. You can't program via steps, anymore than you can design a factory by steps. Steps can tell you one way to do a big design, and can tell you how to write the tiny bits. But you'll never have the slightest clue how to write the middle, or whether or your big design was a good one.
At some point, you need to hook up a machine dumping out 10 items a second at 5 mph at three feet off the ground and need to hook it up to a machine accepting 3 items a second at 12 mph six feet off the ground, which is twelve feet away and facing at an odd angle...and you won't be able to buy a part for that. You'll have to build it. And it will be crap if you asked me to do it, because I am not a mechanical engineer.
Companies look at the programming mills in India that can churn out the little steps, and they grab some random programming structure and think they can make a program from that. Well...they can. And it will be crap. The middle is important, no matter how many books come out trying to say otherwise, or trying to come out with ways of making the top and bottom closer.
And while the bottom is extremely uncreative, or at least can be done well without creativity, and you can basically write any program with any top, the middle is creative, period. (And it will get even more creative as management, in an attempt to remove it, builds more and more of the top, and outsources more and more of the bottom.)
Frankly, there is plenty of grunt work in programming that can be gotten rid off, and just like other industries, the correct way is not to pretend there's no creativity, but to give the creative people some assistants. We don't pretend we don't need sound engineers, we give them assistants so they don't have to run around all over the place adjusting mics. And most civil engineers never do any construction work. OTOH, most programmers are already carrying around code libraries, so I don't know how much assistants would help. But it would be nice to say 'Hey, I need this single linked-list turned into a double. And change that place in foo.c where I had to start walking the list from the start to back up one. And anywhere else I did that.' and have some grunt in India do it magically overnight. Saves money, too.
It's times like this that I'm reminded of the story with the plumber who charged 1 dollar for a part and 99 dollars to know which part to replace. Companies today have realized that anyone can operate a wench, so they think they can save 98 dollars by hiring the cheapest guy. Of course, they've ended up paying him for 3 hours instead of five minutes, they've spent 70 dollars in parts, you can't operate more than one sink at a time, and there's still a leak.
Concession speeches have absolutely no meaning, and people have backed out of them. All a concession speech means is that you think the other guy won, so people should stop sitting on their edge of their seats. All an incorrect concession speech does is make you look slightly foolish. (And politicions looking foolish is a national pasttime.)
I have no idea what you mean about 'honor' or 'courts' WRT concession speeches...no one has ever argued that their opponent conceeded and thus didn't really win the election. It's completely meaningless legally, and, in fact, you can't withdraw from an election after a certain point, as evidenced by the dead guy that infamously ran for congress a few years ago. And he won. In fact, you can be elected even if you didn't choose to run, although they can't make take the office.
As for vote counters, even ignoring the impossiblity of them just walking off the job if the race was close, which is just completely idiotic, a ballot has many choices on it. Usually several dozen. It would be rather astonishing to have a race where all races were close, which completely removes your idea right off the bat.
In reality, of course, even if all the races were close, ballot counters are closely watched by all sorts of people, and them saying 'Ah, forget it, I'm going home, we'll just make up numbers for the rest' would rather immediately result in their arrest for election fraud.
Doing a little bit of rewriting of history, aren't you?
Your original claim: Absentee ballots aren't counted unless the election is close. So in most cases your vote won't be counted at all, ESPECIALLY if you use an absentee ballot.
Your new claim: Historically, absentee ballots are counted after an election is called, and only to make the final tally official.
These are, of course, completely different claims. I like this 'historically', which you obviously think gets you an out. Well, no, it doesn't...absentee ballots have always worked this way. And interestingly enough, I can't think of even one historical voting fraud that involved not counting absentee ballots.)
As for talking about when an election is 'called', that is complete gibberish. Elections are not 'called' by vote counters at all, and your vote isn't then added to make anything 'final'.
Elections are 'called' by television networks who do exit polls. Obviously these polls do not include absentee ballots, and in fact those totals never include them, they aren't magically added later.
However, as those totals are completely and utterly meaningless, legally, I fail to see what that has to do with anything. Those polls are just that...polls. They're estimates. I can 'call' an election with just as much legal validity as they can. It's just someone saying 'It looks like Bush will win, because that's what the people I asked at the exit said.'.
Absentee ballots get counted at exactly the same time that everyone else's ballot does, and they get added to the exact same precinct talleys, and they get counted up exactly the same way as everyone else's vote does.
I thought so. You're the dumbass. Civil law is..law created by the government! Wow!
Civil disobedience is delibrately breaking the law and getting arrested publically for it. Any law, although it works best if it's a law at the same level of government as what you are protesting. Ie., if you want to get arrested smashing up voting machines you want to get arrested by the state police instead of some local guys.
Mine has the name 'Jerome K. Jerome' associated with it.
The person taking the form didn't even flinch. She probably would have if I'd put his actual birthdate, though, instead of one I made up that roughly is close to mine.
Also I live at a nonexistent address in the ten thousands on a real street that goes up to 400 or so. And, I don't mind at all them mailing me stuff, I even checked a box for that. Send me anything you want, the post office will just send it right back.
Poison the well, people. Poison the well. We can't stop them from collecting data, so make it as worthless as possible.
No kidding. The Metal Gear Solid games are really bad at this. Each has enemies that are near-impossible to beat unless you figure out a trick, and the bad thing is the near-impossible bit. So half the time you don't realize you've missed the trick and spend fricking hours fighting one guy, cheering every time you manage to knock off tiny fraction of his life bar. When you should have used weapon X during time Y, which would take exactly seven hits.
Don't get me wrong, I love thoses games, I'm probably going to buy 3 when it comes out, but I've learned that if I'm fighting the same guy for more than five minutes, and he's not down by at least 25%, I'm probably doing it wrong. So I go google it.
I beat the mind-reader guy with explosives, I believe. The game isn't actually psychic, obviously. It just had his reactions to your button press be extremely fast...but it didn't cheat and move him out of harm's way if the harm was coming in too fast for him to move normally.
So all you had to do to beat him was to set it up where he couldn't move out of harm's way...and C-4 worked nicely. Push the button, ka-boom. (Or you could pay attention to the hint.)
Or maybe I'm confusing him with Vamp, who I know I beat with C-4. You're apparently supposed to snipe him, but that's way too much work. If you stood in a certain place, he'd always land basically the same distance from you, and start walking towards you. So I'd turn to there, place C-4, and run back, being careful to stand outside the shadow, and wait for him to land. Sometimes he'd be too fast for me, or come in while I was still placing the C-4, and I'd have to run like hell.
C-4 was much underrated in that game. Sure, you couldn't use it while wandering around trying to stay hidden, but it worked against basically all the bosses, because they were too damn stupid not to walk on top of it.
It's not fucking complicated how to fix it, and the solution works for every browser out there: Stop letting web pages turn off the URL box and menus. DUH.
I've had issues with that ever since I learned it was possible.
Firefox lets you stop people from turning off the status line, which seems rather idiotic. It's easy enough to create a fake paypal login with links that point to the real site, and a 'login' form that doesn't...and forms don't update the status bar. The important thing is never ever ever letting people turn off the address bar, ever. (Also, don't let them size a window to offscreen.)
Microsoft, sadly, is solving this problem the same way as Mozilla 'solved' it, by not letting people turn off the status bar in SP2.
I, personally, are not vulerable to this, as both IE and Firefox have the buttons and the URL field next to my menu on the same line. However, it's not like this is the only computer I ever use.
So, you're still under the impression that Real somehow illegally reverse engineered some patent we don't know about, despite the fact you can get a copy of any patent from the patent office. That's the point of patents, you have to reveal how they work.
And you can't 'illegally' reverse engineer a piece of hardware, or, come to think of it, a piece of software. Although you can possible violate the EULA...but iPods don't have an EULA, duh. It's a piece of a hardware. (And if they are putting EULAs on hardware and trying to enforce them, that's just as evil as trying to use the DMCA to stomp competition.)
I suspect any patents on Fairplay (We still don't know if there are any or not.) are on the hardware implimentation, and not on the software, but that can be decided in a court of law, and I don't really care, unless it's an overbroad software patent.
However, that's not what Apple said they were looking into suing them for. (And thus I suspect either Real's not violating a patent, or Apple's lawyers are not on the ball.) They said they were looking into suing under the DMCA. Which for any other company would automatically make them evil. They're basically threatening to do the same as printer manufacturers suing under the DMCA about toner. For exactly the same reason...they don't want the competition.
It's not to protect any copyrighted works...in fact, Real's plan actually safeguards copyrighted works. Real could have easily sold a crack to get around FairPlay (Yes, yes, you can get them for free, I know.), but instead they used their legally obtained knowledge to make it where their songs, also, could not be copied from iPod to iPod, indefinately.
Not to mention how Apple is being against a time-honored tradition of hackers...misusing hardware to make it do what we what, not what the manufacturer wants. The most appalling thing is that this is coming from Apple of all places. Apple, who in recent years got back to their roots as hackers-who-make-pretty-things.
No, wait, the most appalling thing is people who think Apple can do no wrong. If this were literally any other company, it would be 'Cool hack' and 'Damnit, I don't want DRM on more music' and 'Why this does or does not violate the DMCA'. We get all that, but we also get one out of every four posts talking about how Apple is in the right, and it sickens me. I suspect, because I also think highly of Apple, that Apple will, in the end, not do anything, and this is just a boneheaded move by the PR people. However, people praising it is beyond absurd. Yes, Real sucks, and Apple is cool. And cool companies can do evil things to sucky companies, and we should call them on it.
Pacemakers are just replaced, completely. As the battery lasts about ten years, and advances in technology happen during that time, it would be rather stupid to just replace the battery, especially considering you have to cut people open regardless. Plus, the ability to open a pacemaker would be another point for fluids in the body to sneak into the pacemaker.
The wires running to the heart, called 'pacer leads', are not replaced, though, so it's just a simple matter of slicing open the skin and hooking up a new pacemaker to the lead. (Usually they have two leads, so they can pick which ever one seems better, and have a backup if one breaks.)
Now, what would be vaguely useful would be a way to recharge them from outside, by induction, or, hell, body motion. They can be programmed from the outside, but not charged, which I think is stupid.
Of course, pacemakers use a lot less power than artifical hearts. Pacemakers just give the heart a very tiny shock to get it to automatically work, because the heart's natural pacemaker has been screwed up somehow. A lot of times they only have to do it every few seconds or so. Artifical hearts have to move a hell of a lot of blood continually around the body, whereas you could probably operate a pacemaker from a watch battery for quite some time.
I have some old pacemakers laying around (They give you the old one when you get a new one. Weird, eh?) and I've been tempted to take then apart to see how much is the battery. I suspect 90% of them.
And, no, I don't know what you mean. You appear to believe in some sort of vague 'IP' cloud surrounding the iPod. I think, and the law agrees, that position is completely absurd, but it doesn't stop companies from acting like it exists.
If Apple has patents on how music gets into their device (The only patents Real could violate), they have patents. As these have not been mentioned, I seriuosly doubt they do. If they do not have patents, they are basically screwed. If Real is using their software that already resides on the user's computer, instead of implimenting the patent themselves, they are basically screwed, too.
Yes, even with the DMCA. Real isn't circumventing their DRM, Real is using their DRM.
Frankly, people at this site are seriously starting to piss me off. Why the hell are people defending a company that's threatening to use the DMCA to keep alternates off their hardware platform? What is the difference between this and running Linux on an XBox? (And the first person to say 'Real is a company, they don't have the rights to do this, whereas XBox owners do', will get shot. Real isn't running around altering people's iPods, it's giving out the ability for them to do so.)
What a brave new world we live in, where you reverse engineer a patent. You know, a patent, one of those things you can get a copy of from the patent office for a nominal fee.
Sigh. If Real was violating a patent, Apple wouldn't have threatened to bring in the DMCA. They'd just say 'Hey, you're violating our patent.' and Real would back down. Considering they haven't done so, I think we can all assume there is no patent involved here.
And, yes, nothing is unbreakable, but if you truly cared about the remote possiblity that someone would go to that much trouble, you'd care a lot more about the much greater possiblity that someone would crack a server your data is located on, and you'd be living off the grid with your own generator and shooting at tax collectors.
They're doing that to me, too! I've been informed my brother has 'registered' at various stores for 'wedding presents'. My 'mother' has left me messages that show a surprising amount of information about me...this is some well organized scam. What's scary is that I called her and somehow got intercepted by these wedding phishers. It sounded just like her. Those bastards will stop at nothing.
What I can't understand is why the 'wedding' is set in December...that seems a long time for a scam to finish. Surely they realize I'll talk to my brother in person before then, as soon as he and his girlfriend get through buying that house. Come to think about it, I haven't spoken to him in a while, I should email him.
Any nerd worth his salt wouldn't bother with that. If the email looks legit, the thing to do is to type the address in your browser and login from there. OOo, scary.
That's basically what I suggest, except there's no reason not to count the printed ballots, too. Which also means you need to count the shredded ballots, also, but, hey, why not? There's no harm, and almost no cost...you have one scanner hooked to a shredder, and one hooked to a ballot box.
I think the way to stop ballot tampering is to keep track of as much as possible. There's no harm in keeping track of printed ballots. Also, there should be a serial number printed on each ballot, that should be kept track of, so in the end we can say 'Ballot RE-203828193 was printed by machine H-392, which recorded that it was for {list of people}, and scanned by machine RW-3927, which recorded the same votes, and placed in box PQ-393812, and here it is, and it clearly has the same votes on it'.
No 'CS major' has anything against a computerized system with a recorded printout. The entire issue is that anyone who any knowledge of computers at all knows that computers can lie, and lie very convincingly, if you tell them to do so.
Any system that relies on computers to tell the truth is as completely and utterly as broken as can be. If it doesn't rely on that, if the computers can be checked, it's fine, no one has any problem with it, except people the confusion where people say 'receipts' and mean 'paper backup' and people who think that means you take that with you.
Frankly, the best solution is to have a nice computer interface that prints a paper ballor, which you then run through a scanner that keeps it. Then you have three counts...the printer, the scanner, and the paper. In most cases, if the printer and the scanner agree and it's not close, you don't need to count the paper.
You're obviously not a lawyer, because case law doesn't work like that.
To charge someone with reckless driving, it has to be proven they were, in fact, acting in a reckless manner. Just because you proved someone watching a DVD was doing so recklessly does not, in any way, mean that everyone who ever watching a DVD was automatically reckless, that's nonsense and completely violates due process.
There have been people driving in a reckless manner because they were tuning the radio, and arrested for reckless driving. Hell, there have been people driving recklessly for no apparent reason at all. Teenagers are very fond of that. In your universe, we'd all automatically be guilt of reckless driving, because if someone who drove with no distractions can be guilty of reckless driving, all people who drive with no distractions are guilty of reckless driving. That's patent nonsense. The only people guilty of reckless driving are people driving in a reckless manner, regardless of anything else, or engaging in a behavior that is defined by law as reckless.
Having a law specifically defining watching TV as reckless while driving allows the prosecution to not have to prove the driver was driving in a manner that it was reckless, and instead just prove they were watching TV, which is then automatically reckless. And, just as importantly, it allows them to arrest people who are doing so but aren't driving in a reckless manner at that exact moment in time. Because, frankly, I don't care if you're driving down a straight highway, and managing to keep the car in the correct lane, while watching TV...you need to be stopped, period. That's not acceptable behavior.
That's nothing. You should try downloading off Kazaa's network with OE or Thunderbird. It's practically impossible!
Seriously, yes, if you use the wrong tools, you're screwed. OE and Thunderbird are not only incorrect tools for binary newsreaders, they suck as text newsreaders, too.
You can get nice newsreaders that will merge servers, and assign weighs to them, so, for example, you download from your ISPs free newserver if they have an article, otherwise you use a 10 dollar a month pay one.
Getting binaries from newsgroups has gotten a bad rap because there are a lot of incorrect choices you can make WRT servers and readers, and because people tried it before new technology was out there, specifically par2, which allows you to repair incomplete images.
If you choose correctly (Binary News Reaper and easynews are good choices), it works quite well. I've never been unable to finish a file.
The episodes are basically substitutes for transcripts. When I got hooked on Buffy in season 3, I went back and read seasons 1 and 2, via the transcripts.
Nowadays, if someone gets hooked on Stargate, they go and download the episodes from there. They're also useful for quick reference: 'What exactly did Jack say in episode so-and-so?'.
Anyone who thinks those things cut in the production company's profits is on crack. Only a serious fan would bother seeking out crappy-ass 30 meg episodes to watch.
Now, something that does cut into their DVD profit, and that I personally use, and in fact are using right now, is Usenet, to download large nicely encoded episodes. I do this because I do not get the Sci-Fi channel, and cannot get the Sci-Fi channel in any way, so I feel no guilt about it. Of course, I download current episodes, and don't keep them around, but you can get high quality rips and even VCD encoded episodes from there.
Slashdot Mirror
You might have to edit code, or patch, if you want features that are not present, or to fix bugs, but you don't have to go in editing Linux because your 'rules' changed, because that's just silly and time-wasting. At worst you have to recompile...all the rules are already seperated out from the code, and you just choose which ones get built in.
Design methodology has improved in the last century, but that's because of engineering advances, it has nothing to do with assembly lines, which usually result in worse products because of various constraints and having looser tolerance due to using interchangable parts, instead of custom fitted. And they're the reason that every plastic electronic device seems to be held together with stupid tabs and screws instead of just screws, and battery covers now slide in and out with easy-to-break covers instead of having well designed hinged covers....because machines can just snap the bits together.
OTOH, assembly lines produce much more consistent products, and the contraints they supply have resulted in many engineering advances out of necessity, which in turn resulted in better produces. But that's like calling the plague 'a great liberator' because the manpower shortages forced societal changes afterwards. (And it's not like you need to invent reasons that the assembly line is a good thing. Duh. They're in the top three innovations for giving us such a high standard of living. You don't need to start ascribing mythological properties to them.)
I swear, some people are living in an alternate universe. Programming does need to get better, and manufacturing has nothing to do with it. Programming needs to be treated like engineering, not fucking manufacturing. Treating it like manufacturing is what's wrong with it...you can't just stick program bits together and hope they work.
You shouldn't have to change the software at all to specify business rules. It should all be in an understandable form that can be easily changed.
Now, whether or not Peoplesoft lets their end users do this, or builds these rules, unalterably, into the finished application is up to them. I predict the later. ;) But regardless, they shouldn't, and I suspect they don't, require 'programmers' for this.
Not only is there a time and money issue, there's a support issue. Support's much easier if everyone has the same version of the software.
Sure, you can get unskilled laborers to hook the parts together and plug the things in afterwards, just like you can get non-programmers to build a GUI using Visual Studio or whatever. And you can buy off-the-shelf machines to hook together, just like good programmers know how to locate useful libraries.
But anyone who things programming is an assembly line process needs to read this. You can't program via steps, anymore than you can design a factory by steps. Steps can tell you one way to do a big design, and can tell you how to write the tiny bits. But you'll never have the slightest clue how to write the middle, or whether or your big design was a good one.
At some point, you need to hook up a machine dumping out 10 items a second at 5 mph at three feet off the ground and need to hook it up to a machine accepting 3 items a second at 12 mph six feet off the ground, which is twelve feet away and facing at an odd angle...and you won't be able to buy a part for that. You'll have to build it. And it will be crap if you asked me to do it, because I am not a mechanical engineer.
Companies look at the programming mills in India that can churn out the little steps, and they grab some random programming structure and think they can make a program from that. Well...they can. And it will be crap. The middle is important, no matter how many books come out trying to say otherwise, or trying to come out with ways of making the top and bottom closer.
And while the bottom is extremely uncreative, or at least can be done well without creativity, and you can basically write any program with any top, the middle is creative, period. (And it will get even more creative as management, in an attempt to remove it, builds more and more of the top, and outsources more and more of the bottom.)
Frankly, there is plenty of grunt work in programming that can be gotten rid off, and just like other industries, the correct way is not to pretend there's no creativity, but to give the creative people some assistants. We don't pretend we don't need sound engineers, we give them assistants so they don't have to run around all over the place adjusting mics. And most civil engineers never do any construction work. OTOH, most programmers are already carrying around code libraries, so I don't know how much assistants would help. But it would be nice to say 'Hey, I need this single linked-list turned into a double. And change that place in foo.c where I had to start walking the list from the start to back up one. And anywhere else I did that.' and have some grunt in India do it magically overnight. Saves money, too.
It's times like this that I'm reminded of the story with the plumber who charged 1 dollar for a part and 99 dollars to know which part to replace. Companies today have realized that anyone can operate a wench, so they think they can save 98 dollars by hiring the cheapest guy. Of course, they've ended up paying him for 3 hours instead of five minutes, they've spent 70 dollars in parts, you can't operate more than one sink at a time, and there's still a leak.
Concession speeches have absolutely no meaning, and people have backed out of them. All a concession speech means is that you think the other guy won, so people should stop sitting on their edge of their seats. All an incorrect concession speech does is make you look slightly foolish. (And politicions looking foolish is a national pasttime.)
I have no idea what you mean about 'honor' or 'courts' WRT concession speeches...no one has ever argued that their opponent conceeded and thus didn't really win the election. It's completely meaningless legally, and, in fact, you can't withdraw from an election after a certain point, as evidenced by the dead guy that infamously ran for congress a few years ago. And he won. In fact, you can be elected even if you didn't choose to run, although they can't make take the office.
As for vote counters, even ignoring the impossiblity of them just walking off the job if the race was close, which is just completely idiotic, a ballot has many choices on it. Usually several dozen. It would be rather astonishing to have a race where all races were close, which completely removes your idea right off the bat.
In reality, of course, even if all the races were close, ballot counters are closely watched by all sorts of people, and them saying 'Ah, forget it, I'm going home, we'll just make up numbers for the rest' would rather immediately result in their arrest for election fraud.
Your original claim:
Absentee ballots aren't counted unless the election is close. So in most cases your vote won't be counted at all, ESPECIALLY if you use an absentee ballot.
Your new claim:
Historically, absentee ballots are counted after an election is called, and only to make the final tally official.
These are, of course, completely different claims. I like this 'historically', which you obviously think gets you an out. Well, no, it doesn't...absentee ballots have always worked this way. And interestingly enough, I can't think of even one historical voting fraud that involved not counting absentee ballots.)
As for talking about when an election is 'called', that is complete gibberish. Elections are not 'called' by vote counters at all, and your vote isn't then added to make anything 'final'.
Elections are 'called' by television networks who do exit polls. Obviously these polls do not include absentee ballots, and in fact those totals never include them, they aren't magically added later.
However, as those totals are completely and utterly meaningless, legally, I fail to see what that has to do with anything. Those polls are just that...polls. They're estimates. I can 'call' an election with just as much legal validity as they can. It's just someone saying 'It looks like Bush will win, because that's what the people I asked at the exit said.'.
Absentee ballots get counted at exactly the same time that everyone else's ballot does, and they get added to the exact same precinct talleys, and they get counted up exactly the same way as everyone else's vote does.
I thought so. You're the dumbass. Civil law is..law created by the government! Wow!
Civil disobedience is delibrately breaking the law and getting arrested publically for it. Any law, although it works best if it's a law at the same level of government as what you are protesting. Ie., if you want to get arrested smashing up voting machines you want to get arrested by the state police instead of some local guys.
That's the stupidist misinformation I've ever read.
And you get arrested for fraud when you hack a saved game file to get 999999 gold?
The person taking the form didn't even flinch. She probably would have if I'd put his actual birthdate, though, instead of one I made up that roughly is close to mine.
Also I live at a nonexistent address in the ten thousands on a real street that goes up to 400 or so. And, I don't mind at all them mailing me stuff, I even checked a box for that. Send me anything you want, the post office will just send it right back.
Poison the well, people. Poison the well. We can't stop them from collecting data, so make it as worthless as possible.
Don't get me wrong, I love thoses games, I'm probably going to buy 3 when it comes out, but I've learned that if I'm fighting the same guy for more than five minutes, and he's not down by at least 25%, I'm probably doing it wrong. So I go google it.
I beat the mind-reader guy with explosives, I believe. The game isn't actually psychic, obviously. It just had his reactions to your button press be extremely fast...but it didn't cheat and move him out of harm's way if the harm was coming in too fast for him to move normally. So all you had to do to beat him was to set it up where he couldn't move out of harm's way...and C-4 worked nicely. Push the button, ka-boom. (Or you could pay attention to the hint.)
Or maybe I'm confusing him with Vamp, who I know I beat with C-4. You're apparently supposed to snipe him, but that's way too much work. If you stood in a certain place, he'd always land basically the same distance from you, and start walking towards you. So I'd turn to there, place C-4, and run back, being careful to stand outside the shadow, and wait for him to land. Sometimes he'd be too fast for me, or come in while I was still placing the C-4, and I'd have to run like hell.
C-4 was much underrated in that game. Sure, you couldn't use it while wandering around trying to stay hidden, but it worked against basically all the bosses, because they were too damn stupid not to walk on top of it.
I've had issues with that ever since I learned it was possible.
Firefox lets you stop people from turning off the status line, which seems rather idiotic. It's easy enough to create a fake paypal login with links that point to the real site, and a 'login' form that doesn't...and forms don't update the status bar. The important thing is never ever ever letting people turn off the address bar, ever. (Also, don't let them size a window to offscreen.)
Microsoft, sadly, is solving this problem the same way as Mozilla 'solved' it, by not letting people turn off the status bar in SP2.
I, personally, are not vulerable to this, as both IE and Firefox have the buttons and the URL field next to my menu on the same line. However, it's not like this is the only computer I ever use.
And you can't 'illegally' reverse engineer a piece of hardware, or, come to think of it, a piece of software. Although you can possible violate the EULA...but iPods don't have an EULA, duh. It's a piece of a hardware. (And if they are putting EULAs on hardware and trying to enforce them, that's just as evil as trying to use the DMCA to stomp competition.)
I suspect any patents on Fairplay (We still don't know if there are any or not.) are on the hardware implimentation, and not on the software, but that can be decided in a court of law, and I don't really care, unless it's an overbroad software patent.
However, that's not what Apple said they were looking into suing them for. (And thus I suspect either Real's not violating a patent, or Apple's lawyers are not on the ball.) They said they were looking into suing under the DMCA. Which for any other company would automatically make them evil. They're basically threatening to do the same as printer manufacturers suing under the DMCA about toner. For exactly the same reason...they don't want the competition.
It's not to protect any copyrighted works...in fact, Real's plan actually safeguards copyrighted works. Real could have easily sold a crack to get around FairPlay (Yes, yes, you can get them for free, I know.), but instead they used their legally obtained knowledge to make it where their songs, also, could not be copied from iPod to iPod, indefinately.
Not to mention how Apple is being against a time-honored tradition of hackers...misusing hardware to make it do what we what, not what the manufacturer wants. The most appalling thing is that this is coming from Apple of all places. Apple, who in recent years got back to their roots as hackers-who-make-pretty-things.
No, wait, the most appalling thing is people who think Apple can do no wrong. If this were literally any other company, it would be 'Cool hack' and 'Damnit, I don't want DRM on more music' and 'Why this does or does not violate the DMCA'. We get all that, but we also get one out of every four posts talking about how Apple is in the right, and it sickens me. I suspect, because I also think highly of Apple, that Apple will, in the end, not do anything, and this is just a boneheaded move by the PR people. However, people praising it is beyond absurd. Yes, Real sucks, and Apple is cool. And cool companies can do evil things to sucky companies, and we should call them on it.
And it'd kill the white blood cells, also, which might be worse than just folding the red blood cells.
The wires running to the heart, called 'pacer leads', are not replaced, though, so it's just a simple matter of slicing open the skin and hooking up a new pacemaker to the lead. (Usually they have two leads, so they can pick which ever one seems better, and have a backup if one breaks.)
Now, what would be vaguely useful would be a way to recharge them from outside, by induction, or, hell, body motion. They can be programmed from the outside, but not charged, which I think is stupid.
Of course, pacemakers use a lot less power than artifical hearts. Pacemakers just give the heart a very tiny shock to get it to automatically work, because the heart's natural pacemaker has been screwed up somehow. A lot of times they only have to do it every few seconds or so. Artifical hearts have to move a hell of a lot of blood continually around the body, whereas you could probably operate a pacemaker from a watch battery for quite some time.
I have some old pacemakers laying around (They give you the old one when you get a new one. Weird, eh?) and I've been tempted to take then apart to see how much is the battery. I suspect 90% of them.
And, no, I don't know what you mean. You appear to believe in some sort of vague 'IP' cloud surrounding the iPod. I think, and the law agrees, that position is completely absurd, but it doesn't stop companies from acting like it exists.
If Apple has patents on how music gets into their device (The only patents Real could violate), they have patents. As these have not been mentioned, I seriuosly doubt they do. If they do not have patents, they are basically screwed. If Real is using their software that already resides on the user's computer, instead of implimenting the patent themselves, they are basically screwed, too.
Yes, even with the DMCA. Real isn't circumventing their DRM, Real is using their DRM.
Frankly, people at this site are seriously starting to piss me off. Why the hell are people defending a company that's threatening to use the DMCA to keep alternates off their hardware platform? What is the difference between this and running Linux on an XBox? (And the first person to say 'Real is a company, they don't have the rights to do this, whereas XBox owners do', will get shot. Real isn't running around altering people's iPods, it's giving out the ability for them to do so.)
Sigh. If Real was violating a patent, Apple wouldn't have threatened to bring in the DMCA. They'd just say 'Hey, you're violating our patent.' and Real would back down. Considering they haven't done so, I think we can all assume there is no patent involved here.
And, yes, nothing is unbreakable, but if you truly cared about the remote possiblity that someone would go to that much trouble, you'd care a lot more about the much greater possiblity that someone would crack a server your data is located on, and you'd be living off the grid with your own generator and shooting at tax collectors.
What I can't understand is why the 'wedding' is set in December...that seems a long time for a scam to finish. Surely they realize I'll talk to my brother in person before then, as soon as he and his girlfriend get through buying that house. Come to think about it, I haven't spoken to him in a while, I should email him.
Any nerd worth his salt wouldn't bother with that. If the email looks legit, the thing to do is to type the address in your browser and login from there. OOo, scary.
I think the way to stop ballot tampering is to keep track of as much as possible. There's no harm in keeping track of printed ballots. Also, there should be a serial number printed on each ballot, that should be kept track of, so in the end we can say 'Ballot RE-203828193 was printed by machine H-392, which recorded that it was for {list of people}, and scanned by machine RW-3927, which recorded the same votes, and placed in box PQ-393812, and here it is, and it clearly has the same votes on it'.
Any system that relies on computers to tell the truth is as completely and utterly as broken as can be. If it doesn't rely on that, if the computers can be checked, it's fine, no one has any problem with it, except people the confusion where people say 'receipts' and mean 'paper backup' and people who think that means you take that with you.
Frankly, the best solution is to have a nice computer interface that prints a paper ballor, which you then run through a scanner that keeps it. Then you have three counts...the printer, the scanner, and the paper. In most cases, if the printer and the scanner agree and it's not close, you don't need to count the paper.
To charge someone with reckless driving, it has to be proven they were, in fact, acting in a reckless manner. Just because you proved someone watching a DVD was doing so recklessly does not, in any way, mean that everyone who ever watching a DVD was automatically reckless, that's nonsense and completely violates due process.
There have been people driving in a reckless manner because they were tuning the radio, and arrested for reckless driving. Hell, there have been people driving recklessly for no apparent reason at all. Teenagers are very fond of that. In your universe, we'd all automatically be guilt of reckless driving, because if someone who drove with no distractions can be guilty of reckless driving, all people who drive with no distractions are guilty of reckless driving. That's patent nonsense. The only people guilty of reckless driving are people driving in a reckless manner, regardless of anything else, or engaging in a behavior that is defined by law as reckless.
Having a law specifically defining watching TV as reckless while driving allows the prosecution to not have to prove the driver was driving in a manner that it was reckless, and instead just prove they were watching TV, which is then automatically reckless. And, just as importantly, it allows them to arrest people who are doing so but aren't driving in a reckless manner at that exact moment in time. Because, frankly, I don't care if you're driving down a straight highway, and managing to keep the car in the correct lane, while watching TV...you need to be stopped, period. That's not acceptable behavior.
Seriously, yes, if you use the wrong tools, you're screwed. OE and Thunderbird are not only incorrect tools for binary newsreaders, they suck as text newsreaders, too.
You can get nice newsreaders that will merge servers, and assign weighs to them, so, for example, you download from your ISPs free newserver if they have an article, otherwise you use a 10 dollar a month pay one.
Getting binaries from newsgroups has gotten a bad rap because there are a lot of incorrect choices you can make WRT servers and readers, and because people tried it before new technology was out there, specifically par2, which allows you to repair incomplete images.
If you choose correctly (Binary News Reaper and easynews are good choices), it works quite well. I've never been unable to finish a file.
Nowadays, if someone gets hooked on Stargate, they go and download the episodes from there. They're also useful for quick reference: 'What exactly did Jack say in episode so-and-so?'.
Anyone who thinks those things cut in the production company's profits is on crack. Only a serious fan would bother seeking out crappy-ass 30 meg episodes to watch.
Now, something that does cut into their DVD profit, and that I personally use, and in fact are using right now, is Usenet, to download large nicely encoded episodes. I do this because I do not get the Sci-Fi channel, and cannot get the Sci-Fi channel in any way, so I feel no guilt about it. Of course, I download current episodes, and don't keep them around, but you can get high quality rips and even VCD encoded episodes from there.