E-voting, of course, was a knee-jerk response to the problems Florida had with punch card ballots. Instead of fixing the system appropriately by requiring that any system demonstrate an acceptable error rate using random auditing, government went full bore into electronic voting because computers are cool.
Even paper ballots are subject to problems. Ballot stuffing can be carried out in two ways. One, stuff a few ballots for your preferred candidate into several strategic locations. Even though the number of ballots does not equal the number of voters you either must discard the entire box or accept the invalid ballots because you can't tell the difference. Either way is a win for the stuffer (assuming his candidate was going to lose that precinct without stuffing).
Alternatively, stuff a lot of ballots into the box. In this case you pretty much force the staff to invalidate the entire box because the fake votes outnumber the real votes.
The primary way to secure against this is individually numbered ballots where the ballot numbers in the box must match the ballot numbers recorded by the officials. The hack for this is just to make sure that your stuffed numbers match the numbers being used in the precinct. This takes 2 people and assumes that ballot numbers are sequential (they are in my experience). My precinct uses scantron so the way they deal with this is to watch the box to make sure that you only submit one ballot, but if you are using a pure paper system it should be possible for one or a few people to stuff the box, keeping in mind that even if they catch you putting them in, once they're in the box the entire box is contaminated.
The only problem is that it requires and ongoing, large scale war to provide enough veterans to keep the franchise from devolving to an oligarchy. It wouldn't work today because the percentage of veterans in society is quite small compared with the population.
Not quite, there is no requirement that the government service be strictly military service. It happens that the protagonist ended up in the Infantry, but the diplomatic corps (read, state department) is also government service. The biggest barrier to entry was the application process where applicants were actively discouraged from applying. However, if someone persisted through the application process they were guaranteed a role. Not the role they necessarily want, but some role. After a tour of duty of some number of years, barring special circumstances, a person was able to retire from service and be a citizen.
I prefer a different form of democracy espoused in a different Heinlein story. Voting in favor of a thing commits you to working on that thing. If you vote to go to war and that vote passes you report to the recruiting center the next day and are given your assignment. Heinlein only gives the war example, but I think it could be expanded to include other large-scale projects that commit the nation to a direction.
--
JimFive
I really like(d) the plain text message format of newsgroups with the ability to track read messages and thread the discussions. I also miss offline reading. Moving everything to html/ajax seems to force everything into a box that doesn't quite fit. For BBS style sites a straightforward nntp type protocol straight from the source (e.g. that isn't copied around the internet) would be ideal.
--
JimFive
Ok, I read the article and I don't get the excitement. Did Firefox just implement AppleScript?
Tell firefox send selected text to twitter
I mean, ok, the ability to have semi-natural language scripting is neat, and the ability to have it interact with the displayed document is neat, but once the initial golly-gee wears off, so what?
--
JimFive
Implementing a split system would require that a confirmed failed drug test would ban the athlete from the Pure Category for life. Anything less wouldn't work.
I disagree a bit. I think that the Pure (or as a previous poster called it, "Stock") category would garner greater respect because we like to imagine that we could do these things with enough effort. I think that the Unlimited category would become a spectacle like the WWE that no one took seriously.
When we moved into our current house (built ca. 1950) the meters were inside the basement. They have since been moved outside. So it is possible that the fireman in the basement was pulling the meter.
Also, How well does your thermal cam work from the outside into a basement. Is it possible for the fire to travel between the walls down into a finished basement?
So, you're saying that only the cheater should tell his or her spouse of the extramarital activity, and anyone else who does is an outlaw vigilante that should be punishes?
I don't think that's what is being said. Fortuny didn't call up the guys wife and say, "Hey" your husband is cheating on you. Fortuny is not the wife's friend saying, "Hey, I'm really sorry to have to tell you this but I saw your husband with a prostitute yesterday". He solicited under false pretences, and published, damaging photos and messages, purely for the punishment value of the act.
No, bringing an act to the attention of a person in a position to act is not being a vigilante. Trying to impose justice yourself would be vigilantism. Calling the cops is not being a vigilante, shooting the escaping criminal is.
Fortuny performed his so-called experiment purely for the malicious thrill that he got out of exposing (read: punishing) the respondents to his ad. The fact that he took it upon himself to punish behavior that society deems taboo is what makes this a form of vigilante justice.
You're gambling that real estate prices don't go down whenever you buy a home.
Not quite. Your residence is not an investment, your residence is a place to store you stuff (and yourself). If you plan on living in the same area for 5 years you are probably better off buying than renting, with the caveat that you must buy within your means. If your property value goes down but you aren't trying to sell your house, you don't care. You still get to live in it. It is still just as valuable to you this year as it was last year.
--
JimFive
That is technically true in the US, also. Exempt employees are not entitled to overtime pay. Exempt status includes: Managers, Professionals, and Sales. Just because you are salaried does not necessarily mean you are exempt, although your employer would like you to believe that it does.
The basic rules for exemptions:
Managers - Must supervise people, cannot do production work for more than 50% of their time.
Professionals - Position must require a professional college degree and some other criteria
Sales - Paid on commission. Total compensation must meet some guidelines regardless of the comission agreement.
Most IT people are forced in the Professional category by their employers to make them exempt. However, a lot of these jobs don't really "require" the degree (think Helpdesk). You can challenge your exempt status but if you lose you'll get fired and if you win you'll get fired a little later.
Note to later post RE: Walmart and managers. Calling someone a manager doesn't make them a manager. To be a manager you have to have people that report to you and you cannot perform the job functions of staff for more than a certain amount of your day(I think it's 50%). So, if you see someone wearing a pin that says "Assistant manager" and they're always stocking shelves the pin is lying.
The problem is that while most employers know this (Or at least their lawyers do) most employees do not.
(Most of this is based on some research I did into the FLSA about 10 years ago when working on a payroll system for a small business, it may be out of date)
Do it later when you have the time to commit to it, a motivational reason for doing it, and you don't have to worry about it affecting your GPA. The only people I knew at college that did ok in the language classes had already had 2+ years in high school.
Foreign language classes at University have two major problems:
1. They take up a huge amount of time. I don't just mean that they are a lot of work, but that they are time consuming.
2. They don't effectively teach you a foreign language unless you stick with it through at least 3 years.
Are you saying that the cyberbullies have the power to block my huge eraser, my block button, my infinite amount of potential names and identities, email addresses and accounts?
The consumer of the information is not the bullying target, it is the acquaintances of the target. Certainly you can erase the bully from your screen, but you can't erase the false information from the internet and the brains of the people who saw it.
The point is, if a cyber bully gets pictures of you it's because your dumb ass gave them the material to blackmail you with.
Or s/he bought a yearbook, or owns a camera and some decent photo manipulation software.
If a cyber bully gets your address its because your dumb ass gave it to them.
Or your parents have a listed telephone number, or he rides the same bus as you, or is a friend of a friend. A school is not some sort of huge anonymous society. It's a small, closed society where anyone can learn your name and who you associate with.
If they impersonate you, it's identity theft, and it can only happen if you are stupid enough to give all your information including your picture and signature.
I doubt it's (legally) identity theft if they don't use or SSN or apply for credit. And do you really think you need all that stuff to set up a fake myspace page under someone else's name? I doubt it. Set up a fake page with real picture/information, start off with a few normal teen-angst posts and then descend into anguished goatse. How hard do you think that is to fake? How hard do you think that is to get rid of? Once it's on the internet it is there, you can't delete it. Even if you can convince myspace to delete it, someone read it and saved it. Maybe it's in google cache. It's out there somewhere.
--
JimFive
I'm not trying to be a grammar nazi, but I notice that you are from Poland and thought you might appreciate a minor correction:
In the sentence:
we got for free in the meantime few frigates, few hundred Humvees, few Herculeses and F-16s
You should say "a few frigates, a few hundred Humvees..." etc.
When you use the article "a" it means the you received a small number of them. Without the "a" it implies that you received not enough of them. And while that latter may be true, I don't think it is quite what you meant to say.
I assume you know this, but when performing a dictionary attack you are presumed to have bypassed the login system and are comparing directly to the password storage mechanism. e.g. On an old (pre-shadow) Linux system you grab/etc/password and run a dictionary against it. -- JimFive
He's got the entire customer contact list. Our competition would pay at least $2500.00 for that.
Bull! Your competition already has contacts with your customers. The fact that you do business with a company is neither secret nor valuable.
He's got his email on there, Competition would love that as well.
Possibly, but stop storing documents in email. Email isn't a file system.
Also 2 gigs worth of one note files on specific projects being bid on, internal documents,etc...
Your CEO has 2G of files on his phone not much into sharing or security is he?
I'm betting to the right buyer his phone unlocked is worth at least $10,000.00 as it can generate at least a quarter million in additional sales and revenue.
Maybe, depending on what's in the emails, but $10,000 isn't a lot. And really, $250,000 isn't a lot of revenue, the small companies I have worked for were in the $10M to $20M revenue range so an extra 2% would be nice, but not worth going to jail over.
Oh I know of at least 4 companies around here that would love to get their hands on that info
I think you seriously overestimate how much that data is worth, and how much your competitors care about your company's future plans. -- JimFive
Simply neither I nor any one else who tries to lead a healthful life style should not have to subsidize others' bad choices.
Except that this is the entire point of insurance. Pooling risk. Those who use fewer services subsidize those who use more services. The extra that you pay buys you a bit of peace of mind in case you ever end up on the receiving end of the equation. -- JimFive
No you can't, because to be VP you have to be eligible to be president so once you've served more than 6 years as president you are not eligible to be VP.
-- JimFive
Interesting. If you type "What is the closest planet to the sun" the first result is Venus, which contains the text "second closest planet to the sun". It looks like they need to work on combined modifiers a little more.
--
JimFive
Slashdot Mirror
E-voting, of course, was a knee-jerk response to the problems Florida had with punch card ballots. Instead of fixing the system appropriately by requiring that any system demonstrate an acceptable error rate using random auditing, government went full bore into electronic voting because computers are cool.
Even paper ballots are subject to problems. Ballot stuffing can be carried out in two ways. One, stuff a few ballots for your preferred candidate into several strategic locations. Even though the number of ballots does not equal the number of voters you either must discard the entire box or accept the invalid ballots because you can't tell the difference. Either way is a win for the stuffer (assuming his candidate was going to lose that precinct without stuffing). Alternatively, stuff a lot of ballots into the box. In this case you pretty much force the staff to invalidate the entire box because the fake votes outnumber the real votes. The primary way to secure against this is individually numbered ballots where the ballot numbers in the box must match the ballot numbers recorded by the officials. The hack for this is just to make sure that your stuffed numbers match the numbers being used in the precinct. This takes 2 people and assumes that ballot numbers are sequential (they are in my experience). My precinct uses scantron so the way they deal with this is to watch the box to make sure that you only submit one ballot, but if you are using a pure paper system it should be possible for one or a few people to stuff the box, keeping in mind that even if they catch you putting them in, once they're in the box the entire box is contaminated.
--
JimFive
Not quite, there is no requirement that the government service be strictly military service. It happens that the protagonist ended up in the Infantry, but the diplomatic corps (read, state department) is also government service. The biggest barrier to entry was the application process where applicants were actively discouraged from applying. However, if someone persisted through the application process they were guaranteed a role. Not the role they necessarily want, but some role. After a tour of duty of some number of years, barring special circumstances, a person was able to retire from service and be a citizen.
I prefer a different form of democracy espoused in a different Heinlein story. Voting in favor of a thing commits you to working on that thing. If you vote to go to war and that vote passes you report to the recruiting center the next day and are given your assignment. Heinlein only gives the war example, but I think it could be expanded to include other large-scale projects that commit the nation to a direction.
--
JimFive
My ballot in a small midwestern city is going to have:
1 Presidential Race
1 US Senate Race
1 US House Race
1 State Senate Race
1 State House Race
1 Secretary of State Race
1 State Attorney Race
6 State University School Board Races
X State Judges races
2 City Commissioner races
2 Local School board races
Y Other local officials (Register of Deeds, County Sherrif)
Z State and local proposals.
Why (and how) would the IRS be able to coordinate this for every jurisdiction under US Control?
--
JimFive
I'd like to chime in that I agree with you.
I really like(d) the plain text message format of newsgroups with the ability to track read messages and thread the discussions. I also miss offline reading. Moving everything to html/ajax seems to force everything into a box that doesn't quite fit. For BBS style sites a straightforward nntp type protocol straight from the source (e.g. that isn't copied around the internet) would be ideal.
--
JimFive
Ok, I read the article and I don't get the excitement. Did Firefox just implement AppleScript? Tell firefox send selected text to twitter I mean, ok, the ability to have semi-natural language scripting is neat, and the ability to have it interact with the displayed document is neat, but once the initial golly-gee wears off, so what? -- JimFive
Wrong direction, everyone should be riding the exact same bike. The Tour is about the athletes not the equipment.
--
JimFive
Implementing a split system would require that a confirmed failed drug test would ban the athlete from the Pure Category for life. Anything less wouldn't work.
--
JimFive
I disagree a bit. I think that the Pure (or as a previous poster called it, "Stock") category would garner greater respect because we like to imagine that we could do these things with enough effort. I think that the Unlimited category would become a spectacle like the WWE that no one took seriously.
--
JimFive
When we moved into our current house (built ca. 1950) the meters were inside the basement. They have since been moved outside. So it is possible that the fireman in the basement was pulling the meter.
Also, How well does your thermal cam work from the outside into a basement. Is it possible for the fire to travel between the walls down into a finished basement?
--
JimFive
I don't think that's what is being said. Fortuny didn't call up the guys wife and say, "Hey" your husband is cheating on you. Fortuny is not the wife's friend saying, "Hey, I'm really sorry to have to tell you this but I saw your husband with a prostitute yesterday". He solicited under false pretences, and published, damaging photos and messages, purely for the punishment value of the act.
--
JimFive
No, bringing an act to the attention of a person in a position to act is not being a vigilante. Trying to impose justice yourself would be vigilantism. Calling the cops is not being a vigilante, shooting the escaping criminal is.
--
JimFive
Because it's none of Fortuny's business.
Fortuny performed his so-called experiment purely for the malicious thrill that he got out of exposing (read: punishing) the respondents to his ad. The fact that he took it upon himself to punish behavior that society deems taboo is what makes this a form of vigilante justice.
--
JimFive
Not quite. Your residence is not an investment, your residence is a place to store you stuff (and yourself). If you plan on living in the same area for 5 years you are probably better off buying than renting, with the caveat that you must buy within your means. If your property value goes down but you aren't trying to sell your house, you don't care. You still get to live in it. It is still just as valuable to you this year as it was last year. -- JimFive
That is technically true in the US, also. Exempt employees are not entitled to overtime pay. Exempt status includes: Managers, Professionals, and Sales. Just because you are salaried does not necessarily mean you are exempt, although your employer would like you to believe that it does.
The basic rules for exemptions:
Managers - Must supervise people, cannot do production work for more than 50% of their time.
Professionals - Position must require a professional college degree and some other criteria
Sales - Paid on commission. Total compensation must meet some guidelines regardless of the comission agreement.
Most IT people are forced in the Professional category by their employers to make them exempt. However, a lot of these jobs don't really "require" the degree (think Helpdesk). You can challenge your exempt status but if you lose you'll get fired and if you win you'll get fired a little later.
Note to later post RE: Walmart and managers. Calling someone a manager doesn't make them a manager. To be a manager you have to have people that report to you and you cannot perform the job functions of staff for more than a certain amount of your day(I think it's 50%). So, if you see someone wearing a pin that says "Assistant manager" and they're always stocking shelves the pin is lying.
The problem is that while most employers know this (Or at least their lawyers do) most employees do not.
(Most of this is based on some research I did into the FLSA about 10 years ago when working on a payroll system for a small business, it may be out of date)
--
JimFive
Do it later when you have the time to commit to it, a motivational reason for doing it, and you don't have to worry about it affecting your GPA. The only people I knew at college that did ok in the language classes had already had 2+ years in high school. Foreign language classes at University have two major problems:
1. They take up a huge amount of time. I don't just mean that they are a lot of work, but that they are time consuming.
2. They don't effectively teach you a foreign language unless you stick with it through at least 3 years.
--
JimFive
I think it is more like asking whether it is still the internet if you aren't using the Internet Protocol?
Is it still "the web" if you are no longer using http and html to deliver content to the users?
-- JimFive
You are clearly in the right major and I hope that you become a major influential force in your field. viva simplicite -- JimFive
"If there's a bustle in your hedgerow
Don't be alarmed now
It's just a spring clean for the May queen"
--
JimFive
In the sentence: You should say "a few frigates, a few hundred Humvees..." etc. When you use the article "a" it means the you received a small number of them. Without the "a" it implies that you received not enough of them. And while that latter may be true, I don't think it is quite what you meant to say.
Regards
--
JimFive
I assume you know this, but when performing a dictionary attack you are presumed to have bypassed the login system and are comparing directly to the password storage mechanism. e.g. On an old (pre-shadow) Linux system you grab /etc/password and run a dictionary against it.
--
JimFive
Possibly, but stop storing documents in email. Email isn't a file system. Your CEO has 2G of files on his phone not much into sharing or security is he? Maybe, depending on what's in the emails, but $10,000 isn't a lot. And really, $250,000 isn't a lot of revenue, the small companies I have worked for were in the $10M to $20M revenue range so an extra 2% would be nice, but not worth going to jail over.
I think you seriously overestimate how much that data is worth, and how much your competitors care about your company's future plans.
--
JimFive
--
JimFive
No you can't, because to be VP you have to be eligible to be president so once you've served more than 6 years as president you are not eligible to be VP.
--
JimFive
Interesting. If you type "What is the closest planet to the sun" the first result is Venus, which contains the text "second closest planet to the sun". It looks like they need to work on combined modifiers a little more. -- JimFive