> No where did you say why Apple has to force > iTunes to be compatible with third party > devices. Anti trust is not a reason because > Apple is not a monopoly.
That sounds a lot like the arguments Microsoft used to use. Nobody believed them either. Apple seems to be determined to illustrate the consequences of a failure to benefit from the lessons of history.
<p>Funny, my survival plan involves following somebody like you to his survival house and killing him once he shows me where everything is hidden.:)</p></quote>
Good luck finding someone smart enough to have a good contingency plan, yet dumb enough to show all his secret holdouts to a stranger. That's a fine line.:)
Not too thick a forest. You need to be able to see people approaching, and not provide assailants with cover within range. As ultranova points out, a typical residential house in an urban or suburban area is not defensible over the long term. My emergency plan involves a little place in the North Ga. mountains - limited approaches, fresh water, good hunting and arable land adjacent, and you can't find it unless you know how. Google Maps and Mapquest will both get you totally lost.
You're calling me authoritarian? I laugh. And so would anyone who knows me. Here's another well-worn talking point: Your right to swing your fist about ends at the tip of my nose. Similarly, your right to speak ends where it begins to infringe on my right to make a free and uninfluenced choice in exercising my franchise.
Your post inspires some questions: 1. Do you think that allowing active campaigning at the polls would enhance the democratic process? 2. Do you feel that a 250' radius bubble of enforced neutrality is inhibiting the free exchange of ideas and public dialogue? 3. Do you favor removing other restrictions on "free" speech, as described in my previous post?
Jim Beam makes Knob Creek? Seriously? Cuz Jim Beam tastes like ass, and Knob Creek is some of the best whiskey I ever tasted. That's like finding out that Sam Adams beer is made by Schlitz. I guess it's all in the recipe.
No, they're not. Nor should they be under any circumstances. They are bias-free zones. If you come in *my* precinct with "paraphernalia" on, or talking about the candidates, or any other political issue, you will get one warning from me, and the second from a Paulding county sheriff's deputy, who will not think you are funny.
Free speech does *not* mean you can say anything you want, anywhere you want, any time you want. There are many limits. You can't libel someone and call it free speech. Some information is classified and cannot be disseminated to those not cleared for it. In many jurisdictions there is such a thing as "fighting words". You can't (to use the classic example) shout "fire" in a crowded theater.
Your right to speak is not abridged. You can say anything you want if you go 250 feet thataway, but polling places are protected by law as regions free of any persuasive influence. At home or on the street you can persuade or be persuaded to your heart's content. Once you pass that red "No Campaigning" sign, you are on your own and have to make up your own mind and vote what *you* think. That's the system.
The honesty of the people executing a hand recount can be ensured, or at least rendered minimally relevant, by procedure. Here's an example:
You are a vote-counter, part of a small army of temp workers called in to do the job. You get a big pile of ballots. Your job is to separate them into a McCain pile, and an Obama pile. Each pile is then checked by a different worker to make sure it only contains what it's supposed to contain. If you put Obama ballots in the McCain pile, the person checking your piles should correct it. At some point, each precinct is going to have two big piles, each of which only contains votes for one candidate. At this point, this has been verified by multiple pairs of eyes checking each ballot. The actual count can be done by feeding each pile into very simple machines of the type used by banks to count money. For obvious reasons, these machines are highly accurate, tamper-resistant, and consist of widely used and extensively proven technology.
I will preface this by saying that I have been a poll worker for many elections, from the days of punch cards (hanging chads, anyone?) up through the switch to e-voting. This November 4th should be very interesting.
> Only problem is, if they don't match, how do > you know which one was tampered with? > > It's a good way to detect a problem, but you > can't fix the problem once its detected, except > by revoting.
Exactly. Regardless of whether the ballots are paper, ferrite, bits in the tubes, or little clay balls, somebody somewhere *will* try to tamper with the result. Prevention of tampering is not accomplishable through technology, but only through massive reform of the entire human race's ethical character, which is beyond our current capabilities.
Since we live in an imperfect world, we have to settle for making tampering as detectable as possible, first as a deterrent, and second to minimize the harm that those who are not deterred will be able to do. If we find that the election results show signs of tampering, and the actual vote count is not determinable, then the election will have to be redone. This will suck, yea, with a mighty suckage will it suck, and one hopes that the people responsible will be apprehended and remanded for a very long time to PMITA prison.
Having seen several versions of e-voting machines and procedures, I agree with the AC above. The machine should maintain an electronic record of the vote, which enables rapid tabulation and reporting of results. As a hedge against evildoers, the machine should also provide a human-readable ballot. This allows the voter to visually verify that his/her vote has been accurately recorded, and provides a tamper-resistant artifact which can be stored securely against the possible need for verification.
As for the question of which one is official, I would hope that legislation would define the human-readable version as official, since it is harder to tamper with. It wouldn't be that hard to make a ballot that would be readable by human and machine both. We have the technology, implementing it is just a question of engineering. If the electronic count is screwy, you unpack the paper ballots and run them through the scanner to check the totals. If it's still screwy, you have the option of a hand recount.
"The Internet has made it possible to make more mistakes, faster, than any other invention in history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." -- A Usenet.sig I remember from years ago
A lot of my friends are working musicians. I appreciate the need for intellectual property rights and copyright. Travel, equipment, and other expenses must be covered, and the adoring adulation of fans doesn't pay the mortgage. But the RIAA is still wrong.
I think that the volume of exchange possible with internet distribution caught them by surprise. They need to find a new business plan to effectively extract revenue from the market as it is now. It may ultimately be impossible to prevent online free sharing of any data, copyrighted or not. It would behoove the RIAA to accept that the world has changed and find a way to survive in it. Their basic legal theory will eventually be found to be precisely analagous to suits brought by buggy-whip manufacturers against Henry Ford.
Ultimately, the situation will be resolved by a return to the emphasis on live music that existed before that smart-ass Thomas Edison and his silly wax cylinders started the whole mess. Live performances can't be copied, pirated or traded. Recordings of them can, but so it goes.
The internet has made the recording industry obsolete. From the dawn of time performing artists have generated revenue by performing. For a century or so, a unique technological window - the post-Edison, pre-Napster era - allowed them to duplicate performances and generate revenue for the same performance multiple times. Then people started getting rich, and then they got greedy, and now they're just stupid. The window is shutting, the cash tree has dried up, the golden goose is on her last legs. The result is that a lot of musicians and actors are going to have to work harder for less pay, like they used to do. You know, like Shakespeare and those guys. Whoever said that a little starvation was bad for art?
In the future, free online distribution will be seen as a vital part of the marketing plan to drive consumers to see live performances. There will always be a market for recordings, engineered and edited beyond the possibilities of the stage and combined on convenient media with attractive packaging. People will still buy CDs and DVDs, or whatever comes after that, but not in the volumes that they used to. Content providers will have to understand that sale of recordings is not a feasible long-term major revenue strategy any more.
I look forward to the coming of the new age. It will be different than what came before.
Common names are vague, disorganised, and often misleading. Latin names are not. Unfortunately, not many fishmarkets label their wares in Latin, but some do, and for any given piece of fish I'll bet you that at some point in the logistical train from ocean to market *someone* unambiguously identified it and represented to a buyer as a particular species. So, the study is certainly asking a reasonable question.
I've heard that back in olden times, in some jurisdictions, automobiles were required to have a man walk in front of them ringing a bell or some such thing. Maybe we should bring that back.
Actually though, that was when automobiles were a new technology, and now that we have integrated the concept of large machines moving through our streets at speed into our consciousness and know to allow for it, the idea sounds ridiculous. With energy prices doing what they've been doing, the idea of a personal vehicle that wastes fuel by converting it to unproductive sonic energy instead of useful kinetic energy is going to become similarly ridiculous.
Silent vehicles may be slightly more dangerous, but they are better than noisy vehicles in so many ways that nobody is going to be worried about the danger. In the long run, it will improve the human race by Darwinning out the ones who were too dumb to look both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
> No where did you say why Apple has to force
> iTunes to be compatible with third party
> devices. Anti trust is not a reason because
> Apple is not a monopoly.
That sounds a lot like the arguments Microsoft used to use. Nobody believed them either. Apple seems to be determined to illustrate the consequences of a failure to benefit from the lessons of history.
<p>Funny, my survival plan involves following somebody like you to his survival house and killing him once he shows me where everything is hidden.
Good luck finding someone smart enough to have a good contingency plan, yet dumb enough to show all his secret holdouts to a stranger. That's a fine line.
Not too thick a forest. You need to be able to see people approaching, and not provide assailants with cover within range. As ultranova points out, a typical residential house in an urban or suburban area is not defensible over the long term. My emergency plan involves a little place in the North Ga. mountains - limited approaches, fresh water, good hunting and arable land adjacent, and you can't find it unless you know how. Google Maps and Mapquest will both get you totally lost.
You're calling me authoritarian? I laugh. And so would anyone who knows me. Here's another well-worn talking point: Your right to swing your fist about ends at the tip of my nose. Similarly, your right to speak ends where it begins to infringe on my right to make a free and uninfluenced choice in exercising my franchise.
Your post inspires some questions:
1. Do you think that allowing active campaigning at the polls would enhance the democratic process?
2. Do you feel that a 250' radius bubble of enforced neutrality is inhibiting the free exchange of ideas and public dialogue?
3. Do you favor removing other restrictions on "free" speech, as described in my previous post?
Jim Beam makes Knob Creek? Seriously?
Cuz Jim Beam tastes like ass, and Knob Creek is some of the best whiskey I ever tasted.
That's like finding out that Sam Adams beer is made by Schlitz.
I guess it's all in the recipe.
Anyway, I'm a Jameson man meself.
So, that means their voting machines are engineered to the stringent standards applicable to pointless marketing gizmos. That's just spectacular.
> I guess these places are not free speech zones.
No, they're not. Nor should they be under any circumstances. They are bias-free zones. If you come in *my* precinct with "paraphernalia" on, or talking about the candidates, or any other political issue, you will get one warning from me, and the second from a Paulding county sheriff's deputy, who will not think you are funny.
Free speech does *not* mean you can say anything you want, anywhere you want, any time you want. There are many limits. You can't libel someone and call it free speech. Some information is classified and cannot be disseminated to those not cleared for it. In many jurisdictions there is such a thing as "fighting words". You can't (to use the classic example) shout "fire" in a crowded theater.
Your right to speak is not abridged. You can say anything you want if you go 250 feet thataway, but polling places are protected by law as regions free of any persuasive influence. At home or on the street you can persuade or be persuaded to your heart's content. Once you pass that red "No Campaigning" sign, you are on your own and have to make up your own mind and vote what *you* think. That's the system.
The honesty of the people executing a hand recount can be ensured, or at least rendered minimally relevant, by procedure. Here's an example:
You are a vote-counter, part of a small army of temp workers called in to do the job. You get a big pile of ballots. Your job is to separate them into a McCain pile, and an Obama pile. Each pile is then checked by a different worker to make sure it only contains what it's supposed to contain. If you put Obama ballots in the McCain pile, the person checking your piles should correct it. At some point, each precinct is going to have two big piles, each of which only contains votes for one candidate. At this point, this has been verified by multiple pairs of eyes checking each ballot. The actual count can be done by feeding each pile into very simple machines of the type used by banks to count money. For obvious reasons, these machines are highly accurate, tamper-resistant, and consist of widely used and extensively proven technology.
Given the above, how would *you* game the system?
And incidentally, I'm voting absentee. On a paper ballot. With a pen.
(Is a Sharpie open source?)
I will preface this by saying that I have been a poll worker for many elections, from the days of punch cards (hanging chads, anyone?) up through the switch to e-voting. This November 4th should be very interesting.
> Only problem is, if they don't match, how do
> you know which one was tampered with?
>
> It's a good way to detect a problem, but you
> can't fix the problem once its detected, except
> by revoting.
Exactly. Regardless of whether the ballots are paper, ferrite, bits in the tubes, or little clay balls, somebody somewhere *will* try to tamper with the result. Prevention of tampering is not accomplishable through technology, but only through massive reform of the entire human race's ethical character, which is beyond our current capabilities.
Since we live in an imperfect world, we have to settle for making tampering as detectable as possible, first as a deterrent, and second to minimize the harm that those who are not deterred will be able to do. If we find that the election results show signs of tampering, and the actual vote count is not determinable, then the election will have to be redone. This will suck, yea, with a mighty suckage will it suck, and one hopes that the people responsible will be apprehended and remanded for a very long time to PMITA prison.
Having seen several versions of e-voting machines and procedures, I agree with the AC above. The machine should maintain an electronic record of the vote, which enables rapid tabulation and reporting of results. As a hedge against evildoers, the machine should also provide a human-readable ballot. This allows the voter to visually verify that his/her vote has been accurately recorded, and provides a tamper-resistant artifact which can be stored securely against the possible need for verification.
As for the question of which one is official, I would hope that legislation would define the human-readable version as official, since it is harder to tamper with. It wouldn't be that hard to make a ballot that would be readable by human and machine both. We have the technology, implementing it is just a question of engineering. If the electronic count is screwy, you unpack the paper ballots and run them through the scanner to check the totals. If it's still screwy, you have the option of a hand recount.
"The Internet has made it possible to make more mistakes, faster, than any other invention in history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." .sig I remember from years ago
-- A Usenet
Yes, it's not all butterflies and cupcakes, but no job is, barring rockstars and whatnot.
Actually, I know a few rockstars and they also work pretty damn hard, and take a lot of shit from their "employers". It just sucks all over.
A lot of my friends are working musicians. I appreciate the need for intellectual property rights and copyright. Travel, equipment, and other expenses must be covered, and the adoring adulation of fans doesn't pay the mortgage. But the RIAA is still wrong.
I think that the volume of exchange possible with internet distribution caught them by surprise. They need to find a new business plan to effectively extract revenue from the market as it is now. It may ultimately be impossible to prevent online free sharing of any data, copyrighted or not. It would behoove the RIAA to accept that the world has changed and find a way to survive in it. Their basic legal theory will eventually be found to be precisely analagous to suits brought by buggy-whip manufacturers against Henry Ford.
Ultimately, the situation will be resolved by a return to the emphasis on live music that existed before that smart-ass Thomas Edison and his silly wax cylinders started the whole mess. Live performances can't be copied, pirated or traded. Recordings of them can, but so it goes.
The internet has made the recording industry obsolete. From the dawn of time performing artists have generated revenue by performing. For a century or so, a unique technological window - the post-Edison, pre-Napster era - allowed them to duplicate performances and generate revenue for the same performance multiple times. Then people started getting rich, and then they got greedy, and now they're just stupid. The window is shutting, the cash tree has dried up, the golden goose is on her last legs. The result is that a lot of musicians and actors are going to have to work harder for less pay, like they used to do. You know, like Shakespeare and those guys. Whoever said that a little starvation was bad for art?
In the future, free online distribution will be seen as a vital part of the marketing plan to drive consumers to see live performances. There will always be a market for recordings, engineered and edited beyond the possibilities of the stage and combined on convenient media with attractive packaging. People will still buy CDs and DVDs, or whatever comes after that, but not in the volumes that they used to. Content providers will have to understand that sale of recordings is not a feasible long-term major revenue strategy any more.
I look forward to the coming of the new age. It will be different than what came before.
Common names are vague, disorganised, and often misleading. Latin names are not. Unfortunately, not many fishmarkets label their wares in Latin, but some do, and for any given piece of fish I'll bet you that at some point in the logistical train from ocean to market *someone* unambiguously identified it and represented to a buyer as a particular species. So, the study is certainly asking a reasonable question.
I've heard that back in olden times, in some jurisdictions, automobiles were required to have a man walk in front of them ringing a bell or some such thing. Maybe we should bring that back.
Actually though, that was when automobiles were a new technology, and now that we have integrated the concept of large machines moving through our streets at speed into our consciousness and know to allow for it, the idea sounds ridiculous. With energy prices doing what they've been doing, the idea of a personal vehicle that wastes fuel by converting it to unproductive sonic energy instead of useful kinetic energy is going to become similarly ridiculous.
Silent vehicles may be slightly more dangerous, but they are better than noisy vehicles in so many ways that nobody is going to be worried about the danger. In the long run, it will improve the human race by Darwinning out the ones who were too dumb to look both ways.