Yup, and all those civilizations already were making copper, quite a lot of it. And had giant public-works projects that including moving water around. Perfect for power-generating waterwheels.
All you really need to do is demonstrate how to insulate and wrap copper wire, spin it around in a magnetic field, and show it moves metal somewhere else. From there, it's easy to invent the telegraph, and they could have an 'electrical grid' from their water supply in a year if they wanted it. You don't really even need to 'store' the power...you just put the telegraph stations next to the continually-turning waterwheels.
And soon they'd figure out 'relays', (Which are, after all, just tiny telegraphs...click click click.) so they could just run the wire to a way-station with a waterwheel there, and 'boast' the signal.
Anyone who wants to figure out what we'd do in such circumstances needs to go read on the 1632 boards, who have all sorts of science discussion based around the 1632 series, when a town from 2000 gets thrown back in time to 1632.
They were downgrading from 2000, and essentially went back to the start of the industrial revolution.
But it wouldn't take much longer to go forward to that point, pretending none of the modern world existed. Any idiot can make copper and a waterwheel or a steam engine, and, tada, power.
Hell, just Roman-level engineering would put you ahead of everyone. Like if you've gotten a river that's below where you need water to be, you build a waterwheel, use it to lift some water straight up, high enough to run to where you need it. You don't need any fancy 'smelting' for that, you can build it out of wood.
You're an idiot. New Orlean's was only at 'the point of violence' in racists' fevered dreams. In fact, crime, except for 'looting', aka, taking food from closed stores, was near zero.
most urban folks would fan out into the surrounding rural areas, but would have no way to survive or support themselves. Rural folks would have to put them down in order to defend themselves.
Or, more likely, responsible people would shoot you for shooting at homeless people, and then offer them work at the various farms which had ramped up production.
You're one of those assholes who thinks everyone in a city is some subhuman welfare recipient, aren't you?
And, FYI: Cities have much more food stores than the countryside, so in your delusional fantasy you damn well better hope civilization collapses in mid-summer so rural areas actually have enough to harvest feed themselves and pack for the winter, because otherwise all the damn food is sitting in city warehouses and you'll starve to death if the food shipments store mid-winter.
To clear up #4, people have 'likeness rights'. You can't use a photograph of them to sell something.
They have to be recognizable, it has to be specifically of them, and it has to imply, in some manner, that they're endorsing something. It's what licensed sports game have to pay for, in addition to the team names and logos.
Which is why the paparazzi aren't covered...they're taking pictures of him to sell as pictures of him, not to use in some adverting campaign he didn't agree to.
There's also a 'privacy right' that's in the same general thing...but that's more anti-harrassment. You do not have permission to follow non-public people and take pictures of them specifically. This doesn't apply to public people, somehow, and only applies if you're publishing the photos publicly. (As opposed to private investigators, for example.)
I suspect what these people are is trying to is something pretty close to 'Likeness rights' for Stonehenge, but there are no likeness rights for anything but people.
This blanket mistrust of a well-designed electronic voting system as an alternate to error-prone, manually recounted ballots that are validated (or invalidated) by the whim of the election officials who most certainly have a horse in the race smacks of foolishness and ludditism, especially on a tech site like Slashdot.
No, it really just demonstrates we know a fuckload more about computer than you, and know it's impossible for a unprivileged user to know an administrator hasn't tampered with a machine, regardless of how 'open' the hypothetical software running on such a machine is.
You cannot see software. You cannot test software externally. It's called 'virtualization'. There is no conceivable way to determine a machine does what the person who set up the machine says it does, and nothing more. It's not even theoretically possible from the outside.
Any Turing-complete computer can be simulate another, and run programs on that simulation, and any such mimic program can 'hack' the program running on the machine it's mimicking, and there is no way to stop this or detect this. And that's just the extreme hypothetically-impossible-to-detect case, there's a lot simpler ways to tamper that are more detectable in theory, but still functionally undetectable, like a BIOS injection.
(And if you're thinking that 'from the outside' means there's a way to detect it otherwise...yes, if we're willing to let people disassemble voting machines and all the chips in then before voting. This does not seem reasonable.)
'OPEN CODE' IS MEANINGLESS BECAUSE YOU DO NOT, AND CANNOT, HAVE A WAY TO SEE THE VOTING COMPUTER IS RUNNING THAT CODE, AND JUST THAT CODE.
All these other 'sensitive' machines you're talking about are set up by people who have no reason to have malicious motives, and anything they did would be easily detectable. Banks want ATMs that are truthful, having them steal from customers really isn't a good business model. But you'll note we actually have cameras on said machines so we can see if the stuff that was given them actually happened if there's any problem.
With elections, though, the miscounting is undetectable.
The fact a tech site such as slashdot, with people who know a lot about computers, has a higher percentage of people who have huge issues with electronic voting than the general population should tell you something.
And yet you trust that the bank hasn't screwed up your transactions every time you go talk to them, or been stolen by all the thieves and scammers out there. Why?
Because I can see the transactions they assert I've made, you utter nimrod. And require them to document them, which they mail me every month, and I can add up and see if they've messed up.
I cannot see how a computer told another computer how I voted.
We use computers every day to track, monitor, validate, and secure data that is WAY more sensitive than "who i voted for"
The idea that how 'sensitive' a vote is is what we care about really sorta demonstrates how stupid you are.
Keeping the ballot secret is moderately important, but not as important as ensuring the actual vote was tallied correctly, which you managed to not address at all.
Unless your 'solution' was to make every vote entirely public, and then count them up, which would, indeed, be entirely correct and impossible to tamper with. But at that point computers are an absurd overkill.
half the people around you put a goddamned bumper sticker on their car or sign on their lawn so you KNOW who they fucking voted for, for christ's sake.
Hey, dumbass, that's fine for candidates in areas where they are acceptable. But some people being able to assert who they did vote for is not the same as votes being public...people can lie, and of course a lot of them don't tell who they vote for.
It's rather hilarious you mention 'Tammany Hall' as an aspect of 'paper vote tampering', when, of course, almost no paper ballot tampering happened at all. The voter fraud there was giving people money and, in turn, telling them who to vote for.(1) And threaten people into voting that way, because they knew who you voted for.
You know, the type of voter fraud that works best if votes are public.
1) And having ineligible people vote, or people vote under fake names, neither of which has anything to do with the type of voting.
But there actually is a copyright on a web site. I mean, the Met, or someone they paid, did make it, very recently. (Compared to their actual art, that is.) Likewise, someone took those pictures.
You can take pictures at the Met for free of uncopyrighted work. Go in with a tripod and take whatever non-flash pictures you want.
You just can't use their professionally taken photographs from their website. I agree that it would be nice if museums would provide such pictures for free, but museums are chronically underfunded and need the cash from selling them, and no one's stopping anyone else from doing that, from taking a picture of every painting, and then putting them in the public domain on a web site, so blaming the museum for not doing that is a bit silly.(1)
I suspect, with you, they didn't quite understand what you were trying to do with screenshots of their site. It probably got forwarded to the 'He wants to reprint our pictures in a book' lawyer, and they sent you the normal fees, not understanding you weren't trying to sell an art book.
1) I do, however, sharply criticize any museum that does stop people from taking their own pictures.
If you don't protect these sites, people will vandalize them. It's not like Stonehenge is the only English Heritage site either, there are plenty of castles, gardens monuments and what ever. It takes money to maintain them.
It takes paying a rent-a-cop to sit there and yell at people who get too close to stuff. That's it.
I don't understand why they need any budget beyond paying a guard to stand at the site and yell at people doing stuff they aren't allowed, and a guy to come along every week and cut the grass.
I'm pretty sure Stonehenge 'maintains' itself.
Now, if the British people want to turn those responsibilities over to third party, and thus the third party getting the right to build a souvenir stand next to it or and sell guided tours, that seems reasonable. Perhaps even charge for admission, although that seems dodgy. (You can functionally charge for admission by charging for parking, which seems more reasonable.)
The whole idea that they're 'in charge' of the site and can claim to 'own' Stonehenge is a bit disturbing, though. The British people own Stonehenge.
Frankly, I'm not a big fan of 'privatizing' historic sites, and I'm certainly not a big fan of letting these companies do whatever they want,. especially when they still have a huge subside from the government! The US, amazingly enough for a country much farther to the right than the UK, still manages to run its own historic sites, or has grant-supported non-profits do it, and often don't even charge any admission.
I mean, frickin Stone Mountain, which is a giant complex built around a historic site, has a $10 parking pass (Which is the same price as Stonehenge...but for a carload of people. Or you can walk in for free.), which lets you into all the public areas with hiking trails, picnic areas, lasers shows (Actual recent man-made things that cost money to build and maintain.), and, guess what? You can take all the pictures of the mountain you want.
They can assert their rights as a condition of entry to the property. This does happen also on entry to various museums which may explicitly forbid all photography or just commercial photography. If you photograph Stonehenge from somewhere else (especially from public land), then there can be no objection or claim to copyright.
This is what is, frankly, nonsense.
There are only two reasons to forbid photography in a museum:
One is banning flash photography to stop damage to paintings. This is clearly a stupid rational for something outside, and I would assume almost all photographs of Stonehenge are taken without a flash anyway.
Two is if there are things still copyright. Which is an even stupider reason for this.
I went to the Museum of Modern Art , and could take non-flash photography of all works except, strangely, a single one, because it was on loan and still under copyright. (It was some sort of shark in a case.)
This group might have some legal basis for restricting photography, you can indeed stop people from taking pictures on your 'property', but at that point Stonehenge needs to be taken away from their management and given to someone else. They don't actually 'own' Stonehenge, they're just running the property on behave of the British government, and if they're going to act like this, they should be removed from that.
This is, incidentally, different than restricting someone from using it as a trademark, which the British government could do if they wanted.
They're ACTUAL THINGS. You can see them. You can secure the doors and makes sure no one walks in or out with one.
You know computers? With all the stuff inside that's just electronic signals? And how parts of the computer can change those signals?
Do the damn math. One of those is much harder to secure than the other, and the fact we've had some physical security errors doesn't mean signals in a computer are anywhere near as tamper-resistant as actual objects we can watch the entire time and control.
The idea you can make signals inside a computer that no one can see 'transparent' show you're, I dunno, rather stupid. Show me exactly how I can see what software is actually running on a computer and, fine, we'll do it your way. Transparent cases and flashing lights? How exactly do you think computers work? NO ONE CAN SEE WHAT A COMPUTER IS DOING.
It is perfectly easy to build a physical system that people can see every aspect of. You have a ballot box away from everyone, where no one can tamper with it, you send people one at a time to put votes, you open it up in front of everyone and pull out the ballots one at a time and count them.
And you can't monitor voting in realtime, you loon. Or you'll know how people voted.
For paper ballots, that means you have multiple little old lady volunteers at every precinct watching the vote counts. For electronic ballots, that means you have multiple PhDs at every machine disassembling it for electron microscopy.
That, really, is what it boils down to. You cannot trust a process unless you can see every step of it.
I can, in theory, see every step of paper ballot counting. Yes, yes, sometimes things get...dodgy, but usually you can see they got dodgy and complain and do something about it, and a large section of the system has to be corrupt. You can solve all problems with extra poll workers.
I cannot see electronic voting. Period. It is physically impossible for me to see part of the process. Not 'hard', not 'difficult', but I cannot, under any circumstances, see my vote sitting a machine after I leave it. (Whereas I can watch the ballot box, and see nothing leaves it during the day, and see all votes that leave it at the end get counted.)
For other processes we could build a system that was secure enough...for example, we could have a big counter on the wall, and when you pushed a button, a bell went off at your booth and it went up by one, and people could watch that, and see the amount only changes upward, and only by one, and only when a bell goes off. We could build an 'electronic tallying system' that allows you to watch the process. It's functionally the same as a cash register.
But we can't make a secret ballot that is watchable and is electronic. Paper ballots work solely because they have the property that you can put them in a box, shuffle them up, and know they're all there later to be counted if no one has taken anything from the box.
This is not a property that is replicable in computers. (No, I won't get into why you can't do that it via hashing, but essentially that either results in you just knowing that some vote labeled 'yours' was counted, which could have been anything the computer put in, or it reveals your vote, which means now people can be threatened for their vote, undoing the entire point of a secret ballot.)
And, also, um...in what universe were the Republicans in the lead in the 2006 election? Even well before the election, it was obvious the Democrats would gain ground. I suspect he accidentally included that one.
There's a certain group of people who likes to see a conspiracy between Republicans and Diebold, which may or may not exist, I dunno. It really does seem a bad idea to have an electronic voting company that's clearly partisan, and holds political fundraisers.
But the entire idea of having computers count votes is just incredibly stupid to start with, and that has nothing to do with any political party. Anyone who thinks this is a partisan issue needs to have their head examined. The people making it a partisan issue just make it more likely for Republican voters to dismiss the concerns, instead of looking at the demonstrable fact that you cannot trust a computer that someone else built and programmed, no matter how much it is 'checked'.
I'll assume you weren't talking to me, as quite obviously I couldn't have modded you down, because people can't post and moderate in the same discussion.
Regardless, you shouldn't have been modded down, and they used the scummy 'Overrated' mod to keep from being metamodded. Anyone who does 'Overrated' to an unrated post needs to have their mod privs removed.
There is no way to check a computer is doing what you think it does, ever, under any circumstances. Anyone who thinks there is is delusional. You would need the ability to take silicon apart.
It is not possible to demonstrate that hardware has not been tampered with without an electron scanning microscope, and it is not possible to demonstrate that software hasn't been tampered with without external hardware. (And it's a bad idea to let people hook up their computer to the voting computer with full memory access and disc access for patently obvious reasons.)
And even then you have to be sure you checked everywhere. Did you take apart each chip in the video card?
But don't fall for the 'paper trail' nonsense. What you actually want, and you need to think about it like this, is paper voting, period. That's what it's called.
People, voting with paper ballots. Paper voting.
Now, those paper ballots might be printed by a computer, where you punch in stuff and it writes one out, but that doesn't matter at all. The vote is not the computer, the vote is the ballot. If the computer screws up, you void that ballot and get a new one.
Well, the problem is that the DNS namespace people refuse to use any of the existing namespaces.
For example, every location is supposed to have a unique street address. Why not normalize all streets into a DNS-compatible form, spaces to hypens, 'street' spelled out, etc, so that software can turn any street address into predefined name...and then let residents buy theirs?
Likewise, all radio stations in the US have unique call letters. Why isn't there a.radio.us namespace, managed by the FCC, and you get your call letters?
Instead, they keep inventing new ones, ones that are entirely meaningless, like the recent.co one, and every trademark owner and company leaps in and has to buy another domain, and confusion is not reduced in the least.
Oh, speaking of trademarks...there two dozen trademark categories. Why not give each of those a namespace? So Apple Music and Apple Computers, for example, have their own domain?
I'm all for saying 'we shouldn't give big government handouts to businesses', and I'd much rather the government simply ran and maintained the wires themselves.
What the person you're arguing with seems to be saying, however, is 'Big government handouts rock, but the government shouldn't try to put any conditions on them!'.
Which, frankly, is not only not a way to fight dictatorships, but is slipping into outright fascism itself. It's one thing for the government to pay companies to do things...we can debate that, and to what extent, but the idea that government exists to give big business money for no reason is just flatly insane.
Of course, I actually think the point of the government is to regulate things, and I'd have no problem with regulating ISPs even if they weren't using all sorts of public resources, but were just magically somehow regional monopolies.
But even the most rapid libertarian should see that 'Hey, we've given you the right to use public property, and in return you have to carry all content neutrally' is entirely reasonable. But decades of corporatism has drilled into people's head 'People can do whatever they want with their property', so much they're even applying it here, where it's not private property.
If they don't like "the terms of use" associated with being a government-subsidized monopoly, they are free to "build their own" Internet and run the lines over their own land.
Amen.
ISPs can stop bitching about 'their property' when I have the right to attach a CAT-6 cable to a telephone pole and string it across town. Oh, sorry, that's a government granted monopoly? Well, the government granted monopoly can do whatever we say or take their wires off our land.
The wireless carriers can just "build their own" airwaves, I guess.
Perhaps they can use semaphores. Like Discworld's 'clacks'. Or perhaps laser communication, the visible spectrum is free to use.
It's utterly amazing how decades of the corporate media has so internalized 'private property rights' in everyone's brain that they'll just spit it out like zombies. Like people of the US don't own the public right of ways and the public airwaves, and license ISPs to operate over them.
Less than 0.1% of the network was funded by taxpayers. Most of the burden (i.e. trillions of dollars) came from corporations expanding the network over the last 90-100 years, first as analog lines, then 56k-capable digital, and more recently copper, coaxial, and fiber (CATV and internet).
And almost every fucking inch of it is via government granted right of ways.
They want a private network, they can remove their goddamn telephone poles from my road and wires running across my property.
And then we'll let them do whatever the hell they want with private wires they string up across whatever private property will give them permission to string them up.
Yeah, and this is stupid anyway. It's pretty easy to start connections to sites fast and then gradually slow them slightly, so everyone's web browsing has blazing speeds...until they transfer more than 10 megs in a minute, at which point their speed get slightly slowed, or at least put second in the queue.
Or, even better, forget IPs...everyone gets QoS'd...except the first X packets every minute, which should be about 1/10th of the total bandwidth they have. The people still on the first 1/10th compete with each other, the people on the other 9/10th compete with each other.
And even add another segment in there, based on the day. Use more than 1/10th your max bandwidth for the entire day, you end up competing in that bracket. Or perhaps just count hold long they were in the minute-based 9/10th bracket. More than 300 minutes there in the last 24 hours, bump them down.
You don't even need to know anything about protocols at all. It's entire possibly to be 'fair' without being discriminatory towards protocols at all. Just count packets, and as the packets go up, bump them down in the QoS list, so that someone who just wants to check their email can do so very quickly.
And no one is 'capped' at all. You're just allocating resources first to the people who haven't used much, and then the heavy users get access to them.
I volunteer at a community theater, and last weekend the town had a festival and we opened and ran public domain movies all day, five dollars to enter, you could go in and out all day.
Originally, we were going to stamp people's hands, but that was shot down because, and I quote, 'People can lick their hand and transfer the stamp to someone else's hand'.
Ignoring all the silliness with that idea (The stamp is backwards, the stamp is then very smeared.), at some point you have to say 'Who the hell cares if someone gets in for free? It's a five dollar ticket that costs us nothing! The show is free for us!'.
At some point, you're spending more time and money monitoring and controlling people then they'd actually scam from you.
Erm, I think a better word would be 'underinformed'.
I mean, they're upset because of something that, somewhere, in some universe, might actually be illegal. There is some gradient of 'battery', and hitting people with, for example, a water balloon is indeed battery. Hitting someone with a very thin film of soap, especially a slow moving and not-under-your-control one, shouldn't be illegal, but I can comprehend some sort of screwy law that makes hitting anyone, with anything, at all, illegal. (I know the same gradient exist for touch, and the police will often used any touch at all as a pretext for arresting people on 'battery'.)
OTOH, I can't comprehend how having a backpack is illegal, nor can I comprehend how having the telephone number of a lawyer is. The second, access to a lawyer, is something that the government must provide people in the first place! (Yes, that's the same in Canada.)
So, yes, people are 'misinformed', and should be fucking livid, instead of just 'ha ha, the cops think bubbles are illegal'.
The only "correction" I made was to point out that the First Amendment does not say you may say whatever you wish about someone, which is absolutely true.
And then you went on a totally unrelated comment, and in fact the rest of your post, about laws protecting people from 'ridicule', laws which DO NOT EXIST. There is no law, at all, that protects people from ridicule, and no one can sue because they were ridiculed. People can sue because they were libeled or slandered, which in the US requires lies.
Unless, and this is entirely possible, you're a fool who ran two entirely unrelated sentences together in one paragraph, and saying one sentence about American and then another talking about Canadian law, which the parent post wasn't talking about at all.
Although even if that's what you meant, you're still wrong. The Canadian defamation laws are fairly close to America's, except that the truth isn't a total excuse, which means sometimes people can get sued for true things. The laws have nothing to do with 'ridicule', they, and America's laws also, have to do with harm. It's just that Canada lets people assert they were harmed by someone saying true things about them, whereas the US doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, and all those civilizations already were making copper, quite a lot of it. And had giant public-works projects that including moving water around. Perfect for power-generating waterwheels.
All you really need to do is demonstrate how to insulate and wrap copper wire, spin it around in a magnetic field, and show it moves metal somewhere else. From there, it's easy to invent the telegraph, and they could have an 'electrical grid' from their water supply in a year if they wanted it. You don't really even need to 'store' the power...you just put the telegraph stations next to the continually-turning waterwheels.
And soon they'd figure out 'relays', (Which are, after all, just tiny telegraphs...click click click.) so they could just run the wire to a way-station with a waterwheel there, and 'boast' the signal.
Anyone who wants to figure out what we'd do in such circumstances needs to go read on the 1632 boards, who have all sorts of science discussion based around the 1632 series, when a town from 2000 gets thrown back in time to 1632.
They were downgrading from 2000, and essentially went back to the start of the industrial revolution.
But it wouldn't take much longer to go forward to that point, pretending none of the modern world existed. Any idiot can make copper and a waterwheel or a steam engine, and, tada, power.
Hell, just Roman-level engineering would put you ahead of everyone. Like if you've gotten a river that's below where you need water to be, you build a waterwheel, use it to lift some water straight up, high enough to run to where you need it. You don't need any fancy 'smelting' for that, you can build it out of wood.
see Hurricane Katrina
You're an idiot. New Orlean's was only at 'the point of violence' in racists' fevered dreams. In fact, crime, except for 'looting', aka, taking food from closed stores, was near zero.
most urban folks would fan out into the surrounding rural areas, but would have no way to survive or support themselves. Rural folks would have to put them down in order to defend themselves.
Or, more likely, responsible people would shoot you for shooting at homeless people, and then offer them work at the various farms which had ramped up production.
You're one of those assholes who thinks everyone in a city is some subhuman welfare recipient, aren't you?
And, FYI: Cities have much more food stores than the countryside, so in your delusional fantasy you damn well better hope civilization collapses in mid-summer so rural areas actually have enough to harvest feed themselves and pack for the winter, because otherwise all the damn food is sitting in city warehouses and you'll starve to death if the food shipments store mid-winter.
To clear up #4, people have 'likeness rights'. You can't use a photograph of them to sell something.
They have to be recognizable, it has to be specifically of them, and it has to imply, in some manner, that they're endorsing something. It's what licensed sports game have to pay for, in addition to the team names and logos.
Which is why the paparazzi aren't covered...they're taking pictures of him to sell as pictures of him, not to use in some adverting campaign he didn't agree to.
There's also a 'privacy right' that's in the same general thing...but that's more anti-harrassment. You do not have permission to follow non-public people and take pictures of them specifically. This doesn't apply to public people, somehow, and only applies if you're publishing the photos publicly. (As opposed to private investigators, for example.)
I suspect what these people are is trying to is something pretty close to 'Likeness rights' for Stonehenge, but there are no likeness rights for anything but people.
This blanket mistrust of a well-designed electronic voting system as an alternate to error-prone, manually recounted ballots that are validated (or invalidated) by the whim of the election officials who most certainly have a horse in the race smacks of foolishness and ludditism, especially on a tech site like Slashdot.
No, it really just demonstrates we know a fuckload more about computer than you, and know it's impossible for a unprivileged user to know an administrator hasn't tampered with a machine, regardless of how 'open' the hypothetical software running on such a machine is.
You cannot see software. You cannot test software externally. It's called 'virtualization'. There is no conceivable way to determine a machine does what the person who set up the machine says it does, and nothing more. It's not even theoretically possible from the outside.
Any Turing-complete computer can be simulate another, and run programs on that simulation, and any such mimic program can 'hack' the program running on the machine it's mimicking, and there is no way to stop this or detect this. And that's just the extreme hypothetically-impossible-to-detect case, there's a lot simpler ways to tamper that are more detectable in theory, but still functionally undetectable, like a BIOS injection.
(And if you're thinking that 'from the outside' means there's a way to detect it otherwise...yes, if we're willing to let people disassemble voting machines and all the chips in then before voting. This does not seem reasonable.)
'OPEN CODE' IS MEANINGLESS BECAUSE YOU DO NOT, AND CANNOT, HAVE A WAY TO SEE THE VOTING COMPUTER IS RUNNING THAT CODE, AND JUST THAT CODE.
All these other 'sensitive' machines you're talking about are set up by people who have no reason to have malicious motives, and anything they did would be easily detectable. Banks want ATMs that are truthful, having them steal from customers really isn't a good business model. But you'll note we actually have cameras on said machines so we can see if the stuff that was given them actually happened if there's any problem.
With elections, though, the miscounting is undetectable.
The fact a tech site such as slashdot, with people who know a lot about computers, has a higher percentage of people who have huge issues with electronic voting than the general population should tell you something.
And yet you trust that the bank hasn't screwed up your transactions every time you go talk to them, or been stolen by all the thieves and scammers out there. Why?
Because I can see the transactions they assert I've made, you utter nimrod. And require them to document them, which they mail me every month, and I can add up and see if they've messed up.
I cannot see how a computer told another computer how I voted.
We use computers every day to track, monitor, validate, and secure data that is WAY more sensitive than "who i voted for"
The idea that how 'sensitive' a vote is is what we care about really sorta demonstrates how stupid you are.
Keeping the ballot secret is moderately important, but not as important as ensuring the actual vote was tallied correctly, which you managed to not address at all.
Unless your 'solution' was to make every vote entirely public, and then count them up, which would, indeed, be entirely correct and impossible to tamper with. But at that point computers are an absurd overkill.
half the people around you put a goddamned bumper sticker on their car or sign on their lawn so you KNOW who they fucking voted for, for christ's sake.
Hey, dumbass, that's fine for candidates in areas where they are acceptable. But some people being able to assert who they did vote for is not the same as votes being public...people can lie, and of course a lot of them don't tell who they vote for.
It's rather hilarious you mention 'Tammany Hall' as an aspect of 'paper vote tampering', when, of course, almost no paper ballot tampering happened at all. The voter fraud there was giving people money and, in turn, telling them who to vote for.(1) And threaten people into voting that way, because they knew who you voted for.
You know, the type of voter fraud that works best if votes are public.
1) And having ineligible people vote, or people vote under fake names, neither of which has anything to do with the type of voting.
But there actually is a copyright on a web site. I mean, the Met, or someone they paid, did make it, very recently. (Compared to their actual art, that is.) Likewise, someone took those pictures.
You can take pictures at the Met for free of uncopyrighted work. Go in with a tripod and take whatever non-flash pictures you want.
You just can't use their professionally taken photographs from their website. I agree that it would be nice if museums would provide such pictures for free, but museums are chronically underfunded and need the cash from selling them, and no one's stopping anyone else from doing that, from taking a picture of every painting, and then putting them in the public domain on a web site, so blaming the museum for not doing that is a bit silly.(1)
I suspect, with you, they didn't quite understand what you were trying to do with screenshots of their site. It probably got forwarded to the 'He wants to reprint our pictures in a book' lawyer, and they sent you the normal fees, not understanding you weren't trying to sell an art book.
1) I do, however, sharply criticize any museum that does stop people from taking their own pictures.
Well, yes, that's the point.
If pictures of Stonehenge belong to Stonehenge (Or the organization running it.) then pictures of HertzaHaeon belong to HertzaHaeon.
In actual law, pictures belong to the people who take them, of course.
If you don't protect these sites, people will vandalize them. It's not like Stonehenge is the only English Heritage site either, there are plenty of castles, gardens monuments and what ever. It takes money to maintain them.
It takes paying a rent-a-cop to sit there and yell at people who get too close to stuff. That's it.
I don't understand why they need any budget beyond paying a guard to stand at the site and yell at people doing stuff they aren't allowed, and a guy to come along every week and cut the grass.
I'm pretty sure Stonehenge 'maintains' itself.
Now, if the British people want to turn those responsibilities over to third party, and thus the third party getting the right to build a souvenir stand next to it or and sell guided tours, that seems reasonable. Perhaps even charge for admission, although that seems dodgy. (You can functionally charge for admission by charging for parking, which seems more reasonable.)
The whole idea that they're 'in charge' of the site and can claim to 'own' Stonehenge is a bit disturbing, though. The British people own Stonehenge.
Frankly, I'm not a big fan of 'privatizing' historic sites, and I'm certainly not a big fan of letting these companies do whatever they want,. especially when they still have a huge subside from the government! The US, amazingly enough for a country much farther to the right than the UK, still manages to run its own historic sites, or has grant-supported non-profits do it, and often don't even charge any admission.
I mean, frickin Stone Mountain, which is a giant complex built around a historic site, has a $10 parking pass (Which is the same price as Stonehenge...but for a carload of people. Or you can walk in for free.), which lets you into all the public areas with hiking trails, picnic areas, lasers shows (Actual recent man-made things that cost money to build and maintain.), and, guess what? You can take all the pictures of the mountain you want.
They can assert their rights as a condition of entry to the property. This does happen also on entry to various museums which may explicitly forbid all photography or just commercial photography. If you photograph Stonehenge from somewhere else (especially from public land), then there can be no objection or claim to copyright.
This is what is, frankly, nonsense.
There are only two reasons to forbid photography in a museum:
One is banning flash photography to stop damage to paintings. This is clearly a stupid rational for something outside, and I would assume almost all photographs of Stonehenge are taken without a flash anyway.
Two is if there are things still copyright. Which is an even stupider reason for this.
I went to the Museum of Modern Art , and could take non-flash photography of all works except, strangely, a single one, because it was on loan and still under copyright. (It was some sort of shark in a case.)
This group might have some legal basis for restricting photography, you can indeed stop people from taking pictures on your 'property', but at that point Stonehenge needs to be taken away from their management and given to someone else. They don't actually 'own' Stonehenge, they're just running the property on behave of the British government, and if they're going to act like this, they should be removed from that.
This is, incidentally, different than restricting someone from using it as a trademark, which the British government could do if they wanted.
You know those 'boxes' you're talking about?
They're ACTUAL THINGS. You can see them. You can secure the doors and makes sure no one walks in or out with one.
You know computers? With all the stuff inside that's just electronic signals? And how parts of the computer can change those signals?
Do the damn math. One of those is much harder to secure than the other, and the fact we've had some physical security errors doesn't mean signals in a computer are anywhere near as tamper-resistant as actual objects we can watch the entire time and control.
The idea you can make signals inside a computer that no one can see 'transparent' show you're, I dunno, rather stupid. Show me exactly how I can see what software is actually running on a computer and, fine, we'll do it your way. Transparent cases and flashing lights? How exactly do you think computers work? NO ONE CAN SEE WHAT A COMPUTER IS DOING.
It is perfectly easy to build a physical system that people can see every aspect of. You have a ballot box away from everyone, where no one can tamper with it, you send people one at a time to put votes, you open it up in front of everyone and pull out the ballots one at a time and count them.
And you can't monitor voting in realtime, you loon. Or you'll know how people voted.
For paper ballots, that means you have multiple little old lady volunteers at every precinct watching the vote counts. For electronic ballots, that means you have multiple PhDs at every machine disassembling it for electron microscopy.
That, really, is what it boils down to. You cannot trust a process unless you can see every step of it.
I can, in theory, see every step of paper ballot counting. Yes, yes, sometimes things get...dodgy, but usually you can see they got dodgy and complain and do something about it, and a large section of the system has to be corrupt. You can solve all problems with extra poll workers.
I cannot see electronic voting. Period. It is physically impossible for me to see part of the process. Not 'hard', not 'difficult', but I cannot, under any circumstances, see my vote sitting a machine after I leave it. (Whereas I can watch the ballot box, and see nothing leaves it during the day, and see all votes that leave it at the end get counted.)
For other processes we could build a system that was secure enough...for example, we could have a big counter on the wall, and when you pushed a button, a bell went off at your booth and it went up by one, and people could watch that, and see the amount only changes upward, and only by one, and only when a bell goes off. We could build an 'electronic tallying system' that allows you to watch the process. It's functionally the same as a cash register.
But we can't make a secret ballot that is watchable and is electronic. Paper ballots work solely because they have the property that you can put them in a box, shuffle them up, and know they're all there later to be counted if no one has taken anything from the box.
This is not a property that is replicable in computers. (No, I won't get into why you can't do that it via hashing, but essentially that either results in you just knowing that some vote labeled 'yours' was counted, which could have been anything the computer put in, or it reveals your vote, which means now people can be threatened for their vote, undoing the entire point of a secret ballot.)
And, also, um...in what universe were the Republicans in the lead in the 2006 election? Even well before the election, it was obvious the Democrats would gain ground. I suspect he accidentally included that one.
There's a certain group of people who likes to see a conspiracy between Republicans and Diebold, which may or may not exist, I dunno. It really does seem a bad idea to have an electronic voting company that's clearly partisan, and holds political fundraisers.
But the entire idea of having computers count votes is just incredibly stupid to start with, and that has nothing to do with any political party. Anyone who thinks this is a partisan issue needs to have their head examined. The people making it a partisan issue just make it more likely for Republican voters to dismiss the concerns, instead of looking at the demonstrable fact that you cannot trust a computer that someone else built and programmed, no matter how much it is 'checked'.
I'll assume you weren't talking to me, as quite obviously I couldn't have modded you down, because people can't post and moderate in the same discussion.
Regardless, you shouldn't have been modded down, and they used the scummy 'Overrated' mod to keep from being metamodded. Anyone who does 'Overrated' to an unrated post needs to have their mod privs removed.
There is no way to check a computer is doing what you think it does, ever, under any circumstances. Anyone who thinks there is is delusional. You would need the ability to take silicon apart.
It is not possible to demonstrate that hardware has not been tampered with without an electron scanning microscope, and it is not possible to demonstrate that software hasn't been tampered with without external hardware. (And it's a bad idea to let people hook up their computer to the voting computer with full memory access and disc access for patently obvious reasons.)
And even then you have to be sure you checked everywhere. Did you take apart each chip in the video card?
But don't fall for the 'paper trail' nonsense. What you actually want, and you need to think about it like this, is paper voting, period. That's what it's called.
People, voting with paper ballots. Paper voting.
Now, those paper ballots might be printed by a computer, where you punch in stuff and it writes one out, but that doesn't matter at all. The vote is not the computer, the vote is the ballot. If the computer screws up, you void that ballot and get a new one.
Well, the problem is that the DNS namespace people refuse to use any of the existing namespaces.
For example, every location is supposed to have a unique street address. Why not normalize all streets into a DNS-compatible form, spaces to hypens, 'street' spelled out, etc, so that software can turn any street address into predefined name...and then let residents buy theirs?
Likewise, all radio stations in the US have unique call letters. Why isn't there a .radio.us namespace, managed by the FCC, and you get your call letters?
Instead, they keep inventing new ones, ones that are entirely meaningless, like the recent .co one, and every trademark owner and company leaps in and has to buy another domain, and confusion is not reduced in the least.
Oh, speaking of trademarks...there two dozen trademark categories. Why not give each of those a namespace? So Apple Music and Apple Computers, for example, have their own domain?
I'm all for saying 'we shouldn't give big government handouts to businesses', and I'd much rather the government simply ran and maintained the wires themselves.
What the person you're arguing with seems to be saying, however, is 'Big government handouts rock, but the government shouldn't try to put any conditions on them!'.
Which, frankly, is not only not a way to fight dictatorships, but is slipping into outright fascism itself. It's one thing for the government to pay companies to do things...we can debate that, and to what extent, but the idea that government exists to give big business money for no reason is just flatly insane.
Of course, I actually think the point of the government is to regulate things, and I'd have no problem with regulating ISPs even if they weren't using all sorts of public resources, but were just magically somehow regional monopolies.
But even the most rapid libertarian should see that 'Hey, we've given you the right to use public property, and in return you have to carry all content neutrally' is entirely reasonable. But decades of corporatism has drilled into people's head 'People can do whatever they want with their property', so much they're even applying it here, where it's not private property.
If they don't like "the terms of use" associated with being a government-subsidized monopoly, they are free to "build their own" Internet and run the lines over their own land.
Amen.
ISPs can stop bitching about 'their property' when I have the right to attach a CAT-6 cable to a telephone pole and string it across town. Oh, sorry, that's a government granted monopoly? Well, the government granted monopoly can do whatever we say or take their wires off our land.
The wireless carriers can just "build their own" airwaves, I guess.
Perhaps they can use semaphores. Like Discworld's 'clacks'. Or perhaps laser communication, the visible spectrum is free to use.
It's utterly amazing how decades of the corporate media has so internalized 'private property rights' in everyone's brain that they'll just spit it out like zombies. Like people of the US don't own the public right of ways and the public airwaves, and license ISPs to operate over them.
Less than 0.1% of the network was funded by taxpayers. Most of the burden (i.e. trillions of dollars) came from corporations expanding the network over the last 90-100 years, first as analog lines, then 56k-capable digital, and more recently copper, coaxial, and fiber (CATV and internet).
And almost every fucking inch of it is via government granted right of ways.
They want a private network, they can remove their goddamn telephone poles from my road and wires running across my property.
And then we'll let them do whatever the hell they want with private wires they string up across whatever private property will give them permission to string them up.
Yeah, and this is stupid anyway. It's pretty easy to start connections to sites fast and then gradually slow them slightly, so everyone's web browsing has blazing speeds...until they transfer more than 10 megs in a minute, at which point their speed get slightly slowed, or at least put second in the queue.
Or, even better, forget IPs...everyone gets QoS'd...except the first X packets every minute, which should be about 1/10th of the total bandwidth they have. The people still on the first 1/10th compete with each other, the people on the other 9/10th compete with each other.
And even add another segment in there, based on the day. Use more than 1/10th your max bandwidth for the entire day, you end up competing in that bracket. Or perhaps just count hold long they were in the minute-based 9/10th bracket. More than 300 minutes there in the last 24 hours, bump them down.
You don't even need to know anything about protocols at all. It's entire possibly to be 'fair' without being discriminatory towards protocols at all. Just count packets, and as the packets go up, bump them down in the QoS list, so that someone who just wants to check their email can do so very quickly.
And no one is 'capped' at all. You're just allocating resources first to the people who haven't used much, and then the heavy users get access to them.
Yeah, ISPs want to have it both ways. I don't see why they're able to get away with that.
Are they a telephone company, or are they a newspaper? Pick one. Don't get to be both.
I volunteer at a community theater, and last weekend the town had a festival and we opened and ran public domain movies all day, five dollars to enter, you could go in and out all day.
Originally, we were going to stamp people's hands, but that was shot down because, and I quote, 'People can lick their hand and transfer the stamp to someone else's hand'.
Ignoring all the silliness with that idea (The stamp is backwards, the stamp is then very smeared.), at some point you have to say 'Who the hell cares if someone gets in for free? It's a five dollar ticket that costs us nothing! The show is free for us!'.
At some point, you're spending more time and money monitoring and controlling people then they'd actually scam from you.
Erm, I think a better word would be 'underinformed'.
I mean, they're upset because of something that, somewhere, in some universe, might actually be illegal. There is some gradient of 'battery', and hitting people with, for example, a water balloon is indeed battery. Hitting someone with a very thin film of soap, especially a slow moving and not-under-your-control one, shouldn't be illegal, but I can comprehend some sort of screwy law that makes hitting anyone, with anything, at all, illegal. (I know the same gradient exist for touch, and the police will often used any touch at all as a pretext for arresting people on 'battery'.)
OTOH, I can't comprehend how having a backpack is illegal, nor can I comprehend how having the telephone number of a lawyer is. The second, access to a lawyer, is something that the government must provide people in the first place! (Yes, that's the same in Canada.)
So, yes, people are 'misinformed', and should be fucking livid, instead of just 'ha ha, the cops think bubbles are illegal'.
The only "correction" I made was to point out that the First Amendment does not say you may say whatever you wish about someone, which is absolutely true.
And then you went on a totally unrelated comment, and in fact the rest of your post, about laws protecting people from 'ridicule', laws which DO NOT EXIST. There is no law, at all, that protects people from ridicule, and no one can sue because they were ridiculed. People can sue because they were libeled or slandered, which in the US requires lies.
Unless, and this is entirely possible, you're a fool who ran two entirely unrelated sentences together in one paragraph, and saying one sentence about American and then another talking about Canadian law, which the parent post wasn't talking about at all.
Although even if that's what you meant, you're still wrong. The Canadian defamation laws are fairly close to America's, except that the truth isn't a total excuse, which means sometimes people can get sued for true things. The laws have nothing to do with 'ridicule', they, and America's laws also, have to do with harm. It's just that Canada lets people assert they were harmed by someone saying true things about them, whereas the US doesn't.