But not a list generated by a self-selected set of voters, with little security over people voting twice (I have multiple cell numbers and an infinite number of E-mail addresses.)
You either need a verified, non self-selected set of the public, or a committee of top travel writers, like the Baseball hall of fame.
The law bans misleading or inaccurate caller ID. Since Caller ID identifies the phone number making a call, not the person, would it now be illegal to:
a) Make a call from your Asterisk box using the Caller ID of your mobile phone? I do this frequently. I am misleading them to think I am calling from my cell, which is not accurate.
b) Have a click to call service that calls two phones to connect them provide the caller id of the other phone, rather than of the service that is doing the calling?
I am not sure what this law means. One would hope one can provide the callerid of any phone number belonging to the party you will be talking to, or if desired, of the service.
The article claims to be about reputation but mostly talks about the various "identity" efforts out there. Yes, a reputation is associated with an identity, but most of the identity systems being promoted focus on real identity rather than pseudonyms which you can choose to associate with yourself or not.
There is a paradox to those systems -- the easier they are to use, the more they will get used -- and demanded. We'll go from a web where most web sites can be used casually, with no "sign on" (single or otherwise) to a web where far more sites demand you use the single sign on and thus have an account, because it's easy for them to ask.
I mean it just seems to me to be ridiculous to have detailed review of the packaging of all these coolers, and to pick a winner on something we'll throw out, but not to measure one of the most important factors in choosing a cooler -- noise levels.
I just can't fathom why the packaging review, it makes me suspect the motives of the whole thing.
Yes, I have noticed that many DVR users, perhaps call them "less sophisticated" ones do not always FF over the ads.
However, we MythTV users don't FF over ads, the skip is instantaneous. The system makes judements, about 95% accurate over where the ad bounds are. When an ad is coming up, it says "3 minute commercial break" in a pop up and you push a key to skip it. If it has guessed wrong on the length that's usually obvious, and of course it's obvious on the start. With technologies like this, which the studios have sued to keep out of PVRs, there will be few who don't skip the breaks, or who even notice interesting ads and rewind to watch them.
A _sidereal_ day would be the same as the year on a tidally locked planet, but nobody talks in sidereal days except some astronomers. The vast majority talk about a solar day, the noon-to-noon time, and that, for a tidally locked planet, is undefined.
Well, actually it _did_ protect the Americans from McCarthy, it just took its time in doing so. Likewise over time the likes of Lenny Bruce and Lady Chatterley's lover were vindicated.
And I fervently hope (with some merit) that thanks to a free press, Gitmo will become the Manzanar of this era, reviled and used for a century as an example of what not to do. I wish the constitution could stop Gitmo in advance, but it has powerful enemies, and it is not strong enough to stop them immediately, but if things go OK, it will stop them in time, and leave them in the history books as a story of evil.
Of course, those who remember history are sometimes condemned to be the only ones in horror as they watch it repeat.
Yes, I want a shared and roamable calendar so I can maintain a variety of calendars -- one that's private for me but which I can add to from any machine, and some that I can share with others -- both read/write and read only, and of course the ability to import easily events from public calendars.
But I also want to be able to sync my 'combined' calendar to my PDA or cell phone's calendar too. Is there anything (on Linux, not Windows) that can do this for me?
Personal example: I want my own private calendar for myself which only I add events to. Then I want a "household" calendar which anybody in the house can add events to, such as "we're going to a party on Saturday" and these events appear to me, and sync to my PDA. Then I may want to publish free/busy on the merged calendar to others who want to schedule me in meetings etc.
He points out the human eye resolves one minute of arc, and then talks about that meaning "12 lines per degree".
One minute resolution means a screen subtending 30 degrees wants 1800 pixels, which is about right for 1920x1080.
But in fact we can resolve a little bit below a minute on non-moving parts of an image because our eyes move and gain sub-pixel resolution over time. (This may suggest that 1080p isn't a great deal better than 1080i because 1080i provides the full res on still images but gets jaggies or blurs on moving images. 1080p is just nice because you don't have to play interlace games.)
If your screen subtends 30 degrees, 1920 is about right. You won't gain a great deal going to 3000 or 4000 -- but you will gain something. My desktop screen is 2560 x 1600, and even it's not enough for my stills.
It is not clear in the article if Paypal is asking that sites block all mail that is not authenticated, or just unauthenticated mail that claims to be from paypal.com or related domains.
The latter would be fine. The former would require every user in the world to get a new mailer, certify themselves with authorities and end the ability of those who wish to communicate anonymously through email to do so even when parties are consenting.
The latter could be accomplished with keys that allow one signed email to declare "All future mails from this address or domain must be signed." You would need a key for a site to set the rule for the entire domain, a key for a user could set it for a single user.
However, even this may be misleading security. Once users become convinced that all mail from paypal.com is now signed, phishers can trick them more easily by sending mail from paypa1.com (that's a "one" not an "el") or similar games. This mail, from paypa1, can even trumpet how you know you can trust it because you know that all mail from us is authenticated with wonderful crypto.
Of course, paypal can try to get command of any domain that might look like theirs, in every character set, but sometimes when you tell people something is more secure, but it still has _any_ window into it, you actually create a greater danger of social engineering.
But there is a vastly simpler way to stand up to the RIAA on matters like this.
Erase your logs after a short period of time. Don't keep a record of what IP address was allocated to what account at any given time.
Then if the RIAA shows up, not simply with letters, but with lawsuits and court orders, you still can simply say "don't have the info."
This is what librarians do at many libraries. After you return the book, they destroy the circulation record. There is no record of what books you have read.
Yes, this means giving up using the logs for your own enforcement activities done after the fact. You can have a live database, or even keep the records for a few hours if you want to respond to problems same day. After that, no luck. But why is that so terrible? It's not like people who want to be anonymous for something truly nasty can't find an open wireless node these days. Main problem is that IT admins can't bear the thought of giving up control.
However, this would save the universities a ton of money (no need for legal department to handle requests) and it would also save the students a ton of money ($4000 per student served, $3000 with the "discount") which they could be spending on education.
You misunderstand -- this is why CitizenRe insists on net metering. The extra power does not get wasted, it gets sold back to the grid. Then you buy power back at night. The only issue is if you overprovision and actually sell back more power in a whole year than you buy back, so you make sure to slightly underprovision.
CitizenRe may or may not be a scam, but this part isn't the problem.
If you go off grid, and don't use 100% of the power you generate, you are not being very green at all. Not even counting the problem of disposal of batteries. On-grid has minor costs but every watt hour is used.
If you want backup power with your grid-tie system, of course you have that during the day. Non-green as it seems, the greenest choice is actually a generator for your night usage, because in reality you are hardly ever going to run it.
If you're off grid the right approach is to underprovision the solar so you are using 100% of it, have a modest battery bank, and then use a clean generator for the rest. No wasted generation. Possibly throw in some wind, but again, unless you have a 100% efficient place to store any excess, you are throwing away power. Batteries have a problem in that they only have so many deep cycles in them. So if you design to discharge them every night they won't last long and that has its own problems.
Sorry to be rude, but you really need to be more accurate in your math if you're going to opine on this. First of all, it's not nearly so small a fraction wholesale. Typical costs installed are about $8/watt, which covers quite a bit more than the panels, which cost about $4/watt wholesale.
However, just take your $10,000 system. Now in reality that only will provide you with about $50 of electricity per month at $4/watt (2500 watts) but even if it did provide you with $150, you have forgotten what every mortgage holder knows -- that money today is worth far more than money (or electricity) in the future.
So $10,000 at 7% interest in fact takes 85 months, not 67 months to pay off at $150/month saving. This doesn't seem like a big difference, but it's because your price numbers are off. At the real price of solar, a $10K system provides, as noted, only $50 worth of power, and you can never, ever, in any number of months, pay off $10,000 at $50 per month because the interest per month is more than $50. So the math error becomes a difference between a real payoff rate and infinity.
This is now a hot topic and you'll find a couple of detailed threads about CitizenRe at my blog. Executives of the company have been participating there and trying to give some (not too satisfactory) answers to critics.
Normal solar is not yet close to economical. That's why everybody is skeptical about CitizenRe's as yet unfulfilled promise to deliver economical solar. The combination of secrecy, multi-level-marketing and astounding claims has many people feeling it sounds too good to be true.
Odd that you think off-grid solar is cost effective and grid-tie isn't. Off-grid solar usually has batteries. Since people don't want their batteries to be constantly in discharge, they often end up with the panels throwing away the output because the batteries are charged or close to charged. This really screws up the economics of panels. With grid-tie, all power generated by the panels is always used, either in the house, or by the grid. The grid is your 100% efficient storage.
Solar can not yet pay for itself (ever) compared to grid, but it's getting closer and closer (through subsidies mostly.) Without subsidies it's not even remotely close to ever breaking even -- it's always a decision to be green at a higher cost. CitizenRe claims they can beat this, and that's why everybody is saying "sounds too good to be true." People who know the real math of solar know that CitizenRe's claims are a dramatic improvement in the economics.
Voting over the internet has its attractions, but it often involves leaving behind the concept of the secret ballot (as does mail-in voting as in Oregon of course) and also can generate serious security risks. Not enough details on the Estonian system -- if the real voting is done on the small box they put their card into and it can generate a secure channel to the voting system, then it's possible to do it securely even with a compromised network or PC, but if the PC is involved in anything but passing along encrypted traffic, there are serious risks.
Likewise if these are terminals at home, secret ballot goes out the window. If these are terminals in a secured location just using the internet as a platform for encrypted communication with a server, you can still have secret ballot.
But in any case, voting over the internet presents real problems in auditability. Where is the paper trail?
Keith Henson has been involved in a long battle with the Scientologists which got very emotional and at times he has done irrational things, but nothing approaching becoming a physical danger to scientologists to my knowledge. Keith didn't have much knowledge of Scientology before he took up this charge, he mostly got into it when he saw them attempting to silence other critics, particularly on the net. THe more he learned the deeper he got.
What he alleges are serious charges. Effectively that Scientology is not a religion, but more a confidence trick (or even organized criminal enterprise) masquerading as a religion. He further alleges they have significant untoward influence over goverment officials and courts in their strongholds, such as Clearwater and Riverside. He says he has been threatened that once he is in jail there they will arrange his death.
These are very serious charges. Since it is fairly easy to imagine a confidence trick masquerading as a religion, a court should consider arguments for this allegation in any case allocating religious rights to the alleged religion. Since corruption of officials does take place, accusations of such corruption should be considered with care, with appeal to external jurisdictions not likely to be subject to such corruption. I'm not saying that anybody should be able to willy nilly complain of religion or con-games, but if there is any credible evidence, it should be presented and considered.
Nobody flees their country and leaves their family behind over a short jail term from a misdemeanor conviction. Keith believes the threat to be real, and deserves the chance to present his evidence to an unbiased jury.
That is how eBay works for a large proportion of buyers. eBay is actually a semi-sealed second price auction.
A second-price auction means the winning bidder pays the price of the second highest bid (in eBay's case plus a small delta.)
A sealed bid auction, which is what you describe, can be done on eBay. It's done by entering your bid just before auction close. Derisively called sniping, this is actually the proper bidding strategy if what you seek is a sealed 2nd price auction.
eBay confusingly allows people to reveal their bids in advance, something that makes no sense, but gets people excited sometimes and gives people the illusion of a live, going-going-gone style auction. But ebay is not that, it's an auction with a set finish, highest bid wins.
Shill bidding is not that useful a strategy. The shill, of course, runs the risk of winning, which means the seller pays auction fees and nothing happens. For shill bidding to aid the seller, they must increase the winner's price by increasing the 2nd price, and do it sufficiently often to offset the lost fees and time when the shill mistakenly wins.
Shilling makes much more sense in a live room auction where you can read the faces of the real bidders, and sense that they will indeed go higher.
Shilling does indeed always disadvantage the buyer, it's never useful for the buyer. The key is to design things so it is not useful to the seller. Shilling has a second negative value for the seller, which is that if buyers believe it is happening, they are less likely to participate.
But it is zero-sum, which is not so much unethical as it is uninteresting as a real spam solution.
Far more useful are anti-spam techniques that reduce the total amount of spam.
And in fact, since E-mail only works when 2 parties are involved, making your mailbox more usable at the cost of hurting the value of another random party's mailbox may actually hurt you, since some of those random parties the spammer is bumped to by you or others will be your own correspondents, who are now less likely to see your mail in the noise.
Fighting spam is hard, especially if you want to keep your principles. We're also seeing a new breed of unintended consequences. Spam filters got good enough at spotting text that spammers are moving to including their text as graphics files. So we end up losing more bandwidth to spammers than in the first place.
But they're often slow to respond. Hell, I changed a DNS record when I moved servers once and spammers will still going after the other server, with no DNS record pointing to it, for 6 months because they use static caches.
Many people were already using this trick, probably hoping it wouldn't show up as lead story on slashdot.
In some ways, selfish ways, it's like the story of the two hikers who face a bear. The first hiker immediately sits down and starts putting on his running shoes. The other says, "What are you doing? You can't outrun the bear!" The first hiker says, "I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you."
Many spammers, faced with a failed attempt at sending mail, do not bother to retry or try other MX. Instead, they just move on to the next target in the list, since trying a new target is just as easy as retrying an old target. No real difference to them. But it means you just push your spam attempts onto other people who haven't elected to bend the standards to divert the spammers.
The "good" spam sending programs run many threads, timeouts don't punish them, their limit is more the bandwidth. Attempts to divert spammers onto others who have not tried the tricks should create an ethical question. Are we just arranging for the bear to eat our friend?
I put on nofollow on my blog some time ago, and there is a simple turing test to post comments, and it explains to people that links in the comments will not be counted by search engines like Google.
They still try to comment spam. And not simply spams where they hope people will click on the links. They just are pretty thick, and never stop doing something once they heard it was useful.
So it will be several years before the spammers back off due to nofollow.
Nofollow, in effect says, "This link was not approved by the owners of this site." That doesn't always mean it's not a valid link, and in fact there are tons of user generated links that are totally valid.
Wikipedia, however, should consider not putting nofollow onto links which have received some vetting by somebody with appropriate cred, though admittedly they try to keep their set of users will privileges very small so this may not be enough.
Actually, conversely there is a "proof" we are in a virtual universe. The proof first asks you to accept the assertion that virtual worlds are possible (seems credible) and that thus we will create many of them, including ones that reimplement the source universe and others. As such there will be an arbitrarily large number of virtual Earths.
What are the odds that you're in the original? Vanishingly small.
Did you not take the most basic financial math in school?
Go to your bank for a mortgage. They won't make the same mistake. $100K over 25 years, at today's 7% rate is about $8600 per year. If you'll give me $100K now I'll give you $5,000 per year and be happy to do it.
I hate how people who should know their math, people who own homes, people who sell solar panels, can make such a basic mistake.
At today's prices, PV _never_ pays for itself compared to grid power. Not in 12 years, not in 50 years, not ever. That's because typical installed costs are $7.50 per peak watt, and 1 peak watt is 2 khw/year.
You need to get to about $2.60 per peak watt to compete with grid right now. And, thanks to rebates and tax credits we are starting to get close to that, and CitizenRe is betting that combining the tax breaks and cheaper costs that they can take it to a profitable $1.50, which would be great.
Solar, right now, is green, but don't pretend it is competitive with grid power. But solar is going to get cheaper. (Of course as solar gets cheaper than grid, the grid will start using solar and grid power will drop in price too, though not as fast due to transmission costs.) However, I have hope for the future.
Slashdot Mirror
But not a list generated by a self-selected set of voters, with little security over people voting twice (I have multiple cell numbers and an infinite number of E-mail addresses.)
You either need a verified, non self-selected set of the public, or a committee of top travel writers, like the Baseball hall of fame.
The law bans misleading or inaccurate caller ID. Since Caller ID identifies the phone number making a call, not the person, would it now be illegal to:
a) Make a call from your Asterisk box using the Caller ID of your mobile phone? I do this frequently. I am misleading them to think I am calling from
my cell, which is not accurate.
b) Have a click to call service that calls two phones to connect them provide the caller id of the other phone, rather than of the service that is doing the calling?
I am not sure what this law means. One would hope one can provide the callerid of any phone number belonging to the party you will be talking to, or if desired, of the service.
The article claims to be about reputation but mostly talks about the various "identity" efforts out there. Yes, a reputation is associated with an identity, but most of the identity systems being promoted focus on real identity rather than pseudonyms which you can choose to associate with yourself or not.
t
There is a paradox to those systems -- the easier they are to use, the more they will get used -- and demanded. We'll go from a web where most web sites can be used casually, with no "sign on" (single or otherwise) to a web where far more sites demand you use the single sign on and thus have an account, because it's easy for them to ask.
This paradox is described at http://ideas.4brad.com/paradox-identity-managemen
I mean it just seems to me to be ridiculous to have detailed review of the packaging of all these coolers, and to pick a winner on something we'll throw out, but not to measure one of the most important factors in choosing a cooler -- noise levels.
I just can't fathom why the packaging review, it makes me suspect the motives of the whole thing.
Yes, I have noticed that many DVR users, perhaps call them "less sophisticated" ones do not always FF over the ads.
However, we MythTV users don't FF over ads, the skip is instantaneous. The system makes judements, about 95% accurate
over where the ad bounds are. When an ad is coming up, it says "3 minute commercial break" in a pop up and you push
a key to skip it. If it has guessed wrong on the length that's usually obvious, and of course it's obvious on the
start. With technologies like this, which the studios have sued to keep out of PVRs, there will be few who don't
skip the breaks, or who even notice interesting ads and rewind to watch them.
A _sidereal_ day would be the same as the year on a tidally locked planet, but nobody talks in sidereal days except some astronomers. The vast majority talk about a solar day, the noon-to-noon time, and that, for a tidally locked planet, is undefined.
Well, actually it _did_ protect the Americans from McCarthy, it just took its time in doing so. Likewise over time the likes of Lenny Bruce and Lady Chatterley's lover were vindicated.
And I fervently hope (with some merit) that thanks to a free press, Gitmo will become the Manzanar of this era, reviled and used for a century as an example of what not to do. I wish the constitution could stop Gitmo in advance, but it has powerful enemies, and it is not strong enough to stop them immediately, but if things go OK, it will stop them in time, and leave them in the history books as a story of evil.
Of course, those who remember history are sometimes condemned to be the only ones in horror as they watch it repeat.
Yes, I want a shared and roamable calendar so I can maintain a variety of calendars -- one that's private for me but which I can add to from any machine, and some that I can share with others -- both read/write and read only, and of course the ability to import easily events from public calendars.
But I also want to be able to sync my 'combined' calendar to my PDA or cell phone's calendar too. Is there anything (on Linux, not Windows) that can do this for me?
Personal example: I want my own private calendar for myself which only I add events to. Then I want a "household" calendar which anybody in the house can add events to, such as "we're going to a party on Saturday" and these events appear to me, and sync to my PDA. Then I may want to publish free/busy on the merged calendar to others who want to schedule me in meetings etc.
He points out the human eye resolves one minute of arc, and then talks about that meaning "12 lines per degree".
One minute resolution means a screen subtending 30 degrees wants 1800 pixels, which is about right for 1920x1080.
But in fact we can resolve a little bit below a minute on non-moving parts of an image because our eyes move and gain sub-pixel resolution over time. (This may suggest that 1080p isn't a great deal better than 1080i because 1080i provides the full res on still images but gets jaggies or blurs on moving images. 1080p is just nice because you don't have to play interlace games.)
If your screen subtends 30 degrees, 1920 is about right. You won't gain a great deal going to 3000 or 4000 -- but you will gain something. My desktop screen is 2560 x 1600, and even it's not enough for my stills.
It is not clear in the article if Paypal is asking that sites block all mail that is not authenticated, or just unauthenticated mail that claims to be from paypal.com or related domains.
The latter would be fine. The former would require every user in the world to get a new mailer, certify themselves with authorities and end the ability of those who wish to communicate anonymously through email to do so even when parties are consenting.
The latter could be accomplished with keys that allow one signed email to declare "All future mails from this address or domain must be signed." You would need a key for a site to set the rule for the entire domain, a key for a user could set it for a single user.
However, even this may be misleading security. Once users become convinced that all mail from paypal.com is now signed, phishers can trick them more easily by sending mail from paypa1.com (that's a "one" not an "el") or similar games. This mail, from paypa1, can even trumpet how you know you can trust it because you know that all mail from us is authenticated with wonderful crypto.
Of course, paypal can try to get command of any domain that might look like theirs, in every character set, but sometimes when you tell people something is more secure, but it still has _any_ window into it, you actually create a greater danger of social engineering.
But there is a vastly simpler way to stand up to the RIAA on matters like this.
Erase your logs after a short period of time. Don't keep a record of what IP address was allocated to what account at any given time.
Then if the RIAA shows up, not simply with letters, but with lawsuits and court orders, you still can simply say "don't have the info."
This is what librarians do at many libraries. After you return the book, they destroy the circulation record. There is no record of what books you have read.
Yes, this means giving up using the logs for your own enforcement activities done after the fact. You can have a live database, or even keep the records for a few hours if you want to respond to problems same day. After that, no luck. But why is that so terrible? It's not like people who want to be anonymous for something truly nasty can't find an open wireless node these days. Main problem is that IT admins can't bear the thought of giving up control.
However, this would save the universities a ton of money (no need for legal department to handle requests) and it would also save the students a ton of money ($4000 per student served, $3000 with the "discount") which they could be spending on education.
You misunderstand -- this is why CitizenRe insists on net metering. The extra power does not get wasted, it gets sold back to the grid. Then you buy power back at night. The only issue is if you overprovision and actually sell back more power in a whole year than you buy back, so you make sure to slightly underprovision.
CitizenRe may or may not be a scam, but this part isn't the problem.
If you go off grid, and don't use 100% of the power you generate, you are not being very green at all. Not even counting the problem of disposal of batteries. On-grid has minor costs but every watt hour is used.
If you want backup power with your grid-tie system, of course you have that during the day. Non-green as it seems, the greenest choice is actually a generator for your night usage, because in reality you are hardly ever going to run it.
If you're off grid the right approach is to underprovision the solar so you are using 100% of it, have a modest battery bank, and then use a clean generator for the rest. No wasted generation. Possibly throw in some wind, but again, unless you have a 100% efficient place to store any excess, you are throwing away power. Batteries have a problem in that they only have so many deep cycles in them. So if you design to discharge them every night they won't last long and that has its own problems.
Sorry to be rude, but you really need to be more accurate in your math if you're going to opine on this. First of all, it's not nearly so small a fraction wholesale. Typical costs installed are about $8/watt, which covers quite a bit more than the panels, which cost about $4/watt wholesale.
However, just take your $10,000 system. Now in reality that only will provide you with about $50 of electricity per month at $4/watt (2500 watts) but even if it did provide you with $150, you have forgotten what every mortgage holder knows -- that money today is worth far more than money (or electricity) in the future.
So $10,000 at 7% interest in fact takes 85 months, not 67 months to pay off at $150/month saving. This doesn't seem like a big difference, but it's because your price numbers are off. At the real price of solar, a $10K system provides, as noted, only $50 worth of power, and you can never, ever, in any number of months, pay off $10,000 at $50 per month because the interest per month is more than $50. So the math error becomes a difference between a real payoff rate and infinity.
This is now a hot topic and you'll find a couple of detailed threads about CitizenRe at my blog. Executives of the company have been participating there and trying to give some (not too satisfactory) answers to critics.
- challenge
You may wish to check out the original thread at:
http://ideas.4brad.com/node/504
And then the followup thread with my summary of what was learned at:
http://ideas.4brad.com/citizenre-real-or-imagined
Normal solar is not yet close to economical. That's why everybody is skeptical about CitizenRe's as yet unfulfilled promise to deliver economical solar. The combination of secrecy, multi-level-marketing and astounding claims has many people feeling it sounds too good to be true.
Odd that you think off-grid solar is cost effective and grid-tie isn't. Off-grid solar usually has batteries. Since people don't want their batteries to be constantly in discharge, they often end up with the panels throwing away the output because the batteries are charged or close to charged. This really screws up the economics of panels. With grid-tie, all power generated by the panels is always used, either in the house, or by the grid. The grid is your 100% efficient storage.
Solar can not yet pay for itself (ever) compared to grid, but it's getting closer and closer (through subsidies mostly.) Without subsidies it's not even remotely close to ever breaking even -- it's always a decision to be green at a higher cost. CitizenRe claims they can beat this, and that's why everybody is saying "sounds too good to be true." People who know the real math of solar know that CitizenRe's claims are a dramatic improvement in the economics.
Voting over the internet has its attractions, but it often involves leaving behind the concept of the secret ballot (as does mail-in voting as in Oregon of course) and also can generate serious security risks. Not enough details on the Estonian system -- if the real voting is done on the small box they put their card into and it can generate a secure channel to the voting system, then it's possible to do it securely even with a compromised network or PC, but if the PC is involved in anything but passing along encrypted traffic, there are serious risks.
Likewise if these are terminals at home, secret ballot goes out the window. If these are terminals in a secured location just using the internet as a platform for encrypted communication with a server, you can still have secret ballot.
But in any case, voting over the internet presents real problems in auditability. Where is the paper trail?
It's good to be left behind in these areas.
Keith Henson has been involved in a long battle with the Scientologists which got very emotional and at times he has done irrational things, but nothing approaching becoming a physical danger to scientologists to my knowledge. Keith didn't have much knowledge of Scientology before he took up this charge, he mostly got into it when he saw them attempting to silence other critics, particularly on the net. THe more he learned the deeper he got.
What he alleges are serious charges. Effectively that Scientology is not a religion, but more a confidence trick (or even organized criminal enterprise) masquerading as a religion. He further alleges they have significant untoward influence over goverment officials and courts in their strongholds, such as Clearwater and Riverside. He says he has been threatened that once he is in jail there they will arrange his death.
These are very serious charges. Since it is fairly easy to imagine a confidence trick masquerading as a religion, a court should consider arguments for this allegation in any case allocating religious rights to the alleged religion. Since corruption of officials does take place, accusations of such corruption should be considered with care, with appeal to external jurisdictions not likely to be subject to such corruption. I'm not saying that anybody should be able to willy nilly complain of religion or con-games, but if there is any credible evidence, it should be presented and considered.
Nobody flees their country and leaves their family behind over a short jail term from a misdemeanor conviction. Keith believes the threat to be real, and deserves the chance to present his evidence to an unbiased jury.
That is how eBay works for a large proportion of buyers. eBay is actually a semi-sealed second price auction.
A second-price auction means the winning bidder pays the price of the second highest bid (in eBay's case plus a small delta.)
A sealed bid auction, which is what you describe, can be done on eBay. It's done by entering your bid just before auction close. Derisively called sniping, this is actually the proper bidding strategy if what you seek is a sealed 2nd price auction.
eBay confusingly allows people to reveal their bids in advance, something that makes no sense, but gets people excited sometimes and gives people the illusion of a live, going-going-gone style auction. But ebay is not that, it's an auction with a set finish, highest bid wins.
Shill bidding is not that useful a strategy. The shill, of course, runs the risk of winning, which means the seller pays auction fees and nothing happens. For shill bidding to aid the seller, they must increase the winner's price by increasing the 2nd price, and do it sufficiently often to offset the lost fees and time when the shill mistakenly wins.
Shilling makes much more sense in a live room auction where you can read the faces of the real bidders, and sense that they will indeed go higher.
Shilling does indeed always disadvantage the buyer, it's never useful for the buyer. The key is to design things so it is not useful to the seller. Shilling has a second negative value for the seller, which is that if buyers believe it is happening, they are less likely to participate.
But it is zero-sum, which is not so much unethical as it is uninteresting as a real spam solution.
Far more useful are anti-spam techniques that reduce the total amount of spam.
And in fact, since E-mail only works when 2 parties are involved, making your mailbox more usable at the cost of hurting the value of another random party's mailbox may actually hurt you, since some of those random parties the spammer is bumped to by you or others will be your own correspondents, who are now less likely to see your mail in the noise.
Fighting spam is hard, especially if you want to keep your principles. We're also seeing a new breed of unintended consequences. Spam filters got good enough at spotting text that spammers are moving to including their text as graphics files. So we end up losing more bandwidth to spammers than in the first place.
But they're often slow to respond. Hell, I changed a DNS record when I moved servers once and spammers will still going after the other server, with no DNS record pointing to it, for 6 months because they use static caches.
Many people were already using this trick, probably hoping it wouldn't show up as lead story on slashdot.
In some ways, selfish ways, it's like the story of the two hikers who face a bear. The first hiker immediately sits down and starts putting on his running shoes. The other says, "What are you doing? You can't outrun the bear!" The first hiker says, "I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you."
Many spammers, faced with a failed attempt at sending mail, do not bother to retry or try other MX. Instead, they just move on to the next target in the list, since trying a new target is just as easy as retrying an old target. No real difference to them. But it means you just push your spam attempts onto other people who haven't elected to bend the standards to divert the spammers.
The "good" spam sending programs run many threads, timeouts don't punish them, their limit is more the bandwidth. Attempts to divert spammers onto others who have not tried the tricks should create an ethical question. Are we just arranging for the bear to eat our friend?
I put on nofollow on my blog some time ago, and there is a simple turing test to post comments, and it explains to people that links in the comments will not be counted by search engines like Google.
They still try to comment spam. And not simply spams where they hope people will click on the links. They just are pretty thick, and never stop doing something once they heard it was useful.
So it will be several years before the spammers back off due to nofollow.
Nofollow, in effect says, "This link was not approved by the owners of this site." That doesn't always mean it's not a valid link, and in fact there are tons of user generated links that are totally valid.
Wikipedia, however, should consider not putting nofollow onto links which have received some vetting by somebody with appropriate cred, though admittedly they try to keep their set of users will privileges very small so this may not be enough.
Actually, conversely there is a "proof" we are in a virtual universe. The proof first asks you to accept the assertion that virtual worlds are possible (seems credible) and that thus we will create many of them, including ones that reimplement the source universe and others. As such there will be an arbitrarily large number of virtual Earths.
What are the odds that you're in the original? Vanishingly small.
Did you not take the most basic financial math in school?
Go to your bank for a mortgage. They won't make the same mistake. $100K over 25 years, at today's 7% rate is about $8600 per year. If you'll give me $100K now I'll give you $5,000 per year and be happy to do it.
I hate how people who should know their math, people who own homes, people who sell solar panels, can make such a basic mistake.
At today's prices, PV _never_ pays for itself compared to grid power. Not in 12 years, not in 50 years, not ever. That's because typical installed costs are $7.50 per peak watt, and 1 peak watt is 2 khw/year.
You need to get to about $2.60 per peak watt to compete with grid right now. And, thanks to rebates and tax credits we are starting to get close to that, and CitizenRe is betting that combining the tax breaks and cheaper costs that they can take it to a profitable $1.50, which would be great.
Solar, right now, is green, but don't pretend it is competitive with grid power. But solar is going to get cheaper. (Of course as solar gets cheaper than grid, the grid will start using solar and grid power will drop in price too, though not as fast due to transmission costs.) However, I have hope for the future.
You have confused a Turing machine (which is an idealized model of a computation device) with a Von Neumann self-replicating machine.