Actually pencil marked paper ballots still constitute about 80% (rough guess, looking at a "voting machine" map in a recent magazine) of all voting machines. My state uses them exclusively, has used them for a long time, and I don't think it has any intention of changing. We have had no issues (so far). Most states are the same. This is fact, not conjecture or opinion.
The vast majority of votes in the US are filled-in circle on paper types that are electronically read. Also, the Parent said it is mass madness to switch from paper to e-voting, and specifically said:
What's the idea? Save on paper? Ridiculous. Faster results?
The reason, at least in the US (and yes, I'm assuming he's an American, most slashdotters are), was Accuracy. The mass push was fallout from the 2000 election. E-voting was provided as a way to ensure the accuracy of the vote by its yes/no nature. There are other places that have been using more reliable mechanical methods than Florida, but the fact remains that Florida 2000 caused the hubub that created the industry in the US.
Since I was replying to the Parent, and not the GP, I don't see how it's not relevant? Unless for some reason you regard the Parent's statement as irrelevant. Which it seems to me it was.
Nice try, they call that the "Genetic" logical fallacy. The military's ability to keep track of finances has nothing at all to do with their ability to produce secure systems. They are, in fact, very good at it. With a military machine that is certified for handling and storing classified military information, it is virtualy impossible access - let alone attempt to hack - such a machine with out some pretty darn impressive social engineering. I myself went through significant training in order to access sensitive data, but I was never certified to work on a classified machine and there was no way I would have been able to gain access to one. While the machines are networked, they are not connected in any physical way to the regular military network, and they have no internet access or other outside access. The computers are all kept in locked rooms. USB drives must be certified for Classified use to be inserted into a machine, and they have special software to account for that, as well as strict procedures for handling external media as well as the machines themselves, obviously.
There are many more, but you should get the idea. Some of the military's methods would not apply to a voting terminal, but the concept is the same, and relatively simple. Computer security - and an e-voting terminal is nothing more than a single purpose computer - involves the doctrine of least access. You give the least access necessary to adequately perform the task.
At the lowest level is the voter: The least access a voter needs to their terminal is is physical access to the input device (the touch screen), physical access to the voter verification mechanism, and the rights necessary to choose their votes.
Next are the local voting officials: The least access they require is the ability to open the secured enclosure to remove the data storage device and shut down the machine. They may need extremely limited access to the software, in which case a limited account with access to a shutdown feature in the software is all that would be required. They should NOT under any circumstances have write access to the machine, and they should not even have read access to the data disk in this mode. Shut down and remove, that's it.
You then collect the data storage and the paper audit trails, send them to an official tally location - again with more secure-handling procedures, counts, and audits - where a separate secure system in a secure location runs the tallies.
These are BASIC security measures, and for the type of application - e-voting - the security measures can be quite high while maintaining usability. With these measures and a few more like them, NONE of the viruses or hacks that did happen, would have happened. That's not to say other attacks could not have happened, but if the system was designed properly it would have taken nothing less than insiders at the vendors to pull it off. Insiders with high access rights and trust levels, mind you, not just "joe-blow" Diebold employee.
Lastly, there is no such thing as "hack-proof", and thinking such a thing exists invites complacency and future attacks. However, with physical and policy measures, as well as vigilance, you can make it damn near impossible to access a system and hack it. I think the vendors did not bother because of the incredibly massive profit margins they could get with these government mandates combined with low oversight. It certainly would have cut into their profits in the short term, but they also could have simply charged a little more.
I think the idea is that you can continue the download while your computer sleeps, drawing almost nil power in the process.
It would be quite trivial for this to have 16-32gb of memory built in (more gets prohibitively expensive, IMO), and most people would be hard pressed to download that much in a single session.
Actually diskette simply adds the suffix -ette to the root disk in order to show it as a diminutive version.
It went hard disk first, then floppy diskette. GP is still right.
However, Disks have always meant some form of magnettic platter (floppy or hard) in an enclosure of some sort.
If this is not enclosed it should follow the optical disc naming convention, and be a holographic disc. If it is enclosed it should probably be called a holographic disk.
Seagate has always been a little off anyway, so I'd just ignore them.
And how often do jet-liners fly around Manhattan at 1/2 the height of the WTC towers? You realise that is how low Air Force 1.2 was flying, right?
Any idiot with a memory and a little willingness to live will trade 2 hours of their work day on a one-off event to make sure they don't die.
Risk of death (since this is quite similar to what happened 8 years ago) vs. missing an hour or two of work. Most reasonably intelligent people would scram, just in case. By the way you and others evaluate risk, man I'd sure love to play some poker against you some time. I could make a killing! You'll be thinking: "He's only ever taken all of my chips once, and even though he's playing almost exactly like he did last time, there's no way he's going to do the same thing to me this time, I'll just keep betting even though I have no good cards." Ka-ching! What are the odds anyway, right? AmIright?
Flip the situation around, if it HAD been another hijacked plane, and it HAD flown into a building and the people HADN'T evacuated because they didn't want to be seen as wussies, then you same people would be talking about how such idiots they were, they had all this evidence, I mean it was almost EXACTLY LIKE last time, any idiot would know to evacuate, blah blah blah.
You people are childish. When an event has only ever happened once, and something that appears to be very similar is happening again in the same area, the rational response is to protect yourself. The only protection against a plane crashing into a building is: *drumroll* Evacuating!
My question is, why the hell were they flying so low? They HAD to have known this would cause a scare!
Statiscially speaking you're just as likely to be eaten by a shark while in a tall building.
I don't know how many sharks eat people in tall buildings, but in any case if I saw a shark heading towards me, I would immediately think "Oh SH** I'm about to become a statistic!" and run/swim like hell.
What's wrong with finding a new suit if the original manufacturer raises his prices?
That is actually a big motivator for the manufacturer of these super special suits to -not- raise their prices. If they go too far they could very well lose all of their business, and generate ill will which would prevent the customers from coming back even if they dropped their prices later.
It's called "freedom to choose", and it creates market pressures that create a level of stability.
RMS's definition of freedom is not choice, it's choice but only as long as your options fall under such and such strict criteria. FOSS is great, and useful, but it is not the be-all end-all and never will be. There are a LOT of software applications that barely have a commercial solution; you can forget about a FOSS solution. People don't even know the software exists, they won't be writing an alternative for it any time soon. What does Stallman suggest? Finding a different industry? Somebody has to do it anyway, why not me?
I think it's funny that, for all his talk about freedom, if you listen to what he says he doesn't just try to open your mind to what's out there. No, he tries to tell you what you should do! Freedom is doing exactly what I say? An odd way of expressing freedom, in my opinion.
I know he has been influential in pushing FOSS, and getting it where it is today. That's great, don't stop! But FOSS is just another option that may or may not fit the situation. It cannot meet every need, because there are different criteria for what is important, and honestly "free" doesn't offset the costs of using some FOSS tools, whereas a multi-thousand dollar price tag may be offset by another piece of software's toolset.
Same with SAAS, there are situations that make SAAS a better solution than purchasing and then supporting commercial software, or developing the software in-house, or hiring people who can support a FOSS solution. There are a lot more factors to consider than simply the upfront cost. That you are handing over control of your data to someone else. But that may not be a big deal, the important factor may be low support costs and the software service itself. Whether or not it gets over-used because it's the "hot new thing", well, that happens in all aspects of life and people who live that way tend to be fools anyway. Live and learn. Some people can't think through things, they have to screw them up first before it's clear that they probably didn't want to go that direction in the first place.
The true freedom is that we have options. RMS wants everybody to live by his definition of "freedom", but his is pretty narrow and restrictive, which kinda defeats the purpose of the concept of freedom.
My company outsourced their digital security department to India.
I was shocked.
And there are ways to ensure your data is secure, but they generally require having enough clout to have one of your own guys inspect their methods of storing and securing your data on a regular basis.
That rules out 95% of all companies, let alone individuals.
I always thought the whole idea of SAS was simply shifting and consolodating the effort of creating and servicing software to (hopefully) lower costs. Not eliminate them. Kinda like call centers for help desk support (they usually manage multiple companies' help desks at one center), only it's serving your software. Honestly, who said paying someone else to serve software for you to use would be free? There's a contradiction in that statement if they did.
I'm surprised anybody needed to point this out. It blows my mind. And calling it a con? I'll bet they never thought anybody would be dumb enough to think it's free! Even at the most basic level.
My point was not to lay the blame on Clinton. He helped speed it up, but the problem was there much earlier, and it was Congress that created the bill and Clinton simply signed it anyway.
The reasons subprimes would grow between 2001 and 2006 is really rather simple, and points to the problem: as long as the housing market continued to grow, subprimes showed themselves to be high return and low risk. Legislation got the ball rolling and encouraged idiotic lending standards for subprimes, and it simply grew. Not everything went through CAP, but not everything had to. Poor standards were encouraged, and it was pretty easy to get a sub-prime loan. The problem was the low risk was dependant upon a market condition that HAD to change some time. Any idiot could look at the housing market and say "Well, it can't grow forever". Nobody bothered to run their risk assesment under a case when the market stalls and estimate what that fallout might be. Not at these big investment banks anyway. This crash was predicted and could have been effectively mitigated. Instead we got strategies for hiding how bad the debt was.
And the one and a half trillion dollar bailout will probably prove to be even more harmful by rewarding the people who screwed up, and making sure they stay in a position to screw things up all over again!!
You know some banks and mortgage companies were hardly touched by the crash in the housing market? They had sound business practices, and took care who they lended to and who they bought loans from. If you're going to give trillions of dollars away to prop up the system, it is THOSE banks should be getting government backing to buy out the assets of the failures like AIG and their ilk. If it's that important to make sure jobs aren't lost, then for god's sake help a better company grow, don't prop up companies that have proven to the world they don't know the correct way to manage their assets.
The argument is BS and really, easily refuted with real life examples on both sides of the obesity problem. And before you write it off as anecdotal, anecdotal evidence can't be used to predict a trend, but it is solid evidence for refuting a widely held belief.
For example, I am pretty careful about what I eat, partly for health reasons and partly because I work 12 hours a day and if I eat too much after a meal (I end up working for a period of time after each meal) I will fall asleep, which is no good if I want to keep my job. So I am very careful not to "stuff my face" like most overweight people are assumed to, and I generally stick with lighter foods like salads and veggies and only sample meats. I weigh about 320lbs and it has been consistant for the last 6 months. I swim several times a week and go to the gym several times a week for both areobic and muscle building exercise. Yet I haven't lost any weight.
My mom has been counting calories religiously since college, which was the only time in her life she was ever thin. She was fat before college, and fat after, and hasn't been able to figure out why she was thin in school, and also hasn't been able to lose any of that weight. Growing up she would even go so far as cooking one meal for us (my dad liked food, heh) and eating a different meal for herself. None of it has worked and she looks about the same now as she did 15 years ago, just older.
Now, you look at a guy like Michael Phelps. His daily intake is around 8,000-10,000 calories a day. On intense training days he'll burn around 6,000 calories swimming, but on average it would be more like 3,000, plus the estimated 2,000 calories and that works out to between 5,000-8,000 calories burned depending on the whether he is in intense training mode or not. That works out to about 2,000-3,000 calories every single day that are just up in smoke. He's eating an entire person's diet every day that he isn't burning... or at least shouldn't be burning if every body works about the same. He should be putting on weight so fast your head would spin, and yet he's not. He actually has extremely low body-fat.
He's an extreme example but we all know people who eat a lot of really bad food (both quantity and variety), don't do more than moderate exercise, and yet are completely fit. Most people also known someone who has tried for years to lose weight and cannot.
I remember a pretty good single from Prince just a year or two ago, I think that album made top 100. I don't remember the album or song name though. He's staying fairly contemporary.
Also, just because YOU don't like it doesn't mean it's insignificant or not worth saving or protected.
That said, copyright beyond the lifetime of the performer/artist has never made sense to me. That gravy train should end with death, at least, and probably sooner really, considering 99% of money made on a piece is made in the first 5-10 years, the benefit to the performer should clearly be less than the benefit to society in opening that up.
You can argue that the Beatles and Elvis still make a lot of money off their sales, but the fact remains that the vast majority of the money they made was in the first 10 years of each album. And most of that was in the first year.
The earth's core is slowing down and cooling off, causing a drop in the strength of our magnetic field.
Who's got the plan that injects boatloads of energy into the core in such a way that both increases its temperature significantly AND boosts the speed of its spin? That would fix us for hundreds of thousands of years, and yet nooooobody talks about it.
These patchwork fixes allow us to ignore the REAL problem.;)
You obviously don't remember, but the reason for the big push to go electronic was because of Florida in the 2000 election. It came down to election officials' opinions on whether the hanging/pregnant/dimpled chad constituted a vote for one candidate or not.
That election was decided by around 100 people if I remember correctly, and certainly less than 1000 people. With so few votes being the difference between one president and another, every single vote counted.
The idea was that an electronic vote would either be a Yes or a No. And conceptually that's true, it eliminates the specific problems they had in Florida by its very nature. However, for some strange reason, the government(s) that comissioned the e-voting machines for some reason did not put any kind of oversight or quality assurance in place to make sure that the machines would be as good or better than paper. This was IN SPITE of well known flaws in the systems, with thousands of security professionals pulling their hair out trying to point out the problems and just being flat out ignored in most cases. You would think that these issues would come out, and the government would send in an expert - either already affiliated with the government or a third party - to verify the designs and implimentations of these systems.
And why they cry "Trade secret! trade secret!", well, too bad. Often when a company comissions a product, especially a highly specialised product, they are involved with the design and implementation from the beginning making sure that it meets their needs. If the e-voting machine companies wanted to keep it all secret, no problem. Just scrap them and do business with somebody who will work with you. I bet they'd change their minds real quick.
Anyway, the whole reason for e-voting, at least in the US, was for accuracy and reliability. Speed and paper savings were supposed to be bonuses to using an electronic system. In reality we got significantly less reliable results, slower results (due to increased challenges on the accuracy), probably didn't save much on paper, and we ended up with a plethora of new problems that not only make it less accurate, but actually make it easier to cheat!
And you know what? There is absolutely no technical reason for any of it not to work well.
For example, look at this ballot from the recent Minnesota election. Did that person want to vote for Al Franken or for lizard people?
Obviously, though he wrote in his own candidate, the one he voted for was Al Franken. If he wanted to vote for the Lizard People, he would have filled in the circle for them.
The vote itself is quite clear. I think he should have chosen the Lizard People though, I hear they are made for politics.
The problem with e-voting is the idiot elected officials who don't know diddly squat about quality assurance concepts. Most of the electronic voting systems that have been put forward have been abysmal, -I- could do better, and I don't have much confidence in producing a reliable voting system with a verifiable paper trail.
You know, probably the best system would be a combination of the "fill in the dot" paper voting schemes, which are electronically read and counted, a machine for filling in said dots. You receive a ballot after you sign in at your local polling place, put the ballot in the machine, make your selections, hit "go", it fills them in and records it electronicly before spitting the ballot back out for the voter to look at before turning in. With procedures for dealing with bad ballots, a system like that should be nearly error-free.
Apparently California has used a hole-punch version of the same thing, sans electronic recording, for 30 years now and it works out well. Or so I hear.
The problem is how much we let the "news" media to get away with posting guesses/wishes as fact.
There IS a statistical point where there is no way one candidate can get more electoral votes than another, however the news media tries to one-up each other, so as soon as reports come in and the line is crossed they declare a winner. This is a mistake, because there are any number of reasons why the count could be off, and several recounts needed, which make the statistical "certainty" little more then a very good guess.
Technically, even after the popular vote, and a statistical certainty for one candidate is reached, that candidate can still lose if the members of electoral college choose to vote for the other candidate. This is possible for all but a couple of states, though it is almost unheard of for a voter to go against his candidate. This happened to Roosavelt or Truman or someone else around that time period, I don't remember which, when their second term would be a unanimous vote, one member of the college voted against him, so that only Washington would have been voted in unanimously. Something like that.
In any case, the final tally isn't completed for weeks after the vote, and the actual vote doesn't happen for another week or two at the earliest. The the actual vote for the presidency is not until long after the popular vote, and I'd appreciate it if the "news" media more accurately portrayed this myself.
E-voting is not pre-mature. We have more than enough capability to produce secure machines. The military uses such machines all the time, and provided they follow their own security policies they are almost impossible to hack.
The problem is not that the machines were hackable, you'll never be able to get rid of hackers and there is an acceptable risk limit. The problem was that "hacking" a lot of these machines meant plugging in a USB drive and Alt-tabbing to the windows desktop to start messing with the text files that the votes were stored in. Some were slightly more secure, but even most of those were pitiful.
Why were the USB ports on these things not disabled? Why was there even physical access to the USB ports? Why were some of the systems not password locked? Why didn't they use a type of encrypted storage for the voting records? There was so much crap they didn't do with these systems, stuff that isn't even creative, you could pick up a book for $20 and learn how to do basic system hardening and it would have been 100 times better than Diebold $ company managed.
The only difficult parts really are figuring out a reliable paper trail, and how to detect tampering. They could probably go hand in hand. Diebold & co failed at both anyway.
The problem is the people with the money (OUR money, aka the local Governments) for some reason did no more than a minimal amount of Quality Assurance. In most every municipality, and absolutely every state, there are a number of people who already work for the government who had to knowledge to do basic security testing. Most all of those people would also know how to get a system hardened, even if they couldn't do it themselves. NONE of these people were used to check the systems, and so in a lot of cases you ended up with $500 kiosk machines with $200 software on them being sold for $10k each.
The problem was local governments trying to be hip after the 2000 election and allowed "We don't want another Florida" to be their excuse for complete incompetance in comissioning these systems.
Like my contract management professor usded to tell us: Quality Control is the responsibility of the Vendor, Quality Assurance is the responsibility of the Customer. QC is making sure it's right, QA is not accepting it if it is wrong. The electronic voting vendors may be the actual dirty slimeballs, but it's our local governments who have let us down.
You're thinking of fascism, which is a system of government, not an economic system. Granted, fascism goes very well with socialism, but it doesn't preclude capitalism.
Any time you "share the wealth", it's socialism. More specifically, whenever the government distributes wealth, it's socialism. The more often you share the wealth the closer you get to pure socialism. The government paying for services is capitalism, but the government seems to suck at it. Right now we have a pretty strong mix of both socialism and capitalism, which annoys both socialists and capitalists.
The $200b in 2000 or so was not a payment for service. It should have been, but it wasn't. There was no contract established with the telcos to provide the service, there were no consequences for not providing it (as there are in contract law), there was nobody from the Government doign quality assurance. It was basically just congress saying "Here's $200b, do this for us". They weren't acting on behalf of the people to get something done for the good of everyone, they were just throwing money out there and hoping it was done right. It became just another handout for an industry who's entire existance has been mandated and supported by the government since the invention of the telephone.
With the telcos in general we have an odd situation of the government mandating a service (i.e. telephone service everywhere), but not wanting to be socialistic. That idea by itself is a little contradictory. So they guaranteed a monopoly to a couple telcos to get it done. That's not socialism, in a raw sense, that's just poor management. They inadvertantly took away the only effective balancing agent in a capitalist system, which is competition. With it you get maximum value possible (be it low price or high quality, or somewhere in between), but without it you get the minimum value tolerable. It's the second situation that we are in with Telcos - though not completely, as the telcos were split up once, so there is a moderate amount of competition in a national sense. Regionally though there are plenty of places with no competition.
Socialism makes everybody feel good as long as you put your blinders up and ignore how crappy your situation really is compared to what it should be. Greed, if leveraged in a capitalist system, allows for maximum effectiveness with minimum effort and oversight, and everybody can establish the best position for the. It fails in a social sense though, when you trust people with greedy fingers to "do the right thing". That's basically what Congress did with the $200b, and what they did with the telcos in the first place.
And they're doing it in the biggest way ever with this one and a half trillion dollar bailout. This "inherited deficit" that Obama, the sleezeball, tries to play off as getting stuck with when he voted for the first half and signed into law the second half. I just hope we don't regret this BS for the next 50 years like I'm afraid we will.
This is trademark infringement, not copyright infringement. The DMCA doesn't apply at all, trademark law does.
There would be little to no case if the items hadn't been branded "Taser". I believe there are cases for trademark infringement on the design of the device, if the original is distinct enough and the immitator is close enough.
If it were a copyright case it would be pretty open and shut - Taser doesn't sell a digital version of their device, so recreating the device in the game is fair use. Selling it should even be fine, as long as you don't brand it Taser or pretend you are from Taser, cause that's trademark infringement. Hence, this case.;)
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Actually pencil marked paper ballots still constitute about 80% (rough guess, looking at a "voting machine" map in a recent magazine) of all voting machines. My state uses them exclusively, has used them for a long time, and I don't think it has any intention of changing. We have had no issues (so far). Most states are the same. This is fact, not conjecture or opinion.
The vast majority of votes in the US are filled-in circle on paper types that are electronically read. Also, the Parent said it is mass madness to switch from paper to e-voting, and specifically said:
What's the idea? Save on paper? Ridiculous. Faster results?
The reason, at least in the US (and yes, I'm assuming he's an American, most slashdotters are), was Accuracy. The mass push was fallout from the 2000 election. E-voting was provided as a way to ensure the accuracy of the vote by its yes/no nature. There are other places that have been using more reliable mechanical methods than Florida, but the fact remains that Florida 2000 caused the hubub that created the industry in the US.
Since I was replying to the Parent, and not the GP, I don't see how it's not relevant? Unless for some reason you regard the Parent's statement as irrelevant. Which it seems to me it was.
Nice try, they call that the "Genetic" logical fallacy. The military's ability to keep track of finances has nothing at all to do with their ability to produce secure systems. They are, in fact, very good at it. With a military machine that is certified for handling and storing classified military information, it is virtualy impossible access - let alone attempt to hack - such a machine with out some pretty darn impressive social engineering. I myself went through significant training in order to access sensitive data, but I was never certified to work on a classified machine and there was no way I would have been able to gain access to one. While the machines are networked, they are not connected in any physical way to the regular military network, and they have no internet access or other outside access. The computers are all kept in locked rooms. USB drives must be certified for Classified use to be inserted into a machine, and they have special software to account for that, as well as strict procedures for handling external media as well as the machines themselves, obviously.
There are many more, but you should get the idea. Some of the military's methods would not apply to a voting terminal, but the concept is the same, and relatively simple. Computer security - and an e-voting terminal is nothing more than a single purpose computer - involves the doctrine of least access. You give the least access necessary to adequately perform the task.
At the lowest level is the voter: The least access a voter needs to their terminal is is physical access to the input device (the touch screen), physical access to the voter verification mechanism, and the rights necessary to choose their votes.
Next are the local voting officials: The least access they require is the ability to open the secured enclosure to remove the data storage device and shut down the machine. They may need extremely limited access to the software, in which case a limited account with access to a shutdown feature in the software is all that would be required. They should NOT under any circumstances have write access to the machine, and they should not even have read access to the data disk in this mode. Shut down and remove, that's it.
You then collect the data storage and the paper audit trails, send them to an official tally location - again with more secure-handling procedures, counts, and audits - where a separate secure system in a secure location runs the tallies.
These are BASIC security measures, and for the type of application - e-voting - the security measures can be quite high while maintaining usability. With these measures and a few more like them, NONE of the viruses or hacks that did happen, would have happened. That's not to say other attacks could not have happened, but if the system was designed properly it would have taken nothing less than insiders at the vendors to pull it off. Insiders with high access rights and trust levels, mind you, not just "joe-blow" Diebold employee.
Lastly, there is no such thing as "hack-proof", and thinking such a thing exists invites complacency and future attacks. However, with physical and policy measures, as well as vigilance, you can make it damn near impossible to access a system and hack it. I think the vendors did not bother because of the incredibly massive profit margins they could get with these government mandates combined with low oversight. It certainly would have cut into their profits in the short term, but they also could have simply charged a little more.
Yeah! It would need to be at least... THREE TIMES that big!
I think the idea is that you can continue the download while your computer sleeps, drawing almost nil power in the process.
It would be quite trivial for this to have 16-32gb of memory built in (more gets prohibitively expensive, IMO), and most people would be hard pressed to download that much in a single session.
Actually diskette simply adds the suffix -ette to the root disk in order to show it as a diminutive version.
It went hard disk first, then floppy diskette. GP is still right.
However, Disks have always meant some form of magnettic platter (floppy or hard) in an enclosure of some sort.
If this is not enclosed it should follow the optical disc naming convention, and be a holographic disc. If it is enclosed it should probably be called a holographic disk.
Seagate has always been a little off anyway, so I'd just ignore them.
Oh yeah and of course, I didn't RTFA.
And how often do jet-liners fly around Manhattan at 1/2 the height of the WTC towers? You realise that is how low Air Force 1.2 was flying, right?
Any idiot with a memory and a little willingness to live will trade 2 hours of their work day on a one-off event to make sure they don't die.
Risk of death (since this is quite similar to what happened 8 years ago) vs. missing an hour or two of work. Most reasonably intelligent people would scram, just in case. By the way you and others evaluate risk, man I'd sure love to play some poker against you some time. I could make a killing! You'll be thinking: "He's only ever taken all of my chips once, and even though he's playing almost exactly like he did last time, there's no way he's going to do the same thing to me this time, I'll just keep betting even though I have no good cards." Ka-ching! What are the odds anyway, right? AmIright?
Flip the situation around, if it HAD been another hijacked plane, and it HAD flown into a building and the people HADN'T evacuated because they didn't want to be seen as wussies, then you same people would be talking about how such idiots they were, they had all this evidence, I mean it was almost EXACTLY LIKE last time, any idiot would know to evacuate, blah blah blah.
You people are childish. When an event has only ever happened once, and something that appears to be very similar is happening again in the same area, the rational response is to protect yourself. The only protection against a plane crashing into a building is: *drumroll* Evacuating!
My question is, why the hell were they flying so low? They HAD to have known this would cause a scare!
Statiscially speaking you're just as likely to be eaten by a shark while in a tall building.
I don't know how many sharks eat people in tall buildings, but in any case if I saw a shark heading towards me, I would immediately think "Oh SH** I'm about to become a statistic!" and run/swim like hell.
I'm just wondering what the GP's full statement was!
Oy vei! Does anybody use T568A these days? I thought that was pretty much phased out?
What's wrong with finding a new suit if the original manufacturer raises his prices?
That is actually a big motivator for the manufacturer of these super special suits to -not- raise their prices. If they go too far they could very well lose all of their business, and generate ill will which would prevent the customers from coming back even if they dropped their prices later.
It's called "freedom to choose", and it creates market pressures that create a level of stability.
RMS's definition of freedom is not choice, it's choice but only as long as your options fall under such and such strict criteria. FOSS is great, and useful, but it is not the be-all end-all and never will be. There are a LOT of software applications that barely have a commercial solution; you can forget about a FOSS solution. People don't even know the software exists, they won't be writing an alternative for it any time soon. What does Stallman suggest? Finding a different industry? Somebody has to do it anyway, why not me?
Emphasis on his.
I think it's funny that, for all his talk about freedom, if you listen to what he says he doesn't just try to open your mind to what's out there. No, he tries to tell you what you should do! Freedom is doing exactly what I say? An odd way of expressing freedom, in my opinion.
I know he has been influential in pushing FOSS, and getting it where it is today. That's great, don't stop! But FOSS is just another option that may or may not fit the situation. It cannot meet every need, because there are different criteria for what is important, and honestly "free" doesn't offset the costs of using some FOSS tools, whereas a multi-thousand dollar price tag may be offset by another piece of software's toolset.
Same with SAAS, there are situations that make SAAS a better solution than purchasing and then supporting commercial software, or developing the software in-house, or hiring people who can support a FOSS solution. There are a lot more factors to consider than simply the upfront cost. That you are handing over control of your data to someone else. But that may not be a big deal, the important factor may be low support costs and the software service itself. Whether or not it gets over-used because it's the "hot new thing", well, that happens in all aspects of life and people who live that way tend to be fools anyway. Live and learn. Some people can't think through things, they have to screw them up first before it's clear that they probably didn't want to go that direction in the first place.
The true freedom is that we have options. RMS wants everybody to live by his definition of "freedom", but his is pretty narrow and restrictive, which kinda defeats the purpose of the concept of freedom.
My company outsourced their digital security department to India.
I was shocked.
And there are ways to ensure your data is secure, but they generally require having enough clout to have one of your own guys inspect their methods of storing and securing your data on a regular basis.
That rules out 95% of all companies, let alone individuals.
Is it really a con?
I always thought the whole idea of SAS was simply shifting and consolodating the effort of creating and servicing software to (hopefully) lower costs. Not eliminate them. Kinda like call centers for help desk support (they usually manage multiple companies' help desks at one center), only it's serving your software. Honestly, who said paying someone else to serve software for you to use would be free? There's a contradiction in that statement if they did.
I'm surprised anybody needed to point this out. It blows my mind. And calling it a con? I'll bet they never thought anybody would be dumb enough to think it's free! Even at the most basic level.
Wow.
My point was not to lay the blame on Clinton. He helped speed it up, but the problem was there much earlier, and it was Congress that created the bill and Clinton simply signed it anyway.
The reasons subprimes would grow between 2001 and 2006 is really rather simple, and points to the problem: as long as the housing market continued to grow, subprimes showed themselves to be high return and low risk. Legislation got the ball rolling and encouraged idiotic lending standards for subprimes, and it simply grew. Not everything went through CAP, but not everything had to. Poor standards were encouraged, and it was pretty easy to get a sub-prime loan. The problem was the low risk was dependant upon a market condition that HAD to change some time. Any idiot could look at the housing market and say "Well, it can't grow forever". Nobody bothered to run their risk assesment under a case when the market stalls and estimate what that fallout might be. Not at these big investment banks anyway. This crash was predicted and could have been effectively mitigated. Instead we got strategies for hiding how bad the debt was.
And the one and a half trillion dollar bailout will probably prove to be even more harmful by rewarding the people who screwed up, and making sure they stay in a position to screw things up all over again!!
You know some banks and mortgage companies were hardly touched by the crash in the housing market? They had sound business practices, and took care who they lended to and who they bought loans from. If you're going to give trillions of dollars away to prop up the system, it is THOSE banks should be getting government backing to buy out the assets of the failures like AIG and their ilk. If it's that important to make sure jobs aren't lost, then for god's sake help a better company grow, don't prop up companies that have proven to the world they don't know the correct way to manage their assets.
The argument is BS and really, easily refuted with real life examples on both sides of the obesity problem. And before you write it off as anecdotal, anecdotal evidence can't be used to predict a trend, but it is solid evidence for refuting a widely held belief.
For example, I am pretty careful about what I eat, partly for health reasons and partly because I work 12 hours a day and if I eat too much after a meal (I end up working for a period of time after each meal) I will fall asleep, which is no good if I want to keep my job. So I am very careful not to "stuff my face" like most overweight people are assumed to, and I generally stick with lighter foods like salads and veggies and only sample meats. I weigh about 320lbs and it has been consistant for the last 6 months. I swim several times a week and go to the gym several times a week for both areobic and muscle building exercise. Yet I haven't lost any weight.
My mom has been counting calories religiously since college, which was the only time in her life she was ever thin. She was fat before college, and fat after, and hasn't been able to figure out why she was thin in school, and also hasn't been able to lose any of that weight. Growing up she would even go so far as cooking one meal for us (my dad liked food, heh) and eating a different meal for herself. None of it has worked and she looks about the same now as she did 15 years ago, just older.
Now, you look at a guy like Michael Phelps. His daily intake is around 8,000-10,000 calories a day. On intense training days he'll burn around 6,000 calories swimming, but on average it would be more like 3,000, plus the estimated 2,000 calories and that works out to between 5,000-8,000 calories burned depending on the whether he is in intense training mode or not. That works out to about 2,000-3,000 calories every single day that are just up in smoke. He's eating an entire person's diet every day that he isn't burning... or at least shouldn't be burning if every body works about the same. He should be putting on weight so fast your head would spin, and yet he's not. He actually has extremely low body-fat.
He's an extreme example but we all know people who eat a lot of really bad food (both quantity and variety), don't do more than moderate exercise, and yet are completely fit. Most people also known someone who has tried for years to lose weight and cannot.
So what's up?
I remember a pretty good single from Prince just a year or two ago, I think that album made top 100. I don't remember the album or song name though. He's staying fairly contemporary.
Also, just because YOU don't like it doesn't mean it's insignificant or not worth saving or protected.
That said, copyright beyond the lifetime of the performer/artist has never made sense to me. That gravy train should end with death, at least, and probably sooner really, considering 99% of money made on a piece is made in the first 5-10 years, the benefit to the performer should clearly be less than the benefit to society in opening that up.
You can argue that the Beatles and Elvis still make a lot of money off their sales, but the fact remains that the vast majority of the money they made was in the first 10 years of each album. And most of that was in the first year.
Nobody looks at the real problem here:
The earth's core is slowing down and cooling off, causing a drop in the strength of our magnetic field.
Who's got the plan that injects boatloads of energy into the core in such a way that both increases its temperature significantly AND boosts the speed of its spin? That would fix us for hundreds of thousands of years, and yet nooooobody talks about it.
These patchwork fixes allow us to ignore the REAL problem. ;)
You obviously don't remember, but the reason for the big push to go electronic was because of Florida in the 2000 election. It came down to election officials' opinions on whether the hanging/pregnant/dimpled chad constituted a vote for one candidate or not.
That election was decided by around 100 people if I remember correctly, and certainly less than 1000 people. With so few votes being the difference between one president and another, every single vote counted.
The idea was that an electronic vote would either be a Yes or a No. And conceptually that's true, it eliminates the specific problems they had in Florida by its very nature. However, for some strange reason, the government(s) that comissioned the e-voting machines for some reason did not put any kind of oversight or quality assurance in place to make sure that the machines would be as good or better than paper. This was IN SPITE of well known flaws in the systems, with thousands of security professionals pulling their hair out trying to point out the problems and just being flat out ignored in most cases. You would think that these issues would come out, and the government would send in an expert - either already affiliated with the government or a third party - to verify the designs and implimentations of these systems.
And why they cry "Trade secret! trade secret!", well, too bad. Often when a company comissions a product, especially a highly specialised product, they are involved with the design and implementation from the beginning making sure that it meets their needs. If the e-voting machine companies wanted to keep it all secret, no problem. Just scrap them and do business with somebody who will work with you. I bet they'd change their minds real quick.
Anyway, the whole reason for e-voting, at least in the US, was for accuracy and reliability. Speed and paper savings were supposed to be bonuses to using an electronic system. In reality we got significantly less reliable results, slower results (due to increased challenges on the accuracy), probably didn't save much on paper, and we ended up with a plethora of new problems that not only make it less accurate, but actually make it easier to cheat!
And you know what? There is absolutely no technical reason for any of it not to work well.
For example, look at this ballot from the recent Minnesota election. Did that person want to vote for Al Franken or for lizard people?
Obviously, though he wrote in his own candidate, the one he voted for was Al Franken. If he wanted to vote for the Lizard People, he would have filled in the circle for them.
The vote itself is quite clear. I think he should have chosen the Lizard People though, I hear they are made for politics.
The problem with e-voting is the idiot elected officials who don't know diddly squat about quality assurance concepts. Most of the electronic voting systems that have been put forward have been abysmal, -I- could do better, and I don't have much confidence in producing a reliable voting system with a verifiable paper trail.
You know, probably the best system would be a combination of the "fill in the dot" paper voting schemes, which are electronically read and counted, a machine for filling in said dots. You receive a ballot after you sign in at your local polling place, put the ballot in the machine, make your selections, hit "go", it fills them in and records it electronicly before spitting the ballot back out for the voter to look at before turning in. With procedures for dealing with bad ballots, a system like that should be nearly error-free.
Apparently California has used a hole-punch version of the same thing, sans electronic recording, for 30 years now and it works out well. Or so I hear.
The problem is how much we let the "news" media to get away with posting guesses/wishes as fact.
There IS a statistical point where there is no way one candidate can get more electoral votes than another, however the news media tries to one-up each other, so as soon as reports come in and the line is crossed they declare a winner. This is a mistake, because there are any number of reasons why the count could be off, and several recounts needed, which make the statistical "certainty" little more then a very good guess.
Technically, even after the popular vote, and a statistical certainty for one candidate is reached, that candidate can still lose if the members of electoral college choose to vote for the other candidate. This is possible for all but a couple of states, though it is almost unheard of for a voter to go against his candidate. This happened to Roosavelt or Truman or someone else around that time period, I don't remember which, when their second term would be a unanimous vote, one member of the college voted against him, so that only Washington would have been voted in unanimously. Something like that.
In any case, the final tally isn't completed for weeks after the vote, and the actual vote doesn't happen for another week or two at the earliest. The the actual vote for the presidency is not until long after the popular vote, and I'd appreciate it if the "news" media more accurately portrayed this myself.
E-voting is not pre-mature. We have more than enough capability to produce secure machines. The military uses such machines all the time, and provided they follow their own security policies they are almost impossible to hack.
The problem is not that the machines were hackable, you'll never be able to get rid of hackers and there is an acceptable risk limit. The problem was that "hacking" a lot of these machines meant plugging in a USB drive and Alt-tabbing to the windows desktop to start messing with the text files that the votes were stored in. Some were slightly more secure, but even most of those were pitiful.
Why were the USB ports on these things not disabled? Why was there even physical access to the USB ports? Why were some of the systems not password locked? Why didn't they use a type of encrypted storage for the voting records? There was so much crap they didn't do with these systems, stuff that isn't even creative, you could pick up a book for $20 and learn how to do basic system hardening and it would have been 100 times better than Diebold $ company managed.
The only difficult parts really are figuring out a reliable paper trail, and how to detect tampering. They could probably go hand in hand. Diebold & co failed at both anyway.
The problem is the people with the money (OUR money, aka the local Governments) for some reason did no more than a minimal amount of Quality Assurance. In most every municipality, and absolutely every state, there are a number of people who already work for the government who had to knowledge to do basic security testing. Most all of those people would also know how to get a system hardened, even if they couldn't do it themselves. NONE of these people were used to check the systems, and so in a lot of cases you ended up with $500 kiosk machines with $200 software on them being sold for $10k each.
The problem was local governments trying to be hip after the 2000 election and allowed "We don't want another Florida" to be their excuse for complete incompetance in comissioning these systems.
Like my contract management professor usded to tell us: Quality Control is the responsibility of the Vendor, Quality Assurance is the responsibility of the Customer. QC is making sure it's right, QA is not accepting it if it is wrong. The electronic voting vendors may be the actual dirty slimeballs, but it's our local governments who have let us down.
It filters UV-B and UV-C pretty well, but not UV-A. Phototropic glasses are usually less effective in a car, but not completely useless.
Depending on the wavelength it changes at, these sunglasses could either work great or piss poor. Should be interesting.
You're thinking of fascism, which is a system of government, not an economic system. Granted, fascism goes very well with socialism, but it doesn't preclude capitalism.
Any time you "share the wealth", it's socialism. More specifically, whenever the government distributes wealth, it's socialism. The more often you share the wealth the closer you get to pure socialism. The government paying for services is capitalism, but the government seems to suck at it. Right now we have a pretty strong mix of both socialism and capitalism, which annoys both socialists and capitalists.
The $200b in 2000 or so was not a payment for service. It should have been, but it wasn't. There was no contract established with the telcos to provide the service, there were no consequences for not providing it (as there are in contract law), there was nobody from the Government doign quality assurance. It was basically just congress saying "Here's $200b, do this for us". They weren't acting on behalf of the people to get something done for the good of everyone, they were just throwing money out there and hoping it was done right. It became just another handout for an industry who's entire existance has been mandated and supported by the government since the invention of the telephone.
With the telcos in general we have an odd situation of the government mandating a service (i.e. telephone service everywhere), but not wanting to be socialistic. That idea by itself is a little contradictory. So they guaranteed a monopoly to a couple telcos to get it done. That's not socialism, in a raw sense, that's just poor management. They inadvertantly took away the only effective balancing agent in a capitalist system, which is competition. With it you get maximum value possible (be it low price or high quality, or somewhere in between), but without it you get the minimum value tolerable. It's the second situation that we are in with Telcos - though not completely, as the telcos were split up once, so there is a moderate amount of competition in a national sense. Regionally though there are plenty of places with no competition.
Socialism makes everybody feel good as long as you put your blinders up and ignore how crappy your situation really is compared to what it should be. Greed, if leveraged in a capitalist system, allows for maximum effectiveness with minimum effort and oversight, and everybody can establish the best position for the. It fails in a social sense though, when you trust people with greedy fingers to "do the right thing". That's basically what Congress did with the $200b, and what they did with the telcos in the first place.
And they're doing it in the biggest way ever with this one and a half trillion dollar bailout. This "inherited deficit" that Obama, the sleezeball, tries to play off as getting stuck with when he voted for the first half and signed into law the second half. I just hope we don't regret this BS for the next 50 years like I'm afraid we will.
This is trademark infringement, not copyright infringement. The DMCA doesn't apply at all, trademark law does.
There would be little to no case if the items hadn't been branded "Taser". I believe there are cases for trademark infringement on the design of the device, if the original is distinct enough and the immitator is close enough.
If it were a copyright case it would be pretty open and shut - Taser doesn't sell a digital version of their device, so recreating the device in the game is fair use. Selling it should even be fine, as long as you don't brand it Taser or pretend you are from Taser, cause that's trademark infringement. Hence, this case. ;)