The first "authority" to step in would be the site operators. The First Amendment does not protect private venues like Slashdot, Twitter, or Facebook, who are free to censor, ban, or even issue a warning as they see fit. I would expect that, at least for the foreseeable future, such actions would be under the review of a human team, and the AI would simply bring conversations to their attention.
I imagine most trash-talk on the internet is simply talk.
Certainly... though I'd be willing to argue on a tangent that talk is part of the problem as well. Conflicts start as talk, then escalate without anyone ever backing down. I suggest that the AI-assisted forum moderators act as referees, and force the conflict to stop before it passes that forum's limit of animosity.
You could probably develop an AI which identified potential criminals based on their internet speech but it would just be potential criminals. Most of those people turn out to be all talk.
And after a 15-minute chat ban in their Call of Duty game, they keep the talk civil, learn from their mistakes, and never cause problems again. That is the main intent of this system, to intervene while the conflict is still growing, and force the matter to settle down.
Forums like slashdot and twitter and facebook and the comment sections on the likes of the Washington Post could all be subject to looking for potential criminals. How do we tweak the algorithms?
Well, yes. Slashdot's a mild case, mostly due to its established and educated clientele, so its mods tend to do a reasonable job of keeping conversations steered to constructive forms. As I understand, Facebook already has AI reviewing posts and comments for things that might need human review (though they aren't focused much on interaction, but more on content).
Of course racism is still protected under the First Amendment
No, it isn't. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from restricting speech, but it does not affect private companies or individuals from censoring how they see fit within their own domains. If the Washington Post chooses to censor any racist comments, it is free to do so, and (in fact because of the First Amendment) there is very little that can be done legally to oppose it.
so this AI would have to distinguish between those who simply hate and those who would commit violence due to their hatred - that might be tricky.
Fortunately, AI tends to be either very good or very bad at such problems. It would mostly depend on whether there is an identifiable pattern of behavior in the confrontation. By implementing a progressive reprimand, the risk of societal damage from false positives is very low. If someone gets flagged accidentally, it has little lasting effect.
Making a false report is already illegal, and there's a decent case that this guy could get some form of manslaughter charge as well. Laws aren't going to fix this.
I, for one, am betting on AI being the best hope. Let AI watch conversations on games (where it is a private affair, mind you, not a constitutional issue), and start cracking down on overly-aggressive players before they can turn into hazards.
The moment something crosses the line of legality, the game platform should have all the logs and records needed to make an easy case for prosecution, and that case law is what will change the public perception, and in turn reduce incidents. If the perpetrators know that they'll get caught and likely convicted, they'll find other (hopefully more legal and less lethal) means to vent their frustrations.
I've known a good number of dumbass techie Libertarians myself, and even the guy who made a road trip with the explicit goal of spending only bitcoin still brought good old dollars with him, just in case.
Even us regular old dumbass techie non-Libertarians tend to travel with multiple forms of currency, to avoid problems
Since this is being touted as an economic issue, I'm more right-wing than anything else... and I could also find a few good reasons to abruptly perform a manual realignment of his septum.
Since the issue has arisen, yes, let's follow up with a discussion of why you'd bother bringing politics into a discussion of a hubristic asshole undermining the democratic process that is the foundation of our country. I do, in fact, disagree with the decision to allow government-sanctioned monopolies to add arbitrary fees, but moreso I disagree with the entire process surrounding the vote.
This isn't a political decision of whether we want a society-focused or a individual-focused government, which is usually the core difference between conservative and liberal ideologies. Rather, this is a very straightforward ruling to let private companies increase profit by harming individuals and other companies, and thanks to the existence of municipal monopolies, the competition that might drive is essentially outlawed across most of the country. If the legality of local monopolies was also on the chopping block, I'd have more concern for the chairman's countenance, but under the current conditions, I must oppose.
The net result is that ISPs are free to extort other businesses, and their position of power is being backed by government enforcement. This is the antithesis of the highly-competitive conservative ideal, and it's also contrary to the community-focused goals of a liberal government. It does, however, align with the goals of a kleptocracy. The politicians get their cushy jobs and revolving doors leading to the decision's benefactors, and those who engage in honest competition are left paying the bill.
It was released in 2007. Office did the same thing with the 97, 2013, and 2016 versions, and is expecting to release the 2019 version in late 2018. That alone isn't enough to cause any confusion, but other versions (namely 2000 through 2010) were released in their namesake years.
Let's not forget other names, mostly chosen by Microsoft's marketing department:
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows ME
Windows 10
Any Windows Server "R2" version
Visual Studio 2008 (and many other products named for the year after they were actually released)
The whole name, including the version "number", is a brand. Microsoft's marketing folks tend to prefer making connections to other Microsoft products, while Linux folks tend to use names to evoke an emotional connection to their product. Yes, it's all marketing, and it's a standard practice in this and most other fields.
1/ Stop the ability for having physical access to the inner computer, NO USB ports, no wifi, Ethernet module
Put a vampire tap on the Ethernet cable.
inside the case so you only have one cable trailing (POE) - or two if AC is required to power a small touch screen (really?)
I don't recall the details, but there are some attacks perpetrated by modulating power, essentially causing transistors to behave erratically, with a variety of effects.
go all Apple with custom torque screw drives and lots of them to open these machines.
Just like the TSA keys, right? The ones that can be easily fabricated and bought now that pictures of them were published in a news article?
2/ No internet access for these devices or the server ever, voter lists are loaded into an onsite server
...So I can hack the onsite server, or impersonate it.
which provides DHCP for the voting machines
DHCP is a broadcast-based protocol, though, so I can drop in my own server that will respond to requests with my own configuration.
(anything with an incorrect MAC address gets dropped on to a blackhole VLAN).
I first listen for an existing MAC address on the cable I've tapped, then spoof it.
If I've missed anything...
Yeah, you missed a few things. The main one is that you're thinking about how to lock down a system, rather than attack it. To use an analogy, you're putting a deadbolt on your front door while leaving the windows open.
Assume that every component of your system will be under attack. Not just the ballot counts, but the names listed, the user interface, and the infrastructure. Assume that it will be under attack at all times: In manufacture, storage, shipping, and during the election itself. Assume that your adversary has technology you don't, and will break anything that isn't proven to be impossible. Finally, assume that any knowable results of an individual's vote will be used to coerce or intimidate the voters.
In the interest of understanding, you should know a bit of my background: I used to build robots, and these days I do a lot of work automating manual processes.
I see it as a mixed bag. On the one hand, a manual recount is more error-prone on the surface, but it's also less error-prone in that a manual review can account for more inconsistency. Where a smudge on the paper might confuse an optical reader, a human would have no problem determining the correct result. Yes, that can be resolved with high-end visual sensors (essentially cameras), but those single-purpose devices are also far more expensive than a human's time. Using statistical analysis also means that the one vote wouldn't matter, but such a situation could be problematic if, say,
paper ballots were stored incorrectly.
Having humans involved also drastically reduce the attack surface if interference is considered a viable threat. Having a farm of 500 vote-counting machines means one attack can be repeated 500 times with expected success. Having 1000 humans means that 1000 individual corrupting attacks must be executed, and there's just a slim chance they'll succeed... and a good chance they'll alert authorities. As a check to validate a machine-generated initial count, humans are certainly a safer option.
As with any system, defense in depth is the best option. We expect the machines will handle the initial count correctly, but it needs to be verified by the humans. We expect they'll handle the recount properly, but to ensure the correct methodology, the statistical parameters are being prescribed by law, open to public review and criticism. To ensure the law matches society's expectations, we have the democratic process allowing new representatives to revise the law as needed.
No, it isn't perfect, but it's the best the world has to offer.
Firstly, I think you might be confusing growth rates with absolute amounts
No, I'm not. The GDP has grown at 1-4% per year, while national debt has grown by 4-15% year-on-year.
To explain my point: the GDP is much bigger than the National Debt, which is a small fraction of the overall GDP.
Not quite. The national debt is at around $20 trillion dollars, while the US GDP is around $18 trillion per year.
Therefore, the GDP could grow at a much smaller rate compared to the debt, and still completely wipe it out.
Even if the entirety of the GDP growth (which is not actually cash, mind you, but let's pretend it was) was devoted to paying off the debt, we still wouldn't match the debt growth.
An analogy would be Bill Gates donating 1% of his yearly expenses to completely covering 200% of yours. Makes sense?
A better analogy would be someone living paycheck-to-paycheck forgetting about rent when deciding to go to a fancy restaurant for dinner.
As long as we catch up to the debt soon before compounding kicks in, we will be fine.
The opportunity for that passed when the recession hit in 2008. Prior to that, the debt hovered at around 60% of annual GDP.
Second: Yes, Obama is 80% responsible for the current growth rate. He's also responsible for saving the economy in 2009.
I'm not so inclined to credit "Obama" with those as I am to credit the army of economists and legislators that actually enacted recovery efforts. I happened to be working in the financial sector at the time, and saw firsthand the effects of the policy changes and incentive programs. There was hardly any mention of the President, but quite a lot of attention on his nominee, Ben Bernanke.
Doesn't negate Trump contribution: cancelling parasitic regulations, dumb TPP and Paris accords, and just inspiring investment overall.
None of which has had any meaningful effect, leading to investment activity almost exactly the same as 2014-2015. Nice use of the Trump spice, though: "parasitic", "dumb", and "inspiring" convey that wonderful emotion without requiring any actual facts.
If the stock market believes there will be grown, everybody will invest, and there indeed will be growth.
That's consumer confidence, which has been climbing steadily since 2009. We're not quite up to late-1990s levels, but confidence generally rises during periods of stability, and falls shortly after instability when the money to invest suddenly isn't available.
Finally, my opinion about Infrastructure and 10% growth is my finger-in-the-ass estimate
Yeah, I noticed.
yet guided by decades of experience. I saw what computing did in the 80s: in my field, productivity increased by about 4 orders of magnitude in a decade.
So where's my jetpack?
"Productivity" actually has little to do with economic growth. As productivity goes up, costs come down, but that leaves more cash to spend in other ways. Your field's costs dropped and revenues went up, but then you turn around and spend that revenue on a vacation, or home improvements, or security investments. It all works out to about the same.
Given that out major infrastructure (to me: power, airports, pipelines) is from the 70s-80s and is completely obsolete, I certainly see a lot of potential.
Most of that infrastructure was also designed to last 50 years, and plans to replace it have been underway for the last decade. Despite the alarmism, there's still no detail as to what infrastructure Trump wants to renovate, apart from the few specific cases he's called out in public tirades.
I'd focus on power, drones (flying cars, really), healthcare, RND/universities, and fiber.
Even Trump's claim is that it's just "more than $1m". One single million. For comparison, that's the low estimate for the cost of security for Melania Trump staying in New York City for a single week, or three days if it's the President himself visiting the Big Apple. It's also well under the cost for a single trip for the President to go golfing as his own Mar-a-Lago resort.
Somehow, I don't think cost was the driving factor in this decision.
Good point, but 2% yearly growth in the economy will generate enough revenue to pay down all debt.
2% is adorable. That's not enough to cover interest and inflation, let alone pay down any debt, which has been growing at 5% for the last 4 years.
For the record, we are at 4% since last November (and with this tax plan, 6-8% is doable).
Despite Trump's claims of shockingly-high GDP, we're just over 3% this year, which is only a little above average. Since we've had a strong stable economy for the last five years, this is unsurprising. Yes, 6-8% is doable, but it was last done in 1984, accompanied by a notable tax increase and a big increase in debt, as well.
If the infrastructure plan of Trump goes through, we might be at 10%
That's also an entertaining estimate, since the White House hasn't actually released any details of this great plan.
The question was whether the backers could be held liable. If you wish to argue that the act of backing a Kickstarter campaign cannot possibly be illegal, that's a different matter entirely.
...sue somebody you don't have a relationship with...
That's your core assumption, but it's the one that's not necessarily true.
The relationship is that the backers funded the project. Depending on the circumstances, that could in itself be enough for liability. Yes, the plaintiff would have to show that the backers knowingly committed a criminal act, but I'm not going to assume that could never happen. One of the most illustrative examples would be an election campaign. Kickstarter's default process certainly doesn't meet campaign reporting requirements, and knowingly contributing to a campaign that isn't fulfilling reporting requirements is itself a violation.
In the civil arena, there is precedent for funding sources to be sued as conspirators in another act, also if they participated knowingly. While it is less likely to succeed than a criminal case, it's not necessarily unheard of.
when no crime has been reported and you don't have any evidence of one
Again, you're assuming that such a thing is impossible, just because it hasn't come up in the few years that Kickstarter has been active. It would depend on the facts available, probably most importantly the Kickstarter project description. I certainly won't assume that there is no criminal stupid enough to publish evidence against himself when soliciting for funding, and that would likely cover the "knowingly and willingly" terms in a good many statutes.
To abuse the campaign finance example, a statement that the Kickstarter campaign is requiring "no additional paperwork or verification" would be a good indicator that they're avoiding reporting rules, perhaps even to the point that a judge would consider backers to be suitably informed.
Now we're getting back to the original issue of liability, and the part that has not been tested, and probably won't for a long time to come. While I'm not going to claim it's impossible, it is certainly unlikely that a project creator would openly publish such statements that would reveal themselves and their backers as committing a crime. Until that happens, the question of whether Kickstarter provides any protection from liability remains unanswered.
you'd have to sue kickstarter and then ask the court's permission to add the people donating the money
There may be a discovery action to name the John Does, but if there's already a case against the project and a legal basis to generically go after the funding sources, there's little reason to expect that Kickstarter would be a defendant. They're just the payment processor.
With prison budgets already stretched thin, and a general lack of IT support, we now expect they'll maintain a self-contained cell network?
Nevermind that many phones today (not sure about the ones in TFA) allow the user to select the carrier they connect to, as well. It'd be trivial to bypass the femtocells and connect to the network service the community outside the prison walls.
That's certainly a pithy statement, but that logical leap you took cleared right over the contents of a basic civics course. It makes you look stupid and silly without purpose.
A password manager alone does not increase your security. Rather, it enables the use of much stronger passwords and enables having unique passwords for each resource, while also allowing the password list to be securely backed up for disaster recovery. With those combined efforts, the attack surface for an individual is reduced tremendously.
The days of individual attacks are long gone. Unless you're a high-profile political dissident, nobody cares about your personal computer. Rather, you're just one of a half-million account credentials stolen from a website you've long since forgot about, and your password happened to be one of the early ones to have its hash broken. You just happen to be the guy who used that same password on your email account, and you just happen to be the guy whose bank account is tied to their email, and has enough personal identity details in old messages to make an attack successful.
Attacks today aren't looking for bullseyes. They're shooting buckshot, and they'll score the first thing they hit.
Shame on anyone for reusing a password, or having one less than 12 characters.
Security is hard task with a fragile result. There's a quote that I can't precisely recall, something along the lines of "Security is like math, except it matters which kind of pen you use to write it". It's vastly easier to leak information accidentally, than to accidentally keep everything secret that should be.
On the other side of the coin, let's suppose someone did accidentally do things right. Even if they don't know how they did it, that's not an accident. That's just doing things right, and not the sort of thing anyone notices or reports on, until that person stops accidentally succeeding... Then, of course, the problem isn't reported as "we have no idea how he didn't screw up earlier", but rather as "he made one mistake after many successes."
The short answer is "we don't know". On the one hand, Kickstarter has set up a pretty decent barrier of isolation between backers and creators, mostly by establishing that backing a project does not come with any legal obligation for return. On the other hand, the laws against funding a criminal enterprise are some of the strongest, so it wouldn't surprise me to see a lawsuit go after backers as well. There is some legal basis for such things, mostly lying in money-laundering laws. To the best of my knowledge, though, those legal theories haven't been tested.
To quote one of the best lawyers I've ever had the pleasure of working with, "Laws and contracts don't matter. All that really matters is what a judge decides. The laws just make strong suggestions."
I've been working on a silly little web project, that someday I hope to turn into an income-generating company.
Unfortunately, my project relies on having fairly snappy response times (mostly low bandwidth/low latency, but occasionally having bursts of high bandwidth usage) for a good user experience. Without neutrality, I can't expect that any more. Traffic to and from my tiny little project will be queued behind the high-definition stream for Netflix, because I can't afford to pay Comcast (or Spectrum, or Verizon, or AT&T, or whoever else owns the customers) the millions of dollars in fees to get fast-lane prioritization.
Yes, it's speculation. It's also history, because I lived through the last round of these problems. I remember working with ISPs in the 90s and 2000s to figure out why certain traffic was unusually slow... sure enough, it's because that particular service had been deemed "low-priority" and was throttled. Fortunately at the time I had a big enough team of corporate lawyers that we could force a bit more throughput from the small ISP, but that's not usually the case today.
The reality is that probably 90% of Americans won't notice a difference. Their Netflix subscription might cost a few cents more, or their telecom stock value might get a small boost, but that's about it. The real loss is in potential. The next big Internet-based success might just be someone's silly little project today, and it'll likely never be able to grow because of the arbitrary limits placed by ISPs.
No, it's not just about torrents. It's about waiting for a product demo video to buffer, or waiting for an AJAX call to update a GUI, or waiting for a site's style sheet to properly load. It's about my user experience (and thus my project's success) being heavily dependent on how much extra money I pay to which ISPs, rather than how good my actual product is.
In short, you're saying that creating a new role of toll collector is "pro-competition".
In short, I'm saying that is an argument that could be (and has been) made. When the FCC commissioners and telecom lobbyists say things like "removing neutrality promotes growth opportunities", this is the scenario they're picturing. At the risk of invoking the strawman fallacy, I present the argument here as a perspective on how throttling might not be seen as always anti-competitive.
So, on all your roads around your house, we'll open up bidding for toll collectors, and those toll-collectors can block whatever services your particular neighborhood will receive. So, blue apron - not a chance. Lyft wins over Uber, no Uber for you. Walmart beat Amazon, no Amazon anything for you. USPS can no longer deliver to you - too bad about your mail.
Yep, that's about right. As an interesting anecdote, I used to live in a gated community with a similar problem. UPS, FedEx, and USPS could come & go as they pleased, but a local courier service would have to wait at the gate until a resident called the gate office to say the delivery was expected. On the one hand, it seems reasonable (for a gated community, at least). I don't want just anybody with a Pizza Hut delivery sign to be able to drive into my community. On the other hand, my neighbors and I got a lot of cold pizzas.
Take it that way and you can see how anti-competitive this action is.
Absolutely. I think the big difference in perspective is that the big players can afford to play the longer games, while small startups have to get a string of constant and immediate wins to survive. As the AC above me pointed out, there is competition within the bidding process, and that's what the lobbyists and other friends-of-big-business emphasize. The big competitors compete to gain hundreds or thousands of customers at once.
Small companies, however, can't compete at the level where they can gain or lose whole markets. They have to compete for individual customers to develop enough working capital to pursue those opportunities. Without network neutrality, those doors are permanently and quickly closed, just as solidly as my community's extruded aluminum gates.
Slashdot Mirror
At what point do the authorities step in?
The first "authority" to step in would be the site operators. The First Amendment does not protect private venues like Slashdot, Twitter, or Facebook, who are free to censor, ban, or even issue a warning as they see fit. I would expect that, at least for the foreseeable future, such actions would be under the review of a human team, and the AI would simply bring conversations to their attention.
I imagine most trash-talk on the internet is simply talk.
Certainly... though I'd be willing to argue on a tangent that talk is part of the problem as well. Conflicts start as talk, then escalate without anyone ever backing down. I suggest that the AI-assisted forum moderators act as referees, and force the conflict to stop before it passes that forum's limit of animosity.
You could probably develop an AI which identified potential criminals based on their internet speech but it would just be potential criminals. Most of those people turn out to be all talk.
And after a 15-minute chat ban in their Call of Duty game, they keep the talk civil, learn from their mistakes, and never cause problems again. That is the main intent of this system, to intervene while the conflict is still growing, and force the matter to settle down.
Forums like slashdot and twitter and facebook and the comment sections on the likes of the Washington Post could all be subject to looking for potential criminals. How do we tweak the algorithms?
Well, yes. Slashdot's a mild case, mostly due to its established and educated clientele, so its mods tend to do a reasonable job of keeping conversations steered to constructive forms. As I understand, Facebook already has AI reviewing posts and comments for things that might need human review (though they aren't focused much on interaction, but more on content).
Of course racism is still protected under the First Amendment
No, it isn't. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from restricting speech, but it does not affect private companies or individuals from censoring how they see fit within their own domains. If the Washington Post chooses to censor any racist comments, it is free to do so, and (in fact because of the First Amendment) there is very little that can be done legally to oppose it.
so this AI would have to distinguish between those who simply hate and those who would commit violence due to their hatred - that might be tricky.
Fortunately, AI tends to be either very good or very bad at such problems. It would mostly depend on whether there is an identifiable pattern of behavior in the confrontation. By implementing a progressive reprimand, the risk of societal damage from false positives is very low. If someone gets flagged accidentally, it has little lasting effect.
He knew he could, but every other person out there considering it must know that they will get caught.
Making a false report is already illegal, and there's a decent case that this guy could get some form of manslaughter charge as well. Laws aren't going to fix this.
I, for one, am betting on AI being the best hope. Let AI watch conversations on games (where it is a private affair, mind you, not a constitutional issue), and start cracking down on overly-aggressive players before they can turn into hazards.
The moment something crosses the line of legality, the game platform should have all the logs and records needed to make an easy case for prosecution, and that case law is what will change the public perception, and in turn reduce incidents. If the perpetrators know that they'll get caught and likely convicted, they'll find other (hopefully more legal and less lethal) means to vent their frustrations.
Better yet, just don't be a hazard to society.
That sounds about right...
I've known a good number of dumbass techie Libertarians myself, and even the guy who made a road trip with the explicit goal of spending only bitcoin still brought good old dollars with him, just in case.
Even us regular old dumbass techie non-Libertarians tend to travel with multiple forms of currency, to avoid problems
I am disappointed that this new feature is not being called an Overpressure Event Generator.
Since this is being touted as an economic issue, I'm more right-wing than anything else... and I could also find a few good reasons to abruptly perform a manual realignment of his septum.
Since the issue has arisen, yes, let's follow up with a discussion of why you'd bother bringing politics into a discussion of a hubristic asshole undermining the democratic process that is the foundation of our country. I do, in fact, disagree with the decision to allow government-sanctioned monopolies to add arbitrary fees, but moreso I disagree with the entire process surrounding the vote.
This isn't a political decision of whether we want a society-focused or a individual-focused government, which is usually the core difference between conservative and liberal ideologies. Rather, this is a very straightforward ruling to let private companies increase profit by harming individuals and other companies, and thanks to the existence of municipal monopolies, the competition that might drive is essentially outlawed across most of the country. If the legality of local monopolies was also on the chopping block, I'd have more concern for the chairman's countenance, but under the current conditions, I must oppose.
The net result is that ISPs are free to extort other businesses, and their position of power is being backed by government enforcement. This is the antithesis of the highly-competitive conservative ideal, and it's also contrary to the community-focused goals of a liberal government. It does, however, align with the goals of a kleptocracy. The politicians get their cushy jobs and revolving doors leading to the decision's benefactors, and those who engage in honest competition are left paying the bill.
It was released in 2007. Office did the same thing with the 97, 2013, and 2016 versions, and is expecting to release the 2019 version in late 2018. That alone isn't enough to cause any confusion, but other versions (namely 2000 through 2010) were released in their namesake years.
Let's not forget other names, mostly chosen by Microsoft's marketing department:
The whole name, including the version "number", is a brand. Microsoft's marketing folks tend to prefer making connections to other Microsoft products, while Linux folks tend to use names to evoke an emotional connection to their product. Yes, it's all marketing, and it's a standard practice in this and most other fields.
In case you missed it, things have improved in the 16 years since that story was written.
In the interest of fairness, should we compare modern Linux distros to Windows ME?
Ooo! I love these games!
1/ Stop the ability for having physical access to the inner computer, NO USB ports, no wifi, Ethernet module
Put a vampire tap on the Ethernet cable.
inside the case so you only have one cable trailing (POE) - or two if AC is required to power a small touch screen (really?)
I don't recall the details, but there are some attacks perpetrated by modulating power, essentially causing transistors to behave erratically, with a variety of effects.
go all Apple with custom torque screw drives and lots of them to open these machines.
Just like the TSA keys, right? The ones that can be easily fabricated and bought now that pictures of them were published in a news article?
2/ No internet access for these devices or the server ever, voter lists are loaded into an onsite server
...So I can hack the onsite server, or impersonate it.
which provides DHCP for the voting machines
DHCP is a broadcast-based protocol, though, so I can drop in my own server that will respond to requests with my own configuration.
(anything with an incorrect MAC address gets dropped on to a blackhole VLAN).
I first listen for an existing MAC address on the cable I've tapped, then spoof it.
If I've missed anything...
Yeah, you missed a few things. The main one is that you're thinking about how to lock down a system, rather than attack it. To use an analogy, you're putting a deadbolt on your front door while leaving the windows open.
Assume that every component of your system will be under attack. Not just the ballot counts, but the names listed, the user interface, and the infrastructure. Assume that it will be under attack at all times: In manufacture, storage, shipping, and during the election itself. Assume that your adversary has technology you don't, and will break anything that isn't proven to be impossible. Finally, assume that any knowable results of an individual's vote will be used to coerce or intimidate the voters.
Ehhh......
In the interest of understanding, you should know a bit of my background: I used to build robots, and these days I do a lot of work automating manual processes.
I see it as a mixed bag. On the one hand, a manual recount is more error-prone on the surface, but it's also less error-prone in that a manual review can account for more inconsistency. Where a smudge on the paper might confuse an optical reader, a human would have no problem determining the correct result. Yes, that can be resolved with high-end visual sensors (essentially cameras), but those single-purpose devices are also far more expensive than a human's time. Using statistical analysis also means that the one vote wouldn't matter, but such a situation could be problematic if, say, paper ballots were stored incorrectly.
Having humans involved also drastically reduce the attack surface if interference is considered a viable threat. Having a farm of 500 vote-counting machines means one attack can be repeated 500 times with expected success. Having 1000 humans means that 1000 individual corrupting attacks must be executed, and there's just a slim chance they'll succeed... and a good chance they'll alert authorities. As a check to validate a machine-generated initial count, humans are certainly a safer option.
As with any system, defense in depth is the best option. We expect the machines will handle the initial count correctly, but it needs to be verified by the humans. We expect they'll handle the recount properly, but to ensure the correct methodology, the statistical parameters are being prescribed by law, open to public review and criticism. To ensure the law matches society's expectations, we have the democratic process allowing new representatives to revise the law as needed.
No, it isn't perfect, but it's the best the world has to offer.
I was going to say all the same things, but I guess just "me too" will suffice.
Firstly, I think you might be confusing growth rates with absolute amounts
No, I'm not. The GDP has grown at 1-4% per year, while national debt has grown by 4-15% year-on-year.
To explain my point: the GDP is much bigger than the National Debt, which is a small fraction of the overall GDP.
Not quite. The national debt is at around $20 trillion dollars, while the US GDP is around $18 trillion per year.
Therefore, the GDP could grow at a much smaller rate compared to the debt, and still completely wipe it out.
Even if the entirety of the GDP growth (which is not actually cash, mind you, but let's pretend it was) was devoted to paying off the debt, we still wouldn't match the debt growth.
An analogy would be Bill Gates donating 1% of his yearly expenses to completely covering 200% of yours. Makes sense?
A better analogy would be someone living paycheck-to-paycheck forgetting about rent when deciding to go to a fancy restaurant for dinner.
As long as we catch up to the debt soon before compounding kicks in, we will be fine.
The opportunity for that passed when the recession hit in 2008. Prior to that, the debt hovered at around 60% of annual GDP.
Second: Yes, Obama is 80% responsible for the current growth rate. He's also responsible for saving the economy in 2009.
I'm not so inclined to credit "Obama" with those as I am to credit the army of economists and legislators that actually enacted recovery efforts. I happened to be working in the financial sector at the time, and saw firsthand the effects of the policy changes and incentive programs. There was hardly any mention of the President, but quite a lot of attention on his nominee, Ben Bernanke.
Doesn't negate Trump contribution: cancelling parasitic regulations, dumb TPP and Paris accords, and just inspiring investment overall.
None of which has had any meaningful effect, leading to investment activity almost exactly the same as 2014-2015. Nice use of the Trump spice, though: "parasitic", "dumb", and "inspiring" convey that wonderful emotion without requiring any actual facts.
If the stock market believes there will be grown, everybody will invest, and there indeed will be growth.
That's consumer confidence, which has been climbing steadily since 2009. We're not quite up to late-1990s levels, but confidence generally rises during periods of stability, and falls shortly after instability when the money to invest suddenly isn't available.
Finally, my opinion about Infrastructure and 10% growth is my finger-in-the-ass estimate
Yeah, I noticed.
yet guided by decades of experience. I saw what computing did in the 80s: in my field, productivity increased by about 4 orders of magnitude in a decade.
So where's my jetpack?
"Productivity" actually has little to do with economic growth. As productivity goes up, costs come down, but that leaves more cash to spend in other ways. Your field's costs dropped and revenues went up, but then you turn around and spend that revenue on a vacation, or home improvements, or security investments. It all works out to about the same.
Given that out major infrastructure (to me: power, airports, pipelines) is from the 70s-80s and is completely obsolete, I certainly see a lot of potential.
Most of that infrastructure was also designed to last 50 years, and plans to replace it have been underway for the last decade. Despite the alarmism, there's still no detail as to what infrastructure Trump wants to renovate, apart from the few specific cases he's called out in public tirades.
I'd focus on power, drones (flying cars, really), healthcare, RND/universities, and fiber.
T
Even Trump's claim is that it's just "more than $1m". One single million. For comparison, that's the low estimate for the cost of security for Melania Trump staying in New York City for a single week, or three days if it's the President himself visiting the Big Apple. It's also well under the cost for a single trip for the President to go golfing as his own Mar-a-Lago resort.
Somehow, I don't think cost was the driving factor in this decision.
Good point, but 2% yearly growth in the economy will generate enough revenue to pay down all debt.
2% is adorable. That's not enough to cover interest and inflation, let alone pay down any debt, which has been growing at 5% for the last 4 years.
For the record, we are at 4% since last November (and with this tax plan, 6-8% is doable).
Despite Trump's claims of shockingly-high GDP, we're just over 3% this year, which is only a little above average. Since we've had a strong stable economy for the last five years, this is unsurprising. Yes, 6-8% is doable, but it was last done in 1984, accompanied by a notable tax increase and a big increase in debt, as well.
If the infrastructure plan of Trump goes through, we might be at 10%
That's also an entertaining estimate, since the White House hasn't actually released any details of this great plan.
The question was whether the backers could be held liable. If you wish to argue that the act of backing a Kickstarter campaign cannot possibly be illegal, that's a different matter entirely.
...sue somebody you don't have a relationship with...
That's your core assumption, but it's the one that's not necessarily true.
The relationship is that the backers funded the project. Depending on the circumstances, that could in itself be enough for liability. Yes, the plaintiff would have to show that the backers knowingly committed a criminal act, but I'm not going to assume that could never happen. One of the most illustrative examples would be an election campaign. Kickstarter's default process certainly doesn't meet campaign reporting requirements, and knowingly contributing to a campaign that isn't fulfilling reporting requirements is itself a violation.
In the civil arena, there is precedent for funding sources to be sued as conspirators in another act, also if they participated knowingly. While it is less likely to succeed than a criminal case, it's not necessarily unheard of.
when no crime has been reported and you don't have any evidence of one
Again, you're assuming that such a thing is impossible, just because it hasn't come up in the few years that Kickstarter has been active. It would depend on the facts available, probably most importantly the Kickstarter project description. I certainly won't assume that there is no criminal stupid enough to publish evidence against himself when soliciting for funding, and that would likely cover the "knowingly and willingly" terms in a good many statutes.
To abuse the campaign finance example, a statement that the Kickstarter campaign is requiring "no additional paperwork or verification" would be a good indicator that they're avoiding reporting rules, perhaps even to the point that a judge would consider backers to be suitably informed.
Now we're getting back to the original issue of liability, and the part that has not been tested, and probably won't for a long time to come. While I'm not going to claim it's impossible, it is certainly unlikely that a project creator would openly publish such statements that would reveal themselves and their backers as committing a crime. Until that happens, the question of whether Kickstarter provides any protection from liability remains unanswered.
you'd have to sue kickstarter and then ask the court's permission to add the people donating the money
There may be a discovery action to name the John Does, but if there's already a case against the project and a legal basis to generically go after the funding sources, there's little reason to expect that Kickstarter would be a defendant. They're just the payment processor.
With prison budgets already stretched thin, and a general lack of IT support, we now expect they'll maintain a self-contained cell network?
Nevermind that many phones today (not sure about the ones in TFA) allow the user to select the carrier they connect to, as well. It'd be trivial to bypass the femtocells and connect to the network service the community outside the prison walls.
That's certainly a pithy statement, but that logical leap you took cleared right over the contents of a basic civics course. It makes you look stupid and silly without purpose.
A password manager alone does not increase your security. Rather, it enables the use of much stronger passwords and enables having unique passwords for each resource, while also allowing the password list to be securely backed up for disaster recovery. With those combined efforts, the attack surface for an individual is reduced tremendously.
The days of individual attacks are long gone. Unless you're a high-profile political dissident, nobody cares about your personal computer. Rather, you're just one of a half-million account credentials stolen from a website you've long since forgot about, and your password happened to be one of the early ones to have its hash broken. You just happen to be the guy who used that same password on your email account, and you just happen to be the guy whose bank account is tied to their email, and has enough personal identity details in old messages to make an attack successful.
Attacks today aren't looking for bullseyes. They're shooting buckshot, and they'll score the first thing they hit.
Shame on anyone for reusing a password, or having one less than 12 characters.
The irony is strong in this one.
Security is hard task with a fragile result. There's a quote that I can't precisely recall, something along the lines of "Security is like math, except it matters which kind of pen you use to write it". It's vastly easier to leak information accidentally, than to accidentally keep everything secret that should be.
On the other side of the coin, let's suppose someone did accidentally do things right. Even if they don't know how they did it, that's not an accident. That's just doing things right, and not the sort of thing anyone notices or reports on, until that person stops accidentally succeeding... Then, of course, the problem isn't reported as "we have no idea how he didn't screw up earlier", but rather as "he made one mistake after many successes."
I could say the same thing.
The short answer is "we don't know". On the one hand, Kickstarter has set up a pretty decent barrier of isolation between backers and creators, mostly by establishing that backing a project does not come with any legal obligation for return. On the other hand, the laws against funding a criminal enterprise are some of the strongest, so it wouldn't surprise me to see a lawsuit go after backers as well. There is some legal basis for such things, mostly lying in money-laundering laws. To the best of my knowledge, though, those legal theories haven't been tested.
To quote one of the best lawyers I've ever had the pleasure of working with, "Laws and contracts don't matter. All that really matters is what a judge decides. The laws just make strong suggestions."
Hi. I'm Sarten-X. It's a big deal to me.
I've been working on a silly little web project, that someday I hope to turn into an income-generating company.
Unfortunately, my project relies on having fairly snappy response times (mostly low bandwidth/low latency, but occasionally having bursts of high bandwidth usage) for a good user experience. Without neutrality, I can't expect that any more. Traffic to and from my tiny little project will be queued behind the high-definition stream for Netflix, because I can't afford to pay Comcast (or Spectrum, or Verizon, or AT&T, or whoever else owns the customers) the millions of dollars in fees to get fast-lane prioritization.
Yes, it's speculation. It's also history, because I lived through the last round of these problems. I remember working with ISPs in the 90s and 2000s to figure out why certain traffic was unusually slow... sure enough, it's because that particular service had been deemed "low-priority" and was throttled. Fortunately at the time I had a big enough team of corporate lawyers that we could force a bit more throughput from the small ISP, but that's not usually the case today.
The reality is that probably 90% of Americans won't notice a difference. Their Netflix subscription might cost a few cents more, or their telecom stock value might get a small boost, but that's about it. The real loss is in potential. The next big Internet-based success might just be someone's silly little project today, and it'll likely never be able to grow because of the arbitrary limits placed by ISPs.
No, it's not just about torrents. It's about waiting for a product demo video to buffer, or waiting for an AJAX call to update a GUI, or waiting for a site's style sheet to properly load. It's about my user experience (and thus my project's success) being heavily dependent on how much extra money I pay to which ISPs, rather than how good my actual product is.
Yes, it's a big deal.
In short, you're saying that creating a new role of toll collector is "pro-competition".
In short, I'm saying that is an argument that could be (and has been) made. When the FCC commissioners and telecom lobbyists say things like "removing neutrality promotes growth opportunities", this is the scenario they're picturing. At the risk of invoking the strawman fallacy, I present the argument here as a perspective on how throttling might not be seen as always anti-competitive.
So, on all your roads around your house, we'll open up bidding for toll collectors, and those toll-collectors can block whatever services your particular neighborhood will receive. So, blue apron - not a chance. Lyft wins over Uber, no Uber for you. Walmart beat Amazon, no Amazon anything for you. USPS can no longer deliver to you - too bad about your mail.
Yep, that's about right. As an interesting anecdote, I used to live in a gated community with a similar problem. UPS, FedEx, and USPS could come & go as they pleased, but a local courier service would have to wait at the gate until a resident called the gate office to say the delivery was expected. On the one hand, it seems reasonable (for a gated community, at least). I don't want just anybody with a Pizza Hut delivery sign to be able to drive into my community. On the other hand, my neighbors and I got a lot of cold pizzas.
Take it that way and you can see how anti-competitive this action is.
Absolutely. I think the big difference in perspective is that the big players can afford to play the longer games, while small startups have to get a string of constant and immediate wins to survive. As the AC above me pointed out, there is competition within the bidding process, and that's what the lobbyists and other friends-of-big-business emphasize. The big competitors compete to gain hundreds or thousands of customers at once.
Small companies, however, can't compete at the level where they can gain or lose whole markets. They have to compete for individual customers to develop enough working capital to pursue those opportunities. Without network neutrality, those doors are permanently and quickly closed, just as solidly as my community's extruded aluminum gates.