[...] they vote for upwards of a half a dozen people for various government positions.
This makes counting more difficult, combined with the size of the country.
The size is an independent issue -- both the number of timezones and the existance of remote areas are going to slow things down no matter what method is used to actually record votes.
The number of votes isn't really a qualitative difference. It's common to have combined elections here (eg local plus scottish parliament, local plus European), so 3 or 4 ballots aren't unknown. Doesn't cause any significant delays. Certainly I don't think there has been a UK election which took as long to sort out as the last US presidential one (given the Florida mess) in modern times. And the Scottish elections are not a simple first past the post poll.
The biggest problem there has been in the UK recently was in the most recent election when they experimented in some areas with postal voting. In accordance with expectation, when they tried to fix something which wasn't broken, they ended up with a mess. Pens and paper really does work very well.
BTW, Australia uses some e-voting systems; however they were Government-designed, use Linux and are open-source -- you can get the source code from the Australian Government's website, if you so desired.
The only really sucessful move to electronic voting seems to have been the Indian one, where they designed something to do the job, rather than starting with all the fun technology they'd like to charge the government for.
The biggest problem with pen ballots is that it takes a long time to count.
UK elections are done with pen and paper and the results are in overnight. Since the number of people available to do the counting is more or less proportional to the number of people who need to vote, I see no reason why a US national election run with pen and paper ballots would take any longer to count.
I consider the use of loss leaders to be sneaky at best, deceptive or even fraudulent at worst
OTOH, if you are in a position to take advantage, they are very nice.
Safeway (the UK one) had a policy of relatively high prices, with special offers to tempt in customers. I live next door, so was in every other day to buy something for lunch or whatever. Naturally I would buy 8 or 10 jars of instant coffee when it was at half their normal, maybe 2/3 everyone else's price.
They were recently bought out by another chain, who have a (now more normal) strategy of price competition across the store, so prices have come down, the dramatic specials have dissapeared and I'm probably paying more overall.
surely it's just a matter of time before someone writes a devastating linux virus? i know the system is laid out differently to help avoid this - but [...]
Please use the shift key, going out of your way to make your posting hard to read is VERY rude.
It's not a question of layout, but of sanity. Windows is very vulnerable because it is used by people who don't understand the tools they are using, who run with administrator priveliges (they used to have no choice, more recently M$ just made running as a normal user a pain in the arse) and who run badly designed mail clients and web browsers which will execute code recieved in email or froma web server at the click of a button.
With linux based systems becoming more widespread, the same syndrome will become more and more widespread there too. People running as root. People running brain damaged, but pretty, mailers. People not knowing that this is a Really Bad Idea.
Personally I don't trust any mail client which understands MIME or HTML, and I only read root's email with `less'.
because the majority of the money we give NASA doesn't go to projects like this... they go to the ones that fail.
If only...
NASA should be doing more stuff which might fail, rather than pissing away money on things like the ISS and Shuttle which never achieve anything, but stagger on, never quite dieing, for decades.
IIRC the ISS admitted cost is 100bn, Cassini is about 3.5bn. 30 Cassini type missions for a tin can in orbit which has no prospect of ever doing anything vaguely interesting unless it blows up.
I run both spamprobe and bogofilter and find that the OR of the two is noticably better than either alone. Haven't managed to spot why, but the moral is that if you have CPU to burn it can be worth getting a second opinion.
most pda's have pens used to operate them anyway...
But this new thing wouldn't just be just a hunk of plastic which you can buy half a dozen spares of if you care to, but an expensive piece of technology in it's own right.
Most bluetooth or IrDA cellphones support swapping business cards
But that's only a corner of the functionality (and to be honest, one I don't see the point of, dead tree does this job just fine IMO). Addressbook, simple calender and so on is the more useful stuff.
I've seen PDA sized objects which have phones built in, but last time I looked for a replacement phone (admittedly a year or more ago) nothing as small and light as I'd want a phone to be with useful, simple PDA like functionality. Maybve I need to try again.
A business card pre-encoded with the contact information for its owner would be cool.
Someone needs to resurrect the Rex. Then your business card can be your PDA.
Actually, they should build that functionality into a phone. Rather than making phones the size of a PDA, make something the size of a Rex (ie PC Card sized) which acts as phone and PDA.
On the other hand, if they can get it to be as robust and enough mem like thumb drives, they could really take off.
No memory, it just passes a handle and you computer gets the stuff from a server.
I'm not sure what advantage it gives over just making the PDA, or whatever, do the job directly. The pen is just another thing to break/lose/have stolen.
Actually, what we should have is IR on the PDA and a tilt switch inside. Then you could pour the data from yours into your friend's. Bummer when you spill your address book on the floor though.
Why are companies allowed to get away with this crap just because we pay them for their shoddy wares?
You answered your own question. If everyone who owns one of these took it back and demanded their money back because it is not suitable for the purpose for which it was sold, they'd soon get the message.
Why on EARTH is this not literally considered a criminal offense for a company to do?
Because the civil courts are there to cope with this kind of thing?
What do we do with kiddie porn when no children are abused to make it?
You realise this is only a couple of steps less difficult than `what is the meaning of life'. This question raises all the really hard issues about free will and responsibility and conditioning and so on. If asked in the pub it legitimises pushing red hot pork scratchings up the speaker's nose until they promise never to ask it again.
Of course, if you ask it on Usenet lots of people will give you simple, obvious and mutually contradictory answers of which the most sane will be the one about the alien conspiracy to reduce the size of the poster's penis using rays emitted from cellular phone masts.
Wait, you actually want the state to determine what's moral?
Er, no, I said that some people would say there was an argument that if what was blocked is immoral, then there isn't a problem. I neither support that position, nor does it imply the state having moral authority. So you're off target in two dimensions:-).
Outlawing poltical thoughts and beliefs goes against first amendment type protections in the first place.
Not enough. The first amendment is about speech and assembly, not about posession. The argument I was criticising was that which says that mere illegality (for instance of posession, or promotion, or shouting of in theatres) takes something outside the remit of the first amendment, or equivalent, rights.
If you start to accept that the fact that something is illegal makes blocking it acceptable, you have lost. Game over man. All your eyeballs are belonging to us. And every other/. chiche, except possibly the one about underpants. It's one of those small seeming tools which has amazing potential in the hands of a suitably determined legislator.
Bringing the argument back around to your first point, saying blocking illegal things is OK is giving the state moral authority. It in effect says that the state can declare anything immoral and so blockable, simply by saying so.
The only stable place to stand is where you keep in mind the fact that immorality and illegality are completely orthogonal concepts, and never let the bastards try to blurr the issue. There is a horrible slippery slope waiting for the first step away from that.
So there is nothing wrong with blocking access to illegal material.
Yes there is.
There is a legitimate argument for blocking harmful material, and some would say there is a legitimate argument for blocking immoral material.
However, blocking illegal material is, by definition, blocking material the government doesn't want you to see, if you accept it as legitimate, you are accepting every possible act of government censorship.
In china, for instance, certain kinds of political material are illegal, so by your argument there is nothing wrong with the Chinese government blocking it.
I know this may sound pedantic, but this is one of those confusions which we are encouraged to make by the state and it's friends in the media. One we all need to be wary of. Slipping betwen `immoral' and `illegal' is easy and dangerous.
And of course, this will not stop the knowledgable pedophile, but if it can keep some companies from earning money via paid subscriptions, good for BT.
Surely it would make more sense to track the payments and thus catch the punters, rather than just forcing them to become a little more knowledgable.
ISTM that the internet has done us all a favour by bringing much of this kind of stuff out of secretive meetings in back rooms into a public place. Rather than going `urgh, this is nasty' and driving it back, we should be going `aha, gotcha!'.
What I don't understand is why the credit card companies are allowed to go on supporting this market. All it takes is one investigator putting in a subscription to trace that back to the real company which puts through the credit card payment, at which point all CC companies in all legitimate jurisdictions should be able to drop that company and put their whole set of sites out of business.
Do that and the commercial side of the industry is, effectively, dead.
Take the information the CC companies must collect from companies under the money laundering laws, and you have a starting place for investigators to track back to the actual abusers.
I can only assume that the CC companies have too much political pull and don't want to lose a profitable market segment.
Slashdot Mirror
This makes counting more difficult, combined with the size of the country.
The size is an independent issue -- both the number of timezones and the existance of remote areas are going to slow things down no matter what method is used to actually record votes.
The number of votes isn't really a qualitative difference. It's common to have combined elections here (eg local plus scottish parliament, local plus European), so 3 or 4 ballots aren't unknown. Doesn't cause any significant delays. Certainly I don't think there has been a UK election which took as long to sort out as the last US presidential one (given the Florida mess) in modern times. And the Scottish elections are not a simple first past the post poll.
The biggest problem there has been in the UK recently was in the most recent election when they experimented in some areas with postal voting. In accordance with expectation, when they tried to fix something which wasn't broken, they ended up with a mess. Pens and paper really does work very well.
BTW, Australia uses some e-voting systems; however they were Government-designed, use Linux and are open-source -- you can get the source code from the Australian Government's website, if you so desired.
The only really sucessful move to electronic voting seems to have been the Indian one, where they designed something to do the job, rather than starting with all the fun technology they'd like to charge the government for.
UK elections are done with pen and paper and the results are in overnight. Since the number of people available to do the counting is more or less proportional to the number of people who need to vote, I see no reason why a US national election run with pen and paper ballots would take any longer to count.
Notice that he chose not to release it into the public domain (as someone said earlier), but to retain copyright and give certain rights to everyone.
That copyright notice is a BSD licence for music.
Because a significant proportion of /.ers have problems understanding humour more subtle than the three stooges and Benny Hill.
I, for one, welcome our new humourless masters.
You can just see Ossama burrying Iraq's WMDs.
Er, borrow the CD from someone else, that's how I first installed FBSD.
Free software you know, you're allowed to do that kind of thing.
Mind you, $40, 22 quid, the word whopping hardly applies. Less than Doom3 and far more fun.
Or, given this is Starbucks, over-burn you a copy so that every time you play it you are left with a rather nasty taste in your mouth.
OTOH, if you are in a position to take advantage, they are very nice.
Safeway (the UK one) had a policy of relatively high prices, with special offers to tempt in customers. I live next door, so was in every other day to buy something for lunch or whatever. Naturally I would buy 8 or 10 jars of instant coffee when it was at half their normal, maybe 2/3 everyone else's price.
They were recently bought out by another chain, who have a (now more normal) strategy of price competition across the store, so prices have come down, the dramatic specials have dissapeared and I'm probably paying more overall.
Bastards!
Please use the shift key, going out of your way to make your posting hard to read is VERY rude.
It's not a question of layout, but of sanity. Windows is very vulnerable because it is used by people who don't understand the tools they are using, who run with administrator priveliges (they used to have no choice, more recently M$ just made running as a normal user a pain in the arse) and who run badly designed mail clients and web browsers which will execute code recieved in email or froma web server at the click of a button.
With linux based systems becoming more widespread, the same syndrome will become more and more widespread there too. People running as root. People running brain damaged, but pretty, mailers. People not knowing that this is a Really Bad Idea.
Personally I don't trust any mail client which understands MIME or HTML, and I only read root's email with `less'.
If only...
NASA should be doing more stuff which might fail, rather than pissing away money on things like the ISS and Shuttle which never achieve anything, but stagger on, never quite dieing, for decades.
IIRC the ISS admitted cost is 100bn, Cassini is about 3.5bn. 30 Cassini type missions for a tin can in orbit which has no prospect of ever doing anything vaguely interesting unless it blows up.
I run both spamprobe and bogofilter and find that the OR of the two is noticably better than either alone. Haven't managed to spot why, but the moral is that if you have CPU to burn it can be worth getting a second opinion.
Michael Jackson
And will they ship two, or prvide a hermaphoradite to save launch mass?
Don't things often swell up when they die?
But this new thing wouldn't just be just a hunk of plastic which you can buy half a dozen spares of if you care to, but an expensive piece of technology in it's own right.
You can poke people in the eye with it! That will get the point across:-).
But that's only a corner of the functionality (and to be honest, one I don't see the point of, dead tree does this job just fine IMO). Addressbook, simple calender and so on is the more useful stuff.
I've seen PDA sized objects which have phones built in, but last time I looked for a replacement phone (admittedly a year or more ago) nothing as small and light as I'd want a phone to be with useful, simple PDA like functionality. Maybve I need to try again.
Someone needs to resurrect the Rex. Then your business card can be your PDA.
Actually, they should build that functionality into a phone. Rather than making phones the size of a PDA, make something the size of a Rex (ie PC Card sized) which acts as phone and PDA.
No memory, it just passes a handle and you computer gets the stuff from a server.
I'm not sure what advantage it gives over just making the PDA, or whatever, do the job directly. The pen is just another thing to break/lose/have stolen.
Actually, what we should have is IR on the PDA and a tilt switch inside. Then you could pour the data from yours into your friend's. Bummer when you spill your address book on the floor though.
You answered your own question. If everyone who owns one of these took it back and demanded their money back because it is not suitable for the purpose for which it was sold, they'd soon get the message.
Why on EARTH is this not literally considered a criminal offense for a company to do?
Because the civil courts are there to cope with this kind of thing?
You realise this is only a couple of steps less difficult than `what is the meaning of life'. This question raises all the really hard issues about free will and responsibility and conditioning and so on. If asked in the pub it legitimises pushing red hot pork scratchings up the speaker's nose until they promise never to ask it again.
Of course, if you ask it on Usenet lots of people will give you simple, obvious and mutually contradictory answers of which the most sane will be the one about the alien conspiracy to reduce the size of the poster's penis using rays emitted from cellular phone masts.
And on /. people will just sidestep the question.
Er, no, I said that some people would say there was an argument that if what was blocked is immoral, then there isn't a problem. I neither support that position, nor does it imply the state having moral authority. So you're off target in two dimensions:-).
Outlawing poltical thoughts and beliefs goes against first amendment type protections in the first place.
Not enough. The first amendment is about speech and assembly, not about posession. The argument I was criticising was that which says that mere illegality (for instance of posession, or promotion, or shouting of in theatres) takes something outside the remit of the first amendment, or equivalent, rights.
If you start to accept that the fact that something is illegal makes blocking it acceptable, you have lost. Game over man. All your eyeballs are belonging to us. And every other /. chiche, except possibly the one about underpants. It's one of those small seeming tools which has amazing potential in the hands of a suitably determined legislator.
Bringing the argument back around to your first point, saying blocking illegal things is OK is giving the state moral authority. It in effect says that the state can declare anything immoral and so blockable, simply by saying so.
The only stable place to stand is where you keep in mind the fact that immorality and illegality are completely orthogonal concepts, and never let the bastards try to blurr the issue. There is a horrible slippery slope waiting for the first step away from that.
Yes there is.
There is a legitimate argument for blocking harmful material, and some would say there is a legitimate argument for blocking immoral material.
However, blocking illegal material is, by definition, blocking material the government doesn't want you to see, if you accept it as legitimate, you are accepting every possible act of government censorship.
In china, for instance, certain kinds of political material are illegal, so by your argument there is nothing wrong with the Chinese government blocking it.
I know this may sound pedantic, but this is one of those confusions which we are encouraged to make by the state and it's friends in the media. One we all need to be wary of. Slipping betwen `immoral' and `illegal' is easy and dangerous.
Surely it would make more sense to track the payments and thus catch the punters, rather than just forcing them to become a little more knowledgable.
ISTM that the internet has done us all a favour by bringing much of this kind of stuff out of secretive meetings in back rooms into a public place. Rather than going `urgh, this is nasty' and driving it back, we should be going `aha, gotcha!'.
What I don't understand is why the credit card companies are allowed to go on supporting this market. All it takes is one investigator putting in a subscription to trace that back to the real company which puts through the credit card payment, at which point all CC companies in all legitimate jurisdictions should be able to drop that company and put their whole set of sites out of business.
Do that and the commercial side of the industry is, effectively, dead.
Take the information the CC companies must collect from companies under the money laundering laws, and you have a starting place for investigators to track back to the actual abusers.
I can only assume that the CC companies have too much political pull and don't want to lose a profitable market segment.