The problem is there is a mass global rebellion to copyright laws. You saw that over in Sweden where a previously unknown and niche party managed to get EU representation. You see it on/. on TPB, all over the internet. Its about as unpopular as prohibition was.
But filtering in China is done at a level independent of the computer. This adds another layer of "protection" and enforcement but isn't really the full filtering of the internet. Think of this like a porn blocker that blocks a few sites compared to the "Golden Shield" which blocks all references to anti-communist or different forms of communist ideals.
Considering that the Chinese government has put a lot of time/effort into mandating Red Flag Linux for internet cafes, I would say that they "install" it and it doesn't function.
Just like the 1880s, right? Sure, you can live free if you're the upper crust. Otherwise, your life will be nasty, brutish, and short, and spent toiling away and never seeing more of your proceeds than you need to stay alive, barely.
Please elaborate. With the decline of government comes the decline of patents, therefore medicine would be cheaper than ever before and would only be limited by the materials needed to manufacture it. And how won't you see any more of your proceeds? Today we can import almost anything we need for cheap, with the sharp reduction in tariffs expected with a decline in government, goods become cheaper.
This isn't a nightmare scenario. It actually happened. It was called the Gilded Age, and we should be glad it ended. Why do extreme libertarians like you consistently deny the logical implications of your policies?
Again, elaborate, the Gilded Age was plagued with lack of information, government policies (such as giving land away to the railroad companies), a lack of a global economy to export to and import from and a lack of (today) basic technology. Suffice to say that the Gilded Age could not be recreated with A) A weaker government and B) 21st century technology/world economy.
I can't eat a Youtube video. How do you think all the thousands of people who are paid to create internet content get paid? With currency only good on the internet? The Internet isn't some isolated bubble divorced from the real economy. It's enmeshed quite heavily: people order real, hard goods through it, put real capital derived from conventional industry into it, and spend the real money generated from it on tangible products.
Your point holds true to a point, but look at Google, their entire business is intangible and works on choice. Plus even though there are thousands getting paid for internet content there are untold millions making no profit whatsoever on internet content. If you don't believe me simply look at your post, you posted a comment with a 0% chance that you could use that comment to make a profit.
The internet though is different than the traditional government controlled economy because you have absolute freedom of choice. Where in the USA you are penalized for choosing a provider in a certain area (either by taxes or by tariffs) it makes no difference where the site is you are accessing on the internet. If I want to go to www.nicovideo.jp rather than YouTube for my online video, that makes no difference. Whereas if I choose to get a Japanese car rather than an American car I would be paying more to the government for doing absolutely nothing.
I suppose I'm dealing with a true believer here. Of course there's a recession "in the internet": it makes as much sense to say "no recession in the internet" as it does to say "no recession on the telephone network".
The difference is there are entire industries not based off the network of the internet but rather the internet as a whole. The phone network functions, well, as a phone network. Other than perhaps a few phone-based services, there is no business using the phone system to really function like Google has for the internet. Then there is the internet community, the phone network has no real community.
Care to propose a government that can function without taxation? The Nobel Prize committee would love to hear about it.
Yes, a pay-per-use government with only one tax mandatory (for defense) would be feasable and would lead to a more free way of living. Just look at the internet, other than connection fees and defense, the internet exists in a fully free economy which thrives, there is no recession in the internet.
Exactly especially whenever you can simply subscribe to SMS Facebook status updates and update your status from your phone. Plus theres the upside that most sane people only update their status once or twice a day.
Um, ARM CPUs really aren't high end in the least. Sure, they might be decent enough for web browsing, but tell me whenever I can get an ARM CPU that can render, play games, etc. Until then I'm sticking with x86. All ARM-based CPUs are good for is low power systems like phones, etc.
Because all a distro release is, is basically a service pack. Everything gets updated in one easily maintained package thats checked (or at least should be) for any incompatibilities. For example, if you upgrade some libraries but have an older version of another program, that program won't work unless you update it, distro upgrades update everything so they all play nicely with each other.
Sure but there *are* other jobs, sure, it might mean taking a job in something that isn't your specialty, taking a job thats "lower than you", etc. But if you really are/that/ stressed about your job, even a job at McDonalds might be better even if that means you can't afford that 50 inch plasma.
Auto-Updating annoys the heck out of people though. Especially whenever you try to do something remotely technical like... You know if you don't want the "latest and greatest, lets fix a bug and make options that you spent hours configuring don't work" version. Or if you custom-compile things, etc. I like(d) Ubuntu until it started popping up "Updates available", it was tolerable until 9.04 whenever it just randomly popped up. Yes Ubuntu, I know I can install some updates, however I don't feel like installing them now. Its gotten so annoying that I have set up a script to kill all the annoying popups, but auto-update, despite how nice it is for some programs (browsers, MMOs, etc) its really annoying sometimes.
Most states (not sure about California, never leaved there never want to) allow individual school boards to make decisions while the state has the curriculum covered. For example the school might require science to cover basic elements of biology, chemistry, geology and anatomy for 5th grade science. But the actual decisions are made by the school board in which textbooks to buy, how to cover it, and then the teachers usually have a say in the way the material is presented (labs, lectures, essays, etc)
Large schools sure, but these large schools also usually have the infrastructure not to have internet interruptions, etc.
I bet there are publishers that settle for such backup systems. After all it would strictly be for the sole purpose of maintaining studies for students. If you run into a publisher that has no interest in this then I see no reason why you'd have any interest in doing business with them, even if they wrote the best book about the subject there is. Fact is that book will, in five years time, be as shitty as the other outdated data in the world.
You assume that there is no textbook monopoly, and that publishers actually care about the students. Honestly the textbook publishers are nothing more than the academic equivalent to the RIAA and MPAA. They just want to make a quick buck and if that means screwing taxpayers, they will do that, if that means screwing students, they have no problem with that, if that means planned obsolescence, they will do that too.
Plus by expanding to internet you've already eliminated the dependency of books. Information can be fetched in numerous ways. If you're a publisher this is rather alarming and thus the power shifts to the favour of the consumer.
You have to remember these are organizations with as much sense as the RIAA/MPAA, their response to competition is to raise prices, sue competitors for little to no reason, and decrease quality.
You though assume that the school is going to have control over these books. Likely that is not the case, you would go to a third-party website, login and then choose your book from there. It is likely that the school has no rights to copy/distribute them.
'It's nonsensical -- and expensive -- to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form,'
Yes, but online textbooks if they don't come with a hard-bound textbook are a bad idea. Already in schools whenever there is an internet outage, virus outbreak, etc. The school basically shuts down in the fact that teachers can't enter in grades, etc. But now the teachers couldn't teach. Then what happens if for some reason these textbooks are not cross platform? What if they restrict access to only Windows machines, or Windows and Mac? What happens whenever a student's computer breaks so they can't do the assignment or if they can only afford low-speed internet or that is all that is offered where they live? What happens if their computer is too old to properly render the site? What happens if the computer lab's hours are inconvenient for said students (for example an after school job where they usually work with their physical textbook during down time)? Take the old saying "my printer broke" and multiply it by a few thousand and thats going to be the result of this program if they do not mandate having a physical textbook.
Because you have to understand the Apple mentality. It is upgrade, upgrade, upgrade to the latest and greatest model. Whereas people with PC hardware/mentalities tend to upgrade slowly. Most Apple people actually want to give money to Apple as if it were a charitable cause.
I don't really understand why they wanted exclusivity especially with as terrible of carrier as AT&T. Really, if they opened up they would lead and the rest of the cell carriers would follow with everything so long as they made the specs available such as with Visual Voicemail.
I wouldn't think so because the point of the iPhone OS is to provide the same platform across all generations of iPhones/iPod Touch. I think there would be some inputs that would make it be impossible to do such as using the camera, etc. But other than that I don't think it makes since to have GS only calls.
Well, really there isn't anything other than the speed upgrade that the iPod Touch would have that the new iPhone has. Tethering, camera upgrades, etc. Wouldn't really work for the iPod Touch.
Not only that but it seemed like "Oh we are releasing a new feature! (not on AT&T)". I mean, just look at it MMS is going to be on every phone (but not AT&T that will be later in the summer) You also get tethering that really works (not on AT&T), etc.
How does a local election provider define the ballot?
Depends, have a list of candidates, choose the candidate, submit it. For a yes or no issue have two buttons, one yes the other no.
How do you ensure that the ballot programming is accessible to politicos and not computer programmers?
Either have a GUI or hire a programmer, I'm sure that the cost of one programmer and one or two other people is a lot less than hiring a team to hand-count votes.
How do you QA the ballot program? How do you verify that nobody has tampered with the ballot program after it has been QAed?
Sign it. Have the program check the signature, good signature it lets it go, bad signature it rejects it and throws up an error message.
For QA, how do you do it without using official ballots that don't end up in the valid votes pile?
Reimage the machine after use.
What happens if the scanner (for optical scanners) gets miscalibrated, or the ballot printer was miscalibrated when it printed them, so that alignments aren't off? What if the initial votes and ballots are correct but later ones are not because of changes in calibration or alignment? Think about multiple ballot runs off a printer in a high-volume election.
Simple, don't use scanners. Simply have it be all digital with a paper printout that may be used if the electronic voting failed due to errors, etc. The paper printouts could be hand-counted if there was a major failure.
What about different election types? "Most-of", "at-large", "one-of", "instant-runoff", etc.? What about the interactions between these election types and other election types on a single ballot? What about multiple ballots in small regional areas? Who programs them and verifies the programs?
Programmers and the town. Have an open meeting where anyone can discuss them, fix them, etc. You only need to hire one competent programmer to program a ballot. Multiple ballots are simply more XML files, trivial to make.
While I'm as puzzled as you are on why its doing simple addition wrong, I can understand why you would want a computer to do the math though, as it should be more error-proof than humans.
It still amazes me how "hard" it is to write a simple program. First have something to scan the ID, check that its unique then move to the voting. Have a few radio buttons that you click, then hit submit, each radio button corresponds to a candidate or a choice, they are added up and give you the results. How the crap do you screw that up?
Hope you were trying to get a +5 funny mod, but seriously how many PCs do we ship to China? Heck, how many American companies really sell PCs? You have Dell and HP and thats about it. I don't think the average Chinese person is on a Dell or HP computer, plus where do you think all the components are made? China. Its trvial to put together a computer whenever you have a CPU, HD, Motherboard, all the cables, RAM, Case, PSU, etc. right there.
Plus, despite what you might think, even the Chinese people who have come to the US to study, can get around censorship, etc. Think that its necessary to have a authoritarian government to continue the growth of China. Sure, it would be good if China became free, but many Chinese are opposed to the idea both because of brainwashing by a party-controlled media and the recent success in China economic wise while the "free world" is suffering a major economic meltdown.
...Except for a few facts. This is being done not just by a government, but one of the most oppressive, authoritarian, and anti-freedom governments on the face of the earth.
If there is one thing worse than not having an anti-virus (on a Windows box at least) its having a bad or outdated one.
The problem with blocking things like this on the ISP level with malware and such is censorship. Assuming a normal policy of "we aren't going to review or fix this" will lead to, in time many legitimate websites being blocked the reason being twofold, first there isn't a one-stop-shop for malware, you don't go to www.example.com/files/malware to download all malware, its tiny, many times infected and hijacked websites that contain malware. Then what happens when a domain name that had malware expires and a legitimate website springs up? If it was a large business and the ISP didn't quickly unblock it they could easily sue.
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The problem is there is a mass global rebellion to copyright laws. You saw that over in Sweden where a previously unknown and niche party managed to get EU representation. You see it on /. on TPB, all over the internet. Its about as unpopular as prohibition was.
But filtering in China is done at a level independent of the computer. This adds another layer of "protection" and enforcement but isn't really the full filtering of the internet. Think of this like a porn blocker that blocks a few sites compared to the "Golden Shield" which blocks all references to anti-communist or different forms of communist ideals.
Considering that the Chinese government has put a lot of time/effort into mandating Red Flag Linux for internet cafes, I would say that they "install" it and it doesn't function.
Just like the 1880s, right? Sure, you can live free if you're the upper crust. Otherwise, your life will be nasty, brutish, and short, and spent toiling away and never seeing more of your proceeds than you need to stay alive, barely.
Please elaborate. With the decline of government comes the decline of patents, therefore medicine would be cheaper than ever before and would only be limited by the materials needed to manufacture it. And how won't you see any more of your proceeds? Today we can import almost anything we need for cheap, with the sharp reduction in tariffs expected with a decline in government, goods become cheaper.
This isn't a nightmare scenario. It actually happened. It was called the Gilded Age, and we should be glad it ended. Why do extreme libertarians like you consistently deny the logical implications of your policies?
Again, elaborate, the Gilded Age was plagued with lack of information, government policies (such as giving land away to the railroad companies), a lack of a global economy to export to and import from and a lack of (today) basic technology. Suffice to say that the Gilded Age could not be recreated with A) A weaker government and B) 21st century technology/world economy.
I can't eat a Youtube video. How do you think all the thousands of people who are paid to create internet content get paid? With currency only good on the internet? The Internet isn't some isolated bubble divorced from the real economy. It's enmeshed quite heavily: people order real, hard goods through it, put real capital derived from conventional industry into it, and spend the real money generated from it on tangible products.
Your point holds true to a point, but look at Google, their entire business is intangible and works on choice. Plus even though there are thousands getting paid for internet content there are untold millions making no profit whatsoever on internet content. If you don't believe me simply look at your post, you posted a comment with a 0% chance that you could use that comment to make a profit.
The internet though is different than the traditional government controlled economy because you have absolute freedom of choice. Where in the USA you are penalized for choosing a provider in a certain area (either by taxes or by tariffs) it makes no difference where the site is you are accessing on the internet. If I want to go to www.nicovideo.jp rather than YouTube for my online video, that makes no difference. Whereas if I choose to get a Japanese car rather than an American car I would be paying more to the government for doing absolutely nothing.
I suppose I'm dealing with a true believer here. Of course there's a recession "in the internet": it makes as much sense to say "no recession in the internet" as it does to say "no recession on the telephone network".
The difference is there are entire industries not based off the network of the internet but rather the internet as a whole. The phone network functions, well, as a phone network. Other than perhaps a few phone-based services, there is no business using the phone system to really function like Google has for the internet. Then there is the internet community, the phone network has no real community.
Care to propose a government that can function without taxation? The Nobel Prize committee would love to hear about it.
Yes, a pay-per-use government with only one tax mandatory (for defense) would be feasable and would lead to a more free way of living. Just look at the internet, other than connection fees and defense, the internet exists in a fully free economy which thrives, there is no recession in the internet.
Exactly especially whenever you can simply subscribe to SMS Facebook status updates and update your status from your phone. Plus theres the upside that most sane people only update their status once or twice a day.
I just created a cronjob to "killall update-manager (or whatever the command was) and set it to run every hour.
Um, ARM CPUs really aren't high end in the least. Sure, they might be decent enough for web browsing, but tell me whenever I can get an ARM CPU that can render, play games, etc. Until then I'm sticking with x86. All ARM-based CPUs are good for is low power systems like phones, etc.
Because all a distro release is, is basically a service pack. Everything gets updated in one easily maintained package thats checked (or at least should be) for any incompatibilities. For example, if you upgrade some libraries but have an older version of another program, that program won't work unless you update it, distro upgrades update everything so they all play nicely with each other.
Sure but there *are* other jobs, sure, it might mean taking a job in something that isn't your specialty, taking a job thats "lower than you", etc. But if you really are /that/ stressed about your job, even a job at McDonalds might be better even if that means you can't afford that 50 inch plasma.
Auto-Updating annoys the heck out of people though. Especially whenever you try to do something remotely technical like... You know if you don't want the "latest and greatest, lets fix a bug and make options that you spent hours configuring don't work" version. Or if you custom-compile things, etc. I like(d) Ubuntu until it started popping up "Updates available", it was tolerable until 9.04 whenever it just randomly popped up. Yes Ubuntu, I know I can install some updates, however I don't feel like installing them now. Its gotten so annoying that I have set up a script to kill all the annoying popups, but auto-update, despite how nice it is for some programs (browsers, MMOs, etc) its really annoying sometimes.
Most states (not sure about California, never leaved there never want to) allow individual school boards to make decisions while the state has the curriculum covered. For example the school might require science to cover basic elements of biology, chemistry, geology and anatomy for 5th grade science. But the actual decisions are made by the school board in which textbooks to buy, how to cover it, and then the teachers usually have a say in the way the material is presented (labs, lectures, essays, etc)
A school has big consumer power.
Large schools sure, but these large schools also usually have the infrastructure not to have internet interruptions, etc.
I bet there are publishers that settle for such backup systems. After all it would strictly be for the sole purpose of maintaining studies for students. If you run into a publisher that has no interest in this then I see no reason why you'd have any interest in doing business with them, even if they wrote the best book about the subject there is. Fact is that book will, in five years time, be as shitty as the other outdated data in the world.
You assume that there is no textbook monopoly, and that publishers actually care about the students. Honestly the textbook publishers are nothing more than the academic equivalent to the RIAA and MPAA. They just want to make a quick buck and if that means screwing taxpayers, they will do that, if that means screwing students, they have no problem with that, if that means planned obsolescence, they will do that too.
Plus by expanding to internet you've already eliminated the dependency of books. Information can be fetched in numerous ways. If you're a publisher this is rather alarming and thus the power shifts to the favour of the consumer.
You have to remember these are organizations with as much sense as the RIAA/MPAA, their response to competition is to raise prices, sue competitors for little to no reason, and decrease quality.
You though assume that the school is going to have control over these books. Likely that is not the case, you would go to a third-party website, login and then choose your book from there. It is likely that the school has no rights to copy/distribute them.
'It's nonsensical -- and expensive -- to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form,'
Yes, but online textbooks if they don't come with a hard-bound textbook are a bad idea. Already in schools whenever there is an internet outage, virus outbreak, etc. The school basically shuts down in the fact that teachers can't enter in grades, etc. But now the teachers couldn't teach. Then what happens if for some reason these textbooks are not cross platform? What if they restrict access to only Windows machines, or Windows and Mac? What happens whenever a student's computer breaks so they can't do the assignment or if they can only afford low-speed internet or that is all that is offered where they live? What happens if their computer is too old to properly render the site? What happens if the computer lab's hours are inconvenient for said students (for example an after school job where they usually work with their physical textbook during down time)? Take the old saying "my printer broke" and multiply it by a few thousand and thats going to be the result of this program if they do not mandate having a physical textbook.
Because you have to understand the Apple mentality. It is upgrade, upgrade, upgrade to the latest and greatest model. Whereas people with PC hardware/mentalities tend to upgrade slowly. Most Apple people actually want to give money to Apple as if it were a charitable cause.
I don't really understand why they wanted exclusivity especially with as terrible of carrier as AT&T. Really, if they opened up they would lead and the rest of the cell carriers would follow with everything so long as they made the specs available such as with Visual Voicemail.
I wouldn't think so because the point of the iPhone OS is to provide the same platform across all generations of iPhones/iPod Touch. I think there would be some inputs that would make it be impossible to do such as using the camera, etc. But other than that I don't think it makes since to have GS only calls.
Well, really there isn't anything other than the speed upgrade that the iPod Touch would have that the new iPhone has. Tethering, camera upgrades, etc. Wouldn't really work for the iPod Touch.
Not only that but it seemed like "Oh we are releasing a new feature! (not on AT&T)". I mean, just look at it MMS is going to be on every phone (but not AT&T that will be later in the summer) You also get tethering that really works (not on AT&T), etc.
How does a local election provider define the ballot?
Depends, have a list of candidates, choose the candidate, submit it. For a yes or no issue have two buttons, one yes the other no.
How do you ensure that the ballot programming is accessible to politicos and not computer programmers?
Either have a GUI or hire a programmer, I'm sure that the cost of one programmer and one or two other people is a lot less than hiring a team to hand-count votes.
How do you QA the ballot program? How do you verify that nobody has tampered with the ballot program after it has been QAed?
Sign it. Have the program check the signature, good signature it lets it go, bad signature it rejects it and throws up an error message.
For QA, how do you do it without using official ballots that don't end up in the valid votes pile?
Reimage the machine after use.
What happens if the scanner (for optical scanners) gets miscalibrated, or the ballot printer was miscalibrated when it printed them, so that alignments aren't off? What if the initial votes and ballots are correct but later ones are not because of changes in calibration or alignment? Think about multiple ballot runs off a printer in a high-volume election.
Simple, don't use scanners. Simply have it be all digital with a paper printout that may be used if the electronic voting failed due to errors, etc. The paper printouts could be hand-counted if there was a major failure.
What about different election types? "Most-of", "at-large", "one-of", "instant-runoff", etc.? What about the interactions between these election types and other election types on a single ballot? What about multiple ballots in small regional areas? Who programs them and verifies the programs?
Programmers and the town. Have an open meeting where anyone can discuss them, fix them, etc. You only need to hire one competent programmer to program a ballot. Multiple ballots are simply more XML files, trivial to make.
While I'm as puzzled as you are on why its doing simple addition wrong, I can understand why you would want a computer to do the math though, as it should be more error-proof than humans.
It still amazes me how "hard" it is to write a simple program. First have something to scan the ID, check that its unique then move to the voting. Have a few radio buttons that you click, then hit submit, each radio button corresponds to a candidate or a choice, they are added up and give you the results. How the crap do you screw that up?
Hope you were trying to get a +5 funny mod, but seriously how many PCs do we ship to China? Heck, how many American companies really sell PCs? You have Dell and HP and thats about it. I don't think the average Chinese person is on a Dell or HP computer, plus where do you think all the components are made? China. Its trvial to put together a computer whenever you have a CPU, HD, Motherboard, all the cables, RAM, Case, PSU, etc. right there.
Plus, despite what you might think, even the Chinese people who have come to the US to study, can get around censorship, etc. Think that its necessary to have a authoritarian government to continue the growth of China. Sure, it would be good if China became free, but many Chinese are opposed to the idea both because of brainwashing by a party-controlled media and the recent success in China economic wise while the "free world" is suffering a major economic meltdown.
...Except for a few facts. This is being done not just by a government, but one of the most oppressive, authoritarian, and anti-freedom governments on the face of the earth.
If there is one thing worse than not having an anti-virus (on a Windows box at least) its having a bad or outdated one.
The problem with blocking things like this on the ISP level with malware and such is censorship. Assuming a normal policy of "we aren't going to review or fix this" will lead to, in time many legitimate websites being blocked the reason being twofold, first there isn't a one-stop-shop for malware, you don't go to www.example.com/files/malware to download all malware, its tiny, many times infected and hijacked websites that contain malware. Then what happens when a domain name that had malware expires and a legitimate website springs up? If it was a large business and the ISP didn't quickly unblock it they could easily sue.