Project Vote Smart may be a good place to start (the website interface is a little confusing; if you pick the wrong state you can change it on the left-hand side of the page). Voting requirements are quite different depending on the state you're in. While the information on this website gives you a pretty good idea of what you need to do, you should look up your state's elections website (the link to which should be available on Project Vote Smart) to make sure you've got the most up-to-date information, and feel free to call your local election office with any questions (they can be found on Project Vote Smart if you know what county of your state you're in). The following points are, in my opinion, the most important to look for:
Some states permit registration at the polling place on the day of the election, others require it before. But you will need to register before you can vote for the first time.
There will likely be a requirement that you live in the state a period of time (such as 30 days) before voting.
Depending on your state you may be challenged for proof-of-identity at the polling place every time you vote -- the easiest form for you to carry would be either a driver's license if you opt to get one or a state-issued photo ID if you don't (both are typically issued at your local Department of Motor Vehicles for a nominal fee; call them first and ask what identification you need to bring before they can issue you a card. Probably something as simple as your passport and Social Security card). In 2004 a number of such challenges were performed in Ohio and it's possible similar tricks could be played in other states, so I suggest bringing valid ID if you have it even if you don't think they'll require it.
If you want to vote in primary elections, which are used by political parties to choose the candidate they're going to run in the general elections, your state may have the requirement that you register with that party. If that's the case it's likely to be on the same form you use to register to vote.
Make sure you know where your polling place is before you vote (sometimes they get changed or your address gets moved to a different voting district).
If you know in advance you won't be able to get to your polling place to cast your vote on the day of the election you can request an absentee ballot, which lets you mail in your vote. If you plan on voting absentee, request the ballot as soon as you can (to avoid any deadline on mailing them out) and mail it as soon as you can (to avoid the deadline on processing it; they will likely require receipt by Election Day.) Check with your local election office for more information.
Plan on a significant delay when you go to vote. In 2004 there were waits of more than an hour in some polling places and a number were closing with lines of people yet to vote -- nothing has really been fixed since then and this election should draw almost as many people. If you think this will be a problem, get to your polling place as early in the day as you can or vote absentee.
Subscribe to your local newspaper, or buy/read a copy for a few days leading up to the election. At least where I'm at, they print a copy of the ballot in there so you can see what you'll be voting on. Voting for candidates is fairly straightforward, but when you're asked to vote on an issue sometimes the wording will be convoluted to confuse voters into voting differently than they intended -- so it helps to look at it ahead of time, and warn family and friends if necessary.
You should be able to leave a ballot item blank if you don't want to vote on it (ask an election official to be sure).
As far as deciding who to vote for, the least-biased sources take the most work to examine. Our next election in November will affect Congress (every member of the House of Representatives and a number of members of the Senate) -- when t
I recognize that there may be some degree of opprobrium as a result of pointing this out, as most of us here believe in bringing the newest and fastest technology to bear on a given problem. I don't disagree with this approach; indeed, given Moore's Law and costs not dramatically increasing, one would be a fool not to recommend the regular upgrade of hardware and software every two to five years, depending on circumstances.
Irregardless, news such as this points out that sometimes blindly following technology without carefully measuring its implications on IT and data processing can create issues. In the interest of bettering our approach to systems analysis and design, I feel it is important to quote: approximately 90% of the typical activities on 1/3rd of the computer systems out there can take 10-15% longer than performing their equivalents using a 50/50 methodology of
planning the computing tasks first, computing the planned tasks second. In other words, you have to know where you are and where you want to be before you purchase and implement new systems; otherwise you not only run the risk of a wasted investment in extra or unnecessary technology (such as private folders when you only need and want public ones) but of having to backtrack and start again to purchase new technology to meet current, previous and future uses.
Unfortunately this seems intuitive but it's not; in fact, in many ways it can actually be seen to be counterintuitive. In other words, it's a balance -- one of considering the importance of keeping pace with current technology while retaining past and projected compatability with previous and anticipated data storage and processing needs.
Skype isn't creating a security hole. Skype is demonstrating that current firewalling practices are inadequate for blocking a determined entity from making an outgoing connection.
Perhaps they ought not to do that; I remember similar concerns about SOAP when it was first being proposed (and no doubt many on here still refuse to use it) and it showed that fewer were willing to blame the inadequacy of the protection than they were the people "bypassing" it. Rather, we should take away the lesson that firewalls in and of themselves are not an absolute solution and instead incorporate other methods and practices in developing secure environments.
Building and promoting enabling technologies, while allowing the temporary exchange of copyrighted material without compensation, has lead (I think inevitably) to compulsory payment elsewhere.
In other words, we wouldn't need to walk through shoplift detectors, have the store check the shopping bags and carts on large purchases, or be videotaped in every place of business if inventory wasn't disappearing behind the employees' backs.
It's a disappointing state of affairs. But watch where you're heaping the scorn -- they have to collect this from everybody (including people who just want to make a phone call or backup their computer) because otherwise the artists can't stay in business. Much as prices go up in a store when shoplifting becomes rampant; they need to pay for the missing merchandise, the cameras, and the detectors and consequently the higher cost is bourne by marking up the goods that are sold to the honest customers.
As someone who has learned many operating systems
on
Linux Annoyances For Geeks
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The secret is to spend less time complaining and more time reading.
Of course a different operating system will act differently than the one you're used to. That's kind of the point. Treat it as something unique rather than as an inferior version of your current platform and you'll get farther.
The problem isn't about whether people are sufficiently aware of ESRB ratings. Movies have had ratings for decades, TV shows have a box in the upper left corner, CDs still come with 'Parental Advisory' stickers on them, and every game I've purchased in at least the last five years has had an ESRB rating on it. If you've got any concern about content (besides books) you're aware.
The problem is that there are folks out there who want nobody to be able to consume content they deem objectionable. There is no middle ground or acceptable compromise for them. We've got chips in every TV out there and now in just about every gaming console but that's simply not good enough. Run all the advertising campaigns you want, it doesn't matter because they're irrelevant to the people causing the fuss.
I'm probably going to run through this series anyway. One bonus over slides of recent lectures is that if they start to lose me on a topic, at least I can be amused by what we used to look like in the 80s.
It really depends on which course you're looking at. I was interested in a review of calculus, and was able to obtain a free book, accompanying teacher's guide (answers to all problems in the text), presentations/notes, and assignments. Other courses are more sparse, but if you can point to a larger resource in one spot on the Internet I'd like to know about it.
The MIT OpenCourseWare site has a sizeable amount of free learning materials. I had it bookmarked a while back when they weren't offering that much but they've since put a lot online.
While other companies nationwide are pushing more employees to work from home to cut office costs, HP believes bringing its information-technology employees together in the office will make them swifter and smarter and allow them to be more effective.
Interesting theory. As IT people tend to work at their best in formal situations, I would also like to suggest mandated progress reports that could be discussed at regular goal-orientation meetings with management. Otherwise you risk losing focus as your whole team goes off playing Quake or discussing pi or whatever eggheads do when you don't put pressure on them to perform.
But I'm still not clear on how if you actually want to make a living selling software you create you can do so without being able to claim an intellectual property right.
I know there are some success stories with selling support or other non-duplicateable services but that seems to suggest less serious attention to user interface design and such may become standard software practice.
For what it's worth, I've had no showstopping problems running the various free Visual Studio 2005 Express releases (C#, C++, Visual Basic) on Windows XP Professional SP2 OEM. I did have to work around some software firewall issues; the software loves to contact Microsoft and actually froze up at one point where the connection was blocked, and I think I had to actually disable the network interface for a bit so that I could shut off various "permit me to phone home" options, but the software has been working nicely since. I wonder perhaps if the problems you're realizing come from additional validation gunk thrown into the academic-licensed versions?
On the other hand, no other development environment gives me the type of headache that Visual Studio on Windows does -- the best it ever was was for me was VS5.0 on Windows 2000, when nagging and timewasters were at their minimum -- so I can appreciate your decision to give it the heave ho instead of splitting your time in the classroom between teaching and tech support.
As I understand it, game demos are copy protected because it avoids giving software crackers an unencrypted/unprotected version of the game binary. While I doubt a demo game.exe would be an exact unprotected copy of a retail game.exe (i.e., you couldn't just drop it in with retail data files and expect it to work in most cases) maybe it's still useful to the cracker for comparison purposes?
I don't know that it makes that big of a difference if somebody's going to reverse the copy protection. I imagine protecting each successive patch a different way makes for a bigger headache. They've gotten so clever that they occasionally fail to permit my use of the games after I buy them, so I've mostly stopped buying or even playing them (although I did buy Galactic Civilizations, which is among the best games I've played, and shall buy Galactic Civilizations II because its creator doesn't engage in this wankery.)
To be honest, I have little sympathy for big content producers. They use the money from legitimate customers to influence government policy and legislation against those same customers (via the DMCA or local equivalent, constantly-extended copyright terms, and soon the broadcast flag). They show a perplexing degree of contempt towards computer owners, whether by dumping undisclosed system-level drivers on their systems, requiring them to phone the company for permission to continue to use their operating system if they change their hardware around, or poking around for virtual devices and simply refusing to allow access to content when they are found on the system. In a relatively short amount of time most people will be running computers with hardware DRM. It's anyone's guess as to the ultimate ramifications of allowing content to be tied over the Internet to hidden data within an expensive and difficult-to-replace device that can fail and destroy all that data, but what you don't have to guess is that we'll have to pay more for the device and we won't be able to get a decent motherboard without it. Again, thanks to big content.
But your situation is discouraging. Small developers, independent film and music, and the like are viable alternatives for those of us who resent the encroachment by the big content producers. I used to buy a lot of music and games and have rented and purchased a reasonable amount of movies in the day, and certainly less now, but I've discovered games like Uplink, Pontifex or Galactic Civilizations, rediscovered light reading (although some book publishers also suck), and found a local used CD/DVD place to buy those things from. It's not even that I planned to go out of my way to avoid big content -- just that I find myself putting that new game back on the shelf at the store and spending that $50 online to buy a new indie CD and a couple of indie games I can download and play that night. By the way, with as much or more entertainment value than for the big content version, because I preview much or all of the CD before I buy it on the artist's website (some even put concert recordings out for free) and the indie games in my experience have more demos, fewer bugs, and better support than the average game the big publishers have rushed out the door for the $60 collector's edition pre-order fanboys to test.
I guess what I'm getting at is this. All the wordsmithing I read about illicit P2P use not being theft, wanting to try it before you buy it, maybe the game isn't that great, I wasn't going to buy it anyway so you haven't lost a sale, etc. is really just so much bullshit. Freeloading. A handful of us do it and it isn't even noticed, some of us and it makes a noticable blip, many of us and it kills off smaller content providers who cannot afford to continue providing their services. No matter what, big content will continue to work the system to keep their business model viable (some would say artificially, but to them I'd ask how you distribute a multi-million dollar blockbuster without anybody paying for it.) If we're to continue having alternatives, we need to invest in them.
I'm guessing a lot of youth have missed the video, but sadly it is as relevant today as it ever was.
The sum of all the unique vulnerabilities from all the Linux distros does not equate to the sum of vulnerabilities in any single Linux distro
No, but it sounds like they're adding the vulnerabilities to represent Linux. Much as they're adding the unique Windows vulnerabilities to represent Windows.
Seems like a lot of companies are into hot potato. When did it become frowned upon to care about what happens to the business five or more years down the road?
This is the same media that's been pooh-poohing blogs for over a year now, not to mention at it's also the one that nowadays covers only the most politically insipid stories it can find, and rushes to air and to press the instant there's a tragedy, screwing up the facts for hours.
Sure, Wikipedia wouldn't compare well to actual journalism, but where do you find that nowadays?
I think so. When you talk paper ballots people think it's just paper and pencil/pen, but it would be possible to use a computer to fill the ballot while allowing visual verification by the voter (helpful to prevent filling out the ballot incorrectly or to provide accessibility features).
The advantage to computers is that if they aren't tampered with and are implemented properly, they should provide a more accurate count than manually processing the ballots. Nice in theory, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Prey tell, how many different acronyms can we cram into networking -- MoCA, PNA, triple-play?
Ethernet and TCPIP are more than enough internet unless you're trying to make a sandwich.
Project Vote Smart may be a good place to start (the website interface is a little confusing; if you pick the wrong state you can change it on the left-hand side of the page). Voting requirements are quite different depending on the state you're in. While the information on this website gives you a pretty good idea of what you need to do, you should look up your state's elections website (the link to which should be available on Project Vote Smart) to make sure you've got the most up-to-date information, and feel free to call your local election office with any questions (they can be found on Project Vote Smart if you know what county of your state you're in). The following points are, in my opinion, the most important to look for:
As far as deciding who to vote for, the least-biased sources take the most work to examine. Our next election in November will affect Congress (every member of the House of Representatives and a number of members of the Senate) -- when t
Well, one can do this at the risk of having her think you're pleasuring yourself to video game walkthroughs and Linux HOWTOs, anyway.
I recognize that there may be some degree of opprobrium as a result of pointing this out, as most of us here believe in bringing the newest and fastest technology to bear on a given problem. I don't disagree with this approach; indeed, given Moore's Law and costs not dramatically increasing, one would be a fool not to recommend the regular upgrade of hardware and software every two to five years, depending on circumstances.
Irregardless, news such as this points out that sometimes blindly following technology without carefully measuring its implications on IT and data processing can create issues. In the interest of bettering our approach to systems analysis and design, I feel it is important to quote: approximately 90% of the typical activities on 1/3rd of the computer systems out there can take 10-15% longer than performing their equivalents using a 50/50 methodology of planning the computing tasks first, computing the planned tasks second. In other words, you have to know where you are and where you want to be before you purchase and implement new systems; otherwise you not only run the risk of a wasted investment in extra or unnecessary technology (such as private folders when you only need and want public ones) but of having to backtrack and start again to purchase new technology to meet current, previous and future uses.
Unfortunately this seems intuitive but it's not; in fact, in many ways it can actually be seen to be counterintuitive. In other words, it's a balance -- one of considering the importance of keeping pace with current technology while retaining past and projected compatability with previous and anticipated data storage and processing needs.
Skype isn't creating a security hole. Skype is demonstrating that current firewalling practices are inadequate for blocking a determined entity from making an outgoing connection.
Perhaps they ought not to do that; I remember similar concerns about SOAP when it was first being proposed (and no doubt many on here still refuse to use it) and it showed that fewer were willing to blame the inadequacy of the protection than they were the people "bypassing" it. Rather, we should take away the lesson that firewalls in and of themselves are not an absolute solution and instead incorporate other methods and practices in developing secure environments.
In other words, we wouldn't need to walk through shoplift detectors, have the store check the shopping bags and carts on large purchases, or be videotaped in every place of business if inventory wasn't disappearing behind the employees' backs.
It's a disappointing state of affairs. But watch where you're heaping the scorn -- they have to collect this from everybody (including people who just want to make a phone call or backup their computer) because otherwise the artists can't stay in business. Much as prices go up in a store when shoplifting becomes rampant; they need to pay for the missing merchandise, the cameras, and the detectors and consequently the higher cost is bourne by marking up the goods that are sold to the honest customers.
The secret is to spend less time complaining and more time reading.
Of course a different operating system will act differently than the one you're used to. That's kind of the point. Treat it as something unique rather than as an inferior version of your current platform and you'll get farther.
The problem isn't about whether people are sufficiently aware of ESRB ratings. Movies have had ratings for decades, TV shows have a box in the upper left corner, CDs still come with 'Parental Advisory' stickers on them, and every game I've purchased in at least the last five years has had an ESRB rating on it. If you've got any concern about content (besides books) you're aware.
The problem is that there are folks out there who want nobody to be able to consume content they deem objectionable. There is no middle ground or acceptable compromise for them. We've got chips in every TV out there and now in just about every gaming console but that's simply not good enough. Run all the advertising campaigns you want, it doesn't matter because they're irrelevant to the people causing the fuss.
I'm probably going to run through this series anyway. One bonus over slides of recent lectures is that if they start to lose me on a topic, at least I can be amused by what we used to look like in the 80s.
It really depends on which course you're looking at. I was interested in a review of calculus, and was able to obtain a free book, accompanying teacher's guide (answers to all problems in the text), presentations/notes, and assignments. Other courses are more sparse, but if you can point to a larger resource in one spot on the Internet I'd like to know about it.
The MIT OpenCourseWare site has a sizeable amount of free learning materials. I had it bookmarked a while back when they weren't offering that much but they've since put a lot online.
Interesting theory. As IT people tend to work at their best in formal situations, I would also like to suggest mandated progress reports that could be discussed at regular goal-orientation meetings with management. Otherwise you risk losing focus as your whole team goes off playing Quake or discussing pi or whatever eggheads do when you don't put pressure on them to perform.
I know there are some success stories with selling support or other non-duplicateable services but that seems to suggest less serious attention to user interface design and such may become standard software practice.
I agree. A recent telephone survey indicates his statement only holds true for about 63% of them.
Isn't this the industry that turned the concept of "net profit" into a running joke?
On the other hand, no other development environment gives me the type of headache that Visual Studio on Windows does -- the best it ever was was for me was VS5.0 on Windows 2000, when nagging and timewasters were at their minimum -- so I can appreciate your decision to give it the heave ho instead of splitting your time in the classroom between teaching and tech support.
I don't know that it makes that big of a difference if somebody's going to reverse the copy protection. I imagine protecting each successive patch a different way makes for a bigger headache. They've gotten so clever that they occasionally fail to permit my use of the games after I buy them, so I've mostly stopped buying or even playing them (although I did buy Galactic Civilizations, which is among the best games I've played, and shall buy Galactic Civilizations II because its creator doesn't engage in this wankery.)
In more ways than one, it would seem.
But your situation is discouraging. Small developers, independent film and music, and the like are viable alternatives for those of us who resent the encroachment by the big content producers. I used to buy a lot of music and games and have rented and purchased a reasonable amount of movies in the day, and certainly less now, but I've discovered games like Uplink, Pontifex or Galactic Civilizations, rediscovered light reading (although some book publishers also suck), and found a local used CD/DVD place to buy those things from. It's not even that I planned to go out of my way to avoid big content -- just that I find myself putting that new game back on the shelf at the store and spending that $50 online to buy a new indie CD and a couple of indie games I can download and play that night. By the way, with as much or more entertainment value than for the big content version, because I preview much or all of the CD before I buy it on the artist's website (some even put concert recordings out for free) and the indie games in my experience have more demos, fewer bugs, and better support than the average game the big publishers have rushed out the door for the $60 collector's edition pre-order fanboys to test.
I guess what I'm getting at is this. All the wordsmithing I read about illicit P2P use not being theft, wanting to try it before you buy it, maybe the game isn't that great, I wasn't going to buy it anyway so you haven't lost a sale, etc. is really just so much bullshit. Freeloading. A handful of us do it and it isn't even noticed, some of us and it makes a noticable blip, many of us and it kills off smaller content providers who cannot afford to continue providing their services. No matter what, big content will continue to work the system to keep their business model viable (some would say artificially, but to them I'd ask how you distribute a multi-million dollar blockbuster without anybody paying for it.) If we're to continue having alternatives, we need to invest in them.
I'm guessing a lot of youth have missed the video, but sadly it is as relevant today as it ever was.
No, but it sounds like they're adding the vulnerabilities to represent Linux. Much as they're adding the unique Windows vulnerabilities to represent Windows.
Yeah, it's kind of a bummer that the only choice for right-wing comedy on the air right now is Fox News.
Seems like a lot of companies are into hot potato. When did it become frowned upon to care about what happens to the business five or more years down the road?
This is the same media that's been pooh-poohing blogs for over a year now, not to mention at it's also the one that nowadays covers only the most politically insipid stories it can find, and rushes to air and to press the instant there's a tragedy, screwing up the facts for hours.
Sure, Wikipedia wouldn't compare well to actual journalism, but where do you find that nowadays?
I think so. When you talk paper ballots people think it's just paper and pencil/pen, but it would be possible to use a computer to fill the ballot while allowing visual verification by the voter (helpful to prevent filling out the ballot incorrectly or to provide accessibility features).
The advantage to computers is that if they aren't tampered with and are implemented properly, they should provide a more accurate count than manually processing the ballots. Nice in theory, anyway.
There's also a provision that the voting machines be made out of cheddar.