But everyone is telling me that Linux is just like Windows, but it's totally free and never gets any viruses. Shouldn't I dump all my Windows stuff?
Equivalence has been apparent for about five years, superiority of free software for two years or so.
Perhaps some more details on exactly how it will become "more stable, faster, and more secure", and perhaps a rough idea about when it will be available.
The future is indeterminant and you should use what's available now, but the trends are all in favor of free software. Free software already is more stable, faster and more secure than any Microsoft based software. The development model is better and the divergence in quality is going to grow faster unless Microsoft gets it's head out of it's ass. All of Microsoft's promises to break other people's software show that they are still wasting resources trying to harm others. They should be using those resources to improve their own offerings. In the mean time, the faster you get away from Microsoft, the better off you will be.
Businesses want to know that, in the event of the bus flattening the admin, they can get a replacement,
Your admin was run over by a bus? That's rare for two reasons. First, I've never heard of a M$ shop with a ratio of boxes to admins much better than 20:1. Second, 95% of all admin deaths reported in the last two years have been due to email worm induced exhaustion. Deaths from busses must be someware down around 0.0001% You must have a five 9 shop! Nice work.
On a serious note, any scripting that has bad or no comments is just as good as any other. The same can not be said about scripts with good comments. Lisp has been around for 30 years. Something dumb like M$ BASIC, now VB, has had dozens of incompatible incarnations. The old LISP will work next year, VB, dos.bat, or M$C# might not. In two or three years, the M$ stuff will not work at all, no tragic, low probability accident required.
The word possible situation is that if your proposal is screwed up because they use MS Office and you don't. It's worth the $100/seat to eliminate the risk.
I like how you got worst and word confused.
This is really no problem. Anyone can have one dinky M$ box in the corner when confronted by such ignorance. Most companies will take a pdf or text file. Proposals are, after all, text rather than type set publication. The person sending them out can be trained in Microsoft pain if the lost business justifies buying a $500 Dell preloaded with Windoze and Word every two or three years.
That one box is not a reasonable justification for going all Microsoft stupid. Free software is much better for everything else, especially email, web browsing and other forms of information sharing. The actual worst case scenerio is some stupid Microsoft Transmitted Disease comes in and blows out ALL of your proposals, inventory, customer lists, vendor lists and every other record you have. Even if you have backups, you will lose information and you have no idea when the net will once again be a safe place for you poor little M$ boxes. The last wave of viruses took out huge companies with competent staff and enough money to have the very latest and greatest M$ cruft. Microsoft has a place in games. Everywhere else, they are defeated and second rate. There's no reason or excuse for using Microsoft for corporate infrastructure anymore.
What these people are says is "Windows sucks, so we are sticking to Windows." This says it all:
Others include the different skills required of system administrators, incompatible applications, differing management tools, and a lack of cooperation among Microsoft and Linux vendors.... "Those things are gating factors keeping us from bringing Linux in-house," says Rich Plane, chief technologist for information services at Harris Corp.
... on the matter of interoperability at least, customers pin most of the blame on Microsoft. Almost nine of 10 respondents--88%--say Microsoft hasn't done enough to support Windows-Linux interoperability. Nearly an equal number believe it will be the Linux community that works out the interoperability problems.
So there you have it. M$ loads is crap with barbs so that lazy admins can't just use other software and have it work with M$. Because they never use other software and spend all their time memorizing M$'s forest of tabs and other inconveniece features, they never learn "other" management tools. M$ people, used to "ipconfig" would never try "ifconfig". I don't even want to think about why a right click to "network neighborhood" is where the GUI IP configuration is hidden. The nix world of/etc is so much easier by compairison. It's no wonder M$ admins are to taxed.
The constant chase forces M$ to break it's own implementations, print methods and what not. The net result is that Windoze gets more complex, less stable, and less functional every year. Why do people put up with such shit?
Microsoft is the source of your pain and 9 in 10 people realize it. The sooner you get away from Microsoft, the quicker your life gets easy.
I just finished reading that article when I saw this one and I had to laugh. Could not get to the Treo, nor do I have flash to see the artists sight. Oh well. Another co-incidence is that I finally managed to make k-pilot work through a serial cradle this morning. Hmmm, time to get up and do something real.
I've been out of a "real" job for more than a year. It's been hard and I'm not alone. With enough time, I have decided why I am where I am and what to do about it.
With companies offshoring all their engineering work AND screwing their customers at the same time, we are at war. The non free word, composed of MBA bean counters, "intelectual property" lawyers and other users are out to screw us all. The only answer for everyone is free software and direct service. This is a battle for survival, no mistake about it. The makers and creators of the things our former companies are selling must unite to recapture the value of their labor.
Adobe, Quark, Ituit are only small pieces of the puzzle. The larger picture includes software service to everyone. Lawyers, doctors, restaurants, manufacturers, God bless the survivors, and anyone who uses any kind of computer program. Each is a nitch waiting to be effectively served. Windoze costs $100, while a free operating system can be installed in an hour that can be billed to a home user at $50. The Gimp has been used by Hollywood to make movies such as Scooby-Doo, surely it's good enough for 90% of graphic designers. You can bill these people for set up and administration time and they too will be winners. The other 10% you can sell GPL'd modifications. Medical managment software available is the pits, expensive, insecure and clumsy. For doctors, there is GNUmed. Lawyers only need text editing. KOffice should be good enough for them, but there is also Star Office, Open Office and Correl's Word Perfect to tide them over if they need it. Of all the people in the world, they should know best about free formats. For every concievable group of computer user, there is superior and less expensive free software!
Get out there and take your money back! Fuck the people who have thrown you out onto the street. Simply sell your time and free software to people directly. When your customer needs something, make it happen. It's not as hard as it looks and it beats the hell out of some kind of second rate, no benefit shit work.
I like to take my entire music collection along, because apparently unlike you I don't know in the morning what I'd like to listen to in the afternoon.
Funny, I don't know what I want to listen to ever. That's why God made the random function. Just copy 256MB of random oggs to your compact flash and play them in random order. I like alphabetical and size orders. What more can you ask for?
OK, I'd ask for longer battery life, but a 12V to 5V converter for the car is going to solve that problem for me. I have not put the thing to the test yet, because I'm too poor to have bought anything more than 64MB of compact flash, but I know battery life lasts more than the hour or so of music 64 gives. Four AA nicads should hold out for another hour and a half. Two and a half hours is longer than most of my bike rides.
Try Ebay with the right search terms. You might even find a beauty with Debian already on it for $125. Let the dumbasses get WinXP pro on their Itanic, har har har. I will eat cake.
Has anybody noticed that music blips and skips A LOT when running on iTunes whenever you do ANYTHING else, even if it's just like opening Explorer or moving windows?
In order to notice that, I'd have to have a copy of Exploder on my desk. If I had one of those, I might also notice full screen popup adverts, bandwith draining trojans and blue screens of death. I got tired of Windblows a few years ago and have not had any of those problems since.
So, no, since then I have not had problems with my GUI, especially with something as hardware modest as sound files. Ogg rocks. DRM and M$ blow.
Our users expect choice, therefore a choice from Apple is bad!
Our users expect flexibility, therefore we will make sure nothing we make talks to ipod or itunes.
Itunes is too limited for our users who are so complex they only want M$.WMA.
Poop on all the closed source DRM gimped up garbage. Zaurus cost $200, plays mp3 and ogg and takes non DRM'd compact flash. Get Open Zaurus and you can mount up a nice ext2 filesystem for all your long filenames, archiving and all that. Get a $100 wifi card and the thing can talk to any music server you would like to set up. Now that is total flexibility, why would anyone settle for less?
Let's use your admirable system, but assume that DiBold implements it. DiBold can change the results within the accuracy of a hand count and change the result of an election. The memos leaked indicate that this was not only possible, but that it was easy to do.
The attitude of DiBold's staff is unacceptable. Here's two outright shockers:
Ken Clark, dismmising a concern about no password being needed to modify the audit logs, "Of course everyone knows perception is reality." The idiot then goes on to describing Microsoft pains and curse his users as stupid in complete ignorance of free alternatives that cause no pain.
Tyler says, "with regards to the entire NASED certification process, I can never quite get a handle on the relationship between "ostensible" and "reality."...:-) "
True, a GPL'd solution could do this as well, but when we start saying that no commercial product will work, we start to look like zealots who's primary goal is to get Free Software out everywhere.
That's not the first time a comercial software advocate has stooped to name calling. I'll ignore it because it adds nothing.
I'd like you to name one advantage of closed source software and tell me how this outwheighs the need for public transparency in the electoral process. I can easily show that closed source can defeat a paper trail. Can you show an advantage that makes this risk acceptable?
Any closes system can be comprimised by it's owner. A major disadvantage to closed comercial code is that it may contain backdoors. FTP logs from Di-bold machines with time stamps durring elections lends strong support to those who say that DiBold machines have backdoors. Because backdoors work without visible signs, there would be no reason to go to the expense of hand counting. Free software won't have any such mechanism unless it's illegally added.
The only way for a computing machine to be owned by it's physical owner is for it to be free and for the physical owner to be root. This applies to voting machines the same way it applies to personal computers. When DiBold or someone other than the election commision is root, someone other than the election commision runs the election. All they have to do is log in and change things where needed to acheive their ends. In a close election, a paper trail will not be able to prove the fraud, not even a paper trail where the voter has been handed a printed vote to stick into a box.
What possible advantage can their be to closed source that's more important than the integrity of the election? You can't point to code quality because free software has proven itself superior to it's comercial equivalents. You can't point to availability, because free software is filling all nitches already and will fill any nitch mandated by law. You can't even point to ease of use because the ballot layout is decided by the election comissions and free software will meet any demands placed on it. What are you left with? What am I missing that makes me a "Zealot"? What do you have to offer that justifies name calling?
"There are only two investors in this deal: BayStar Capital and the Royal Bank of Canada.
BayStar gets money from M$, so what's the point here? Oh, it's not us, it's the BSA or some other shell.
Well, well, M$ has it's hooks all into that bank. They have been dumb enough to use their software, though they have called in IBM to rescue them with z serries servers. In a few minutes, I might know how heavily those dummies have invested in the M$ ponzi scheme. I wonder if Star Office will faithfully run all of the silly Macros I had to promise to run in order to download this sheet (dasterdly deep link)? Nope and there's no mention of M$ in that sheet either. They sure want you to buy M$ stock, despite a history of overvaluation. For whatever reason Royal Bank of Canada is M$'s bitch.
I've had VERY bad experiences with CIBC(losing records and double charging large amounts etc.). Maybe it was only the fault of the local branch though, who knows.
Ha! I wonder if Microsoft is behind this too.
"SCO spokesman Blake Stowell echoed those sentiments, telling eWeek on Friday that Microsoft was not a vendor to Royal Bank of Canada through this deal. "There are only two vendors in this deal: SCO and Microsoft." (if you can't tell, I made that up).
It's kind of funny what kinds of people are running big tech companies. Two of the people on that page actually are bean counters by training. Two are engineers, but Mr. Bezos has an obvious thyroid condition which reduces him to his current state. The last one is a lawyer, yuck.
We all know that these companies make their way by keeping others from doing things, now we know why. When you count beans for a living, you start to think they have value, that you own them and that you might not want to share with others because there just are not enough to go around. Bring me back AtHome and a real peering internet. I'm sick of how these assholes are making the net look like broadcast TV.
Highlights the stupidity of central control and many laws. Would it not be great to be able to order a case of good wine from a French vinyard instead?
If it's M$, yawn, we all know better. Still, it's fun to say that M$ has finally defeated free beer in one US state.
If it's propriatory Unix, there's another lesson in it.
If it's free software, a speedy fix will be a great relief to all concerned.
If you are stuck in Mississippi, you may care. Then again, some people don't drink, they sniff glue instead.
The population of Canada is about an order of magitude smaller than the population of the US. The Election officials and staffers in the US are already overworked
I'll bet if we had just an order of magnitude more elections officials than Canada has, thing would work just fine. The only hard part would be printing up enough forged cards to stuff enough boxes to make a difference.
A simple improvement to electronic voting systems would print out a similar card to be inspected by the voter and depostited in a box. This would yeild the desired paper trail without hindering the efficency of electronic vote counting. It must be realized, however, that the minimum staff required does not change, because every election can be challenged. Dibold would love to sell that many printers as a mod, I'm sure. Are you listening, Dibold?
Louisiana was one of the first states to go Electronic. I've been creeped out by the no records left, electronic tweet-deet-lee-deet, vote casting for almost 10 years now. Beleive me, there has been some funny stuff associated with Louisana politics.
Long before the Bush/Gore fiasco Florida had borrowed some of these machines. It's amazing how forsightful they were. Dissapointingly, they had to come back because Edwin Edwards kept winning everything.
Cue music, Johny says, "There in the jailhouse now..."
Poor city planning defeats all fixes. The computer will tell you the same thing the radio or habit does when there's only one way to get there from here. Cities that have large walled in neghborhoods at their edges are impossible to get into or around.
New Orleans and Baton Rouge are good examples of good and bad planning. New Orleans, despite being built on a river that flows both north and south, works. It has a grid that starts with the ancient French quarter. The grid was expanded reasonably when the Americans arived in 1812 or so and continued to expand. It's streets curve with the river and are crossed by streets that look like spokes on a wheel. The city has filled the space between the Lake Ponchitrain and the Mississippi River gracefully, so that there are any number of large streets to get from one end to the other. Baton Rouge is cursed by Bayous. The north end of the city follows a rectangular grid that matches one section of the Mississippi River. It is navicable itself but matches up poorly with the much larger and growing southern half. The sothern part of the city is composed of several large neighborhoods oriented around bayous and rural routes that meet at crazy angles. One two lane road follows the river and only the interstate traverses them all. To get from one side of town to another, a person has to drive a crazy zig zag of short rural routes and the interstate which are always choked.
It has an effect on people. New Orleans is known for it's couteous and polite drivers. Baton Rouge is full of hot heads. Insurance companies do take note of driver attitudes and told me what I knew from simply driving in one of their publications.
Just try getting the people of Baton Rouge to buy a gadget that's going to tell them the interstate is clogged and there's no way around it. Ha! My 1970 VW van farts in your general direction.
The funding is to block out all but the spyware they are building. That way they can track the little nits and crush the ones with double plus ungood thoughts. You don't want people at a University thinking, do you? This makes Carnivore look innocent.
They are destroying what the internet should be. By placing a central inteligence at the core and forbidding alternate services, they are creating one giant collection of dumb terminals. Nice work Penn! Shame on you MIT for letting youself get tarred by association with this kind of junk.
How is it going to cut down on traffic if students are using Lionshare for class AND Kazasterwire for their friends?
That's easy, you expell the students who run Kaza and what not. It's not right, but it can be done. If your mac address does not give you away, a remote call through IE to get your prcessors UID will. My fear, soon to be realized, is that only "approved" applications will be alowed on campus networks.
Anonymous speech is integral to free speech. If there is no anonymous electronic publishing, there is no free elctronic speech. Campus networks were the last bastion of reasonable networking. Moves like this eliminate the last hope of a free internet over owned wires.
if you are going to be at a university, expect to be censored.
No, a place of learning is the last place anyone should tolerate censorship. Without free speech, there is no accademic freedom. Whithout accademic freedom you don't get an education, you get an indoctrination. A free state depends on real education. Without it, we are slaves. Censorship of electronic publishing is tantamount to book burning. Shame on any University that implements this shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Equivalence has been apparent for about five years, superiority of free software for two years or so.
Perhaps some more details on exactly how it will become "more stable, faster, and more secure", and perhaps a rough idea about when it will be available.
The future is indeterminant and you should use what's available now, but the trends are all in favor of free software. Free software already is more stable, faster and more secure than any Microsoft based software. The development model is better and the divergence in quality is going to grow faster unless Microsoft gets it's head out of it's ass. All of Microsoft's promises to break other people's software show that they are still wasting resources trying to harm others. They should be using those resources to improve their own offerings. In the mean time, the faster you get away from Microsoft, the better off you will be.
Your admin was run over by a bus? That's rare for two reasons. First, I've never heard of a M$ shop with a ratio of boxes to admins much better than 20:1. Second, 95% of all admin deaths reported in the last two years have been due to email worm induced exhaustion. Deaths from busses must be someware down around 0.0001% You must have a five 9 shop! Nice work.
On a serious note, any scripting that has bad or no comments is just as good as any other. The same can not be said about scripts with good comments. Lisp has been around for 30 years. Something dumb like M$ BASIC, now VB, has had dozens of incompatible incarnations. The old LISP will work next year, VB, dos.bat, or M$C# might not. In two or three years, the M$ stuff will not work at all, no tragic, low probability accident required.
I like how you got worst and word confused.
This is really no problem. Anyone can have one dinky M$ box in the corner when confronted by such ignorance. Most companies will take a pdf or text file. Proposals are, after all, text rather than type set publication. The person sending them out can be trained in Microsoft pain if the lost business justifies buying a $500 Dell preloaded with Windoze and Word every two or three years.
That one box is not a reasonable justification for going all Microsoft stupid. Free software is much better for everything else, especially email, web browsing and other forms of information sharing. The actual worst case scenerio is some stupid Microsoft Transmitted Disease comes in and blows out ALL of your proposals, inventory, customer lists, vendor lists and every other record you have. Even if you have backups, you will lose information and you have no idea when the net will once again be a safe place for you poor little M$ boxes. The last wave of viruses took out huge companies with competent staff and enough money to have the very latest and greatest M$ cruft. Microsoft has a place in games. Everywhere else, they are defeated and second rate. There's no reason or excuse for using Microsoft for corporate infrastructure anymore.
Others include the different skills required of system administrators, incompatible applications, differing management tools, and a lack of cooperation among Microsoft and Linux vendors. ... "Those things are gating factors keeping us from bringing Linux in-house," says Rich Plane, chief technologist for information services at Harris Corp.
... on the matter of interoperability at least, customers pin most of the blame on Microsoft. Almost nine of 10 respondents--88%--say Microsoft hasn't done enough to support Windows-Linux interoperability. Nearly an equal number believe it will be the Linux community that works out the interoperability problems.
So there you have it. M$ loads is crap with barbs so that lazy admins can't just use other software and have it work with M$. Because they never use other software and spend all their time memorizing M$'s forest of tabs and other inconveniece features, they never learn "other" management tools. M$ people, used to "ipconfig" would never try "ifconfig". I don't even want to think about why a right click to "network neighborhood" is where the GUI IP configuration is hidden. The nix world of /etc is so much easier by compairison. It's no wonder M$ admins are to taxed.
The constant chase forces M$ to break it's own implementations, print methods and what not. The net result is that Windoze gets more complex, less stable, and less functional every year. Why do people put up with such shit?
Microsoft is the source of your pain and 9 in 10 people realize it. The sooner you get away from Microsoft, the quicker your life gets easy.
I just finished reading that article when I saw this one and I had to laugh. Could not get to the Treo, nor do I have flash to see the artists sight. Oh well. Another co-incidence is that I finally managed to make k-pilot work through a serial cradle this morning. Hmmm, time to get up and do something real.
With companies offshoring all their engineering work AND screwing their customers at the same time, we are at war. The non free word, composed of MBA bean counters, "intelectual property" lawyers and other users are out to screw us all. The only answer for everyone is free software and direct service. This is a battle for survival, no mistake about it. The makers and creators of the things our former companies are selling must unite to recapture the value of their labor.
Adobe, Quark, Ituit are only small pieces of the puzzle. The larger picture includes software service to everyone. Lawyers, doctors, restaurants, manufacturers, God bless the survivors, and anyone who uses any kind of computer program. Each is a nitch waiting to be effectively served. Windoze costs $100, while a free operating system can be installed in an hour that can be billed to a home user at $50. The Gimp has been used by Hollywood to make movies such as Scooby-Doo, surely it's good enough for 90% of graphic designers. You can bill these people for set up and administration time and they too will be winners. The other 10% you can sell GPL'd modifications. Medical managment software available is the pits, expensive, insecure and clumsy. For doctors, there is GNUmed. Lawyers only need text editing. KOffice should be good enough for them, but there is also Star Office, Open Office and Correl's Word Perfect to tide them over if they need it. Of all the people in the world, they should know best about free formats. For every concievable group of computer user, there is superior and less expensive free software!
Get out there and take your money back! Fuck the people who have thrown you out onto the street. Simply sell your time and free software to people directly. When your customer needs something, make it happen. It's not as hard as it looks and it beats the hell out of some kind of second rate, no benefit shit work.
Funny, I don't know what I want to listen to ever. That's why God made the random function. Just copy 256MB of random oggs to your compact flash and play them in random order. I like alphabetical and size orders. What more can you ask for?
OK, I'd ask for longer battery life, but a 12V to 5V converter for the car is going to solve that problem for me. I have not put the thing to the test yet, because I'm too poor to have bought anything more than 64MB of compact flash, but I know battery life lasts more than the hour or so of music 64 gives. Four AA nicads should hold out for another hour and a half. Two and a half hours is longer than most of my bike rides.
As long as Debian lives, Alpha lives. Apt-get you something nice.
In order to notice that, I'd have to have a copy of Exploder on my desk. If I had one of those, I might also notice full screen popup adverts, bandwith draining trojans and blue screens of death. I got tired of Windblows a few years ago and have not had any of those problems since.
So, no, since then I have not had problems with my GUI, especially with something as hardware modest as sound files. Ogg rocks. DRM and M$ blow.
Our users expect flexibility, therefore we will make sure nothing we make talks to ipod or itunes.
Itunes is too limited for our users who are so complex they only want M$.WMA.
Poop on all the closed source DRM gimped up garbage. Zaurus cost $200, plays mp3 and ogg and takes non DRM'd compact flash. Get Open Zaurus and you can mount up a nice ext2 filesystem for all your long filenames, archiving and all that. Get a $100 wifi card and the thing can talk to any music server you would like to set up. Now that is total flexibility, why would anyone settle for less?
The attitude of DiBold's staff is unacceptable. Here's two outright shockers:
Ken Clark, dismmising a concern about no password being needed to modify the audit logs, "Of course everyone knows perception is reality." The idiot then goes on to describing Microsoft pains and curse his users as stupid in complete ignorance of free alternatives that cause no pain.
Tyler says, "with regards to the entire NASED certification process, I can never quite get a handle on the relationship between "ostensible" and "reality."... :-) "
The more you read, the worse it gets.
That's not the first time a comercial software advocate has stooped to name calling. I'll ignore it because it adds nothing.
I'd like you to name one advantage of closed source software and tell me how this outwheighs the need for public transparency in the electoral process. I can easily show that closed source can defeat a paper trail. Can you show an advantage that makes this risk acceptable?
Any closes system can be comprimised by it's owner. A major disadvantage to closed comercial code is that it may contain backdoors. FTP logs from Di-bold machines with time stamps durring elections lends strong support to those who say that DiBold machines have backdoors. Because backdoors work without visible signs, there would be no reason to go to the expense of hand counting. Free software won't have any such mechanism unless it's illegally added.
The only way for a computing machine to be owned by it's physical owner is for it to be free and for the physical owner to be root. This applies to voting machines the same way it applies to personal computers. When DiBold or someone other than the election commision is root, someone other than the election commision runs the election. All they have to do is log in and change things where needed to acheive their ends. In a close election, a paper trail will not be able to prove the fraud, not even a paper trail where the voter has been handed a printed vote to stick into a box.
What possible advantage can their be to closed source that's more important than the integrity of the election? You can't point to code quality because free software has proven itself superior to it's comercial equivalents. You can't point to availability, because free software is filling all nitches already and will fill any nitch mandated by law. You can't even point to ease of use because the ballot layout is decided by the election comissions and free software will meet any demands placed on it. What are you left with? What am I missing that makes me a "Zealot"? What do you have to offer that justifies name calling?
BayStar gets money from M$, so what's the point here? Oh, it's not us, it's the BSA or some other shell.
Well, well, M$ has it's hooks all into that bank. They have been dumb enough to use their software, though they have called in IBM to rescue them with z serries servers. In a few minutes, I might know how heavily those dummies have invested in the M$ ponzi scheme. I wonder if Star Office will faithfully run all of the silly Macros I had to promise to run in order to download this sheet (dasterdly deep link)? Nope and there's no mention of M$ in that sheet either. They sure want you to buy M$ stock, despite a history of overvaluation. For whatever reason Royal Bank of Canada is M$'s bitch.
Ha! I wonder if Microsoft is behind this too.
"SCO spokesman Blake Stowell echoed those sentiments, telling eWeek on Friday that Microsoft was not a vendor to Royal Bank of Canada through this deal. "There are only two vendors in this deal: SCO and Microsoft." (if you can't tell, I made that up).
Bugs of a feather generally have the same cause.
We all know that these companies make their way by keeping others from doing things, now we know why. When you count beans for a living, you start to think they have value, that you own them and that you might not want to share with others because there just are not enough to go around. Bring me back AtHome and a real peering internet. I'm sick of how these assholes are making the net look like broadcast TV.
Who needs a new law while the old still is working? Silly boy, where did you get name like the Above?
I'll bet if we had just an order of magnitude more elections officials than Canada has, thing would work just fine. The only hard part would be printing up enough forged cards to stuff enough boxes to make a difference.
A simple improvement to electronic voting systems would print out a similar card to be inspected by the voter and depostited in a box. This would yeild the desired paper trail without hindering the efficency of electronic vote counting. It must be realized, however, that the minimum staff required does not change, because every election can be challenged. Dibold would love to sell that many printers as a mod, I'm sure. Are you listening, Dibold?
Long before the Bush/Gore fiasco Florida had borrowed some of these machines. It's amazing how forsightful they were. Dissapointingly, they had to come back because Edwin Edwards kept winning everything.
Cue music, Johny says, "There in the jailhouse now..."
Laugh.
New Orleans and Baton Rouge are good examples of good and bad planning. New Orleans, despite being built on a river that flows both north and south, works. It has a grid that starts with the ancient French quarter. The grid was expanded reasonably when the Americans arived in 1812 or so and continued to expand. It's streets curve with the river and are crossed by streets that look like spokes on a wheel. The city has filled the space between the Lake Ponchitrain and the Mississippi River gracefully, so that there are any number of large streets to get from one end to the other. Baton Rouge is cursed by Bayous. The north end of the city follows a rectangular grid that matches one section of the Mississippi River. It is navicable itself but matches up poorly with the much larger and growing southern half. The sothern part of the city is composed of several large neighborhoods oriented around bayous and rural routes that meet at crazy angles. One two lane road follows the river and only the interstate traverses them all. To get from one side of town to another, a person has to drive a crazy zig zag of short rural routes and the interstate which are always choked.
It has an effect on people. New Orleans is known for it's couteous and polite drivers. Baton Rouge is full of hot heads. Insurance companies do take note of driver attitudes and told me what I knew from simply driving in one of their publications.
Just try getting the people of Baton Rouge to buy a gadget that's going to tell them the interstate is clogged and there's no way around it. Ha! My 1970 VW van farts in your general direction.
The funding is to block out all but the spyware they are building. That way they can track the little nits and crush the ones with double plus ungood thoughts. You don't want people at a University thinking, do you? This makes Carnivore look innocent.
They are destroying what the internet should be. By placing a central inteligence at the core and forbidding alternate services, they are creating one giant collection of dumb terminals. Nice work Penn! Shame on you MIT for letting youself get tarred by association with this kind of junk.
That's easy, you expell the students who run Kaza and what not. It's not right, but it can be done. If your mac address does not give you away, a remote call through IE to get your prcessors UID will. My fear, soon to be realized, is that only "approved" applications will be alowed on campus networks.
Anonymous speech is integral to free speech. If there is no anonymous electronic publishing, there is no free elctronic speech. Campus networks were the last bastion of reasonable networking. Moves like this eliminate the last hope of a free internet over owned wires.
Time to move to free air.
No, a place of learning is the last place anyone should tolerate censorship. Without free speech, there is no accademic freedom. Whithout accademic freedom you don't get an education, you get an indoctrination. A free state depends on real education. Without it, we are slaves. Censorship of electronic publishing is tantamount to book burning. Shame on any University that implements this shit.