This seems like a great concept. It's a great use of current technology to subvert the big phone companies. When I first read about it, I thought to myself "wow! this is going to become HUGE!" Then I realized that there are some serious problems to be overcome, such as
Privacy. I could pick up my phone line and listen to your conversation with Grandma
Currently, anyone who wants to hook up needs to run the whole Asterisk server. I'm sure someone will write a small little client that interfaces with some cheap hardware eventually
Potential for abuses: dialing long distance numbers from your line, making obscene or harassing calls, etc. As the "owner" of a phone line, I'm theoretically liable for all its use
So, while I think this is really an awesome adaptation of the technology we have, and certainly a great perspective of what Asterisk is capable of, it'll be a while before this sort of things becomes mainstream and people want to hook up to it.
This is somewhat offtopic, but it seems that NASA is really getting a lot of good press for very interesting and successful projects. Good for them! Their public perception is really improving after those nasty probe failures on mars a while back.
Deep Impact launches to get data from a comet
BOTH Mars rover projects continue to be successful
Nasa nearing launch of shuttle again
Nasa planning Hubble robotic upgrade
Huygens "hours" from landing on Titan
What a great time to be alive! I'm happy that my tax dollars are funding this stuff.
And as the rover approaches, worn and tired, after more than 9 months past it's warranty expiration date, it begins to extend it's camera for a closer look when bssssssheeeeewwwwww....... The batteries die. The rover goes incommunicado. And that's it.
Yeah, it seems like it's either take the RPM route and suffer with whatever they give you, or just download *everything* and compile it your self... oh well....
See my comments over at K5 on this topic over a year ago . I believe electronic voting machines can be safe, secure, reliable, and trustworthy. The problem appears to be that election officials and secretaries of state do not understand information technology, much less information security and cryptographic methods that can be used to solve these problems. It seems that certain manufacturers are intent on getting by with the lowest common denominator product.
In short, these systems can be useable and safe, and because they can, they should be in ALL cases. Anything less is gross negligence and incompetence and leaves the door wide open for massive undercover voting fraud, which leads to the wrong people taking positions of power, only to continue the cycle.
I'm not sure if people in charge of these elections are just not listening to the technology people or if the vendors are telling very different stories, but it saddens me that there isn't more homegrown competition in the market to help bring these issues front and center.
I have to suggest that maybe being connected in the sense that this article describes is close enough to "real" face-to-face communicate as to fulfull any additional human need.
From a philisophical standpoint, being face-to-face is really just light, sound, and feelings being transmitted to and interpreted by your brain. If a virtual reality system (or whatever it might be) can adequatly stimulate these senses, I see no psycological problems with being "less connected" in a geographical sense. I think technology that allows us to connect with people, even at lower intensity levels than in-person, such as IM, email, or a video chat thingy can fulfill the human need for connection in a very similar way to reality. Maybe we'd all be safer and healthier if we were isolated to a little box with a computer terminal?
What, this extortionist thinks that people will honestly believe that a legitimate organization is now sending child porn? I think not. Let him send out all this child porn, thus not only proving that he has it, but also that he's willing to commit extortion and probably a number of other crimes. Good luck to him...
The Diebold central tabulators use a program called "GEMS" that saves vote totals in Microsoft Access, a Windows-based database program.
Access is a consumer toy. Why the heck didn't they at least use a database engine with some semblance of security, like SQL? It would be trivial to set up something more secure than what is described in the article.
All this Diebold nonsense is making me consider starting my own e-voting machine manufacturing business. A little cryptography, a paper trail... I could do this so much better.
Am I the only one who thinks that this whole article thread could be reduced to about 3 postings and not loose any ideas? Come on guys... read the other postings before you post another "eh, I could script it, but I'm too lazy to actually do it for you" messages...
Tivo is nice, but ReplayTV is better. I use Pooli.com to share shows all the time with people all over the net. I've been using DVArchive to store shows on my PC's drive and burn to DVD for a long time. If you get the 5040 or 5080, Commercial Advance is fully operational and works great. As far as I know, none of this stuff is going to change for the ReplayTV.
Wow... what are you running OS/2 for? As far as I know, only ancient voicemail systems and weird proprietary stuff are the only reason to keep it around. Then again, it would be cool to pull out my old Warp CDs and fire up my old OS/2 BBS with the Gcomm third party serial drivers:) Ahh... the bad old days...
VMWare is superior in all regards. I've had significant problems running Linux under Virtual PC where VMWare handles it without any problems at all. Also, I've found that VMWare has drivers for most host operating systems to enable drive sharing, video, and sound. VirtualPC's guest os driver set is pretty bad. Virtual PC is a lot cheaper (free for us, as Solution Providers) but if I ever really need to get something done, VMWare is the only way to go.
I agree 100%. Stored procedures are nice in certain circumstances, but I try to aviod if I can.
Situations where I use stored procedures:
Identical function will be used in many different areas of the software or by seperate software altogether.
In places where it would be too dangerous for an inexperienced developer to play around. I.e. when working with a central database that is used by a lot of people and the new app is not the sole tool in use to query it
When security is a major concern. In this case, however, one would wonder why you don't trust your developer...
Speed, but this seems to be a rare problem that a stored procedure can solve.
Aside from the above, I steer clear from stored procedures because it isn't worth it otherwise...
I'm very impressed with the Rover program, but I don't believe their engineers really expected the rovers to just die shortly after 90 days. At this point, that seems to be too big of an "error" in their calculations. However, in successful business and successful PR ventures, you promise low and then deliver high, so to speak, to impress. I'm guessing that NASA has been promising below their internally known ability to guarantee restored public confidence in their operations and organization. The new announcement may have been a surprise for them... but I'm guessing not. NASA needs a bevy of widely known successes to convince the American public that it should be kept afloat. So far, so good!
I wonder how the intellectual property is shared between the PhD employee's "individual project" and Google. I would bet that those employees projects are at least partially owned by Google if they are compensating for the time. If so, this may be a reason that PhD employees don't want to reveal all of their great ideas to their employer.
Slashdot Mirror
So, while I think this is really an awesome adaptation of the technology we have, and certainly a great perspective of what Asterisk is capable of, it'll be a while before this sort of things becomes mainstream and people want to hook up to it.
It was down for about a half hour, maybe a little longer. Most obnoxious for the colo facility that *is never supposed to go down*
Here's a listing of recent nasa Missions. Nasa does a lot more than the press regularly lets us know about...
Wow... Mr. Wizard. He *was* cool.
What a great time to be alive! I'm happy that my tax dollars are funding this stuff.
And as the rover approaches, worn and tired, after more than 9 months past it's warranty expiration date, it begins to extend it's camera for a closer look when bssssssheeeeewwwwww....... The batteries die. The rover goes incommunicado. And that's it.
Yeah, it seems like it's either take the RPM route and suffer with whatever they give you, or just download *everything* and compile it your self... oh well....
"Robosapien(tm) V2 - Bigger, Smarter, and more fun" Internal Server Error
So, is is running from a SkyOS box?
Offtopic I know, but why do I seem to be getting the message "Nothing to see here... move along" on the newer articles at first these days?
In short, these systems can be useable and safe, and because they can, they should be in ALL cases. Anything less is gross negligence and incompetence and leaves the door wide open for massive undercover voting fraud, which leads to the wrong people taking positions of power, only to continue the cycle.
I'm not sure if people in charge of these elections are just not listening to the technology people or if the vendors are telling very different stories, but it saddens me that there isn't more homegrown competition in the market to help bring these issues front and center.
I have to suggest that maybe being connected in the sense that this article describes is close enough to "real" face-to-face communicate as to fulfull any additional human need.
From a philisophical standpoint, being face-to-face is really just light, sound, and feelings being transmitted to and interpreted by your brain. If a virtual reality system (or whatever it might be) can adequatly stimulate these senses, I see no psycological problems with being "less connected" in a geographical sense. I think technology that allows us to connect with people, even at lower intensity levels than in-person, such as IM, email, or a video chat thingy can fulfill the human need for connection in a very similar way to reality. Maybe we'd all be safer and healthier if we were isolated to a little box with a computer terminal?
What, this extortionist thinks that people will honestly believe that a legitimate organization is now sending child porn? I think not. Let him send out all this child porn, thus not only proving that he has it, but also that he's willing to commit extortion and probably a number of other crimes. Good luck to him...
The Diebold central tabulators use a program called "GEMS" that saves vote totals in Microsoft Access, a Windows-based database program.
Access is a consumer toy. Why the heck didn't they at least use a database engine with some semblance of security, like SQL? It would be trivial to set up something more secure than what is described in the article.
All this Diebold nonsense is making me consider starting my own e-voting machine manufacturing business. A little cryptography, a paper trail... I could do this so much better.
Am I the only one who thinks that this whole article thread could be reduced to about 3 postings and not loose any ideas? Come on guys... read the other postings before you post another "eh, I could script it, but I'm too lazy to actually do it for you" messages...
Some poor sap's legs are going to be sore as hell the next day.
Tivo is nice, but ReplayTV is better. I use Pooli.com to share shows all the time with people all over the net. I've been using DVArchive to store shows on my PC's drive and burn to DVD for a long time. If you get the 5040 or 5080, Commercial Advance is fully operational and works great. As far as I know, none of this stuff is going to change for the ReplayTV.
Wow... what are you running OS/2 for? As far as I know, only ancient voicemail systems and weird proprietary stuff are the only reason to keep it around. Then again, it would be cool to pull out my old Warp CDs and fire up my old OS/2 BBS with the Gcomm third party serial drivers :) Ahh... the bad old days...
VMWare is superior in all regards. I've had significant problems running Linux under Virtual PC where VMWare handles it without any problems at all. Also, I've found that VMWare has drivers for most host operating systems to enable drive sharing, video, and sound. VirtualPC's guest os driver set is pretty bad. Virtual PC is a lot cheaper (free for us, as Solution Providers) but if I ever really need to get something done, VMWare is the only way to go.
...duh?
Situations where I use stored procedures:
Aside from the above, I steer clear from stored procedures because it isn't worth it otherwise...
Here's some more info about the movie on Yahoo Movies . Greg's Preview from that page will give you a lot of background info.
I'm very impressed with the Rover program, but I don't believe their engineers really expected the rovers to just die shortly after 90 days. At this point, that seems to be too big of an "error" in their calculations. However, in successful business and successful PR ventures, you promise low and then deliver high, so to speak, to impress. I'm guessing that NASA has been promising below their internally known ability to guarantee restored public confidence in their operations and organization. The new announcement may have been a surprise for them... but I'm guessing not. NASA needs a bevy of widely known successes to convince the American public that it should be kept afloat. So far, so good!
Me too... several times in a row. Nice beta...
I wonder how the intellectual property is shared between the PhD employee's "individual project" and Google. I would bet that those employees projects are at least partially owned by Google if they are compensating for the time. If so, this may be a reason that PhD employees don't want to reveal all of their great ideas to their employer.