Well, why aren't there more White basketball players? Or, early in the 20th century you might have asked "why are so many basketball players Jewish?". That's right. Jewish.
It's because basketball started in Springfield, MA and took hold first in Northeastern cities that were populated by Jewish immigrants at the time. When that demographic became successful, the inner city became more Black, but the basketball infrastructure (hoops, gyms, cold winters, confined spaces) remained. The Blacks took to it.
Same deal with NASCAR, except that it sprang out of moonshiners outrunning the revenuers. Moonshiners were mostly white, so NASCAR drivers were mostly white. Originally, racism certainly played a part in it too, but probably not as much as we might imagine.
Asking this question is a bit like asking why there are so many Asian guys who like to do martial arts, while so few of them are to be found at quilting bees. It's just part of the culture.
Sheesh! That's right out of "how not to get scammed 101". Everybody should realize why "limited time offers" are bogus. 1. If the offer was worth making today, it's worth making tomorrow. 2. They want you to make a snap decision, but that violates a basic rule which is... never make snap decisions if you can avoid them, especially where money is involved. 3. If the offer was worth accepting, they would be willing to let you scrutinize the offer, but since they won't, their offer is obviously not worth accepting.
The other, more compelling reason I think these bands fall prey to this is the "lottery effect". A handful of signed artists make a lot of money. The RIAA members, like the states and the casinos, realize something: winners are the best advertisers. For every winner, you can pull in dozens of marks. If the winner is as famous as Mick Jager, you can pull in an a virtually unlimited supply of marks.
If I were an aspiring musician, I think I'd be inclined to look towards bands like Phish for inspiration, not musicly, but for the business model: revenue from shows + liberal bootleg policy for shows that aren't recorded = demand for recordings.
It seems like the band could hire a sales person (or people) and pay them straight comission--say, 10% for the business guy instead of the other way around. Picture the band giving away protected teretories as door prizes at the show.:)
After all, copyright gives the band a monopoly. Why don't they behave more like the monopolists they are? This almost makes me wish I were a starving musician, so I could ask the A&R guy if he thinks I was born yesterday, and then explain why I shouldn't bother with him.
...then why are musicians so eager to sign? This sounds like another example of people regarding the situation as crisis rather than opportunity. RIAA exploits musicians? Great! That gives you the perfect opportunity to build a distribution network that doesn't exploit musicians. You will even earn a fair profit for yourself. Can't do it? Well then, I guess it turns out that the RIAA has the best business model after all, sucky though it may be.
Of course it's so much easier to whine, I doubt anybody will ever topple the RIAA in a way that's truly creative and fair to all parties. Why innovate when you can legislate?
...wastes an awful lot of space. Looks like half the client area of the window is navigation and the logo. You are confined to scrolling in a tiny little table. I hate when websites do that.
Without easy legal rocket motors, what will happen?
Illegal motors.
If the authorities think terrorists are planning to use model rockets to deliver weapons (anthrax? Ammonia+Chlorox binary chemical weapons?) then as it stands, they can track them. I'm sure Estes wouldn't mind letting them peruse their records so they could search for suspicious purchases by suspicious people.
Now, under a regime where model rocket motors are illegal, the bad guys will just roll their own. So will jr. high students, and they won't be anywhere near as safe as Estes. The number of kids who get their fingers blown off will far exceed the number of terrorists who get their fingers blown off.
But wait, it gets worse. It will get harder to track suspicious purchases because there won't be any major sources of the critical components--just many and various sources of precursor chemicals and supplies.
Bottom line? Clamping down on the hobby is objectively pro-terrorist, just as appeasing dictators is objectively pro-fascist. Or, to put it in terms that they can understand: They are unpatriotic and, won't somebody please think of the children?.
MSFT doesn't give it to them, then MSFT is trying to maintain its monopoly in OS software.
MSFT does give it to them, then MSFT is dumping PCs, arguably to maintain their OS monopoly and/or to attempt to shut out Dell, Gateway, etc. and become a PC hardware monopolist too.
The "almost" part is that if I'm MSFT, I process the request and keep it hung up in "channels" until the question is moot. The console lifecycle is short enough so that this should be no problem for them.
For what DSP architecture would the binary encoder be compiled?
I don't know what the state of the art is for "DSP architectures". If it's anything like general purpose computing, there are a handful of major competitors, and a lot of little wannabes. The answer to this question? All of the major players. The little wannabes could make service packs available to their customers, via the internet or by snail-mailing them the appropriate media.
Wouldn't this lock the industry into one manufacturer?
No.
What guarantee would there be that your DSP can decode the particular format?
Since the lead-time for this would have been as long as the lead-time for HDTV, each manufacturer would have had plenty of time to make sure that their architecture was capable of decoding whatever it is that's coming down the pipe.
Consider the internet--we have Real and Windows Media, MPEG, and a few Open Source codecs under development--not too much to manage. We could do something like HDTV over the internet right now if we really wanted, and all of these formats are agnostic when it comes to the underlying hardware. The only things holding back that scenario are the lack of broadband, and the issues swirling around DRM and fair use.
Whether or not broadcast Digital would benefit from specifying things down to the instruction set level (which seems to be an assumption implied by your questions) is open to debate. Think "file format processed by a general purpose processor" not "signal that needs to be processed by specialized hardware". Also, realize that there would be more than one decoder installed in your box. The overhead of specifying which codec to use for each packet is just oh... 32bits. That oughta do it for manufacturers and revisions for years to come. By the time they cycle through, nobody will be running mfct #6 rev #45 anymore. You can recycle the numbers. Yes, it might be more expensive to do that now, but like I said, hardware keeps getting better. Either convergence between the PC and the TV will render HDTV moot, or people just won't shell out for it, or they will have to find some way to put lipstick on this pig (by building really cheap decoders).
Detailed specs for the protocol? Why? It should have been clear to them that computing power would eventually reach a point where...
1. The packets broadcast would contain information telling the receiver what encoding was being used.
2. The decoder (if not already installed in your set) could be downloaded, either piecemeal from the station as it transitioned to more advanced codecs, or through a devoted decoder download channel maintained for that purpose. A devoted channel would present some financing and bandwidth allocation issues, but nothing worse than what we've seen before.
A system like that would prepare us for the day when a 6-foot wide TV is considered "small" and anything less than 2048 horizontal lines is simply "unacceptable" to consumers.
Instead, they've got the standard locked in, setting up another upgrade cycle, forcing people to spend money and... oh... wait... they know what they're doing. Nevermind.
At any rate, if analog signals stop, I'll just watch less TV. Actually, I've been thinking that what this ammounts to is a TV tax. It'll decrease TV watching, just as cigarette taxes decrease smoking. This could, in my wildest of dreams, actually lead to a renaissance as people discover how much time they were wasting... but I won't hold my breath.
Apu: There she is: the world's first convenience store! [points to store on top of mountain] Homer: This isn't very convenient. Apu: Must you dump on everything we do?
OK, it's not the first convenience store, but it's the first one on Mt Everest.
Of course, not that I'm saying Everest is easy, but the purity of it has long been sullied by the fact that pitons and ropes are rigged and maintained on the most popular route, and left there for subsequent climbs.
Obviously the days of "exploration" on Earth are mostly behind us. Most people aren't there to do "science" either. Let's face it--it's the ultimate thrill for those with the bucks and the ability to do it. It's also a cash cow for the locals. Adding more attractions was just the logical next step. You can anticipate that this thing, in its attempt to clean up one form of trash, may invite another. Now don't get me wrong, I have no problem with making the site more accessible to those who don't intend to summit, but I hope they are planning this so it doesn't get too out of control. A few lodges are nice, but I'm sure the last thing anybody wants to see there is strip malls.
According to some sources, WWII veterans in America are dying at the rate of 1000 a day. In a few years, that rate will decrease dramaticly as there will be few vets left, and it will go on for years until "the last WWII vet" appears on the news.
If you know any of these guys, don't wait too long to thank them.
This also means that anyone else can request a voter's public number and ensure that the voter cast his ballot the way he was blackmailed to do
No they can't. The Public number isn't hashed to anything that IDs the voter. It's public in the sense that it's published, but that's about it. The voter and the entity running the election posess both keys. The only thing that ties the voter to either number is their posession of the printed receipt. Even poll workers watching voters leave the booth cannot tell how they voted, assuming that the network cable is not plugged into the voting machine until it's time to transmit results (when the polls close). The entity running the election can't tie the voter to a vote either. The posession of both keys ties the voter to the vote. Nobody can "request" the private key that matches the public key. Only the voter can transmit both keys at a "change booth", which scans his receipt to verify that it is indeed an erroneous vote--which would be exceedingly rare, and in practice unheard of. Mind you, when I say "erroneous vote" I'm talking about votes that are improperly counted due to machine error, such that the receipt says "Gore" but the published vote says "Buchanan". If the voter leaves the booth with a receipt that says "Buchanan" and doesn't tell the poll worker that "vote 532 is invalid, here is the tear-away part of the receipt that says it's vote 532", tough noogies. No practical voting system should have to cater to such egregious voter carelessnes, or to people who want to change their minds after election day.
It might be fun to code something up, and challenge people to break it. I think this is actually something that would be easier to explain with code than with English.
The electoral system isn't "antiquated". If the founders had intended the electoral college members to be nothing more than courriers, they could have easily done that. They didn't.
Ironicly, the electoral system serves to make sure that people are counted. Without the electoral system, nobody would bother to campaign in New Hampshire. Is it unfair that voters in rural New England have such a disproportionate impact on the election? In a sense, yes. However, it's the price that we pay for not having a country dominated by New York and LA with everybody in the middle pissing and moaning about how the City Slickers run everything, and deciding to secede from the Union.
The system failed once, resulting in a little fight you may remember from history... unless you were taught in a public school or something.
What's really interesting is to look at an electoral map of the 2000 election. Do that, and you see that while the majority of the *people* voted for Gore, the vast majority of the *country* voted for Bush. So, in most parts of the country people are happy. It's just the City Slickers that are pissed, and they aren't allowed to buy guns so who cares?:)
1. There's a difference between "closed source" and "secret source". Commiting vote fraud would require compliance from developers and managers. Certainly more than one person would have to be involved. If you are thinking that perhaps a rogue developer with access to the source could nudge the results, than yes, that's a possibility--but it's a possibility that doesn't jibe with the conspiracy theory that you include in your enumeration...
2. Some of the companies have far-right idealogues at the helm. What about the rest? Fair-minded moderates all? I doubt it. It seems likely to represent the full spectrum.
3. Audit trails have never existed because if they did, the ballot wouldn't be secret. The voting system has alway relied on the integrity of poll workers. Polls are usually staffed by volunteer members of both major parties. I'm not sure what the qualifications are for 3rd party poll workers, but I'm sure they can volunteer too, and are not being routinely denied.
4. If somebody other than the manufacturer of the machine recounts the votes, they are no less likely to impose their bias on the outcome than the manufacturers are to impose a bias.
5. What are you implying about Congressman X? Why won't you identify him? Perhaps because you know it would be slander--you have no hard evidence to convict or even indict Congressman X of any wrongdoing.
6. According to sources readily available online, the "Voter News Service" exit polling mechanism was shelved due to faulty analysis in a computer program (!). Other search engine results indicated problems with exit polls in India. What is the right-wing conspiracy doing in India? Huh? There appears to be some consensus that exit polling is historicly unreliable. If that's the case, it would be even worse in a close election.
7. A final analysis widely published showed that Gore would have won if and only if he had requested a state-wide hand recount. All other methods (IIRC, 8 methods were proposed) resulted in Bush victory. Gore thought he could ensure victory more easily by focusing on only counties where he thought he had the best chance--not exactly the action of a man interested in fairness alone. Had he requested the state wide hand, it might have been harder to argue that the Dems were trying to "gin up" votes in favorable counties. I don't recall what the players who made the decisions said they would have done if a request for statewide hand was made at the outset. If the answer was "yes, we'd have granted it" then Gore would have won, OTOH if the regulations spelled out recount procedures and the conditions failed the criteria for a statewide hand, then Gore still would have lost (assuming state regs were followed).
8. At the time of voting, the machine generates 2 unique random numbers (Public and Private) for each voter. The voter receives a printout with both random numbers and his votes on it. At the end of voting, a list is published containing (for each voter) the first random number and the votes. Individual voters can find their public number and verify their votes (as well as use a spreadsheet to tally election results themselves if they are so inclined.). The number of people voting at each polling place is also published.
A vote cannot be changed after the fact unless the voter presents his receipt showing a discrepancy. If this occurs at the polling place, his vote is voided and he tries again. If this occurs after election day, the voter visits an ATM-like terminal (this is no less anonymous than a voting booth) where he enters his public and private keys, and re-votes. The voting receipt is obviously an important document you don't want to lose.
In the unlikely event that a polling place records more votes than poll workers note in their logs, this indicates possible vote fraud. It may be necessary to re-vote at that polling place, but I think somebody more knowledgeable about these things could come up with a better solution.
Can a closed system be made that is verifiably not rigged? You bet.
Don't worry about refuting this guy's arguments--evolution will eventually refute them for you.
I'm assuming of course, that his apathy translates into a lack of action. It need not translate into a total lack of action. Simply procreating and colonizing a little bit less is enough to give enthusiastic parents and colonizers the edge.
The first link I found with any info claims it premiered in 1975. Not much reason to question that there isn't much incentive to spread disinfo about soap premieres (!).
Wasn't there a Ryan aircraft manufacturing company? A lot of WWII pilots and crew were very fond of their planes and would attribute their survival to the quality of their craft. Perhaps WWII fathers chose to thank the company by naming a son after it, and then it just took off from there. Pun intended. Why do people apologize for puns anyway?
Leftists Often See A Crisis... when they should see an opportunity. 1. The case law is in the Public Domain. 2. Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw transform the PD info into a more useful form, but do so on terms that are unacceptable to a particular class of customers.
Crisis: The customers aren't being served! Bwahahaha!
Opportunity: Serve them. You can try this on a non-profit basis. For example, I know a guy who used to work for these guys who specialize in presenting information on the nightmarish complexity that is tax law. IIRC, either or both of the companies mentioned in the article are their competitors, and believe you me they don't enjoy competing with a non-profit. Maybe you can also do this as a for-profit. If there are only two major players, there's a good chance they have gotten fat and lazy, and haven't done everything they can to streamline operations. Put your heads together and figure out a way to beat them, and you might not only serve the libraries, but start stealing their other customers as well.
Of course, option 2 would actually require work, and you may just end up discovering that the current players are doing all they can do just to provide the service to anybody. You might even go broke. So, if you gotta choose...
Yeah, but do MacOS users really want to run an X server? Correct me if I'm wrong, but MacOS uses it's own very nice, fast, GUI that makes it easy to follow interface guidelines--not X.
I guess maybe we have different perceptions of what qualifies as compatable. I think it means that the software installs and runs without any 3rd party software. Of course, that's not a totally clear definition either, since you could include 3rd party apps along with the installer for the app you are delivering. My rule of thumb is that if most users are patient enough to download the app over a 28.8 modem, then including 3rd party apps doesn't render it incompatable. IMHO, most Windows users when given a choice between app A that requires a Cygwin download to run vs. app B that stands on its own would choose app B and wonder what was wrong with app A that it required such a long download.
Of course if you're talking strictly CLI, then I agree--it's pretty much Windows vs. the World now.
OTOH, it doesn't seem like it would take that much effort to make Windows* compatable with a lot of *NIX. I've seen native compilations of sed, awk, etc. for Windows--it's just that nobody relies on them because they aren't endorsed and installed by MS. I can see MS installing grep and other basic tools, but I think installing a compiler--especially gcc--is too much of a leap for them...
...hmmm... could, strange as it seems, the lack of *NIX compatability be Windows undoing? Only time will tell.
Huh? I use Cygwin some. It's a *NIX-like environment. Saying that a working Cygwin build is a port to Windows* is like saying a Windows* program that runs under Wine is a port to *NIX.
Well DUH! Of course you can emulate one environment on the other, with all the attending hassles of emulation. Would any Windows developer serious about appealing to the mass market require users to install Cygwin? I don't think so. Likewise, I wouldn't dare call any software I wrote "for Unix like systems" if you had to install Wine to run it.
For that matter, Mac has had virtual PC for a long time, so I guess portability was never really an issue.:)
Back up, most unix-ish C code can be compiled on any vaguely unix-like system with very little modification. I'd call that platform independence, wouldn't you?
Back up, most GM parts will fit any GM car with no modification. Would you call those parts make independant? I Didn't think so.
This is one of the things that gets me about *NIX people sometimes. They think they can just make their code "portable to any *NIX" and it's fine. As a result, they don't pay attention to abstracting the very much platform dependant aspects of *NIX and their code is not portable to Windows* or MacOS < v10.0. Last time I checked, that's quite a few platforms to which such code is not readily portable.
If GPL'd software achieves monopoly status, the community is regarded as a single entity, and the "free as in beer" status of the software is regarded as "product dumping", how should the monopoly be broken up?
Of these condtions, the regarding of a "community" as a single entity is the least likely, so if you remove that condition and imagine a situation in which, for example, RedHat dominates the desktop and has complete copyright control of a GPL'd desktop, how should that situation be addressed? The classical argument is that competition would be created via forking, but as RedHat moves to not supporting editions from just a couple years ago, this "free beer" could be regarded as a form of product bundling designed to lock people into their support service. The GPL's practical tendency to fix prices at or near zero could be regarded as a form of collusion among GPL'd software vendors.
The bottom line, IMHO, is that being dominated by a single player in any industry is bad. True competition implies that the source isn't shared in the manner in which the GPL permits--it gives rise to a tendancy to reuse code as opposed to coming up with alternative (and sometimes innovative) solutions to problems. I don't see how haveing a single player, GPL'd or otherwise, benefits consumers and others are likely to feel the same way.
Perhaps this could be solved by a simple pledge among the competing companies to GPL their apps, but not to share the source--but then that would be totally contrary to the GPL...
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Well, why aren't there more White basketball players? Or, early in the 20th century you might have asked "why are so many basketball players Jewish?". That's right. Jewish.
It's because basketball started in Springfield, MA and took hold first in Northeastern cities that were populated by Jewish immigrants at the time. When that demographic became successful, the inner city became more Black, but the basketball infrastructure (hoops, gyms, cold winters, confined spaces) remained. The Blacks took to it.
Same deal with NASCAR, except that it sprang out of moonshiners outrunning the revenuers. Moonshiners were mostly white, so NASCAR drivers were mostly white. Originally, racism certainly played a part in it too, but probably not as much as we might imagine.
Asking this question is a bit like asking why there are so many Asian guys who like to do martial arts, while so few of them are to be found at quilting bees. It's just part of the culture.
Sheesh! That's right out of "how not to get scammed 101". Everybody should realize why "limited time offers" are bogus. 1. If the offer was worth making today, it's worth making tomorrow. 2. They want you to make a snap decision, but that violates a basic rule which is... never make snap decisions if you can avoid them, especially where money is involved. 3. If the offer was worth accepting, they would be willing to let you scrutinize the offer, but since they won't, their offer is obviously not worth accepting.
The other, more compelling reason I think these bands fall prey to this is the "lottery effect". A handful of signed artists make a lot of money. The RIAA members, like the states and the casinos, realize something: winners are the best advertisers. For every winner, you can pull in dozens of marks. If the winner is as famous as Mick Jager, you can pull in an a virtually unlimited supply of marks.
If I were an aspiring musician, I think I'd be inclined to look towards bands like Phish for inspiration, not musicly, but for the business model: revenue from shows + liberal bootleg policy for shows that aren't recorded = demand for recordings.
It seems like the band could hire a sales person (or people) and pay them straight comission--say, 10% for the business guy instead of the other way around. Picture the band giving away protected teretories as door prizes at the show. :)
After all, copyright gives the band a monopoly. Why don't they behave more like the monopolists they are? This almost makes me wish I were a starving musician, so I could ask the A&R guy if he thinks I was born yesterday, and then explain why I shouldn't bother with him.
...then why are musicians so eager to sign? This sounds like another example of people regarding the situation as crisis rather than opportunity. RIAA exploits musicians? Great! That gives you the perfect opportunity to build a distribution network that doesn't exploit musicians. You will even earn a fair profit for yourself. Can't do it? Well then, I guess it turns out that the RIAA has the best business model after all, sucky though it may be.
Of course it's so much easier to whine, I doubt anybody will ever topple the RIAA in a way that's truly creative and fair to all parties. Why innovate when you can legislate?
...wastes an awful lot of space. Looks like half the client area of the window is navigation and the logo. You are confined to scrolling in a tiny little table. I hate when websites do that.
So you can have a 386 that trips the main breaker?
No matter what you say, it will lead to an infinite recursive cascade of bullshit.
OK, I understand why overclockers need cooling fans, and I can even deal with liquid cooling, but Electronic Fuel Injection is just a bit too much.
Without easy legal rocket motors, what will happen?
Illegal motors.
If the authorities think terrorists are planning to use model rockets to deliver weapons (anthrax? Ammonia+Chlorox binary chemical weapons?) then as it stands, they can track them. I'm sure Estes wouldn't mind letting them peruse their records so they could search for suspicious purchases by suspicious people.
Now, under a regime where model rocket motors are illegal, the bad guys will just roll their own. So will jr. high students, and they won't be anywhere near as safe as Estes. The number of kids who get their fingers blown off will far exceed the number of terrorists who get their fingers blown off.
But wait, it gets worse. It will get harder to track suspicious purchases because there won't be any major sources of the critical components--just many and various sources of precursor chemicals and supplies.
Bottom line? Clamping down on the hobby is objectively pro-terrorist, just as appeasing dictators is objectively pro-fascist. Or, to put it in terms that they can understand: They are unpatriotic and, won't somebody please think of the children?.
MSFT doesn't give it to them, then MSFT is trying to maintain its monopoly in OS software.
MSFT does give it to them, then MSFT is dumping PCs, arguably to maintain their OS monopoly and/or to attempt to shut out Dell, Gateway, etc. and become a PC hardware monopolist too.
The "almost" part is that if I'm MSFT, I process the request and keep it hung up in "channels" until the question is moot. The console lifecycle is short enough so that this should be no problem for them.
Good questions.
For what DSP architecture would the binary encoder be compiled?
I don't know what the state of the art is for "DSP architectures". If it's anything like general purpose computing, there are a handful of major competitors, and a lot of little wannabes. The answer to this question? All of the major players. The little wannabes could make service packs available to their customers, via the internet or by snail-mailing them the appropriate media.
Wouldn't this lock the industry into one manufacturer?
No.
What guarantee would there be that your DSP can decode the particular format?
Since the lead-time for this would have been as long as the lead-time for HDTV, each manufacturer would have had plenty of time to make sure that their architecture was capable of decoding whatever it is that's coming down the pipe.
Consider the internet--we have Real and Windows Media, MPEG, and a few Open Source codecs under development--not too much to manage. We could do something like HDTV over the internet right now if we really wanted, and all of these formats are agnostic when it comes to the underlying hardware. The only things holding back that scenario are the lack of broadband, and the issues swirling around DRM and fair use.
Whether or not broadcast Digital would benefit from specifying things down to the instruction set level (which seems to be an assumption implied by your questions) is open to debate. Think "file format processed by a general purpose processor" not "signal that needs to be processed by specialized hardware". Also, realize that there would be more than one decoder installed in your box. The overhead of specifying which codec to use for each packet is just oh... 32bits. That oughta do it for manufacturers and revisions for years to come. By the time they cycle through, nobody will be running mfct #6 rev #45 anymore. You can recycle the numbers. Yes, it might be more expensive to do that now, but like I said, hardware keeps getting better. Either convergence between the PC and the TV will render HDTV moot, or people just won't shell out for it, or they will have to find some way to put lipstick on this pig (by building really cheap decoders).
Detailed specs for the protocol? Why? It should have been clear to them that computing power would eventually reach a point where...
1. The packets broadcast would contain information telling the receiver what encoding was being used.
2. The decoder (if not already installed in your set) could be downloaded, either piecemeal from the station as it transitioned to more advanced codecs, or through a devoted decoder download channel maintained for that purpose. A devoted channel would present some financing and bandwidth allocation issues, but nothing worse than what we've seen before.
A system like that would prepare us for the day when a 6-foot wide TV is considered "small" and anything less than 2048 horizontal lines is simply "unacceptable" to consumers.
Instead, they've got the standard locked in, setting up another upgrade cycle, forcing people to spend money and... oh... wait... they know what they're doing. Nevermind.
At any rate, if analog signals stop, I'll just watch less TV. Actually, I've been thinking that what this ammounts to is a TV tax. It'll decrease TV watching, just as cigarette taxes decrease smoking. This could, in my wildest of dreams, actually lead to a renaissance as people discover how much time they were wasting... but I won't hold my breath.
OK, it's not the first convenience store, but it's the first one on Mt Everest.
Of course, not that I'm saying Everest is easy, but the purity of it has long been sullied by the fact that pitons and ropes are rigged and maintained on the most popular route, and left there for subsequent climbs.
Obviously the days of "exploration" on Earth are mostly behind us. Most people aren't there to do "science" either. Let's face it--it's the ultimate thrill for those with the bucks and the ability to do it. It's also a cash cow for the locals. Adding more attractions was just the logical next step. You can anticipate that this thing, in its attempt to clean up one form of trash, may invite another. Now don't get me wrong, I have no problem with making the site more accessible to those who don't intend to summit, but I hope they are planning this so it doesn't get too out of control. A few lodges are nice, but I'm sure the last thing anybody wants to see there is strip malls.
Marks died in the last year or two also.
According to some sources, WWII veterans in America are dying at the rate of 1000 a day. In a few years, that rate will decrease dramaticly as there will be few vets left, and it will go on for years until "the last WWII vet" appears on the news.
If you know any of these guys, don't wait too long to thank them.
Well, you've got me there, so asking to see somebody's receipt would have to be a crime, just as peering into the voting booth with a camera is now.
This also means that anyone else can request a voter's public number and ensure that the voter cast his ballot the way he was blackmailed to do
No they can't. The Public number isn't hashed to anything that IDs the voter. It's public in the sense that it's published, but that's about it. The voter and the entity running the election posess both keys. The only thing that ties the voter to either number is their posession of the printed receipt. Even poll workers watching voters leave the booth cannot tell how they voted, assuming that the network cable is not plugged into the voting machine until it's time to transmit results (when the polls close). The entity running the election can't tie the voter to a vote either. The posession of both keys ties the voter to the vote. Nobody can "request" the private key that matches the public key. Only the voter can transmit both keys at a "change booth", which scans his receipt to verify that it is indeed an erroneous vote--which would be exceedingly rare, and in practice unheard of. Mind you, when I say "erroneous vote" I'm talking about votes that are improperly counted due to machine error, such that the receipt says "Gore" but the published vote says "Buchanan". If the voter leaves the booth with a receipt that says "Buchanan" and doesn't tell the poll worker that "vote 532 is invalid, here is the tear-away part of the receipt that says it's vote 532", tough noogies. No practical voting system should have to cater to such egregious voter carelessnes, or to people who want to change their minds after election day.
It might be fun to code something up, and challenge people to break it. I think this is actually something that would be easier to explain with code than with English.
The electoral system isn't "antiquated". If the founders had intended the electoral college members to be nothing more than courriers, they could have easily done that. They didn't.
Ironicly, the electoral system serves to make sure that people are counted. Without the electoral system, nobody would bother to campaign in New Hampshire. Is it unfair that voters in rural New England have such a disproportionate impact on the election? In a sense, yes. However, it's the price that we pay for not having a country dominated by New York and LA with everybody in the middle pissing and moaning about how the City Slickers run everything, and deciding to secede from the Union.
The system failed once, resulting in a little fight you may remember from history... unless you were taught in a public school or something.
What's really interesting is to look at an electoral map of the 2000 election. Do that, and you see that while the majority of the *people* voted for Gore, the vast majority of the *country* voted for Bush. So, in most parts of the country people are happy. It's just the City Slickers that are pissed, and they aren't allowed to buy guns so who cares? :)
1. There's a difference between "closed source" and "secret source". Commiting vote fraud would require compliance from developers and managers. Certainly more than one person would have to be involved. If you are thinking that perhaps a rogue developer with access to the source could nudge the results, than yes, that's a possibility--but it's a possibility that doesn't jibe with the conspiracy theory that you include in your enumeration...
2. Some of the companies have far-right idealogues at the helm. What about the rest? Fair-minded moderates all? I doubt it. It seems likely to represent the full spectrum.
3. Audit trails have never existed because if they did, the ballot wouldn't be secret. The voting system has alway relied on the integrity of poll workers. Polls are usually staffed by volunteer members of both major parties. I'm not sure what the qualifications are for 3rd party poll workers, but I'm sure they can volunteer too, and are not being routinely denied.
4. If somebody other than the manufacturer of the machine recounts the votes, they are no less likely to impose their bias on the outcome than the manufacturers are to impose a bias.
5. What are you implying about Congressman X? Why won't you identify him? Perhaps because you know it would be slander--you have no hard evidence to convict or even indict Congressman X of any wrongdoing.
6. According to sources readily available online, the "Voter News Service" exit polling mechanism was shelved due to faulty analysis in a computer program (!). Other search engine results indicated problems with exit polls in India. What is the right-wing conspiracy doing in India? Huh? There appears to be some consensus that exit polling is historicly unreliable. If that's the case, it would be even worse in a close election.
7. A final analysis widely published showed that Gore would have won if and only if he had requested a state-wide hand recount. All other methods (IIRC, 8 methods were proposed) resulted in Bush victory. Gore thought he could ensure victory more easily by focusing on only counties where he thought he had the best chance--not exactly the action of a man interested in fairness alone. Had he requested the state wide hand, it might have been harder to argue that the Dems were trying to "gin up" votes in favorable counties. I don't recall what the players who made the decisions said they would have done if a request for statewide hand was made at the outset. If the answer was "yes, we'd have granted it" then Gore would have won, OTOH if the regulations spelled out recount procedures and the conditions failed the criteria for a statewide hand, then Gore still would have lost (assuming state regs were followed).
8. At the time of voting, the machine generates 2 unique random numbers (Public and Private) for each voter. The voter receives a printout with both random numbers and his votes on it. At the end of voting, a list is published containing (for each voter) the first random number and the votes. Individual voters can find their public number and verify their votes (as well as use a spreadsheet to tally election results themselves if they are so inclined.). The number of people voting at each polling place is also published.
A vote cannot be changed after the fact unless the voter presents his receipt showing a discrepancy. If this occurs at the polling place, his vote is voided and he tries again. If this occurs after election day, the voter visits an ATM-like terminal (this is no less anonymous than a voting booth) where he enters his public and private keys, and re-votes. The voting receipt is obviously an important document you don't want to lose.
In the unlikely event that a polling place records more votes than poll workers note in their logs, this indicates possible vote fraud. It may be necessary to re-vote at that polling place, but I think somebody more knowledgeable about these things could come up with a better solution.
Can a closed system be made that is verifiably not rigged? You bet.
Don't worry about refuting this guy's arguments--evolution will eventually refute them for you.
I'm assuming of course, that his apathy translates into a lack of action. It need not translate into a total lack of action. Simply procreating and colonizing a little bit less is enough to give enthusiastic parents and colonizers the edge.
The first link I found with any info claims it premiered in 1975. Not much reason to question that there isn't much incentive to spread disinfo about soap premieres (!).
Wasn't there a Ryan aircraft manufacturing company? A lot of WWII pilots and crew were very fond of their planes and would attribute their survival to the quality of their craft. Perhaps WWII fathers chose to thank the company by naming a son after it, and then it just took off from there. Pun intended. Why do people apologize for puns anyway?
Leftists Often See A Crisis... when they should see an opportunity. 1. The case law is in the Public Domain. 2. Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw transform the PD info into a more useful form, but do so on terms that are unacceptable to a particular class of customers.
Crisis: The customers aren't being served! Bwahahaha!
Opportunity: Serve them. You can try this on a non-profit basis. For example, I know a guy who used to work for these guys who specialize in presenting information on the nightmarish complexity that is tax law. IIRC, either or both of the companies mentioned in the article are their competitors, and believe you me they don't enjoy competing with a non-profit. Maybe you can also do this as a for-profit. If there are only two major players, there's a good chance they have gotten fat and lazy, and haven't done everything they can to streamline operations. Put your heads together and figure out a way to beat them, and you might not only serve the libraries, but start stealing their other customers as well.
Of course, option 2 would actually require work, and you may just end up discovering that the current players are doing all they can do just to provide the service to anybody. You might even go broke. So, if you gotta choose...
BWAAAHAHA!
...is a very appealing option.
Yeah, but do MacOS users really want to run an X server? Correct me if I'm wrong, but MacOS uses it's own very nice, fast, GUI that makes it easy to follow interface guidelines--not X.
I guess maybe we have different perceptions of what qualifies as compatable. I think it means that the software installs and runs without any 3rd party software. Of course, that's not a totally clear definition either, since you could include 3rd party apps along with the installer for the app you are delivering. My rule of thumb is that if most users are patient enough to download the app over a 28.8 modem, then including 3rd party apps doesn't render it incompatable. IMHO, most Windows users when given a choice between app A that requires a Cygwin download to run vs. app B that stands on its own would choose app B and wonder what was wrong with app A that it required such a long download.
Of course if you're talking strictly CLI, then I agree--it's pretty much Windows vs. the World now.
OTOH, it doesn't seem like it would take that much effort to make Windows* compatable with a lot of *NIX. I've seen native compilations of sed, awk, etc. for Windows--it's just that nobody relies on them because they aren't endorsed and installed by MS. I can see MS installing grep and other basic tools, but I think installing a compiler--especially gcc--is too much of a leap for them...
...hmmm... could, strange as it seems, the lack of *NIX compatability be Windows undoing? Only time will tell.
Huh? I use Cygwin some. It's a *NIX-like environment. Saying that a working Cygwin build is a port to Windows* is like saying a Windows* program that runs under Wine is a port to *NIX.
Well DUH! Of course you can emulate one environment on the other, with all the attending hassles of emulation. Would any Windows developer serious about appealing to the mass market require users to install Cygwin? I don't think so. Likewise, I wouldn't dare call any software I wrote "for Unix like systems" if you had to install Wine to run it.
For that matter, Mac has had virtual PC for a long time, so I guess portability was never really an issue. :)
Back up, most unix-ish C code can be compiled on any vaguely unix-like system with very little modification. I'd call that platform independence, wouldn't you?
Back up, most GM parts will fit any GM car with no modification. Would you call those parts make independant? I Didn't think so.
This is one of the things that gets me about *NIX people sometimes. They think they can just make their code "portable to any *NIX" and it's fine. As a result, they don't pay attention to abstracting the very much platform dependant aspects of *NIX and their code is not portable to Windows* or MacOS < v10.0. Last time I checked, that's quite a few platforms to which such code is not readily portable.
This makes me wonder how high you would bounce.
If GPL'd software achieves monopoly status, the community is regarded as a single entity, and the "free as in beer" status of the software is regarded as "product dumping", how should the monopoly be broken up?
Of these condtions, the regarding of a "community" as a single entity is the least likely, so if you remove that condition and imagine a situation in which, for example, RedHat dominates the desktop and has complete copyright control of a GPL'd desktop, how should that situation be addressed? The classical argument is that competition would be created via forking, but as RedHat moves to not supporting editions from just a couple years ago, this "free beer" could be regarded as a form of product bundling designed to lock people into their support service. The GPL's practical tendency to fix prices at or near zero could be regarded as a form of collusion among GPL'd software vendors.
The bottom line, IMHO, is that being dominated by a single player in any industry is bad. True competition implies that the source isn't shared in the manner in which the GPL permits--it gives rise to a tendancy to reuse code as opposed to coming up with alternative (and sometimes innovative) solutions to problems. I don't see how haveing a single player, GPL'd or otherwise, benefits consumers and others are likely to feel the same way.
Perhaps this could be solved by a simple pledge among the competing companies to GPL their apps, but not to share the source--but then that would be totally contrary to the GPL...