First rule of engineering: Never doubt the power of stupidity. Seriously, if someone is stupid enough to get some preliminary results and make the show of bowing out of the race then it's just their tough shit if they jumped the gun.
Other than stupid moves like that then it should have no consequences at all. Either way the final tally will come out the same. Of course if I was designing the machine there'd be no partially marked choices. I'd make damn sure the hole went through the cards completely and in the proper place.
Again if the voter can visually confirm their vote on their card and is to lazy or stupid to do so then really why should their vote even count at all? They could always try again if they messed up or the machine hadn't worked right.
Only a mentally disturbed person would write a Python program with anywhere near 100,000 modules. Even my 1000 modules example sounds farfetched.:)
Sure bzip2 is slow but it'd still be useful. Of course it'd be more useful for storing bulkier data than modules but sometimes people will store large amounts of data as pickles and similar Python data.:)
Could just define a special indexed cat'd file type that lets you use any filter Python supported. So if you imported gzip it could read gzip'd modules.. if you imported an encryption module it could read encrypted modules, etc. Could be useful.. even if overkill.:)
That might be interesting although myself I'm for partiless-voting. Rather than having canidates selected on purpose I'd rather see a running system that tracked trust values for every citizen that every citizen was free to vote on at any time. When the time came for a new election I'd pick the canidates with the highest trust ratings in the district to run and then have a normal election.
This way instead of having people randomly sign off on people they've only recently heard of they could give high marks to people they themselves trust or bad marks to those they distrust. Everybody in your church might give your priest high marks.. or everyone that uses Mozilla might go through the developer list and give them all high marks.. or you could give bad marks to the guy next door that keeps throwing beer cans in your yard.. or to the owner of the local retail chain that refused to exchange your computer when it broke the day after you purchased it. I'd also use short circuiting (like the stock market) so that values couldn't peak or crash to suddenly.. so you couldn't put out a pre-election ad proclaiming how great you were and watch your trust ratings soar.. or smear the competition to watch them dive.
As long as it's just sponsoring the concept of voting I don't have a problem with it. The reward for voting shouldn't be based at all on what your vote was.. only that you showed up to vote. Turn in your ballot and get your coupon.:)
I'd probably go ahead and release the initial electronic count so that the press could be happy and people could start their parties but go ahead and count the cards too before making the results official. Really if the cards are punch style (or something else easy to machine read) and done properly it shouldn't take that long to count those either. Pretty much you can read cards through as fast as it's possible to feed them in without causing them to burst into flame. It seems a bit nutty to have actual humans read cards unless your doing a second recount or something where you suspect the machines are broken.
Never been a felon even if I probably deserved it. (At least it was never mentioned to me.) I'm not black.. or if I am I'm very confussed. I did live in Florida for a while. Do they keep you from voting?
I don't really think it's right to ban people from voting. Even convicts should have a right to vote. If not how will bad laws get changed when all the good people are in jail?
Send me $1000 for parts and either another $1000 for my time and/or an ongoing job and I'll produce a nice voting machine for you. Unfortunately, I don't have the money to produce such things on my own.:)
If someone wanted to hire me I'd go as far as producing the software required and make sure it was properly tested and secure. I'd be more than willing to have the plans and source opensourced if my sponsor didn't care.
You must be using really lame voting software. Jeez the Slashdot poll sounds more reliable than that. Decent programmers can do a much better job any code that is so critical should be both opensource and audited by third party experts. Really voting isn't that complex an idea so the code shouldn't be that hard to secure if the programmers head isn't completely up their own ass.
At least links give some response.. when's the last time voting had any effect whatsoever? Press link #1 for corrupt democrat.. Press link #2 for corrupt republican.. maybe even a rare extra option to Press link #3 for insane third-party canidate.
Mmmm yeah that was worth my effort. Oh well.. I can always use the write in spot to vote for Weird Al. He's my standing vote for President until I see someone that I think would do a better job. Maybe I should be frightened that a man that sings spoof songs would probably do a better job than the canidates actually running.
I think people that show up to vote should get a tax break. That way if you had a voucher proving you voted (even if abstaining) you could write it off come tax time. Even if they only gave you $15 to cover your gas and time I think it'd still help motivate people.
Or to improve the college student turnout maybe they should offer coupons for a free pizza, drink, or whatever to each person that turned out? I'm sure you could get companies to sponsor the elections.
Of course I move every six months or so.. making it hard to get many chances to vote. I think maybe that's why I was refused voter registration during the last Presidential election (though the refusal had no reason writen on it).
I would think it'd be a good idea to have these electronic machines stamp out physical ballots that would need to be submitted and could be visually verified by voters as accurate. That way you could have the benefits of electronic voting (instant results, ease of use, and voting from more remote locations) and would still have a physical object to verify the results against should a recount be asked for. I'd go as far as barcoding each ballot so you could verify them against their digital version quickly.. to verify the machines are working properly in case of a recount.
How many modules are you planning to pack? I can grab a desired file from a tarball with 1000 files in no noticable time. I don't understand why that'd be a problem.
I didn't realize gzip could concatenate files. How does that work? Just cat the resulting files together?
Some of these features look useful enough but the one that stands out most as having a minor problem is importing modules from zip archives. That's all well and dandy but why not also support from other archives? tar + gzip or bzip would get better compression. The syntax looks like it could be a little clearer. Why not just 'import example.zip/mymodule' instead of messing with sys.path.insert() ? That sounds cleaner to me.
True. I feel the same because of how few people are willing to donate to opensource projects they use. They spout high morals but when it comes to opening their checkbook suddenly there aren't so many people interested. I often suggest to people that complain that such and such project isn't advanced enough for their needs that they donate a few bucks to the projects. I'm afraid many people don't do this. Even if it's only a $5 donation once a month it'd be a help but people aren't willing to even go that much.
Still, I think open content is the real solution. I think it could make money while still allowing people to download it freely. You just need enough interested people, or a couple with deeper pockets, so as to get the process rolling. Of course artists themselves could help a lot by donating their talents (as coders have done for opensource) but money would still be needed for equipment. We could probably get some decent musicians but without proper instruments and mixing equipment we won't be able to get near commercial level music. The same for movies, literture, etc. One area I'm especially interested in right now is open-content children's stories, games, and educational shows. I think children's content would be a good place to start because many parents would be willing to donate their own efforts towards their own children and by combined effort with other talented people they could produce things that they couldn't do alone.
If the RIAA, MPAA, etc keep up with tightening the thumb screws and us commoners keep wanting to share then I think we're going to see it get really nasty. I strongly suspect we'll see many more people going to jail, companies being put out of business by angry hackers, riots (cd burnings on mass scale), etc before the issue resolves itself. I can't see either side backing down or compromising. The outcome of this battle will no doubt be like the war on drugs or prohibition. There is no way they are going to stop file sharing with laws or cops and trying to do so is going to make the situation turn violent and will make blackmarket mob bosses rich.
That leaves coders like myself in an obvious dilemma. Do we risk jail and making the fight worse by creating file sharing systems that are stronger? Doing so could protect freedom and make us rich.. both of which sound quite nice. Or my own perfered third option.. create better filesharing networks and sponsor high-quality open content to be placed on those networks. That would no doubt also face legal trouble if it became popular but it'd have the benfit of leaving almost no popular support on the side of the pirates (the RIAA/MPAA).
So I guess my question is. How many people would be willing to pay for the creation of open-content? How much would you put in the pot? What kind of content would you want? Movies, music, artwork, software?
I think a lot of the anti-copyright feelings stem from the great abuse of copyright going on right now. It's so unbalanced that people can't see it's good uses anymore. As I said I write software and as you'll see below I think software deserves less protection than most IP because of it's short lifetime. Also I invent things.. and I freely share my designs. I also am interested in photography and making movies and if I ever get good enough to release my work they'll also be under open content licenses.
I think it'd be reasonable to return to short copyright terms. For writen works, music, movies, drawings, etc I could see maybe 7-14 years as being fair. Software I think should only be able to hold a copyright for a year or two. Any work put under an opensource-style license should be allowed a longer period of control. Any work protected by copy-protection should be denied a copyright unless an unprotected version is filed with the government to be released when the copyright expires.
I think patents should be cut way back to remove software patents, gene patents, business practice patents, etc. Again the term of protection should be cut way back.. maybe to 5-20 years.
Trademarks I'd mostly leave alone. I might remind people that they aren't supposed to abuse trademarks to attack unrelated uses (anti-spam email products have nothing to do with canned meat), that spoofs are allowed, and that domain names have nothing to do with trademarks.
For them all I'd make filing for your copyright, patent, or trademark affordable for every citizen. I'd consider making it $1 for the first year and doubled each year thereafter. The doubling would by way of holding back the protection periods from lengthening again. Politicians are glad to take payoffs to lengthen the period but would be less willing to do away with the fees.
They were.. not sure they count anymore as they've gone off the deep end. I grew up learning to use all sorts of weapons, build things, eat nuts and berrys, crap like that.
I don't below to any websites related to the topic. I'm waiting for a rail gun made from bamboo before I join their website.
I'd be interested in seeing them even bypass something as simple as SSL wrapped data with that many millions of users. Add to that fact that all my file names are hexdigests of the file hashes and I doubt they could so much as match the requests passing through. Then if I decide to be an ass and spoof a lot of files I don't actually have just to screw up their detection methods and they aren't going to be doing much else than picking through false positives. Require the connecting sharers to have a password that they can only get from me personally and I think they'd just be screwed. Oh yeh and let me put my shared files on a ramdisk (on my very secure server) so that if they try to reboot my system with their own 'detective tools' OS all evidence will be gone.
It's okay, I keep my gun cabinet next to my desk along with a microwave and a fridge. I can hold out in here as long as I don't run out of Pepsi or pizza.
If this were a democracy where the voters actually had any power to control the system then file-sharing would be quite legal. Everyone from pre-teens to grandma does it. Almost oobody really thinks that it's wrong. It's only the money of the wealthy IP holders that is keeping these things illegal and constantly adding anti-consumer laws.
A car is a physical item. You can't (yet) just clone it and keep the copy. If someone could then hell they can copy my car and I sure as hell won't mind. Copying isn't taking away the original. It may make it harder for some to become wealthy but it makes it easier for many to enjoy a smaller success and it spreads the intellectual wealth which helps our society as a whole.
As always anyone who thinks they can take my life is free to try. I'd enjoy the challenge. Go for it! (Hint: It's a bad idea to hunt extremely paranoid people that are smarter and tougher than you and were raised by survivalist parents.)
I make my living as a programmer and almost all my code is released under an opensource license. If anything the extra copies make me money because it brings me more clients. I wish more people would copy my work. I could use a few more clients.:)
I'm not 100% anti-copyright.. I'm pro-copyleft. I'm fine with others copying my work as long as I can copy their changes back. I have been considering using a slightly different license though that only allows others to copy my work if they allow all IP they own to be used by others that are again sharing their own IP.
Re:Nice to see the sideswipe at .NET (not)
on
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· Score: 1
I agree about Java but I really don't see how.NET and co are any easier to write cleanly (thus easily portable) than most languages. Even normal C can be quite portable if written by competant programmers (ie I can compile much of the same code on Solaris, Linux, and Windows without problem) and higher level languages like Python are difficult to write in such a way as to not be portable. I can see that maybe Microsoft has the influence to get more programmers to use their tools to develop more portable code but I can't really see the tools as being that unique. I also have doubts that Microsoft will want to do this. I can't see where doing so in the long term would help them and I don't think they are stupid enough to be selling themselves short. I can't help but suspect a bait and switch strategy.
*grins* Okay so what are some real benefits? The one someone mentioned about being able to live-replace libraries I can see as a useful benefit that is fairly unique. (If it works the way I imageine anyway.) Anything else?
To be fair I'll share one of my worries about.NET. It sounds as if it'll be creating a much more homogeneus enviroment.. so security problems will be able to sweep massive parts of the Net with little resistence.
Re:Nice to see the sideswipe at .NET (not)
on
Nat Demos Dashboard
·
· Score: 1
Sure I have been part of enterprise development projects but I've never been part of a company that choose Java to do anything important (and have not used.NET at all.. thus I asked for it's benefits). It's anal retentive style is a pain to work with and it has far more system overhead than is warrented.
I get proper OOP, sepperation of output and logic, and IMO easier deployment than Java.
How does Mono and.NET make sure opensource goes or forever? It just sounds like an excuse to have Microsoft start suing opensource projects that get to successful.
Slashdot Mirror
First rule of engineering: Never doubt the power of stupidity. Seriously, if someone is stupid enough to get some preliminary results and make the show of bowing out of the race then it's just their tough shit if they jumped the gun.
Other than stupid moves like that then it should have no consequences at all. Either way the final tally will come out the same. Of course if I was designing the machine there'd be no partially marked choices. I'd make damn sure the hole went through the cards completely and in the proper place.
Again if the voter can visually confirm their vote on their card and is to lazy or stupid to do so then really why should their vote even count at all? They could always try again if they messed up or the machine hadn't worked right.
Only a mentally disturbed person would write a Python program with anywhere near 100,000 modules. Even my 1000 modules example sounds farfetched. :)
:)
:)
Sure bzip2 is slow but it'd still be useful. Of course it'd be more useful for storing bulkier data than modules but sometimes people will store large amounts of data as pickles and similar Python data.
Could just define a special indexed cat'd file type that lets you use any filter Python supported. So if you imported gzip it could read gzip'd modules.. if you imported an encryption module it could read encrypted modules, etc. Could be useful.. even if overkill.
That might be interesting although myself I'm for partiless-voting. Rather than having canidates selected on purpose I'd rather see a running system that tracked trust values for every citizen that every citizen was free to vote on at any time. When the time came for a new election I'd pick the canidates with the highest trust ratings in the district to run and then have a normal election.
This way instead of having people randomly sign off on people they've only recently heard of they could give high marks to people they themselves trust or bad marks to those they distrust. Everybody in your church might give your priest high marks.. or everyone that uses Mozilla might go through the developer list and give them all high marks.. or you could give bad marks to the guy next door that keeps throwing beer cans in your yard.. or to the owner of the local retail chain that refused to exchange your computer when it broke the day after you purchased it. I'd also use short circuiting (like the stock market) so that values couldn't peak or crash to suddenly.. so you couldn't put out a pre-election ad proclaiming how great you were and watch your trust ratings soar.. or smear the competition to watch them dive.
As long as it's just sponsoring the concept of voting I don't have a problem with it. The reward for voting shouldn't be based at all on what your vote was.. only that you showed up to vote. Turn in your ballot and get your coupon. :)
I'd probably go ahead and release the initial electronic count so that the press could be happy and people could start their parties but go ahead and count the cards too before making the results official. Really if the cards are punch style (or something else easy to machine read) and done properly it shouldn't take that long to count those either. Pretty much you can read cards through as fast as it's possible to feed them in without causing them to burst into flame. It seems a bit nutty to have actual humans read cards unless your doing a second recount or something where you suspect the machines are broken.
Never been a felon even if I probably deserved it. (At least it was never mentioned to me.) I'm not black.. or if I am I'm very confussed. I did live in Florida for a while. Do they keep you from voting?
I don't really think it's right to ban people from voting. Even convicts should have a right to vote. If not how will bad laws get changed when all the good people are in jail?
Send me $1000 for parts and either another $1000 for my time and/or an ongoing job and I'll produce a nice voting machine for you. Unfortunately, I don't have the money to produce such things on my own. :)
If someone wanted to hire me I'd go as far as producing the software required and make sure it was properly tested and secure. I'd be more than willing to have the plans and source opensourced if my sponsor didn't care.
You must be using really lame voting software. Jeez the Slashdot poll sounds more reliable than that. Decent programmers can do a much better job any code that is so critical should be both opensource and audited by third party experts. Really voting isn't that complex an idea so the code shouldn't be that hard to secure if the programmers head isn't completely up their own ass.
At least links give some response.. when's the last time voting had any effect whatsoever? Press link #1 for corrupt democrat.. Press link #2 for corrupt republican.. maybe even a rare extra option to Press link #3 for insane third-party canidate.
Mmmm yeah that was worth my effort. Oh well.. I can always use the write in spot to vote for Weird Al. He's my standing vote for President until I see someone that I think would do a better job. Maybe I should be frightened that a man that sings spoof songs would probably do a better job than the canidates actually running.
I think people that show up to vote should get a tax break. That way if you had a voucher proving you voted (even if abstaining) you could write it off come tax time. Even if they only gave you $15 to cover your gas and time I think it'd still help motivate people.
Or to improve the college student turnout maybe they should offer coupons for a free pizza, drink, or whatever to each person that turned out? I'm sure you could get companies to sponsor the elections.
Of course I move every six months or so.. making it hard to get many chances to vote. I think maybe that's why I was refused voter registration during the last Presidential election (though the refusal had no reason writen on it).
I would think it'd be a good idea to have these electronic machines stamp out physical ballots that would need to be submitted and could be visually verified by voters as accurate. That way you could have the benefits of electronic voting (instant results, ease of use, and voting from more remote locations) and would still have a physical object to verify the results against should a recount be asked for. I'd go as far as barcoding each ballot so you could verify them against their digital version quickly.. to verify the machines are working properly in case of a recount.
How many modules are you planning to pack? I can grab a desired file from a tarball with 1000 files in no noticable time. I don't understand why that'd be a problem.
I didn't realize gzip could concatenate files. How does that work? Just cat the resulting files together?
Some of these features look useful enough but the one that stands out most as having a minor problem is importing modules from zip archives. That's all well and dandy but why not also support from other archives? tar + gzip or bzip would get better compression. The syntax looks like it could be a little clearer. Why not just 'import example.zip/mymodule' instead of messing with sys.path.insert() ? That sounds cleaner to me.
True. I feel the same because of how few people are willing to donate to opensource projects they use. They spout high morals but when it comes to opening their checkbook suddenly there aren't so many people interested. I often suggest to people that complain that such and such project isn't advanced enough for their needs that they donate a few bucks to the projects. I'm afraid many people don't do this. Even if it's only a $5 donation once a month it'd be a help but people aren't willing to even go that much.
Still, I think open content is the real solution. I think it could make money while still allowing people to download it freely. You just need enough interested people, or a couple with deeper pockets, so as to get the process rolling. Of course artists themselves could help a lot by donating their talents (as coders have done for opensource) but money would still be needed for equipment. We could probably get some decent musicians but without proper instruments and mixing equipment we won't be able to get near commercial level music. The same for movies, literture, etc. One area I'm especially interested in right now is open-content children's stories, games, and educational shows. I think children's content would be a good place to start because many parents would be willing to donate their own efforts towards their own children and by combined effort with other talented people they could produce things that they couldn't do alone.
If the RIAA, MPAA, etc keep up with tightening the thumb screws and us commoners keep wanting to share then I think we're going to see it get really nasty. I strongly suspect we'll see many more people going to jail, companies being put out of business by angry hackers, riots (cd burnings on mass scale), etc before the issue resolves itself. I can't see either side backing down or compromising. The outcome of this battle will no doubt be like the war on drugs or prohibition. There is no way they are going to stop file sharing with laws or cops and trying to do so is going to make the situation turn violent and will make blackmarket mob bosses rich.
That leaves coders like myself in an obvious dilemma. Do we risk jail and making the fight worse by creating file sharing systems that are stronger? Doing so could protect freedom and make us rich.. both of which sound quite nice. Or my own perfered third option.. create better filesharing networks and sponsor high-quality open content to be placed on those networks. That would no doubt also face legal trouble if it became popular but it'd have the benfit of leaving almost no popular support on the side of the pirates (the RIAA/MPAA).
So I guess my question is. How many people would be willing to pay for the creation of open-content? How much would you put in the pot? What kind of content would you want? Movies, music, artwork, software?
I think a lot of the anti-copyright feelings stem from the great abuse of copyright going on right now. It's so unbalanced that people can't see it's good uses anymore. As I said I write software and as you'll see below I think software deserves less protection than most IP because of it's short lifetime. Also I invent things.. and I freely share my designs. I also am interested in photography and making movies and if I ever get good enough to release my work they'll also be under open content licenses.
I think it'd be reasonable to return to short copyright terms. For writen works, music, movies, drawings, etc I could see maybe 7-14 years as being fair. Software I think should only be able to hold a copyright for a year or two. Any work put under an opensource-style license should be allowed a longer period of control. Any work protected by copy-protection should be denied a copyright unless an unprotected version is filed with the government to be released when the copyright expires.
I think patents should be cut way back to remove software patents, gene patents, business practice patents, etc. Again the term of protection should be cut way back.. maybe to 5-20 years.
Trademarks I'd mostly leave alone. I might remind people that they aren't supposed to abuse trademarks to attack unrelated uses (anti-spam email products have nothing to do with canned meat), that spoofs are allowed, and that domain names have nothing to do with trademarks.
For them all I'd make filing for your copyright, patent, or trademark affordable for every citizen. I'd consider making it $1 for the first year and doubled each year thereafter. The doubling would by way of holding back the protection periods from lengthening again. Politicians are glad to take payoffs to lengthen the period but would be less willing to do away with the fees.
They were.. not sure they count anymore as they've gone off the deep end. I grew up learning to use all sorts of weapons, build things, eat nuts and berrys, crap like that.
I don't below to any websites related to the topic. I'm waiting for a rail gun made from bamboo before I join their website.
I'd be interested in seeing them even bypass something as simple as SSL wrapped data with that many millions of users. Add to that fact that all my file names are hexdigests of the file hashes and I doubt they could so much as match the requests passing through. Then if I decide to be an ass and spoof a lot of files I don't actually have just to screw up their detection methods and they aren't going to be doing much else than picking through false positives. Require the connecting sharers to have a password that they can only get from me personally and I think they'd just be screwed. Oh yeh and let me put my shared files on a ramdisk (on my very secure server) so that if they try to reboot my system with their own 'detective tools' OS all evidence will be gone.
;)
C'mon detective d00dz I'm ready for ya!
It's okay, I keep my gun cabinet next to my desk along with a microwave and a fridge. I can hold out in here as long as I don't run out of Pepsi or pizza.
If this were a democracy where the voters actually had any power to control the system then file-sharing would be quite legal. Everyone from pre-teens to grandma does it. Almost oobody really thinks that it's wrong. It's only the money of the wealthy IP holders that is keeping these things illegal and constantly adding anti-consumer laws.
A car is a physical item. You can't (yet) just clone it and keep the copy. If someone could then hell they can copy my car and I sure as hell won't mind. Copying isn't taking away the original. It may make it harder for some to become wealthy but it makes it easier for many to enjoy a smaller success and it spreads the intellectual wealth which helps our society as a whole.
As always anyone who thinks they can take my life is free to try. I'd enjoy the challenge. Go for it! (Hint: It's a bad idea to hunt extremely paranoid people that are smarter and tougher than you and were raised by survivalist parents.)
I make my living as a programmer and almost all my code is released under an opensource license. If anything the extra copies make me money because it brings me more clients. I wish more people would copy my work. I could use a few more clients. :)
I'm not 100% anti-copyright.. I'm pro-copyleft. I'm fine with others copying my work as long as I can copy their changes back. I have been considering using a slightly different license though that only allows others to copy my work if they allow all IP they own to be used by others that are again sharing their own IP.
I agree about Java but I really don't see how .NET and co are any easier to write cleanly (thus easily portable) than most languages. Even normal C can be quite portable if written by competant programmers (ie I can compile much of the same code on Solaris, Linux, and Windows without problem) and higher level languages like Python are difficult to write in such a way as to not be portable. I can see that maybe Microsoft has the influence to get more programmers to use their tools to develop more portable code but I can't really see the tools as being that unique. I also have doubts that Microsoft will want to do this. I can't see where doing so in the long term would help them and I don't think they are stupid enough to be selling themselves short. I can't help but suspect a bait and switch strategy.
*grins* Okay so what are some real benefits? The one someone mentioned about being able to live-replace libraries I can see as a useful benefit that is fairly unique. (If it works the way I imageine anyway.) Anything else?
.NET. It sounds as if it'll be creating a much more homogeneus enviroment.. so security problems will be able to sweep massive parts of the Net with little resistence.
To be fair I'll share one of my worries about
Sure I have been part of enterprise development projects but I've never been part of a company that choose Java to do anything important (and have not used .NET at all.. thus I asked for it's benefits). It's anal retentive style is a pain to work with and it has far more system overhead than is warrented.
.NET make sure opensource goes or forever? It just sounds like an excuse to have Microsoft start suing opensource projects that get to successful.
I get proper OOP, sepperation of output and logic, and IMO easier deployment than Java.
How does Mono and