If it was actually being taken seriously it would be done by hand counted paper ballots.
There are already good paper voting systems in use that meet important criteria such as: 1) Being easy for most people to understand how their vote is counted and the effort it takes to cheat the system. 2) Allowing the different political parties and independent bodies have their observers present to observe the votes as they are being counted.
Because, I suggest that: elections don't just have to be fair. They have to be _seen_ as fair.
Otherwise if there's a "surprise" result, there may be too many people on the streets for the police to quieten down. And that is a bad thing. If an election is seen as fair, while there may still be sore losers on the streets, the rest will be drowning their sorrows/disgust/disappointment in less troublesome ways.
Electronic voting fails that way.
It's a black box that the average voter does not understand. And worse, an expert in the field will tell you that it's a black box that makes cheating easier. How can you prove that the source code you see, is the one that was actually running during the election? You can't! If an ATM makes an error, someone in ops, accounts or audit might notice the creation or destruction of money. But the creation and destruction of votes is hard to detect and prove unless it gets to a ridiculous state (like now).
I've been in the IT line for years and I see no good reason to have electronic voting systems in a Democracy.
The more voters you have, the more counters and observers you can have. Hand counting scales fine.
I find it darkly amusing that the most powerful country in the world spends hundreds of billions to choose governments oops "establish democracy" in other countries, and can't even spend a much lower amount to do things properly at home.
I'm well aware that bonds are sold... Whether they will be repaid is something most leave to others to worry about 30-50 years later (the relevant person in China must be hoping he retires before the shit hits the fan).
But if it never actually gets paid back, or the currency is rather devalued in 50 years time, there really is little difference between issuing bonds and printing money.
Germany had hyperinflation when printing money because the rest of the world did not use their currency.
Because if the rest of the world were using their currency for most stuff, Germany could print money and instantly make themselves richer than the rest of the world. Since traded goods would instantly be cheaper for them.
But the rest of the world didn't, so the German government only made themselves richer than their citizens.
As I said, inflation can be a form of taxation. You make those with your currency pay, whether they like it or not. If you tax only your citizens the per person tax is higher, but if you get to tax the rest of the world, the rest of the world might take a while to figure it out;).
Go look at how much the US Dollar has devalued in the past 20-30 years. So did the bondholders get enough interest to cover that and more?
There are plenty of buildings with "decorative spikes" on them, so I wouldn't be surprised if a spike was put on a bridge for nontechnical reasons.
There was a time when pink paint must have been cheap or popular around my area - since plenty of buildings were painted pink. Not hot pink but pink nonetheless.
I never said P2P should be restricted, nor did I say it is illegal. If you think I did, citation please.
Just because "everyone" claims or believes I did so, doesn't mean I did.
I just showed how P2P could easily be restricted. Why? Because "everyone" seems to think that it's so hard to stop P2P traffic, and thus it will be "speed hump" proof.
For example (from the summary): "If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic".
I'm claiming it's not so simple to disguise P2P, because it has a particular characteristic. Once it stops having that characteristic it starts being less efficient at what it is supposed to do. It stops being like P2P and starts being more like "peer to server" with the associated problems.
But you better hope it is legally or commercially infeasible to stop P2P. Because it is indeed technically feasible to stop P2P despite what you believe.
For example, a relatively trivial way P2P can be stopped is by just not moving to IPv6, running out of IPv4 addresses and then putting most "normal users" behind NATs.
Most popular non-P2P services will NOT be affected - only certain VPN technologies will break, the others will be OK (e.g. IPSEC with NAT traversal, openvpn).
But P2P will not work. You will need the ISPs _active_ cooperation for your P2P connection to still work properly behind _their_ NAT they've placed in front of you.
The media companies will find the resulting "network topology" reassuringly familiar - few talkers, many listeners... Back to the good old days. Does Big Media own some ISPs? If you see any inklings of Big Media and the ISPs moving in that direction, you better start acting if you want your P2P.
Just because something has not been implemented already, doesn't mean it cannot be, or it will not be.
The NAT thing is already done by some countries/ISPs and it stops P2P pretty effectively. If more and more hosts end up behind NATs, P2P becomes harder and harder.
I think what will happen is people who need speed will buy multiple 100TB drives and use only the first few TB of those drives (which normally is the fastest). The track to track seek will be faster too.
The US can print money to bail out banks because most of the world buys oil, wheat, microprocessors and other stuff in US dollars. Hence those countries have to keep around billions of US dollars.
Inflation (and thus devaluation) of a currency is a way of taxing the people who hold net positive amounts of that currency. And in the USA's case - it taxes the countries holding US dollars too.
The problem for the USA is if other countries stop using US dollars to buy stuff and use something else like the Euro. Then when the USA prints money, they'll be just like Zimbabwe printing money.
Otherwise, it's like Mugabe (US Gov) printing money, and passing some of it to Mugabe's Cronies (friends of the US Gov - previously the US citizens fell into that category), and the Zimbabweans (rest of the world) having to buy bread using wheelbarrows of cash.
Could be more expensive than it's worth for the drive maker to build. They'd rather sell more drives for RAID10. Since the exact same drives could be sold to those who don't want the extra performance. Thus they get economies of scale.
Whereas it seems (even from the responses here) that most people are quite happy with the current drive sequential speeds, so they wouldn't pay extra for a larger multihead.
Similar reasons why multiple independent heads haven't taken off:
1) I'm sure ISPs would be happy if P2P users paid for a more expensive commercial plan.
2) Once the P2P traffic starts looking like web traffic it stops being P2P, because it ends up with most peers leeching from a few "servers".
Normal web traffic:
Client downloads >> client uploads. Many connections to few IPs.
P2P traffic: Many connections to many IPs. Downloads similar to uploads.
While 2 high speed connections to each IP works fine for HTTP, it doesn't work so well for bittorrent, since it relies on many people serving up different parts of a file. No point being able to get the same part over and over again from the same person.
If only a few end up being the "Big Servers", they become bigger targets for the **AA etc.
I have not given it much thought, but my guess is a P2P protocol that doesn't have problems with being restricted to 2 high speed connections will have many of the problems that bittorrent was created to solve. I'll be happy to be proven wrong on that.
So why am I an ass for saying: "Yes it's hard to stop copying, but it's not that difficult to seriously clamp down on P2P".
Are you also going to say the person I was replying to was an ass for saying: "You can't stop copyright infringement but you can inhibit free culture."
I know it's a standard Slashdot practice to not read the article or even the summary, but nowadays it looks like slashdotters aren't even bothering to read posts they reply to.
Where did I say P2P is illegal? Go read what I wrote. I don't think it's what you imagined I wrote - at least based on your reply.
Just because I show how it can be done does not mean I want it to be done, or say that it should be done. Or I'm labelling stuff as illegal.
What next you're going to say the person I was replying to wants to "inhibit free culture"?
Lastly if an ISP slows something down it doesn't mean they regard it as illegal.
1) The websites would tend to load eight by eight. You would read the first one that loads up. There aren't that many people in the world who can read 20 websites at the same time AND do it quickly. In fact with my suggestion at least the first few websites would load up quick rather than all 20 websites contending for bandwidth.
2) Uploading a video = 1 upload stream. Opening websites - 8 downloads. chatting = 1 voice stream. I don't see a problem there. It does not look like P2P.
What does your dev server do? If it's a webserver for the public it will get squished down if there are many people downloading from it but that's supposed to happen - go figure out why yourself.
3) How do I define it? That's up to the ISP.
If you curb your P2P to a few kilo a second it stops being such a "big problem" right? At 5KB/sec it takes 11 days to transfer a 4.7GB DVD ISO. You may not consider that as "seriously clamp down on P2P" but I'm sure lots of P2P users will think otherwise.
If you are running an ftp server to share photos and video between _many_ concurrent people in a design shop, I'm sure the ISP can offer you a commercial package.
Otherwise 2 people downloading from your server at full speed and the rest getting throttled to crap till one of the two are done isn't such a big problem.
It hurts bittorrent since each connection will be transferring different pieces.
While you can probably keep writing the same old thing (e.g. jetpack, teleporter or spaceshuttle) I figure the game is more of finding fun/interesting ways of solving the puzzle, than solving the puzzle itself.
Heck maybe finding hilarious ways of NOT solving the puzzle would be part of the metagame:).
As in one trailer - a cop and a doughnut were created. The puzzle was not solved, but the cop was happy...
Yes it's hard to stop copying, but it's not that difficult to seriously clamp down on P2P.
To me it's easy to spot P2P, the characteristics are: 1) Lots of connections to multiple other IPs 2) High upload AND download
So if you see that, you can just leave the first 4 "conversations" that are downloading alone, and the first 2 "conversations" that are uploading, and squish down the rest till the first bunch are done.
By conversation I mean IP to IP. Doesn't matter how many TCP/UDP connections between two IPs, it's still one "conversation".
If you see small packets, both ways but at low to medium speeds, that could be voice or video chat.
Civil Engineering: Design Phase costs about 10% of Build Phase Build Phase involves tons of construction workers and heavy machinery. The blueprints and plastic models are way cheaper to make than the Real Thing. Management often doesn't mind spending a bit extra to get the design better, because the budget only allows for one big Build.
Software Engineering: Design Phase costs more than 1000 times the Build Phase. Build Phase involves the programmer typing "make all" and going to read Slashdot or fetch a coffee. The plastic models cost as much to make as the Real Thing. Management often sells the blueprints/plastic models as v1.0 because they compile and "kinda run" and the budget only allows for one big Design...... and the customers often buy it:).
It should be no surprise then that the plastic models regularly fail.
But maybe I'm seeing things wrong?
BTW I suspect that a Civil Engineering Design phase is managed a bit differently from the Build phase. Still, I'm not an architect or civil engineer so what do I know.
My hypothesis- if an animal can play, it can "laugh" or at least it is familiar with the concept of "laughing".
Many animals play. And play is often an important part in their lives and development.
There are various sorts of humour though.
Some involve you laughing because your brain suddenly made a lots of unexpected connections. Not sure how that relates to you being tickled by someone else.
Modern 1TB drive = 120MB/sec Old 10GB drive= 10MB/sec
But wise people care how long the site backups take. Because if the site _restore_ takes as long it's a problem. So that probably means moving to a "hot standby" sort of backup- which won't be as cheap since you'd need extra stuff - running live off your only backup system is not a good idea.
As for saying "for random access" there's SSDs, does that mean more of us will be using SSDs in the future, and fewer of us using 100TB drives? Or are Seagate and friends going to embed small flash buffers in their drives?
The buffers won't help for sustained random writes, but one would hope most random writes are bursts.
BTW many current Flash SSDs are slower for random writes. While Intel's are at about 23MB/sec, the rest can be amazingly bad - many even worse than "spinning disc drives"!
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't that argument also apply to banning Grand Theft Auto and other violent video games (and movies for that matter)?
> It is like Paris Hilton, denying you sex. Not really gonna impact your life, now is it?
Depends on how she denied me...
If it was actually being taken seriously it would be done by hand counted paper ballots.
There are already good paper voting systems in use that meet important criteria such as:
1) Being easy for most people to understand how their vote is counted and the effort it takes to cheat the system.
2) Allowing the different political parties and independent bodies have their observers present to observe the votes as they are being counted.
Because, I suggest that: elections don't just have to be fair. They have to be _seen_ as fair.
Otherwise if there's a "surprise" result, there may be too many people on the streets for the police to quieten down. And that is a bad thing. If an election is seen as fair, while there may still be sore losers on the streets, the rest will be drowning their sorrows/disgust/disappointment in less troublesome ways.
Electronic voting fails that way.
It's a black box that the average voter does not understand. And worse, an expert in the field will tell you that it's a black box that makes cheating easier. How can you prove that the source code you see, is the one that was actually running during the election? You can't! If an ATM makes an error, someone in ops, accounts or audit might notice the creation or destruction of money. But the creation and destruction of votes is hard to detect and prove unless it gets to a ridiculous state (like now).
I've been in the IT line for years and I see no good reason to have electronic voting systems in a Democracy.
The more voters you have, the more counters and observers you can have. Hand counting scales fine.
I find it darkly amusing that the most powerful country in the world spends hundreds of billions to choose governments oops "establish democracy" in other countries, and can't even spend a much lower amount to do things properly at home.
I'm well aware that bonds are sold... Whether they will be repaid is something most leave to others to worry about 30-50 years later (the relevant person in China must be hoping he retires before the shit hits the fan).
;).
But if it never actually gets paid back, or the currency is rather devalued in 50 years time, there really is little difference between issuing bonds and printing money.
Germany had hyperinflation when printing money because the rest of the world did not use their currency.
Because if the rest of the world were using their currency for most stuff, Germany could print money and instantly make themselves richer than the rest of the world. Since traded goods would instantly be cheaper for them.
But the rest of the world didn't, so the German government only made themselves richer than their citizens.
As I said, inflation can be a form of taxation. You make those with your currency pay, whether they like it or not. If you tax only your citizens the per person tax is higher, but if you get to tax the rest of the world, the rest of the world might take a while to figure it out
Go look at how much the US Dollar has devalued in the past 20-30 years. So did the bondholders get enough interest to cover that and more?
There are plenty of buildings with "decorative spikes" on them, so I wouldn't be surprised if a spike was put on a bridge for nontechnical reasons.
There was a time when pink paint must have been cheap or popular around my area - since plenty of buildings were painted pink. Not hot pink but pink nonetheless.
I never said P2P should be restricted, nor did I say it is illegal. If you think I did, citation please.
Just because "everyone" claims or believes I did so, doesn't mean I did.
I just showed how P2P could easily be restricted. Why? Because "everyone" seems to think that it's so hard to stop P2P traffic, and thus it will be "speed hump" proof.
For example (from the summary): "If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic".
I'm claiming it's not so simple to disguise P2P, because it has a particular characteristic. Once it stops having that characteristic it starts being less efficient at what it is supposed to do. It stops being like P2P and starts being more like "peer to server" with the associated problems.
But you better hope it is legally or commercially infeasible to stop P2P. Because it is indeed technically feasible to stop P2P despite what you believe.
For example, a relatively trivial way P2P can be stopped is by just not moving to IPv6, running out of IPv4 addresses and then putting most "normal users" behind NATs.
Most popular non-P2P services will NOT be affected - only certain VPN technologies will break, the others will be OK (e.g. IPSEC with NAT traversal, openvpn).
But P2P will not work. You will need the ISPs _active_ cooperation for your P2P connection to still work properly behind _their_ NAT they've placed in front of you.
The media companies will find the resulting "network topology" reassuringly familiar - few talkers, many listeners... Back to the good old days. Does Big Media own some ISPs? If you see any inklings of Big Media and the ISPs moving in that direction, you better start acting if you want your P2P.
Just because something has not been implemented already, doesn't mean it cannot be, or it will not be.
The NAT thing is already done by some countries/ISPs and it stops P2P pretty effectively. If more and more hosts end up behind NATs, P2P becomes harder and harder.
Why should I pay for Blizzard's server bandwidth?
Can you even read and understand what I wrote?
If you can't, fuck off.
And where did I say we should kill P2P?
Maybe you should check your own eyesight and improve your reading skills before you call other people asses and incredibly short-sighted.
I think what will happen is people who need speed will buy multiple 100TB drives and use only the first few TB of those drives (which normally is the fastest). The track to track seek will be faster too.
It's a waste, but if they're still cheap...
The US can print money to bail out banks because most of the world buys oil, wheat, microprocessors and other stuff in US dollars. Hence those countries have to keep around billions of US dollars.
Inflation (and thus devaluation) of a currency is a way of taxing the people who hold net positive amounts of that currency. And in the USA's case - it taxes the countries holding US dollars too.
The problem for the USA is if other countries stop using US dollars to buy stuff and use something else like the Euro. Then when the USA prints money, they'll be just like Zimbabwe printing money.
Otherwise, it's like Mugabe (US Gov) printing money, and passing some of it to Mugabe's Cronies (friends of the US Gov - previously the US citizens fell into that category), and the Zimbabweans (rest of the world) having to buy bread using wheelbarrows of cash.
Well it's change. He's probably not one of them yet.
I doubt Obama can replace the entire council. So hope it works out well. Or it's back to "same old same old".
Could be more expensive than it's worth for the drive maker to build. They'd rather sell more drives for RAID10. Since the exact same drives could be sold to those who don't want the extra performance. Thus they get economies of scale.
Whereas it seems (even from the responses here) that most people are quite happy with the current drive sequential speeds, so they wouldn't pay extra for a larger multihead.
Similar reasons why multiple independent heads haven't taken off:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/op/actMultiple-c.html
Hmm, so how's that flamebait?
:)
Someone couldn't handle the truth?
Or maybe I should have used the term "restrict" instead of the phrase "clamp down"?
But you can clamp down on stuff that is legal.
To quote Merriam Webster quoting Time: "a clampdown on charge accounts, bank loans, and other inflationary influences"
1) I'm sure ISPs would be happy if P2P users paid for a more expensive commercial plan.
2) Once the P2P traffic starts looking like web traffic it stops being P2P, because it ends up with most peers leeching from a few "servers".
Normal web traffic:
Client downloads >> client uploads.
Many connections to few IPs.
P2P traffic:
Many connections to many IPs.
Downloads similar to uploads.
While 2 high speed connections to each IP works fine for HTTP, it doesn't work so well for bittorrent, since it relies on many people serving up different parts of a file. No point being able to get the same part over and over again from the same person.
If only a few end up being the "Big Servers", they become bigger targets for the **AA etc.
I have not given it much thought, but my guess is a P2P protocol that doesn't have problems with being restricted to 2 high speed connections will have many of the problems that bittorrent was created to solve. I'll be happy to be proven wrong on that.
So why am I an ass for saying: "Yes it's hard to stop copying, but it's not that difficult to seriously clamp down on P2P".
Are you also going to say the person I was replying to was an ass for saying: "You can't stop copyright infringement but you can inhibit free culture."
I know it's a standard Slashdot practice to not read the article or even the summary, but nowadays it looks like slashdotters aren't even bothering to read posts they reply to.
Where did I say P2P is illegal? Go read what I wrote. I don't think it's what you imagined I wrote - at least based on your reply.
Just because I show how it can be done does not mean I want it to be done, or say that it should be done. Or I'm labelling stuff as illegal.
What next you're going to say the person I was replying to wants to "inhibit free culture"?
Lastly if an ISP slows something down it doesn't mean they regard it as illegal.
1) The websites would tend to load eight by eight. You would read the first one that loads up. There aren't that many people in the world who can read 20 websites at the same time AND do it quickly.
In fact with my suggestion at least the first few websites would load up quick rather than all 20 websites contending for bandwidth.
2) Uploading a video = 1 upload stream. Opening websites - 8 downloads. chatting = 1 voice stream. I don't see a problem there. It does not look like P2P.
What does your dev server do? If it's a webserver for the public it will get squished down if there are many people downloading from it but that's supposed to happen - go figure out why yourself.
3) How do I define it? That's up to the ISP.
If you curb your P2P to a few kilo a second it stops being such a "big problem" right? At 5KB/sec it takes 11 days to transfer a 4.7GB DVD ISO. You may not consider that as "seriously clamp down on P2P" but I'm sure lots of P2P users will think otherwise.
If you are running an ftp server to share photos and video between _many_ concurrent people in a design shop, I'm sure the ISP can offer you a commercial package.
Otherwise 2 people downloading from your server at full speed and the rest getting throttled to crap till one of the two are done isn't such a big problem.
It hurts bittorrent since each connection will be transferring different pieces.
While you can probably keep writing the same old thing (e.g. jetpack, teleporter or spaceshuttle) I figure the game is more of finding fun/interesting ways of solving the puzzle, than solving the puzzle itself.
:).
Heck maybe finding hilarious ways of NOT solving the puzzle would be part of the metagame
As in one trailer - a cop and a doughnut were created. The puzzle was not solved, but the cop was happy...
Yes it's hard to stop copying, but it's not that difficult to seriously clamp down on P2P.
To me it's easy to spot P2P, the characteristics are:
1) Lots of connections to multiple other IPs
2) High upload AND download
So if you see that, you can just leave the first 4 "conversations" that are downloading alone, and the first 2 "conversations" that are uploading, and squish down the rest till the first bunch are done.
By conversation I mean IP to IP. Doesn't matter how many TCP/UDP connections between two IPs, it's still one "conversation".
If you see small packets, both ways but at low to medium speeds, that could be voice or video chat.
The way I see it.
... and the customers often buy it :).
Civil Engineering:
Design Phase costs about 10% of Build Phase
Build Phase involves tons of construction workers and heavy machinery.
The blueprints and plastic models are way cheaper to make than the Real Thing.
Management often doesn't mind spending a bit extra to get the design better, because the budget only allows for one big Build.
Software Engineering:
Design Phase costs more than 1000 times the Build Phase.
Build Phase involves the programmer typing "make all" and going to read Slashdot or fetch a coffee.
The plastic models cost as much to make as the Real Thing.
Management often sells the blueprints/plastic models as v1.0 because they compile and "kinda run" and the budget only allows for one big Design...
It should be no surprise then that the plastic models regularly fail.
But maybe I'm seeing things wrong?
BTW I suspect that a Civil Engineering Design phase is managed a bit differently from the Build phase. Still, I'm not an architect or civil engineer so what do I know.
My hypothesis- if an animal can play, it can "laugh" or at least it is familiar with the concept of "laughing".
Many animals play. And play is often an important part in their lives and development.
There are various sorts of humour though.
Some involve you laughing because your brain suddenly made a lots of unexpected connections.
Not sure how that relates to you being tickled by someone else.
> Thank you for disproving the article entirely on your own.
:)
You're welcome. You mean there was an article? I didn't bother reading it.
Did I miss much?
Yeah you're probably going to be right since:
Modern 1TB drive = 120MB/sec
Old 10GB drive= 10MB/sec
But wise people care how long the site backups take. Because if the site _restore_ takes as long it's a problem. So that probably means moving to a "hot standby" sort of backup- which won't be as cheap since you'd need extra stuff - running live off your only backup system is not a good idea.
As for saying "for random access" there's SSDs, does that mean more of us will be using SSDs in the future, and fewer of us using 100TB drives? Or are Seagate and friends going to embed small flash buffers in their drives?
The buffers won't help for sustained random writes, but one would hope most random writes are bursts.
BTW many current Flash SSDs are slower for random writes. While Intel's are at about 23MB/sec, the rest can be amazingly bad - many even worse than "spinning disc drives"!
See: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531
Look for: "4KB Random Write Speed"
Maybe that's it - the judge needs time to stop laughing.
After all if the judge laughed at the plaintiff, the plaintiff might say the judge was unfair and grumble to other judges.
The other judges could laugh at the plaintiff too. But that takes yet more time as well.
While that all happens there's still money to be made...
They _had_ the copies. Their dog chewed them up, so they have to get new ones.