I think the author was well aware that basically anyone who wants to attack their data haven can do so. $320,000 is a drop in the bucket for any international organization.
The CIA could drop Sealand in a second, but they probably wouldn't attempt to do so. If anyone is running a business on Sealand that displeases the US, they'll get the British to solve "their problem." The British will most likely try to negotiate with HavenCo, but if HavenCo fails to respond, the British will have no choice but to waltz in and arrest them all. If the "defense forces of Sealand" open fire, the platform gets trashed beyond repair, and all the personelle go to jail for a very long time.
But lets say that HavenCo & Sealand surrender, and sue the British instead. The lawsuit would take place in a British Court (the ICJ can't take suits from non-state entities like Sealand). The British court would most likely rule in favor of the government, and the pseudo-sovereignty of Sealand is destroyed forever.
This means, as the HavenCo rep is pointing out, that they will try not to piss people off. So long as they avoid making enemies, they'll have a very profitable time.
Researchers in the UK have developed a prototype packet router that is potentially much faster than existing digital technology. They are using a combination of a neural network and "diffractive optical components"
Of course the bloody thing is fast --- it uses optics instead of old fashioned electrons. If I were to build an idiot-simple optic router that uses a routing scheme from the 1970s, I'd be willing to bet it would be pretty fast too!
Stories like this remind me of one of my favorite papers from the Annals of Improbable Research. The Paper is titled "Advances in Artificial Intellegence since the 1970s" (or something like that). it has three German co-authors, and consists of a blank page:)
I'll be attending graduate school in computer science next year, and in my tours of graduate institutions, I have found what the author suggests --- classical systems research is dead.
The most talented academics are all researching things like distributed systems and personal networks. Real systems stuff seems to have gone the way of the dodo. The closest you come these days are for high-performance and parallel computing. There's neither money nor interest in desktops any more. Its a shame, but thats the way it is.
The author is speaking about faith and reason in the context of Christianity, since that is what he can talk intellegently about.
To quote Boethius, a sixth century Christian scholar, "as far as you are possible, join faith and reason" (Letter to Pope John I). Fides et ratio, or faith and reason are not, by nature mutually exclusive. There is nothing special about religion that precludes the use of human reason to discover the world. Likewise, there is nothing special about reason which precludes faith.
In fact, Christian theologians and philosophers from the days of St. Paul to the present have been trying to answer the same question --- how do we give the two a seamless joint. St. Anselm of Canterbury and St. Thomas Aquinas are two of the most famous scholastics, who's life work was to perform that synchronization.
Unfortunately, not all Christians chose to build on the developments of tradition, and choose to ignore them to go back to the "Bible." Those who fail to learn from history...
One of my friends was messing around with his windows box, and he accidentally managed to create a folder on his desktop, which was a hard link to the C: folder. Effects of this Windows "feature" included:
Hard drive size calculated to be several hundred GB, thanks to infinite recurse.
Explorer slowed down a lot when doing said infinite calculation.
Folder could not be deleted without nuking the entire hard drive.
The real sad part is that I'm not making it up. Win95/FAT32 actually did this!!
I've actually used the Template Numerical Toolkit before, and though it does have some advantages, there are still a number of drawbacks to it. The algorithms were implemented soly by Roldan Pozo, and haven't gone through the sort of review for efficiency and correctness that LAPACK has. Add to that the fact that several major matrix decompositions (like singular value decomposition) haven't been done yet.
As a soon-to-be graduate student in scientific computing, I sit and wonder sometimes why the support for mathematical and scientific computation in C++ is so limited. FORTRAN, the ugly and unmanageable beast that it is, is the only haven for computational mathematics.
The good ol' F77 LAPACK is a haven for all of those who need to do matrix math. Granted, there is a f2c'd version of LAPACK for C, but it involves playing all sorts of obnoxious memory games, as F77 doesn't support dynamic memory allocation. I don't like allocating tremendous arrays to pass to FORTRAN routines for work space.
C++ has nothing that comes close to an analog for LAPACK, and the standard support for less specialized computational mathematics is limited as well. The STL has no implementation for a Matrix, and its Vector implementation leaves a lot to be desired , from a mathematician's point of view. C++ can't be all things to all people, but I would love to see a serious mathematical library developed for C++. Cross linking with FORTRAN is a pain in the rear.
Re:Isn't this kind of twisted?
on
Quake Wedding
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· Score: 1
I agree with you entirely. A wedding is a solemn commitment before God and the gathered assembly, between a man and a women. A marriage within a Quake game really speaks to the cheapening of marriage which has occured in modern western society. I wonder sometimes what this world is coming to...
Since the use of the Net and Web is, increasingly, no longer an option but a necessity
Its pretty funny that over half of the American population does not use the internet... but somehow it is a necessity. Even by Katz's estimate only 130 million Americans will use the 'net this year --- still less then half of America's 272,639,608 people (CIA World Factbook). For the majority of Americans, and the vast majority of human beings, the internet is NOT a necessity.
We can only hope that some day this technology can be used justly, for the benefit of ALL people --- not just the rich among us. Justice should be as much of a concern as privacy, if not more.
1)You wrote that, ``Unless an organization, without commercial interest (like the W3) is willing to be heavy handed, there's a tendency for a profit hungry entity to capture the market... I don't think I can honestly condemn companies for trying - that's capitalism. ''
Is this not a glaring flaw in the pure capitalist system? If you won't blame the company, then only the system is to blame....
2) Streaming media isn't that useful to the 98% of us chugging along with a modem. For the T3-connected university world, its something to care about, but for the average joe? I'd be inclined to say that this isn't an issue at all. Too much bandwith, crappy audio quality.
Could the government decrypt Mitnick's files if they really wanted to? Sure. But honestly, they probably don't care about Mitnick. I doubt they ever did, actually. They just want to keep him from possibly getting any ``stolen'' material back... or would like to have a better idea of what he did. He as much as admitted such with his 5th ammendment argument. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
This semester, I have the opportunity to work with a researcher who does nanotechnology. While I still don't know if I'll take him up on the offer, he did say something that I found interesting. He said that he prefers the term "designer materials" to describe his work. He feels that the name "nanotechnology" has all sorts of untrue implications. What do you all think?
I couldn't agree more! Pornography is all about exploitation and objectification of human beings. Talking about sexuality is talking about sexuality. It can be misused horribly, but is at least partially defensible. Porno is completely different.
Lets examine this scene... You've just gotten your brand new DSL line, and you go to www.nasa.com to download pictures of naked asian chicks engaged in lewd behavior. When you pop up that jpg in your browser, what do you think? Do you see the human dignity of the subjects? Do you see their personalities and their struggles? NO! You see the picture and drool over the breast and/or gential area of the women in the picture while engaging in self-stimulation. You are treating people as objects when you get off on pornography! These people aren't people to you, but objects - a pair of breasts or what not. You afford them no human dignity. To me, thats pretty sick. I agree with rkent --- its a shame that people use the first ammendment to justify this sort of behavior. I am of the opinion that porn should not be considered free speech.
But is here not such a thing as a Just War? The theory of just war has been arround since Augustine of Hippo, if not before and it goes something like this.
A war must be fought for just reasons. Self-defense is usually considered just, as are defending against crimes against humanity and other similar ends.
Secondly, a war must be fought justly. In the modern day, this means obeying the Geneva & Hague conventions, avoiding civilian casualties, etc.
If just war does exist -- international legal scholars have thought so since the birth of modern international law -- then it cannot be immoral in and of itself to work for the military. but if they ask you to fight unjustly, thats another story...
I would havt to say the the printing press is one of the greatest gadgets of all time. It had a profound impact on society since its creation, and printed media still have a profound impact on society today. Its a shame that MSNBC left something this fundamental off for the electric hand dryer.
Since we don't really have a definition of what a "top ten geek" is I will define a "top ten geek" as follows:
One who through a high degree of intellegence, makes a nontrivial addition to the human body of knowledge.
Note that being "picked on" and mocked is not part of my criteria of being a geek. This is common but not necessary.
So here are my "top ten geeks" from the 20th century on back.
Albert Einstein - Two words : General Relativity.
Nikolai Tesla - For the same reasons cited in other posts. The man was brilliant.
Isaac Newton - The boss of classical mechanics and calculus. I don't think this one can be argued.
Henri Dunant - Founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross. He's contribution wasn't through his invention so much as observation. His work through the ICRC was instrumental in the work towards the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the "humanization" of war. Though he was no genius, his observation was non-trivial, and helped to make war much less barbaric.
Blaise Pascal - An outstanding scientist and philosopher. Everone has heard of Pascal's wager.
Galileo Galilei - He was brillant, albeit very stubborn. In the end however he won on both counts - he was right, and managed to avoid direct ecclesial condemnation more than once.
Matteo Ricci - The famous missionary to China. In addition to theological studies, his knowledge of astronomy, mathematics and geography captured the facination of Imperial China.
Leonardo DaVinci - Architect, artist, inventor and a whole lot more. There was little this man couldn't wrap his mind around.
Roger Bacon - Philosopher, thologen, scientist. You name it, this man studied it.
Thomas Aquinas - His work systematically covers the issues of theology and ecclesiology. His masterpiece Summa Theologica is probably one of the most comprehensive theological manuals ever written.
I tried to keep the focus out of the 20th century. Newton and Dunant are 19th, Pascal and Galileo are 17th, Ricci 16th, Bacon and Aquinas 13th.
Katz and Social Justice...
on
The Timekeeper
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· Score: 2
I have to say that I've been agreeing with Katz's last few postings... Normally, we're given some drivel about "technology" as "tragic". But here Katz poses a real question, the question of justice.
His emphasis is a little off, in seeing the world as divided between the technology haves and technology have-nots. Actually the distinction is much older --- the difference between the haves and the have-nots themselves. Technology merely reinforces the old divides, it doesn't create anything new.
But can technology be used to break that divide? Sure it can. Like most other things, technology itself is morally neutral. It can be used as it currently is and perpetuate injustice or it can be used to break those lines. But who will implement this change? Will Big Business do this for us? Will this spreading of prosperity be a natural consequence of the market economy?
Katz hits this one right on the head --- NO. Corporations are interested in profit and share price, and will do nothing but work towards those goals. Perhaps back in the days of Disney, one man could wield his company as a tool of his own ideology. Today this is no longer, if it ever were the case. The Board of Directors wants to see profits. This is the bottom line for corporations.
The ONLY answer to the problem of a just dirtribution of wealth and technology can come from the government. Sorry to offend the libertarians in the audience, but face facts. Corporations and "the market" will do nothing but increase the disparity of wealth unless they have the incentive to do otherwise. Only the government can give this incentive. You might not like big government, but without it nothing can stop big business.
I was skimming through the headlines and didn't see something about voting one's conscience in an election, so I thought I'd open the topic for discussion.
Early this year I came to the realization that it is basically impossible for me find a candidate who will be someone I can support 100%. Every candidate has some kind of stance that I find objectionable. And this isn't even small stuff either, these are big issues. Let me explain....
I'm pro-life. But pro-life across the board. For me this means no abortion, and no death penalty. Either I can vote Democrat and vote for a candidate against the death penalty and for abortion, or I can vote Republican and vote for a candidate for the death penalty and against abortion. I can't get a candidate against both!
This was only a specific example, so don't jump on me for being off-topic. What does/. think about this? Is there a way for each voter to vote his/her conscience, and if not, what is that voter to do?
I take it that you've never taken the time to study political systems across the world. A 200-level college government course in Comparative Politics will tell you the truth that you deny --- The US election system lends itself to two parties and no more.
The United States, like the UK uses Single Member Districts. The US adds winner-take-all presidential elections to this as well. This sort of setup promotes two kinds of parties:
The Big etablished ones (Democrats and Rpublicans).
Parties with strong support in specific localities.
Even the second type of party will not win the Presidency, but only stand a chance in Congress. Could a party replace the Democrats or Republicans? Perhaps, but that is unlikely. In that case the replaced party would die, and we'd be back to two.
Look at the UK. Back in the 80s the Liberal party sprang out of nowhere to challenge Conservative and Labour. They garnered vote tallys near 30%, but by the way the system worked, they were left with about 10% of the seats in Parliament. Now they are slowly faiding away with fewer and fewer seats each election.
Why is this? Because parties with weak support that isn't locally tied (eg. the UK's Welsh and Scottish national parties) CAN'T win! The electoral system screws them over --- even in Congress. Thus they get ditched by the voters who like to vote for a candidate with a prayer of winning.
If you want multiple parties, you have to switch to a Continental European-style Proportional Representation system.
One alumnus of my college and a few of his buddies at work (he works for a major DC computer security firm) exploited the sloppy use of random number generation in an online casino's card shuffling algorithm (which they posted on their web site --- the joys of open source:) Courtesy of the casino's random seeding techniques the "hackers" were able to limit the number space to something easily brute forceable, and went on CNN with the results of their efforts. They could know the cards in every player's hand. The casino was not amused.
Do you see a potential increase in these random number "hacks" in the future, as more and more programmers use supposedly random numbers without a clue as to how they were generated and vulnerabilities in this process?
As the de facto Linux guru at my college, I'd like to add my two cents to this discussion:
1) Hardware support with most linux distributions blows. No sort of new printer is ever supported. Some old one aren't either. My HP 860Cse is 3 years old, and there's not printer support for it with any RedHat product. Likewise, trying to get X to work is a crapshoot --- Sometimes my video card driver works, sometimes it won't. It worked fine for my Diamond Stealth, but refuses to detect my RAGE IIC chipset built-in to my new motherboard. Same for ethernet cards. RH 5.x autodetects my NE2000 rip-off, but 6.x doesn't. Go figure. I shouldn't have to play these games. Either RedHat, Debian, etc should include 80 bajillion drivers, or hardware manufaturers should include linux drivers on their install disks. Let em add one more gripe --- installing new hardware without reinstalling Linux.
2) Installation is typically painful. Repartitioning under Win98 is generally difficult unless you have partition magic. But this is not the fault of the Linux people. Most of the time it works, but occasionally it will do strange things like lock up, or lilo will refuse to install itself.
3) Despite the fact that LaTeX and Emacs means freedom from Microsoft Word & Powerpoint for me, the average business user (who would be our mainstream) still is looking for similarly powerful products from Linux. Corel WP is out there, but a lot of other product niches are not filled. They have to be for the average Joe to go to linux.
The government can most certainly tax the citizens for anythign they want. The founding fathers abhorred the ideas of taxation without representation, not just taxation. Besides the fact that the US government basically created the internet, and the Feds or the states have been taxing interstate commerce for decades... This tax is not arbitrary anyway - it is designed to fill a whole in existing tax law through which the "haves" can avoid paying taxes on purchases.
I agree with you on one thing - The Feds should tax the net, not the states IF taxation is to be done at a buyer level. If the taxes are collected by the seller (like in stores) then it doesn't make a difference. It would be just like real-world sales tax.
I have to agree with you - the net should be taxed, just like anything else. If we don't tax the net soon, governments will have to raise other taxes to compensate for lost income. This will, of course, hurt the poor. The Net at thte moment is a tax escape only for the "haves" who can afford it.p> Is taxing the net possible? Sure. Recall that the vast majority of e-business is still American. A little bit of legislation in Washingon, and all the American businesses are collecting a sales tax on their purchases. The Europeans will see that it works and jump on the bandwagon. (Or it could be the other way around - the Europeans are pioneers at this sort of thing). So long as they agree on the rules (such as pay taxes in seller's country) taxation is not only posible, but feasible and necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
The CIA could drop Sealand in a second, but they probably wouldn't attempt to do so. If anyone is running a business on Sealand that displeases the US, they'll get the British to solve "their problem." The British will most likely try to negotiate with HavenCo, but if HavenCo fails to respond, the British will have no choice but to waltz in and arrest them all. If the "defense forces of Sealand" open fire, the platform gets trashed beyond repair, and all the personelle go to jail for a very long time.
But lets say that HavenCo & Sealand surrender, and sue the British instead. The lawsuit would take place in a British Court (the ICJ can't take suits from non-state entities like Sealand). The British court would most likely rule in favor of the government, and the pseudo-sovereignty of Sealand is destroyed forever.
This means, as the HavenCo rep is pointing out, that they will try not to piss people off. So long as they avoid making enemies, they'll have a very profitable time.
Of course the bloody thing is fast --- it uses optics instead of old fashioned electrons. If I were to build an idiot-simple optic router that uses a routing scheme from the 1970s, I'd be willing to bet it would be pretty fast too!
Stories like this remind me of one of my favorite papers from the Annals of Improbable Research. The Paper is titled "Advances in Artificial Intellegence since the 1970s" (or something like that). it has three German co-authors, and consists of a blank page:)
The most talented academics are all researching things like distributed systems and personal networks. Real systems stuff seems to have gone the way of the dodo. The closest you come these days are for high-performance and parallel computing. There's neither money nor interest in desktops any more. Its a shame, but thats the way it is.
To quote Boethius, a sixth century Christian scholar, "as far as you are possible, join faith and reason" (Letter to Pope John I). Fides et ratio, or faith and reason are not, by nature mutually exclusive. There is nothing special about religion that precludes the use of human reason to discover the world. Likewise, there is nothing special about reason which precludes faith.
In fact, Christian theologians and philosophers from the days of St. Paul to the present have been trying to answer the same question --- how do we give the two a seamless joint. St. Anselm of Canterbury and St. Thomas Aquinas are two of the most famous scholastics, who's life work was to perform that synchronization.
Unfortunately, not all Christians chose to build on the developments of tradition, and choose to ignore them to go back to the "Bible." Those who fail to learn from history...
- Hard drive size calculated to be several hundred GB, thanks to infinite recurse.
- Explorer slowed down a lot when doing said infinite calculation.
- Folder could not be deleted without nuking the entire hard drive.
The real sad part is that I'm not making it up. Win95/FAT32 actually did this!!I've actually used the Template Numerical Toolkit before, and though it does have some advantages, there are still a number of drawbacks to it. The algorithms were implemented soly by Roldan Pozo, and haven't gone through the sort of review for efficiency and correctness that LAPACK has. Add to that the fact that several major matrix decompositions (like singular value decomposition) haven't been done yet.
The good ol' F77 LAPACK is a haven for all of those who need to do matrix math. Granted, there is a f2c'd version of LAPACK for C, but it involves playing all sorts of obnoxious memory games, as F77 doesn't support dynamic memory allocation. I don't like allocating tremendous arrays to pass to FORTRAN routines for work space.
C++ has nothing that comes close to an analog for LAPACK, and the standard support for less specialized computational mathematics is limited as well. The STL has no implementation for a Matrix, and its Vector implementation leaves a lot to be desired , from a mathematician's point of view. C++ can't be all things to all people, but I would love to see a serious mathematical library developed for C++. Cross linking with FORTRAN is a pain in the rear.
I agree with you entirely. A wedding is a solemn commitment before God and the gathered assembly, between a man and a women. A marriage within a Quake game really speaks to the cheapening of marriage which has occured in modern western society. I wonder sometimes what this world is coming to...
Its pretty funny that over half of the American population does not use the internet... but somehow it is a necessity. Even by Katz's estimate only 130 million Americans will use the 'net this year --- still less then half of America's 272,639,608 people (CIA World Factbook). For the majority of Americans, and the vast majority of human beings, the internet is NOT a necessity.
We can only hope that some day this technology can be used justly, for the benefit of ALL people --- not just the rich among us. Justice should be as much of a concern as privacy, if not more.
1)You wrote that, ``Unless an organization, without commercial interest (like the W3) is willing to be heavy handed, there's a tendency for a profit hungry entity to capture the market... I don't think I can honestly condemn companies for trying - that's capitalism. ''
Is this not a glaring flaw in the pure capitalist system? If you won't blame the company, then only the system is to blame....
2) Streaming media isn't that useful to the 98% of us chugging along with a modem. For the T3-connected university world, its something to care about, but for the average joe? I'd be inclined to say that this isn't an issue at all. Too much bandwith, crappy audio quality.
Could the government decrypt Mitnick's files if they really wanted to? Sure. But honestly, they probably don't care about Mitnick. I doubt they ever did, actually. They just want to keep him from possibly getting any ``stolen'' material back ... or would like to have a better idea of what he did. He as much as admitted such with his 5th ammendment argument. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
This semester, I have the opportunity to work with a researcher who does nanotechnology. While I still don't know if I'll take him up on the offer, he did say something that I found interesting. He said that he prefers the term "designer materials" to describe his work. He feels that the name "nanotechnology" has all sorts of untrue implications. What do you all think?
Lets examine this scene... You've just gotten your brand new DSL line, and you go to www.nasa.com to download pictures of naked asian chicks engaged in lewd behavior. When you pop up that jpg in your browser, what do you think? Do you see the human dignity of the subjects? Do you see their personalities and their struggles? NO! You see the picture and drool over the breast and/or gential area of the women in the picture while engaging in self-stimulation. You are treating people as objects when you get off on pornography! These people aren't people to you, but objects - a pair of breasts or what not. You afford them no human dignity. To me, thats pretty sick. I agree with rkent --- its a shame that people use the first ammendment to justify this sort of behavior. I am of the opinion that porn should not be considered free speech.
A war must be fought for just reasons. Self-defense is usually considered just, as are defending against crimes against humanity and other similar ends.
Secondly, a war must be fought justly. In the modern day, this means obeying the Geneva & Hague conventions, avoiding civilian casualties, etc.
If just war does exist -- international legal scholars have thought so since the birth of modern international law -- then it cannot be immoral in and of itself to work for the military. but if they ask you to fight unjustly, thats another story...
I would havt to say the the printing press is one of the greatest gadgets of all time. It had a profound impact on society since its creation, and printed media still have a profound impact on society today. Its a shame that MSNBC left something this fundamental off for the electric hand dryer.
One who through a high degree of intellegence, makes a nontrivial addition to the human body of knowledge.
Note that being "picked on" and mocked is not part of my criteria of being a geek. This is common but not necessary.
So here are my "top ten geeks" from the 20th century on back.
- Albert Einstein - Two words : General Relativity.
- Nikolai Tesla - For the same reasons cited in other posts. The man was brilliant.
- Isaac Newton - The boss of classical mechanics and calculus. I don't think this one can be argued.
- Henri Dunant - Founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross. He's contribution wasn't through his invention so much as observation. His work through the ICRC was instrumental in the work towards the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the "humanization" of war. Though he was no genius, his observation was non-trivial, and helped to make war much less barbaric.
- Blaise Pascal - An outstanding scientist and philosopher. Everone has heard of Pascal's wager.
- Galileo Galilei - He was brillant, albeit very stubborn. In the end however he won on both counts - he was right, and managed to avoid direct ecclesial condemnation more than once.
- Matteo Ricci - The famous missionary to China. In addition to theological studies, his knowledge of astronomy, mathematics and geography captured the facination of Imperial China.
- Leonardo DaVinci - Architect, artist, inventor and a whole lot more. There was little this man couldn't wrap his mind around.
- Roger Bacon - Philosopher, thologen, scientist. You name it, this man studied it.
- Thomas Aquinas - His work systematically covers the issues of theology and ecclesiology. His masterpiece Summa Theologica is probably one of the most comprehensive theological manuals ever written.
I tried to keep the focus out of the 20th century. Newton and Dunant are 19th, Pascal and Galileo are 17th, Ricci 16th, Bacon and Aquinas 13th.His emphasis is a little off, in seeing the world as divided between the technology haves and technology have-nots. Actually the distinction is much older --- the difference between the haves and the have-nots themselves. Technology merely reinforces the old divides, it doesn't create anything new.
But can technology be used to break that divide? Sure it can. Like most other things, technology itself is morally neutral. It can be used as it currently is and perpetuate injustice or it can be used to break those lines. But who will implement this change? Will Big Business do this for us? Will this spreading of prosperity be a natural consequence of the market economy?
Katz hits this one right on the head --- NO. Corporations are interested in profit and share price, and will do nothing but work towards those goals. Perhaps back in the days of Disney, one man could wield his company as a tool of his own ideology. Today this is no longer, if it ever were the case. The Board of Directors wants to see profits. This is the bottom line for corporations.
The ONLY answer to the problem of a just dirtribution of wealth and technology can come from the government. Sorry to offend the libertarians in the audience, but face facts. Corporations and "the market" will do nothing but increase the disparity of wealth unless they have the incentive to do otherwise. Only the government can give this incentive. You might not like big government, but without it nothing can stop big business.
Early this year I came to the realization that it is basically impossible for me find a candidate who will be someone I can support 100%. Every candidate has some kind of stance that I find objectionable. And this isn't even small stuff either, these are big issues. Let me explain....
I'm pro-life. But pro-life across the board. For me this means no abortion, and no death penalty. Either I can vote Democrat and vote for a candidate against the death penalty and for abortion, or I can vote Republican and vote for a candidate for the death penalty and against abortion. I can't get a candidate against both!
This was only a specific example, so don't jump on me for being off-topic. What does /. think about this? Is there a way for each voter to vote his/her conscience, and if not, what is that voter to do?
The floor is open, please discuss!
The United States, like the UK uses Single Member Districts. The US adds winner-take-all presidential elections to this as well. This sort of setup promotes two kinds of parties:
- The Big etablished ones (Democrats and Rpublicans).
- Parties with strong support in specific localities.
Even the second type of party will not win the Presidency, but only stand a chance in Congress. Could a party replace the Democrats or Republicans? Perhaps, but that is unlikely. In that case the replaced party would die, and we'd be back to two.Look at the UK. Back in the 80s the Liberal party sprang out of nowhere to challenge Conservative and Labour. They garnered vote tallys near 30%, but by the way the system worked, they were left with about 10% of the seats in Parliament. Now they are slowly faiding away with fewer and fewer seats each election.
Why is this? Because parties with weak support that isn't locally tied (eg. the UK's Welsh and Scottish national parties) CAN'T win! The electoral system screws them over --- even in Congress. Thus they get ditched by the voters who like to vote for a candidate with a prayer of winning.
If you want multiple parties, you have to switch to a Continental European-style Proportional Representation system.
Do you see a potential increase in these random number "hacks" in the future, as more and more programmers use supposedly random numbers without a clue as to how they were generated and vulnerabilities in this process?
1) Hardware support with most linux distributions blows. No sort of new printer is ever supported. Some old one aren't either. My HP 860Cse is 3 years old, and there's not printer support for it with any RedHat product. Likewise, trying to get X to work is a crapshoot --- Sometimes my video card driver works, sometimes it won't. It worked fine for my Diamond Stealth, but refuses to detect my RAGE IIC chipset built-in to my new motherboard. Same for ethernet cards. RH 5.x autodetects my NE2000 rip-off, but 6.x doesn't. Go figure. I shouldn't have to play these games. Either RedHat, Debian, etc should include 80 bajillion drivers, or hardware manufaturers should include linux drivers on their install disks. Let em add one more gripe --- installing new hardware without reinstalling Linux.
2) Installation is typically painful. Repartitioning under Win98 is generally difficult unless you have partition magic. But this is not the fault of the Linux people. Most of the time it works, but occasionally it will do strange things like lock up, or lilo will refuse to install itself.
3) Despite the fact that LaTeX and Emacs means freedom from Microsoft Word & Powerpoint for me, the average business user (who would be our mainstream) still is looking for similarly powerful products from Linux. Corel WP is out there, but a lot of other product niches are not filled. They have to be for the average Joe to go to linux.
I agree with you on one thing - The Feds should tax the net, not the states IF taxation is to be done at a buyer level. If the taxes are collected by the seller (like in stores) then it doesn't make a difference. It would be just like real-world sales tax.
I have to agree with you - the net should be taxed, just like anything else. If we don't tax the net soon, governments will have to raise other taxes to compensate for lost income. This will, of course, hurt the poor. The Net at thte moment is a tax escape only for the "haves" who can afford it.p> Is taxing the net possible? Sure. Recall that the vast majority of e-business is still American. A little bit of legislation in Washingon, and all the American businesses are collecting a sales tax on their purchases. The Europeans will see that it works and jump on the bandwagon. (Or it could be the other way around - the Europeans are pioneers at this sort of thing). So long as they agree on the rules (such as pay taxes in seller's country) taxation is not only posible, but feasible and necessary.