With paper votes, anybody can see a paper ballot, understand who the vote was for, and tally up the votes.
Uumh... no. Only if you restrict the voting to a simple list of choices and allow one only one option to be picked. There are more advanced voting schemes, giving voters more power over the list (of candidates picked by parties). In Germany for example community elections in some states allow "Kumulieren" (cumulate) and "Panaschieren" (cross-voting) along with "Streichen" (scraping). See this ballot (community elections of the city Kassel) for example. You could still just pick a party (we mostly vote parties in Germany) with one cross and all votes would be automatically applied to the candidates of that party from top to bottom. Or you could cherry-pick your candidates across different parties, scrap those that you don't like, vote up the ones you prefer and spend your (in this example) 71 votes that way.
I wouldn't trust "anybody" to understand & tally that one.
I do not agree with Kaspersky's vision of online elections. As you said: a paper ballot does the job just fine and prevents a lot of the problems any other means of voting raises.
There are other types of "votings" besides elections, though. Some of which are in place already (citizens' decision), some of which are not feasable now because of the time/money needed to do them the "old-fashioned" way. I'll just make one up on the fly: vote for/against single positions in the proposed budget of your community. Build that kindergarden? Cut those trees?
The keypoint is to bring power (and responsibility) back to the people. Let them participate in everydays decisions. Voting every 4-5 years and in between you got to say nothing is no longer acceptable. The only way now to interfer with terrible decisions is go to court. And with that means, you're only be able to prevent something from happening. With citizen's decisions and the like you're able to stimulate new developments. At least that's how I envision it.
Except that he's not a native English speaker (nor am I), as you could have easily find out yourself by clicking on that nifty "Homepage" button. Which begs the question "Is your Norwegian as good as his English?"
Granted, the later is the sentence for doing it "commercially". But that doesn't mean you need to make millions off of it. Given past court (German) rulings, running Google Ads on your otherwise private site or similar little things might be enough to make it a formal business(-like) venture.
I mean, why can YouTube be taken to court in Germany, if it's not a German company? I suppose it's some international-corporation thing, but I'm not a businessman so I don't know.
WHOIS for google.de and youtube.de (note the address):
Name: Terri Chen
Organisation: c o Google Germany GmbH
Address: ABC-Strasse 19
Postal code: 20354
City: Hamburg
Country: DE
Phone: +49.40808179000
Let the UN control? The same organization that put Cuba, Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and Sudan on its human rights panel?
You forgot to name the members of that organisation, which has put those countries there. Those are (in no particular order) France, Vietnam, Germany, India, U.S.A., South Africa... etc. etc.
You know, it's called United Nations for a reason.
All files are directly encrypted on your desktop. Your password never leaves your computer. Not even we as the provider can access your files or your password.
I'm giving it a try at the moment and so far it seems to work. If has both a sync and a backup option. It offers clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android. It's not open source and there currently seems to be no API. It's still in beta, so there's hope an API might eventually be added later on.
If you sign up with this referral, you'll start with 3GB instead of 2GB for the free account.
Disclosure: I'll receive additional 250MB storage space per account creation through that referral, up to a max of 5GB, as you can read here.
In fact even Microsoft's offering, SkyDrive, is currently offering 25GB for free.
I don't have a SkyDriver account (and don't plan to create one just to test it), so I have to resort to other sources of information. Wikipedia mentions that 25GB of storage, but also states that it has an individual file size limit of 100MB. If that's true, that's a) an odd limitation and b) does certainly reduce its use cases.
And no one else either. And that's the whole point. That's why the world wide web beat every closed network (AOL, CIS etc.) by the late 1990s/early 2000s.
Of course, Brin is not lacking selfish motives, but that doesn't invalidate the argument per se.
Most of the computer scenarios found population and economic growth continuing at a steady rate until about 2030.
Well then, they're bullshit. Every single country in the world that has ever industrialized has experienced steep declines in population growth as its citizens become wealthier and more educated. This trend is already very noticeable in the up-and-coming Asian and BRIC countries.
You're right, but that doesn't mean the original statement is wrong. Your observation (more wealth = less population growth) is true for a single country, but not necessarily for the whole world.
If I'm not mistaken, the world's population growth is still on the rise and will not stop soon enough. Wasn't there even some article(s) about the fact that we're already over the planet's sustainable population size not that long ago?
Because in their infinite wisdom, it won't ALLOW you to open the document with macros disabled - they give you two options, (1) open it with macros enabled, or (2) don't open it. Brilliant.
Haven't tried that in the recent version, but in previous versions of MS Office one could open the file in question via the application's "Open file" dialogue and press the Shift key while clicking on the "Open" button. That way (AutoStart) macros in that document won't execute.
And Peak Oil has been fracked out of existence for the foreseeable future.
Ah, I see. While that sentence in itself is true, we should note that we haven't experienced Peak Oil yet, because we're desperately extracting oil from resources like oil sands and oil shale - something so extraordinary expensive to do in the 70s that every oil company CEO would have laughed his ass off, if you even slightly hinted at the possibility.
Fast forward to today and even oil extracted in this very inefficient manner is worth selling. Conclusion: the resource oil has become so scarce, therefore - with still raising demand - the price for it so high, that it makes sense economically.
"Intelligent Design" implies that some level of intelligent forethought went into the eventual products of evolution.
[...]
If people understood that evolution does not actually work that way, "Intelligent Design" would be a completely moot point.
Right, sir! The fact that parts of the human species could come up with a concept called "Intelligent Design" immediately voids the whole ID idea. Nothing "intelligently designed" could ever come up with such a stupid idea. Evolution, OTOH explains this quite well.
Also, I used to buy CDs for about $15, some of them contained as low as 9 songs, 5 of them that I didn't want in first place.
I never understood this argument. I buy albums, not songs, from bands I like. Granted, there's always those 1-2 songs on an album that are just average "fillers", but they're part of the album and it's not that I don't like them. It's just that the other songs are better.. I've bought (albums of) bands which I don't like, based on reviews or recommendations. But that's just because I was too lazy to listen to a couple of songs before purchasing the album. My fault - no one else's.
Why do you think religion is so strong among the simple people?
Not simple (minded). Uneducated. The higher a society's education, the lesser religious it is. And we're not talking about "rocket science" here as education. Some basic reading & writing & math & science does the job. Topics even "simple minded" (=below average IQ) people can grok.
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Uumh ... no. Only if you restrict the voting to a simple list of choices and allow one only one option to be picked. There are more advanced voting schemes, giving voters more power over the list (of candidates picked by parties). In Germany for example community elections in some states allow "Kumulieren" (cumulate) and "Panaschieren" (cross-voting) along with "Streichen" (scraping). See this ballot (community elections of the city Kassel) for example. You could still just pick a party (we mostly vote parties in Germany) with one cross and all votes would be automatically applied to the candidates of that party from top to bottom. Or you could cherry-pick your candidates across different parties, scrap those that you don't like, vote up the ones you prefer and spend your (in this example) 71 votes that way.
I wouldn't trust "anybody" to understand & tally that one.
I do not agree with Kaspersky's vision of online elections. As you said: a paper ballot does the job just fine and prevents a lot of the problems any other means of voting raises.
There are other types of "votings" besides elections, though. Some of which are in place already (citizens' decision), some of which are not feasable now because of the time/money needed to do them the "old-fashioned" way. I'll just make one up on the fly: vote for/against single positions in the proposed budget of your community. Build that kindergarden? Cut those trees?
The keypoint is to bring power (and responsibility) back to the people. Let them participate in everydays decisions. Voting every 4-5 years and in between you got to say nothing is no longer acceptable. The only way now to interfer with terrible decisions is go to court. And with that means, you're only be able to prevent something from happening. With citizen's decisions and the like you're able to stimulate new developments. At least that's how I envision it.
... and therefore leave your fingerprints on the ballot, making it easy to identify your vote.
Not exactly self-published, but the partially crowd-funded movie Iron Sky made it into Germany's top 10 (position 9 actually) on its starting week (German page).
Except that he's not a native English speaker (nor am I), as you could have easily find out yourself by clicking on that nifty "Homepage" button. Which begs the question "Is your Norwegian as good as his English?"
Someone? Make that millions. In Germany, causing a nuclear explosion results in the same maximum jail time (5 years) like sharing copies.
Granted, the later is the sentence for doing it "commercially". But that doesn't mean you need to make millions off of it. Given past court (German) rulings, running Google Ads on your otherwise private site or similar little things might be enough to make it a formal business(-like) venture.
As mentioned earlier in this thread, there's an app ... erhm ... addon for that: Long URL Please Firefox Addon
Not sure if it works like Dropbox (have never used DB myself), but worth a look I guess: ownCloud
For whatever reason (my bet's on Google Drive going live), Wuala up'd its storage to 5GB for the free account.
WHOIS for google.de and youtube.de (note the address):
Name: Terri Chen
Organisation: c o Google Germany GmbH
Address: ABC-Strasse 19
Postal code: 20354
City: Hamburg
Country: DE
Phone: +49.40808179000
You forgot to name the members of that organisation, which has put those countries there. Those are (in no particular order) France, Vietnam, Germany, India, U.S.A., South Africa ... etc. etc.
You know, it's called United Nations for a reason.
So, what was your complaint again?
Methinks you confused lenses with Photoshop there.
Wuala claims to encrypt your files locally:
I'm giving it a try at the moment and so far it seems to work. If has both a sync and a backup option. It offers clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android. It's not open source and there currently seems to be no API. It's still in beta, so there's hope an API might eventually be added later on.
If you sign up with this referral, you'll start with 3GB instead of 2GB for the free account.
Disclosure: I'll receive additional 250MB storage space per account creation through that referral, up to a max of 5GB, as you can read here.
Exchange 2003 has no such limit. At least the one we're running here. Do you by chance confuse that with Outlook's PST file size limit?
I don't have a SkyDriver account (and don't plan to create one just to test it), so I have to resort to other sources of information. Wikipedia mentions that 25GB of storage, but also states that it has an individual file size limit of 100MB. If that's true, that's a) an odd limitation and b) does certainly reduce its use cases.
You don't even need to go that far. The death penalty is legalized murder.
And no one else either. And that's the whole point. That's why the world wide web beat every closed network (AOL, CIS etc.) by the late 1990s/early 2000s.
Of course, Brin is not lacking selfish motives, but that doesn't invalidate the argument per se.
He was? In "Mein Kampf" he wrote something to the effect that he's the "choosen one", which implies some kind of higher being that made this choice.
You're right, but that doesn't mean the original statement is wrong. Your observation (more wealth = less population growth) is true for a single country, but not necessarily for the whole world.
If I'm not mistaken, the world's population growth is still on the rise and will not stop soon enough. Wasn't there even some article(s) about the fact that we're already over the planet's sustainable population size not that long ago?
Haven't tried that in the recent version, but in previous versions of MS Office one could open the file in question via the application's "Open file" dialogue and press the Shift key while clicking on the "Open" button. That way (AutoStart) macros in that document won't execute.
Ah, I see. While that sentence in itself is true, we should note that we haven't experienced Peak Oil yet, because we're desperately extracting oil from resources like oil sands and oil shale - something so extraordinary expensive to do in the 70s that every oil company CEO would have laughed his ass off, if you even slightly hinted at the possibility.
Fast forward to today and even oil extracted in this very inefficient manner is worth selling. Conclusion: the resource oil has become so scarce, therefore - with still raising demand - the price for it so high, that it makes sense economically.
Right, sir! The fact that parts of the human species could come up with a concept called "Intelligent Design" immediately voids the whole ID idea. Nothing "intelligently designed" could ever come up with such a stupid idea. Evolution, OTOH explains this quite well.
I never understood this argument. I buy albums, not songs, from bands I like. Granted, there's always those 1-2 songs on an album that are just average "fillers", but they're part of the album and it's not that I don't like them. It's just that the other songs are better.. I've bought (albums of) bands which I don't like, based on reviews or recommendations. But that's just because I was too lazy to listen to a couple of songs before purchasing the album. My fault - no one else's.
I won't call them "musicians" then. You don't call watching porn "having sex" either, do you?
Not simple (minded). Uneducated. The higher a society's education, the lesser religious it is. And we're not talking about "rocket science" here as education. Some basic reading & writing & math & science does the job. Topics even "simple minded" (=below average IQ) people can grok.