The current source code is stored somewhere, and I may assume that's a separate location (preferably separate physical server) than where the web site is run on. Maybe not a dedicated server, but version control is not something that needs major computing resources.
Depending on the exact situation it may simply cost nothing. I'm even surprised that their first step was not to install svn or git or subversion or whatever they like and dump the whole existing code base in there first, and THEN start to clean it up. Sure you have a lot of crap in your version control, but that is also crap that's known to work. So if something breaks during clean-up you can easily roll back.
I'm a long-term user of Mandriva, until about 2009-10. Ubuntu became very popular, and I basically jumped on the bandwagon, tried it out at home, was happy with it, realised they have LTS versions, and started using it for my business too (those computers I don't want to change OSes for - it has to work, and as long as it does what I need it to do I'm happy, and Ubuntu 10.04LTS is doing just that).
The problem is that I've the feeling this lovely distro doesn't have much of a future. I don't understand it, it used to be the easiest to use distro. Looking rather pretty (not brown at least), with it's well working URPMI software management and it's control panel.
Well, one of the most surprising elements of the barely-democratic government of Hong Kong is that they do just that.
Just over half of the legislature (and nothing of the executive part of the government) is elected by popular vote, and if there is any sign of voter fraud the government and the ICAC are on top of it to 1) prosecute fraudsters and 2) take measures to prevent it from happening again.
Also at the polling stations the rules are followed strictly.
One downside of the system here is that absentee ballots are not allowed (so if you're not in town for the election you can not vote). Votes must be cast in person at the polling stations. Otoh as other posters said, absentee votes are a loophole allowing people to prove who they voted for.
The latest major issue was people voting in the wrong district: registering their address in a different district than where they lived. It didn't cause people to cast a second vote or so, they just casted their vote in another district than they should. Lots of effort has since gone into prosecutions and also verifying addresses.
I know offering such incentives is forbidden (not only in the US but in many more jurisdictions though the exact implementation of such laws varies). Buying votes is forbidden. Just putting in the law "forbidden" is not enough: people will try to find ways around it, they always do.
Putting measures in place to make breaking the law easier is always a bad thing, as it will result in more people breaking these laws. Prevention is always better than curing, and prosecution for vote fraud is just a cure - the votes have been casted, damage has been done.
You say "it doesn't" well maybe the version number is wrong (was it 10.10 maybe? Not important) but it was my direct experience with Unity.
Especially the maximising was really irritating. And yeah alt-tab, you're right, I just didn't look what's printed on the buttons. I just know which one it is:-) And it was actually SWITCHED OFF. Completely OFF. The key combination just didn't do anything. The frustration!
If I get the exact same results by going to Google directly or going through the Firefox/Mint search box with the difference that in the second case Google pays a bit to Firefox/Mint, I'm using that second option.
Omnivores before the mutation, omnivores after the mutation. Key difference: after the mutation humans could live without taking in meat (which can be useful to go and live in places where meat is rare or not available at all). Before the mutation meat was an essential part of their diet, and we needed a lot of it, too.
Of course. To this day humans tend to live near water, this has never changed. Almost all our major cities are either at rivers or at the coast - the vast majority of the world's population lives in coastal areas. Water is simply very important for us - and not just for drinking.
The key "mutation" that allowed this was us learning to cook our food.
Personally I consider culture part of the DNA of a species, things that people teach other people, or what animals learn from there brethren. So learning to cook our food is a mutation. And an important one.
We still can not really digest rice, corn or grain, unless the kernels are cooked (or baked; keep it general). We can digest raw meat, but not as efficient as cooked meat. We can digest fruits very well, and generally eat them raw, as we can handle many nuts. Some vegetables we also eat raw, but potatoes for example we can't get much nutricion from without cooking them first.
This cooking allowed us to take in energy very efficiently, and allowed us to grow our brains particularly. At the moment it is virtually impossible for humans to survive on uncooked food alone. There simply not much that we can digest, and then we don't get the energy out of it we need to survive.
Many punk band members I've met over the years were vegan (i.e.: no animal products). You could pick them out: skinny, pale skin. Not healthy. Vegetarians however (no meat, but eating dairy and eggs no problem) are generally pretty healthy.
So the big concern I have is how these barcodes work. Are they public? Are they encrypted? And what I mean by encrypted is if the value is scrambled to link back to the original voter.
Merely being able to be traced back to an individual voter is bad enough. No matter whether it's encrypted, hashed, etc. No trace back of vote to voter should be possible.
The reason I feel like this is unfortunately necessary is that it would be easy to sneak
in votes that had just some barcode if it didn't have to be decrypted and validated.
That can ALWAYS happen. That is why you need honest people in your election committee, and oversight. Allow before the election everyone who wants to see that a ballot box is empty, subsequently locked, and then that each voter can put one and only one paper in it. Keep on following this ballot box until it's opened and the votes are counted. Match total number of votes with total voters (knowing who voted is fine, you need to know that to prevent multiple votes by a single person). Have two opposing parties do this, add maybe an independent observer, and the risk of fraud is low without identification. That's how it's done.
No situation is perfect, but over the years we have come up with pretty good ways of making sure elections are done fairly. Non-traceable votes are key to that.
My suggestion would be to give users a randomly generated number that is then one way hashed with their SSN. Then that information can be published online and anyone can take their autogenerated number and plug it into the hash with their SSN. If they fear retaliation or if they fear their boss might demand the number from them to check on them, they can merely opt for the official to destroy their number.
"So you destroyed that number and you can't show who you voted for? That must mean you did not vote for the party I told you to vote for."
Smart governments, at least those that also like to keep up true democratic values, will do whatever they can to prevent election fraud. This is also one major argument against online voting, without the need of going to a polling station.
Ballots that can be traced to a voter, or where the voter can be watched filling in the ballot paper, can be bought. This way elections can be bought. And that alone is enough reason to not have any identifying mark on any ballot.
CERN and Fermilab want a linux distro that's tailored to their needs, so they create one. They pay for that, just like most companies do for their software (by buying Windows, or Red Hat, or Suse, or whatnot). Bigger companies pay for their software even more by hiring an IT department.
SL goes a little further, creating their own OS. And because they're nice (and scientists like to be nice and share their ideas usually), and because it doesn't cost them much if anything extra, they allow the world to get a copy of their software and use it as they like.
They don't care if they make money out of that, because they build it for a totally different reason. They have an itch, and scratch it, that's all. As soon as that itch they have with commercial products is gone they may just as well drop SL altogether.
They may have fixed it, but my experience was so terrifying (in 11.04 or 11.10, I forgot, when it was first introduced) I'm not going to try the latest version. Here my key complaints:
- everything runs full-screen. That sucks. No drag and drop between windows, without first un-maximising them.
- after you close an application in a not-maximised window, it will relaunch maximised. I un-maximised it not just because!
- the above works when the not maximised window is - the "start" menu sucks. A few "favourite" applications, the rest you have to search for. A HUGE screen area taken for each application; scrolling galore as I don't have a 25" monitor. Or you have to start typing the name of the application to narrow down your search. Big suck. A well arranged menu searches quicker, takes little space, and no need to remove my hand from the mouse.
- crtl-tab window switching did not work. I had to dig deep first online then on my machine to get that basic switcher working. It took me seconds from installing Unity to find that out, all in all about half an hour (!) to fix that. And it still didn't work really well. Now that was a total show-stopper, if I had never before tried Ubuntu I'd have dropped it there and then, and not bothered to find out how to get it working.
Then in the process I found out that there is a "Gnome Classic" too, switched to that, and didn't look back. When upgrading Ubuntu I'm just selecting Gnome Classic and not even trying anything else. It's just that in 12.04 Gnome Classic sucks too, just not sucky enough to go through downloading and installing a whole new distro which sucks too. I'm first and foremost a user of my computer, after all!
I'm going to migrate, for sure. And this is definitely making it more so.
I've not migrated. I'm lazy. I know I should check out Mint, haven't done so. The Gnome Classic UI from Ubuntu 12.04 sucks badly: disappearing window borders, amongst many other irritations and bugs, so I'm already refusing to upgrade. My office is on 10.04 LTS, bugging me all the time for new LTS, not going to happen. I like 10.04, I really do, and am sad to see it go. That is one distro that Just Works. For me, at least. After I fought badly with it getting users to authenticate against Kerberos what Mandriva did out of the box. Unfortunately Mandriva is too much of a zombie business to use.
I understand the need of revenue, Red Hat does too, and is pretty profitable now, while they still have their free distro, Fedora. Without intrusive ads.
I have no problem with pre-installed stuff, preferably removable (Android violates that idea - can't even hide the Google Maps and Facebook apps on my phone, to name a few, but at least they're not in the way). If I happen to like Amazon I may actually use it. Like Firefox setting Google as default search engine, and getting a cut for doing so. I can choose Bing if I wanted to, make that default, and forget about Google. Amazon was there too.
But no ads, please. And a decent, well working UI. No everything-fullscreen shit. No huge icons for applications; a nicely arranged start menu and top bar with some shortcuts to often used stuff is just fine. Those things both Gnome and Ubuntu messed up. Too bad, it was nice working with it.
Making a photo of an existing painting is creative, as you created something that wasn't there before.
You are probably thinking of the popular definition of "creative" which means doing something original, special, and not obvious. That's another meaning of the same word. Luckily the makers of copyright law were smarter than that.
And even though I wouldn't call your comment special or anything, you still own the copyright on your comment for the simple reason that you created it.
Old art works are not copyright protected of course. Everyone is free to make their own copies of such a work - make an identical painting, make a photo, print that photo.
However the newly made painting and photo do have copyright on them. Just like you can not copyright a building or a person, but you can copyright a photo of that building or person.
The cost of hiring a professional photographer to travel to all these museums (and probably a bunch of private collectors) and take all these photographs is probably higher than just buying these photographs from someone.
Anyway at $180 a book one would expect to be able to get photos in it. The $800 each for copyright clearance as TFS claims sounds totally unrealistic to me. Works that are in museums should have photos available at low cost; privately owned works maybe a little more but also not too much. It's mostly stock photo work after all.
A tablet at least you can hold vertical; those super-wide monitors are so irritating. For word processing I want height more than width. Same for web browsing and other reading tasks. Wide is only good for watching movies. And some fringe tasks like software development that 99% of the population doesn't do anyway.
And by the way good luck carrying around a 15" tablet. Bulky and heavy.
And then those 2/3ds of people move to OpenOffice/LibreOffice/whatever.
Suddenly the world realises that they do not need MS Office, and that alternatives work good enough for >95% of uses. And in the meantime so many people use alternative Office software that also the.doc format loses its stranglehold on the market.
Slashdot Mirror
And running a RAID-1 or RAID-5 array is a backup too, right?
The current source code is stored somewhere, and I may assume that's a separate location (preferably separate physical server) than where the web site is run on. Maybe not a dedicated server, but version control is not something that needs major computing resources.
Depending on the exact situation it may simply cost nothing. I'm even surprised that their first step was not to install svn or git or subversion or whatever they like and dump the whole existing code base in there first, and THEN start to clean it up. Sure you have a lot of crap in your version control, but that is also crap that's known to work. So if something breaks during clean-up you can easily roll back.
That doesn't mean they don't have the rights to that video. They could have licensed it for all we know.
Good luck with part 1. The reading half shouldn't be too much of hte problem, the understanding part will be...
I'm a long-term user of Mandriva, until about 2009-10. Ubuntu became very popular, and I basically jumped on the bandwagon, tried it out at home, was happy with it, realised they have LTS versions, and started using it for my business too (those computers I don't want to change OSes for - it has to work, and as long as it does what I need it to do I'm happy, and Ubuntu 10.04LTS is doing just that).
The problem is that I've the feeling this lovely distro doesn't have much of a future. I don't understand it, it used to be the easiest to use distro. Looking rather pretty (not brown at least), with it's well working URPMI software management and it's control panel.
Well, one of the most surprising elements of the barely-democratic government of Hong Kong is that they do just that.
Just over half of the legislature (and nothing of the executive part of the government) is elected by popular vote, and if there is any sign of voter fraud the government and the ICAC are on top of it to 1) prosecute fraudsters and 2) take measures to prevent it from happening again.
Also at the polling stations the rules are followed strictly.
One downside of the system here is that absentee ballots are not allowed (so if you're not in town for the election you can not vote). Votes must be cast in person at the polling stations. Otoh as other posters said, absentee votes are a loophole allowing people to prove who they voted for.
The latest major issue was people voting in the wrong district: registering their address in a different district than where they lived. It didn't cause people to cast a second vote or so, they just casted their vote in another district than they should. Lots of effort has since gone into prosecutions and also verifying addresses.
I know offering such incentives is forbidden (not only in the US but in many more jurisdictions though the exact implementation of such laws varies). Buying votes is forbidden. Just putting in the law "forbidden" is not enough: people will try to find ways around it, they always do.
Putting measures in place to make breaking the law easier is always a bad thing, as it will result in more people breaking these laws. Prevention is always better than curing, and prosecution for vote fraud is just a cure - the votes have been casted, damage has been done.
You say "it doesn't" well maybe the version number is wrong (was it 10.10 maybe? Not important) but it was my direct experience with Unity.
Especially the maximising was really irritating. And yeah alt-tab, you're right, I just didn't look what's printed on the buttons. I just know which one it is :-) And it was actually SWITCHED OFF. Completely OFF. The key combination just didn't do anything. The frustration!
If I get the exact same results by going to Google directly or going through the Firefox/Mint search box with the difference that in the second case Google pays a bit to Firefox/Mint, I'm using that second option.
I'm first and foremost a user.
If it doesn't work properly out of the box, it sucks. That's the state Linux was in 15 years ago.
Ubuntu was good, it's regressing. Time to look for alternatives. I have to upgrade soon anyway or lose security updates.
Omnivores before the mutation, omnivores after the mutation. Key difference: after the mutation humans could live without taking in meat (which can be useful to go and live in places where meat is rare or not available at all). Before the mutation meat was an essential part of their diet, and we needed a lot of it, too.
Of course. To this day humans tend to live near water, this has never changed. Almost all our major cities are either at rivers or at the coast - the vast majority of the world's population lives in coastal areas. Water is simply very important for us - and not just for drinking.
The key "mutation" that allowed this was us learning to cook our food.
Personally I consider culture part of the DNA of a species, things that people teach other people, or what animals learn from there brethren. So learning to cook our food is a mutation. And an important one.
We still can not really digest rice, corn or grain, unless the kernels are cooked (or baked; keep it general). We can digest raw meat, but not as efficient as cooked meat. We can digest fruits very well, and generally eat them raw, as we can handle many nuts. Some vegetables we also eat raw, but potatoes for example we can't get much nutricion from without cooking them first.
This cooking allowed us to take in energy very efficiently, and allowed us to grow our brains particularly. At the moment it is virtually impossible for humans to survive on uncooked food alone. There simply not much that we can digest, and then we don't get the energy out of it we need to survive.
Many punk band members I've met over the years were vegan (i.e.: no animal products). You could pick them out: skinny, pale skin. Not healthy. Vegetarians however (no meat, but eating dairy and eggs no problem) are generally pretty healthy.
So the big concern I have is how these barcodes work. Are they public? Are they encrypted? And what I mean by encrypted is if the value is scrambled to link back to the original voter.
Merely being able to be traced back to an individual voter is bad enough. No matter whether it's encrypted, hashed, etc. No trace back of vote to voter should be possible.
The reason I feel like this is unfortunately necessary is that it would be easy to sneak
in votes that had just some barcode if it didn't have to be decrypted and validated.
That can ALWAYS happen. That is why you need honest people in your election committee, and oversight. Allow before the election everyone who wants to see that a ballot box is empty, subsequently locked, and then that each voter can put one and only one paper in it. Keep on following this ballot box until it's opened and the votes are counted. Match total number of votes with total voters (knowing who voted is fine, you need to know that to prevent multiple votes by a single person). Have two opposing parties do this, add maybe an independent observer, and the risk of fraud is low without identification. That's how it's done.
No situation is perfect, but over the years we have come up with pretty good ways of making sure elections are done fairly. Non-traceable votes are key to that.
My suggestion would be to give users a randomly generated number that is then one way hashed with their SSN. Then that information can be published online and anyone can take their autogenerated number and plug it into the hash with their SSN. If they fear retaliation or if they fear their boss might demand the number from them to check on them, they can merely opt for the official to destroy their number.
"So you destroyed that number and you can't show who you voted for? That must mean you did not vote for the party I told you to vote for."
Again, NO TRACE BACK should be possible. Period.
Smart governments, at least those that also like to keep up true democratic values, will do whatever they can to prevent election fraud. This is also one major argument against online voting, without the need of going to a polling station.
Ballots that can be traced to a voter, or where the voter can be watched filling in the ballot paper, can be bought. This way elections can be bought. And that alone is enough reason to not have any identifying mark on any ballot.
CERN and Fermilab want a linux distro that's tailored to their needs, so they create one. They pay for that, just like most companies do for their software (by buying Windows, or Red Hat, or Suse, or whatnot). Bigger companies pay for their software even more by hiring an IT department.
SL goes a little further, creating their own OS. And because they're nice (and scientists like to be nice and share their ideas usually), and because it doesn't cost them much if anything extra, they allow the world to get a copy of their software and use it as they like.
They don't care if they make money out of that, because they build it for a totally different reason. They have an itch, and scratch it, that's all. As soon as that itch they have with commercial products is gone they may just as well drop SL altogether.
They may have fixed it, but my experience was so terrifying (in 11.04 or 11.10, I forgot, when it was first introduced) I'm not going to try the latest version. Here my key complaints:
- everything runs full-screen. That sucks. No drag and drop between windows, without first un-maximising them.
- after you close an application in a not-maximised window, it will relaunch maximised. I un-maximised it not just because!
- the above works when the not maximised window is - the "start" menu sucks. A few "favourite" applications, the rest you have to search for. A HUGE screen area taken for each application; scrolling galore as I don't have a 25" monitor. Or you have to start typing the name of the application to narrow down your search. Big suck. A well arranged menu searches quicker, takes little space, and no need to remove my hand from the mouse.
- crtl-tab window switching did not work. I had to dig deep first online then on my machine to get that basic switcher working. It took me seconds from installing Unity to find that out, all in all about half an hour (!) to fix that. And it still didn't work really well. Now that was a total show-stopper, if I had never before tried Ubuntu I'd have dropped it there and then, and not bothered to find out how to get it working.
Then in the process I found out that there is a "Gnome Classic" too, switched to that, and didn't look back. When upgrading Ubuntu I'm just selecting Gnome Classic and not even trying anything else. It's just that in 12.04 Gnome Classic sucks too, just not sucky enough to go through downloading and installing a whole new distro which sucks too. I'm first and foremost a user of my computer, after all!
I'm going to migrate, for sure. And this is definitely making it more so.
I've not migrated. I'm lazy. I know I should check out Mint, haven't done so. The Gnome Classic UI from Ubuntu 12.04 sucks badly: disappearing window borders, amongst many other irritations and bugs, so I'm already refusing to upgrade. My office is on 10.04 LTS, bugging me all the time for new LTS, not going to happen. I like 10.04, I really do, and am sad to see it go. That is one distro that Just Works. For me, at least. After I fought badly with it getting users to authenticate against Kerberos what Mandriva did out of the box. Unfortunately Mandriva is too much of a zombie business to use.
I understand the need of revenue, Red Hat does too, and is pretty profitable now, while they still have their free distro, Fedora. Without intrusive ads.
I have no problem with pre-installed stuff, preferably removable (Android violates that idea - can't even hide the Google Maps and Facebook apps on my phone, to name a few, but at least they're not in the way). If I happen to like Amazon I may actually use it. Like Firefox setting Google as default search engine, and getting a cut for doing so. I can choose Bing if I wanted to, make that default, and forget about Google. Amazon was there too.
But no ads, please. And a decent, well working UI. No everything-fullscreen shit. No huge icons for applications; a nicely arranged start menu and top bar with some shortcuts to often used stuff is just fine. Those things both Gnome and Ubuntu messed up. Too bad, it was nice working with it.
Making a photo of an existing painting is creative, as you created something that wasn't there before.
You are probably thinking of the popular definition of "creative" which means doing something original, special, and not obvious. That's another meaning of the same word. Luckily the makers of copyright law were smarter than that.
And even though I wouldn't call your comment special or anything, you still own the copyright on your comment for the simple reason that you created it.
Old art works are not copyright protected of course. Everyone is free to make their own copies of such a work - make an identical painting, make a photo, print that photo.
However the newly made painting and photo do have copyright on them. Just like you can not copyright a building or a person, but you can copyright a photo of that building or person.
The cost of hiring a professional photographer to travel to all these museums (and probably a bunch of private collectors) and take all these photographs is probably higher than just buying these photographs from someone.
Anyway at $180 a book one would expect to be able to get photos in it. The $800 each for copyright clearance as TFS claims sounds totally unrealistic to me. Works that are in museums should have photos available at low cost; privately owned works maybe a little more but also not too much. It's mostly stock photo work after all.
A tablet at least you can hold vertical; those super-wide monitors are so irritating. For word processing I want height more than width. Same for web browsing and other reading tasks. Wide is only good for watching movies. And some fringe tasks like software development that 99% of the population doesn't do anyway.
And by the way good luck carrying around a 15" tablet. Bulky and heavy.
Google makes money indirectly out of Android, as it promotes their services (and sells their ads).
MS can't make money off WinRT other than by selling it to hardware makers.
And then those 2/3ds of people move to OpenOffice/LibreOffice/whatever.
Suddenly the world realises that they do not need MS Office, and that alternatives work good enough for >95% of uses. And in the meantime so many people use alternative Office software that also the .doc format loses its stranglehold on the market.
Yes, it may work out just fine.