No it won't. Compared to touch or even a mouse, speech input is hideously slow. Telling your computer to switch to another window will take you about as long as saying "Switch to (say) eclipse", Alt-Tabbing takes me about a quarter of that and touching the taskbar button with my stylus maybe half. Im very confident of it's advantages for dictating texts, but that's mostly it. Speech is somewhat one-dimensional and not that great at navigating two (or, in the somewhat near future, three) dimensions.
Moving on, there's the matter of reading/interpreting displayed symbols (including letters) vs. getting them read to you. TTS systems are reasonably advanced nowadays and mostly work quite reliably. Yet, apart from assisting blind people, it remains a niche product. Even in that area, speech is often used in conjunction with a braille "screen" (a device used like a wrist rest below the keyboard, except it has a line of 40/80 braille characters) for any non-casual users (the braille thingies only have a very small target demographic, are thus produced in very small production runs and are accordingly expensive).
Speech will only be an effective interface to your computer once it reaches a level of intelligence superior to yours. How long, for example, do you take to scan through each result on your favourite search engine? A second, maybe two? How long to skip over the "sponsored results"? Fractions of a second? Until your computer is smart enough to find out the actual information, instead of just giving you a list of the matches, speech won't work here. The same goes for (even very basic) tabular data. Speech is sequential, i.e. one-dimensional and we are quite well adapted to parsing two-dimensional visual information (3-D to a limited extent). Reading from a 2-D display is not going to be matched this quickly.
Why is it obvious? At one time it was "obvious" that smokers were the cool socialites that everyone wanted to emulate.
And how would one emulate a smoker? By smoking yourself, maybe? So you start smoking. You take smoke breaks whenever your role models take them and happily light a fag or two, taking good care of that nicotine addiction. Already, your smoke breaks will probably be somewhat social. There's going to be more smokers around, they're going to be smoking (just like you!) and every now and then they're going to be asking you for a light. Some talking might ensue, names be exchanged and friend requests be sent back and forth. Congratulations, the percentage of smokers among your friends is likely to increase.
The great thing about smoking is it's addictingness. After all those breaks with your idols and perhaps a few new people, you'll probably run into a situation where you don't know any cool socialite in the vicinity. Doesn't matter, you'll still be taking a smoke break, it's not just about aspiring to the cool guys, it's also about getting that nicotine fix. Others will probably be in the same situation. Just like you, they'll be used to talking to others while smoking. Asking for a light or fag is a great conversation starter; and starting from your mutual love of processed tobacco, a conversation is easily started. Conversation leads to more smoke break leads to more conversations, leads to friend requests. And like that, two lonely smokers may find each other, get together, gift the world with a bunch of newborn (future) smokers. Shortly thereafter he dies of lung cancer, her next child is stillborn, pulling her into a deep depression during which she abuses her children. Finally, she takes her own life. Days later, her dead body and starved children are found by the landlord. While retrieving the bodies, the police accidentally rips open the wallpaper, freeing a large patch of old asbestos-containing isolation. The landlord proceeds to patch it all up with another layer of wallpaper, but having breathed asbestos nanoshrapnel for hours finishes his (due to smoking) already damaged lung off. He manages to call 911 and an ambulance is immediately dispatched. Unfortunately, on it's way to the landlord's apartment, the driver carelessy drops his cigarette. He looks down for a split second to localize the still glowing stub. While he's grabbing it, an unnamed Federal Agent Closely Resembling Jack Bauer sprints across the street in a vain attempt to stop the ticking countdown of a (novel, extremely deadly for the whole continental U.S., Hawaii and Alaska) bomb located a few blocks down. The ambulance slams into our facrjb, killing him on the spot (in a painful, slow way!). Only seconds thereafter, the countdown of the discussed explosive device hits 0:00:00. Smoking kills. But I seem to be digressing a tiny bit, so back to topic:
Doing anything (e.g. being hapy, eating meat, smoking) makes you more likely to spend time with people of similar interest and less likely to spend time with diametrically opposed people (emos, vegans, non-smokers) because the former will approve of your actions, the latter condone them and people, being social animals, tend to favour approval over condemnation. Simple as that.
What have we to lose anyhow? If no form of micropayment makes it through, many newspaper may not survive that much longer.
Throw a working way of monetizing in the mix, not only might we get rid of useless reporting ("useless" as in "nobody will pay to read it") but strengthen interesting reporting. Less dependency on ads means less nonsense spread over 15 ad-riddled pages.
Then, there'll be the whole Analytics tie-in (it's Google, it'll be there). Popular topics and journalists can be identified and given more weight.
I'm way too optimistic, but hey, it might work out.:)
Well, there could be an easy solution for that: Pay-as-you-Go Micropayments. Charge your Google account with $10, spend that, a penny every few clicks, charge it again.
Now the charging part could turn out to be a bit trickier. Ideally, you'd pay cash for a gift card, use that and be totally safe. Unfortunately, making and selling the physical cards isn't free, so this may or may not happen anytime soon. I'm guessing they'll take credit cards to fill you up. There's always Visa/Mastercard gift cards (non-personal, check with your local Mall) as well as Prepaid credit cards (personal, check with your Bank or credit card institution). Pretty safe, too.
In the end, even if you'd be paying directly from a real credit card, you can always cancel charges.
The idea (I'm guessing) is to make the whole deal easier and quicker. Right now you'll need to be signed up with every paper (or enter your credit card details for every article); with this Google thingie it might be enough to simply stay signed in to your Google account. Browse at Google News, see a paywalled article you're interested, click once or twice, paying a penny or ten, go on reading.
Not sure if I like the "Google knowing what articles I read and when I read them" aspect of this, but the "easy payment for insightful articles" seems ok.
Why not? As long as the process is quick and painless and the cost low enough (i.e. a few cents), I wouldn't mind that one click to read the full article with images and everything (and without ads).
It's similar to the model of those boxes containing a stack of newspaper to which you get access by inserting a quarter or two. Of course, one could get the whole stack and distribute it for free; but in reality most people will just get one paper (i.e. read the article) and get on with their lives.
You're obviously right about the definite mapping of an IP address to a location, but one could take an educated guess.
There's several geolocation services, all of them will more or less accurately tell you the location of an IP address. Usually that'll be one of your ISP's termination points; so while it won't be broken down to your city it tends to hit the right state/region and (save proxies and dirty tricks) will get the country right. IMO that wouldn't be necessary:
I'd simply go for the assigned netblock. One netblock is one location. That'll take care of ISPs distributing their traffic throughout their assigned/8; but still catch twi different/24s as different nets.
Alternatively, counting multiple blocks owned by the same person as one might provide better results. Time (and by time I mean log files of high-traffic sites) would tell.
In the end, the techies are going to click [details] where they'll get a list of login attempts, time and originating IP address. Judging about the meaning is up to them.
About the brute forcing: I never understood why would answer the "forgotten password" questions truthfully. Security-wise, it's suicide (I also never got why services would add that feature). Offer your users a nice sheet of paper with all the important details to print, (delete,) lock away in a safe location, but don't compromise the fragile security that's offered by a password.
"Since the last successful login Yesterday at 7:13, 48 attempts to log into your account with a wrong password have been made from 3 locations. [details]"
Simple as that. More detail wouldn't help most users, so let them know something potentially bad is happening. If they care about their account, they'll have a techie friend look into it.
Sorry Timosch, but Centrino does not specify the graphics chipset. It seriously constricts the choice of mobile chipsets, but discrete graphics are an option e.g. using PM965 in "Santa Rosa" Centrino.
If you're not legally allowed to drive then don't tell me how to drive.
There's a Swiss 125cc motorcyclist called Tom Lüthi who, before winning the 125cc GP at age 19 (iirc), has been doing GPs since age 16. Funny thing is: In Switzerland the minimum age for a drivers license (cars as well as 125cc cycles) is 18.
Now I don't know about you, but I wouldn't mind being told about how to drive by a Top-20 MotoGP driver. What do you think?
I'm thinking a lot of effort may be going in just the opposite direction. Most of the people spending (justified) kilobucks on notebooks tend to either be enthusiasts or companies equipping key employees.
For the former, not having that favourite toy/tool/device some work is done on sometimes probably sucks quite a bit but won't really cause any monetary impact through missed deadlines or similar. They may be gamers, Apple customers or Bloggers. Lots of pretty, high-powered models to go around, probably the likes of Macbooks, Dell XPS' and similars.
Very few of those folks will buy next-day on-site warranty. Most can do the wait until stores are open again and get the device repaired/replaced then. Those who can't tend to be able to hack together some kind of solution or find a replacement that's Good Enough. All of those would probably favour indestructible notebooks with easy-to-replace hard drives, but my guess is this isn't where the money is:
The latter group do (some|lots|all) of their work on their notebook. On the road there may be days worth of unsynced (and thus un-backupped) data lying around on their hard drive. Losing that would bring problems to their company. Lots of Thinkpads, Latitudes and HP gear around here, of which lots will have 24-hour on-site replacement or better. That category is where lots of the money's at. They get the new safety upgrades first and in the most complete fashion. For example, current ThinkPads get a (very fucking hard) plastic shell, containing at least a display roll cage, a roll cage for the system portion containing, once again, another roll cage for the (vibration-dampened) hard drive. Of course the devices get more robust, but the focus lies quite clearly on the hard drive. Essentially it's a deal along the lines of "Smash it with a sledge hammer, burn it in a fire, then drive over it (twice; once to slice open the tires, then to get that beautiful metal-on-metal sound): your data is still fine and inside another shell within 24 hours". It's the difference between a toy (screw the data, replace the drive) and a tool (screw the shell and save the data), and tools are what money is made with.
The N900 is a video/still camera, a phone, a portable computer -- it's a lot of things, but it is by no means a Global Positioning System (i.e. a network of several sats orbiting the earth broadcasting a signal allowing GPS receivers just like the N900 to quite precisely determine your position). It's like calling your modem "the Internet". It's a device providing access to the big network/system, not the net/sys itself.
The basic kind of education you might get during school-time isn't wasted, even if done oh soon-to-be obsolete systems. For example, take Windows 2000 vs. Windows 7. The basic concepts haven't changed that much. You'll still start up the box using a similar power button. You'll still log in to some account. You'll still have some documents and programs on your Desktop, ready to be double-clicked. The "start" button will still be at the bottom left corner of your screen. There's still a "My Computer" containing several drives with a drive letter each. There's "My Documents" for all your stuffs. The Control Panel still is your friend when it comes to configuration issues and so on.
What I'm trying to say is: While it all may look a bit different (prettier/more resource wasteful), most of the concepts are still the same. Or, to go for the car analogy: If you've learned to drive an old VW minivan, chances are you'll manage driving in a brand new Porsche, too. Both still tend to have three (this is slashdot, so I'll stick to the male version. Replace with "two" for females;)) pedals, a steering wheel and some kind of stick to your right. The details (AC, light switch,...) will differ to some extent, but for somewhat adaptable people, knowing one variation will make getting used to another very easy.
We still can. The mentioned MAFIAA flaws are based on a vulnerability in server-side code. <iframe [...]> is posted as the search criteria and incorporated into the site output to the user. It's all HTTP (submitting the "evil" param") and HTML (returning a usable <iframe>.
The Firefox implementation "protects" only from scripts included via <script src=..> from another domain. Pure HTML (like above) or in-page scripts aren't blocked. In most* cases, that's a few minutes of extra work, tops; using the same vulnerability.
* Limitations include content filters (though allowing <script> yet blocking important JS keywords seems not that realistic to me), being vulnerable only to GET requests (limits script size to some 900 bytes; depending on implementation). A possible benefit (to the attacker) of including the script is being able to host it on a server he controls; thus the script can be changed while the attack is live and some tracking (how many people downloaded the script) can be done. OTOH, the attacker gets (more) trackable, too.
The local Don standing behind you with a cocked 9mm while you cast your vote is a nice picture to illustrate the possibilities.
The employer/union advising you to vote for x and favouring people who did when promotions and/or layoffs come around are the boring and far more real picture.
The difference is easy: ATM transactions aren't (and can't be) secret.
When I withdraw money from an ATM, I insert my personal card, my personal code and receive money out of my account. Being an honest person, I want this transaction to be stored in a database with information such as the amount, the date and time and most importantly, who actually withdrew that cash with what card.
Casting my vote through an electronic voting machine, I have another expectation. I want my ID to be checked at the entry, to verify I'm voting and voting only once. Alone with the machine, I do not want it to know who I am. The only thing I want it to know is whom I'm voting for. I don't want it to print a receipt, because that could be abused by the local mafia boss with a gun to verify I voted for whomever he wanted me to vote. In order to make the vote stay secret there may not be any way to find out who voted for whom.
The ordering idea sounds kinda neat, but you'd need order a be exactly the same as b, just in reverse. If both can be made up however you want them to, the coercer could just make you put his #1 and #2 in both top slots.
It'd work for votes other than elections, too. Just have Yes/No on both sides (again, left would have to be !right) and you're ready to go.
Build a secure, auditable platform around that and really direct democracy through e-voting becomes possible.
Let's say there's a seperate system for each vote. So a few weeks before, you get an envelope informing you about what's voted on, containing, perhaps, your mail-in ballot and your username and password for the online voting platform. The smart vote-buyer buys unopened envelopes; the voter never even gets their voting materials. No need to watch 'em as only whomever bought the vote knows what it is and how to change it. Potential weak spot: original voter votes physically, electronic/mail-in votes get discarded.
Maybe the system assigns you a username and a password for all coming votes. Let's say the password is user-changeable. Buyer changes password until vote has passed, can vote for whatever he likes whenever he likes. Change that assumption to password isn't user-changeable. Now the buyer needs to either make sure the seller doesn't know his pass (buy the sealed envelope) or goes for the vote-sniping approach. Cast his vote two seconds before the deadline. Potential improvement: fuzzy deadline as in "sometime between 1400 and 1700 no more votes are accepted. Weak spots for both: physical vote will likely be prioritized over other forms; original voter may request another password.
In the end, vote-buying without "cracking the platform" is possible, but it's probably easier to crack or control any of the involved servers or networks.
Imagine a (large) conveyor 100 miles long, stable enough for you to drive on in your car. Now drive from it's start to it's end in one hour. The distance you traveled is 100 miles, right?
Now imagine that conveyor moving in the opposite direction (i.e. towards you) at 50 mph. To still get from your starting point to your destination in an hour, you're doing 150 mph road speed. The GPS will still report 100 mph, but your car's tachymetre will report 150 mph, the wheels will revolve as is necessary to go 150 mph and, if you add 50 mph of headwind, even the air resistance will be equal to doing 150 mph without wind.
In an environment where the you need to stay in a 10 mph zone in order to avoid either stalling, rapid descent, crash, death if going too slow or plane breaking apart in mid-air, rapid descent, crash, death; it's quite helpful to know an accurate measurement. It's like Speed, except the bomb will blow up when your axle speed drops below 145 and the bus will spontaneously disintegrate at 155. Also, there's varying levels of wind. Also, you're driving on slicks. Through some kind of rally track half of which is concrete, the other half sand/dirt and the other half is jell-o.
If you hire a construction worker to build you some drywall, he'll charge you by the hour. He might spend eight hours at your construction site, do whatever it is construction workers do to drywall, then charge you, say, $30/hr for $240.
If you buy some software from an independant programmer, he might have spent two months developing it. Two months could be about 43 working days (60 / 7 * 5). At 8 hours per working day, that's about 344 hours of work done. If that programmer were to charge $30 per hour, he'd get paid $10k for that program now. Except the program probably isn't custom-built for you, but could be interesting to 500 others, too. Thanks to this little detail, he's getting paid his $10k while you only need to pay $20 for his two months of work.
The same basic idea works for musicians except they're mixing both models. Playing live they will do some work, then get paid some money and are done with it (the venue acting like the company a construction worker might be employed by); selling albums they'll do just like the indie programmer.
The problem is, the indie programmer/album selling model needs to make people greedy. The indie programmer could, after 500 copies sold, just call it a day and hand out all further copies for free. Then again, there was risk. His new project, which he spent half a year on, may not sell the 1000 copies at $30 to pay his "salary", so he may need to get some more money from the first one to finance number three. Also, what about the 500 guys who paid $20 for a product that everyone else can get for free now. D'you think he'd be selling lots of copies after doing that a few times? If his software isn't extremely time-sensitive, most people would just wait for 500 morons to buy it so they can get it for free.
Let's not abolish copyrights or patents; instead make them shorter. Five, maybe ten years. Add property tax for intellectual property; setting their value by auction. That way, creators of copyable works can still make money while the public domain prospers.
He seems to have bad karma (i.e. Starting score of -1), gotten an "Insightful" (bringing him to 0) and an "Overrated" (Not displayed; not affecting karma; not in meta-moderation) bringing that back to -1 again.
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My bad. Thanks.
No it won't. Compared to touch or even a mouse, speech input is hideously slow. Telling your computer to switch to another window will take you about as long as saying "Switch to (say) eclipse", Alt-Tabbing takes me about a quarter of that and touching the taskbar button with my stylus maybe half. Im very confident of it's advantages for dictating texts, but that's mostly it. Speech is somewhat one-dimensional and not that great at navigating two (or, in the somewhat near future, three) dimensions.
Moving on, there's the matter of reading/interpreting displayed symbols (including letters) vs. getting them read to you. TTS systems are reasonably advanced nowadays and mostly work quite reliably. Yet, apart from assisting blind people, it remains a niche product. Even in that area, speech is often used in conjunction with a braille "screen" (a device used like a wrist rest below the keyboard, except it has a line of 40/80 braille characters) for any non-casual users (the braille thingies only have a very small target demographic, are thus produced in very small production runs and are accordingly expensive).
Speech will only be an effective interface to your computer once it reaches a level of intelligence superior to yours. How long, for example, do you take to scan through each result on your favourite search engine? A second, maybe two? How long to skip over the "sponsored results"? Fractions of a second? Until your computer is smart enough to find out the actual information, instead of just giving you a list of the matches, speech won't work here. The same goes for (even very basic) tabular data. Speech is sequential, i.e. one-dimensional and we are quite well adapted to parsing two-dimensional visual information (3-D to a limited extent). Reading from a 2-D display is not going to be matched this quickly.
And how would one emulate a smoker? By smoking yourself, maybe? So you start smoking. You take smoke breaks whenever your role models take them and happily light a fag or two, taking good care of that nicotine addiction. Already, your smoke breaks will probably be somewhat social. There's going to be more smokers around, they're going to be smoking (just like you!) and every now and then they're going to be asking you for a light. Some talking might ensue, names be exchanged and friend requests be sent back and forth. Congratulations, the percentage of smokers among your friends is likely to increase.
The great thing about smoking is it's addictingness. After all those breaks with your idols and perhaps a few new people, you'll probably run into a situation where you don't know any cool socialite in the vicinity. Doesn't matter, you'll still be taking a smoke break, it's not just about aspiring to the cool guys, it's also about getting that nicotine fix. Others will probably be in the same situation. Just like you, they'll be used to talking to others while smoking. Asking for a light or fag is a great conversation starter; and starting from your mutual love of processed tobacco, a conversation is easily started. Conversation leads to more smoke break leads to more conversations, leads to friend requests. And like that, two lonely smokers may find each other, get together, gift the world with a bunch of newborn (future) smokers. Shortly thereafter he dies of lung cancer, her next child is stillborn, pulling her into a deep depression during which she abuses her children. Finally, she takes her own life. Days later, her dead body and starved children are found by the landlord. While retrieving the bodies, the police accidentally rips open the wallpaper, freeing a large patch of old asbestos-containing isolation. The landlord proceeds to patch it all up with another layer of wallpaper, but having breathed asbestos nanoshrapnel for hours finishes his (due to smoking) already damaged lung off. He manages to call 911 and an ambulance is immediately dispatched. Unfortunately, on it's way to the landlord's apartment, the driver carelessy drops his cigarette. He looks down for a split second to localize the still glowing stub. While he's grabbing it, an unnamed Federal Agent Closely Resembling Jack Bauer sprints across the street in a vain attempt to stop the ticking countdown of a (novel, extremely deadly for the whole continental U.S., Hawaii and Alaska) bomb located a few blocks down. The ambulance slams into our facrjb, killing him on the spot (in a painful, slow way!). Only seconds thereafter, the countdown of the discussed explosive device hits 0:00:00. Smoking kills. But I seem to be digressing a tiny bit, so back to topic:
Doing anything (e.g. being hapy, eating meat, smoking) makes you more likely to spend time with people of similar interest and less likely to spend time with diametrically opposed people (emos, vegans, non-smokers) because the former will approve of your actions, the latter condone them and people, being social animals, tend to favour approval over condemnation. Simple as that.
What have we to lose anyhow? If no form of micropayment makes it through, many newspaper may not survive that much longer.
Throw a working way of monetizing in the mix, not only might we get rid of useless reporting ("useless" as in "nobody will pay to read it") but strengthen interesting reporting. Less dependency on ads means less nonsense spread over 15 ad-riddled pages.
Then, there'll be the whole Analytics tie-in (it's Google, it'll be there). Popular topics and journalists can be identified and given more weight.
I'm way too optimistic, but hey, it might work out. :)
Well, there could be an easy solution for that: Pay-as-you-Go Micropayments. Charge your Google account with $10, spend that, a penny every few clicks, charge it again.
Now the charging part could turn out to be a bit trickier. Ideally, you'd pay cash for a gift card, use that and be totally safe. Unfortunately, making and selling the physical cards isn't free, so this may or may not happen anytime soon. I'm guessing they'll take credit cards to fill you up. There's always Visa/Mastercard gift cards (non-personal, check with your local Mall) as well as Prepaid credit cards (personal, check with your Bank or credit card institution). Pretty safe, too.
In the end, even if you'd be paying directly from a real credit card, you can always cancel charges.
The idea (I'm guessing) is to make the whole deal easier and quicker. Right now you'll need to be signed up with every paper (or enter your credit card details for every article); with this Google thingie it might be enough to simply stay signed in to your Google account. Browse at Google News, see a paywalled article you're interested, click once or twice, paying a penny or ten, go on reading.
Not sure if I like the "Google knowing what articles I read and when I read them" aspect of this, but the "easy payment for insightful articles" seems ok.
Why not? As long as the process is quick and painless and the cost low enough (i.e. a few cents), I wouldn't mind that one click to read the full article with images and everything (and without ads).
It's similar to the model of those boxes containing a stack of newspaper to which you get access by inserting a quarter or two. Of course, one could get the whole stack and distribute it for free; but in reality most people will just get one paper (i.e. read the article) and get on with their lives.
You're obviously right about the definite mapping of an IP address to a location, but one could take an educated guess.
There's several geolocation services, all of them will more or less accurately tell you the location of an IP address. Usually that'll be one of your ISP's termination points; so while it won't be broken down to your city it tends to hit the right state/region and (save proxies and dirty tricks) will get the country right. IMO that wouldn't be necessary:
I'd simply go for the assigned netblock. One netblock is one location. That'll take care of ISPs distributing their traffic throughout their assigned /8; but still catch twi different /24s as different nets.
Alternatively, counting multiple blocks owned by the same person as one might provide better results. Time (and by time I mean log files of high-traffic sites) would tell.
In the end, the techies are going to click [details] where they'll get a list of login attempts, time and originating IP address. Judging about the meaning is up to them.
About the brute forcing: I never understood why would answer the "forgotten password" questions truthfully. Security-wise, it's suicide (I also never got why services would add that feature). Offer your users a nice sheet of paper with all the important details to print, (delete,) lock away in a safe location, but don't compromise the fragile security that's offered by a password.
"Since the last successful login Yesterday at 7:13, 48 attempts to log into your account with a wrong password have been made from 3 locations. [details]"
Simple as that. More detail wouldn't help most users, so let them know something potentially bad is happening. If they care about their account, they'll have a techie friend look into it.
Sorry Timosch, but Centrino does not specify the graphics chipset. It seriously constricts the choice of mobile chipsets, but discrete graphics are an option e.g. using PM965 in "Santa Rosa" Centrino.
If you're being pedantic, do it right.
There's a Swiss 125cc motorcyclist called Tom Lüthi who, before winning the 125cc GP at age 19 (iirc), has been doing GPs since age 16. Funny thing is: In Switzerland the minimum age for a drivers license (cars as well as 125cc cycles) is 18.
Now I don't know about you, but I wouldn't mind being told about how to drive by a Top-20 MotoGP driver. What do you think?
Hard Drive Active Protection System; around in ThinkPads since about 2003.
Sudden Motion Sensor; Macbooks since 2005.
I'm thinking a lot of effort may be going in just the opposite direction. Most of the people spending (justified) kilobucks on notebooks tend to either be enthusiasts or companies equipping key employees.
For the former, not having that favourite toy/tool/device some work is done on sometimes probably sucks quite a bit but won't really cause any monetary impact through missed deadlines or similar. They may be gamers, Apple customers or Bloggers. Lots of pretty, high-powered models to go around, probably the likes of Macbooks, Dell XPS' and similars.
Very few of those folks will buy next-day on-site warranty. Most can do the wait until stores are open again and get the device repaired/replaced then. Those who can't tend to be able to hack together some kind of solution or find a replacement that's Good Enough. All of those would probably favour indestructible notebooks with easy-to-replace hard drives, but my guess is this isn't where the money is:
The latter group do (some|lots|all) of their work on their notebook. On the road there may be days worth of unsynced (and thus un-backupped) data lying around on their hard drive. Losing that would bring problems to their company. Lots of Thinkpads, Latitudes and HP gear around here, of which lots will have 24-hour on-site replacement or better. That category is where lots of the money's at. They get the new safety upgrades first and in the most complete fashion. For example, current ThinkPads get a (very fucking hard) plastic shell, containing at least a display roll cage, a roll cage for the system portion containing, once again, another roll cage for the (vibration-dampened) hard drive. Of course the devices get more robust, but the focus lies quite clearly on the hard drive. Essentially it's a deal along the lines of "Smash it with a sledge hammer, burn it in a fire, then drive over it (twice; once to slice open the tires, then to get that beautiful metal-on-metal sound): your data is still fine and inside another shell within 24 hours". It's the difference between a toy (screw the data, replace the drive) and a tool (screw the shell and save the data), and tools are what money is made with.
The N900 is a video/still camera, a phone, a portable computer -- it's a lot of things, but it is by no means a Global Positioning System (i.e. a network of several sats orbiting the earth broadcasting a signal allowing GPS receivers just like the N900 to quite precisely determine your position). It's like calling your modem "the Internet". It's a device providing access to the big network/system, not the net/sys itself.
Right.
The basic kind of education you might get during school-time isn't wasted, even if done oh soon-to-be obsolete systems. For example, take Windows 2000 vs. Windows 7. The basic concepts haven't changed that much. You'll still start up the box using a similar power button. You'll still log in to some account. You'll still have some documents and programs on your Desktop, ready to be double-clicked. The "start" button will still be at the bottom left corner of your screen. There's still a "My Computer" containing several drives with a drive letter each. There's "My Documents" for all your stuffs. The Control Panel still is your friend when it comes to configuration issues and so on.
What I'm trying to say is: While it all may look a bit different (prettier/more resource wasteful), most of the concepts are still the same. Or, to go for the car analogy: If you've learned to drive an old VW minivan, chances are you'll manage driving in a brand new Porsche, too. Both still tend to have three (this is slashdot, so I'll stick to the male version. Replace with "two" for females ;)) pedals, a steering wheel and some kind of stick to your right. The details (AC, light switch, ...) will differ to some extent, but for somewhat adaptable people, knowing one variation will make getting used to another very easy.
I've had it with those motherfucking WHOOSHes on this motherfucking site!
We still can. The mentioned MAFIAA flaws are based on a vulnerability in server-side code. <iframe [...]> is posted as the search criteria and incorporated into the site output to the user. It's all HTTP (submitting the "evil" param") and HTML (returning a usable <iframe>.
The Firefox implementation "protects" only from scripts included via <script src=..> from another domain. Pure HTML (like above) or in-page scripts aren't blocked. In most* cases, that's a few minutes of extra work, tops; using the same vulnerability.
* Limitations include content filters (though allowing <script> yet blocking important JS keywords seems not that realistic to me), being vulnerable only to GET requests (limits script size to some 900 bytes; depending on implementation). A possible benefit (to the attacker) of including the script is being able to host it on a server he controls; thus the script can be changed while the attack is live and some tracking (how many people downloaded the script) can be done. OTOH, the attacker gets (more) trackable, too.
The local Don standing behind you with a cocked 9mm while you cast your vote is a nice picture to illustrate the possibilities.
The employer/union advising you to vote for x and favouring people who did when promotions and/or layoffs come around are the boring and far more real picture.
The difference is easy: ATM transactions aren't (and can't be) secret.
When I withdraw money from an ATM, I insert my personal card, my personal code and receive money out of my account. Being an honest person, I want this transaction to be stored in a database with information such as the amount, the date and time and most importantly, who actually withdrew that cash with what card.
Casting my vote through an electronic voting machine, I have another expectation. I want my ID to be checked at the entry, to verify I'm voting and voting only once. Alone with the machine, I do not want it to know who I am. The only thing I want it to know is whom I'm voting for. I don't want it to print a receipt, because that could be abused by the local mafia boss with a gun to verify I voted for whomever he wanted me to vote. In order to make the vote stay secret there may not be any way to find out who voted for whom.
The ordering idea sounds kinda neat, but you'd need order a be exactly the same as b, just in reverse. If both can be made up however you want them to, the coercer could just make you put his #1 and #2 in both top slots.
It'd work for votes other than elections, too. Just have Yes/No on both sides (again, left would have to be !right) and you're ready to go.
Build a secure, auditable platform around that and really direct democracy through e-voting becomes possible.
Let's say there's a seperate system for each vote. So a few weeks before, you get an envelope informing you about what's voted on, containing, perhaps, your mail-in ballot and your username and password for the online voting platform. The smart vote-buyer buys unopened envelopes; the voter never even gets their voting materials. No need to watch 'em as only whomever bought the vote knows what it is and how to change it. Potential weak spot: original voter votes physically, electronic/mail-in votes get discarded.
Maybe the system assigns you a username and a password for all coming votes. Let's say the password is user-changeable. Buyer changes password until vote has passed, can vote for whatever he likes whenever he likes. Change that assumption to password isn't user-changeable. Now the buyer needs to either make sure the seller doesn't know his pass (buy the sealed envelope) or goes for the vote-sniping approach. Cast his vote two seconds before the deadline. Potential improvement: fuzzy deadline as in "sometime between 1400 and 1700 no more votes are accepted. Weak spots for both: physical vote will likely be prioritized over other forms; original voter may request another password.
In the end, vote-buying without "cracking the platform" is possible, but it's probably easier to crack or control any of the involved servers or networks.
To go for the car analogy:
Imagine a (large) conveyor 100 miles long, stable enough for you to drive on in your car. Now drive from it's start to it's end in one hour. The distance you traveled is 100 miles, right?
Now imagine that conveyor moving in the opposite direction (i.e. towards you) at 50 mph. To still get from your starting point to your destination in an hour, you're doing 150 mph road speed. The GPS will still report 100 mph, but your car's tachymetre will report 150 mph, the wheels will revolve as is necessary to go 150 mph and, if you add 50 mph of headwind, even the air resistance will be equal to doing 150 mph without wind.
In an environment where the you need to stay in a 10 mph zone in order to avoid either stalling, rapid descent, crash, death if going too slow or plane breaking apart in mid-air, rapid descent, crash, death; it's quite helpful to know an accurate measurement. It's like Speed, except the bomb will blow up when your axle speed drops below 145 and the bus will spontaneously disintegrate at 155. Also, there's varying levels of wind. Also, you're driving on slicks. Through some kind of rally track half of which is concrete, the other half sand/dirt and the other half is jell-o.
If you hire a construction worker to build you some drywall, he'll charge you by the hour. He might spend eight hours at your construction site, do whatever it is construction workers do to drywall, then charge you, say, $30/hr for $240.
If you buy some software from an independant programmer, he might have spent two months developing it. Two months could be about 43 working days (60 / 7 * 5). At 8 hours per working day, that's about 344 hours of work done. If that programmer were to charge $30 per hour, he'd get paid $10k for that program now. Except the program probably isn't custom-built for you, but could be interesting to 500 others, too. Thanks to this little detail, he's getting paid his $10k while you only need to pay $20 for his two months of work.
The same basic idea works for musicians except they're mixing both models. Playing live they will do some work, then get paid some money and are done with it (the venue acting like the company a construction worker might be employed by); selling albums they'll do just like the indie programmer.
The problem is, the indie programmer/album selling model needs to make people greedy. The indie programmer could, after 500 copies sold, just call it a day and hand out all further copies for free. Then again, there was risk. His new project, which he spent half a year on, may not sell the 1000 copies at $30 to pay his "salary", so he may need to get some more money from the first one to finance number three. Also, what about the 500 guys who paid $20 for a product that everyone else can get for free now. D'you think he'd be selling lots of copies after doing that a few times? If his software isn't extremely time-sensitive, most people would just wait for 500 morons to buy it so they can get it for free.
Let's not abolish copyrights or patents; instead make them shorter. Five, maybe ten years. Add property tax for intellectual property; setting their value by auction. That way, creators of copyable works can still make money while the public domain prospers.
He seems to have bad karma (i.e. Starting score of -1), gotten an "Insightful" (bringing him to 0) and an "Overrated" (Not displayed; not affecting karma; not in meta-moderation) bringing that back to -1 again.