Which is one of the reason why I and more than a million other people like Guitar Hero. I HATE Dance Dance, and Karaoke Revolution, and even most of the Drum Beat whatever. They are too, how should I say, flowery. Its freaking METAL! I don't want to see stupid butterflys, or pastel balls flowing on the screen. I want to see Gene Simmons's tongue, or Ozzy bitting heads off of doves or bats (did I say that this is heavy metal? I think I said that...).
You nailed it. I completely agree with you on that one. The entire interview was/is simply damage control. People are very upset that developers were changed on a great product/franchise without any reason at all, other then possibly corporate greed. When they were caught making that change sooner then they anticipated, they throw one of their PR "firefighters" out to put a "smiley" face on the situation. Trying to get everyone to see that the guys who just lost their jobs for being too good at them (and wanting to be paid appropriately) get dropped after making a crap load of cash for the franchise.
But does it matter if in MP3 (w/ reguards to SCMS)
on
XM+MP3 Going to Trial
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It physically keeps the MP3's on that device, and that device alone. Without access to being able to get the recording off the device, there is no need to create other methods to protect 2nd generation copying as there is no ability to copy it anywhere else. The copy never leaves the recording device to be distributable. The only way to do that would be to connect an analog recorder to the output of the device, which by the way, would also defeat the copy protections on any other SCMS device (hence the analog hole).
Actually color space and bit depth are intertwined. You can't fully display a certain color space without having the bit depth needed to reproduce all the color shades associated with the color space. I agree that 10 bit is very sufficient for TV use, but in the future, TV's and large monitors may very well converge, just as the convergence for media PC's is already happening now. This display technology is not limited to just TV's. It can and possibly will be used for other things such as graphics work and medical imaging.
Last displayed models had contrast in the millions, not tens of thousands... The reason, black is pretty much true black, i.e. no light emitted, only extremely limited bleed from pixels directly next to them due to the way the technology creates the light in the first place. LCD's have a backlight that can never really be gotten rid of until a per pixel backlight is created (or a per pixel block, i.e. every block of 4 or 16 pixels have their own controllable backlight).
The color space I believe is 24 bits, not the 10 bits that the best LCD have. This will really show itself when displaying colors in the magenta range.
I should be possible to place a refresh rate of 120Hz, but I do not know if they will do this. I think the limiting factor will be that they want to use the power savings of the set as a selling point, and having a refresh rate 2x the speed of the competition would mean you need to use almost 2x the power since that would mean sending 2x as many electrons through the nanotube guns of the emitters.
Viewing angles I believe are the same as for CRT based displays. It is essentially the same idea as a CRT, with the difference being that instead of a single gun that has magnets shape the electron gun waveform output to scan across the entire screen, the SED displays have 3 guns for each pixel (one for each of the sub-pixel colors). They still use an electron to excite a phosphor to emit a photon. The only difference is that the electrons are now being channeled and aimed using a nano-tube structure.
So it is truly the best of all worlds in terms of TV display technology, thin as a plasma, weight as a LCD, contrast and color space of the best CRTs, viewing angles of CRTs, resolution of LCDs/CRTs, and better power usage then any of them. Technically, it has the potential to blow away everything. But we all know that technology alone will not win the war. Cost considerations, usability, and reliability will all play a major role (as well as the ability to manufacture).
Truthfully, go take some art lessons. You will be surprised that it just might help you out. Even just a few weeks of lessons might be enough to train your "eye" so that you can better understand what looks good and how to go about accomplishing that task. I had several classes when I was in 6-10th grade at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. They had summer programs as well as weekend programs for people interested in learning. Those courses really helped me out a lot when I was younger (I'm graduated from college now and have been working several full time for several years).
I do not personally get to do a lot of graphics anymore, but from time to time, I do get the chance. It helps that I also took classes in computer graphics programming in college and know a lot of the theory of what to do (i.e. color spaces to use, proper techniques to scale images and points, etc., all of which have come in handy as I have written programs to do things like re-scale and shift click-maps for images (long story, but basically the application that made the image click maps would always generate the html code so that it was shifted several pixels in both the x and y planes as well as scaled.6 smaller in the x plane, and.63 in the y plane, so I wrote a program to read in the html page and correct all the image map coordinates by appropriate amounts)). So long story short, some local colleges and local art schools will have several classes that they offer which will give you some basic idea of how to start.
As for flash and animation, well, I highly suggest leaving that up to people who have spent several years of their lives taking training in the subject. It can be very difficult to work with. Especially dealing with the different versions of flash in existance and coding/drawing the frame movements. You would be surprised how bad some flash can look and how poorly it will perform if you do not do it correctly (there are always many ways to skin a cat, but in flash only 2 or them will run nicely).
LEDs are here. Even MythBusters did an episode on lights and costs. In it, they created a testing device to simulate the abuse a light takes turning on/off with it cycling every 2 minutes. After 2 weeks in that, only the LED lights still worked, traditional, florescent, and CFL's all stopped working by that point, with traditional going first, the regular florescents and the CFL's going approx the same time (the edge went to the CFL's).
The LEDs also produced more lumens per watt power consumption as well as used the lest amount of energy to turn on, whereas the traditional florescents had a 7x power spike for turn on, and the traditionals had a 1.5x spike, even the CFL's had a power spike. Everything says to use LED lights now.
Now that said. How do we know it will reduce quality of works created on the system itself? From my understanding, unless the media files themselves have a form of DRM on them, they won't be treated any differently then any other normal file. If you create it yourself as it seems that you would be if you are a marketing/promotion firm, then the protection is whatever you decide the protection will be. Just like in Linux/Unix, if you give it world read/write, well then anyone can read it and modify it. If you lock it down, well, then it is locked down.
... would be a better solution. I am pretty sure the electrical arch that will form on any/all electrically conductive material would be more then enough to fry the sensitive chips.
LOL... that would have been funny. Man, now I need to install that game again. I havn't played it in a while (last time was when they added the patch to hack networks, not just systems).
AllofMP3.com pays the correct proceeds under Russian law to ROMS (Russian Organization for Multimedia and Digital Systems a.k.a. similar to the RIAA in Russia). ROMS is a non-for-profit organization that handles all copyright payment transactions in Russia, including collecting for foreign interests. All the money is held until it is requested by the appropriate parties with proof that they are the correct owners of the copyrighted material. All requests can also be retro-active requests for payment, (i.e. if you have been the owner of the work, and have not received your cut for the last 4 years, you simply request that you receive your payments for the entire time that you have been the copyright owner).
The RIAA knows this and so do their member groups. The issue is that they do not want to request the payment because they think doing so will give legitimacy to places like AllofMP3.com who are following the Russian rules to copyright payments. The RIAA does not like the Russian rules and seeks to circumvent them. By not requesting for their payments they are trying to use that as a means for the lawsuit(s) you are now witness to over the last few months against different Russian sites.
I mean seriously, I am glad ROT13 is only a useful text encryption format. Because with data, well, ROT13 a hex encoded byte... Doesn't decrypt too well with another ROT13 does it...
...since linking to anything copyrighted is now illegal, unless the page specifically tells you that you that you have the right to link to it or unless it is specifically stated that the page is not copyrighted, you can't link to anything other then pages you own the copyright to without getting express permission from the holders.
Lets see, can anyone say Sparc and RISC? Anyway, if you mean x86_64, then, yes, you pretty much will be purchasing a 64bit capabile processor, as all but the mobile lines are now x86_64 from both Intel and AMD. However, as you have noted, Windows XP-64 is another issue. MS decided that they were going to test out some of their lockdown controls for drivers and hardware, basically a test run for when they release Vista so they could work out some of the more nasty "features" *cough* bugs *cough* that they want to introduce. As a result, all drivers must pass windows certification before being released, which is a hell of paperwork and processes to have done, especially when new hardware is so dependent on their drivers being updated (look at GPUs for instance where you might have a new driver every other week). This introduces a huge delay into those updates being released, and thus many companies simply do not deal with the hassle involved. They might release one version of the driver for Windows XP-64, but it most definitely is not maintained anywhere near as often as the 32bit XP driver branch. Again, all because MS wanted to see what kind of issues this would cause in their upcomming OS, Vista.
I usually don't like advertising a site, but just about everything you are looking to do can be done with stuff found on www.smarthome.com. From automatic water-pipe cut-off devices, to intricated temperature and environmental controls. Just look around. It can and will get expensive, but the water-pipe cut-offs are worth it the first time they engage and stop a problem before it is a problem.
It is very simple, well, seemingly so. I would bring an elementary school math teacher and a professional engineer along with a nice big chart/slideshow that shows the conversion from cents to dollars step by step and that.002 cents =.00002 dollars with the whole to convert cents to dollars rule of moving the decimal point two places to the left from an elementary school math book scanned in on the chart/slideshow. And if there is confusion as to that, then have the elementary school math teacher start teaching the lesson on converting cents to dollars and the lesson on how fractions of a cent can be used to calculate a fraction of a dollar. And finally have the professional engineer who is certified by the state (thus needs to understand fraction and decimal place mathematics) certify the correct conversion of the number (or a finance professor from a local college who might be interested in studying the lack of knowledge and understanding many people have when it comes to money).
As long as there is a clip mechanism for the heatsink to be held in place (and the heatsink makes full contact to the processor), you can use thermal paste instead of the pad. The only reason most laptops (and desktops) even use thermal pads is because it is a lot more difficult to mass produce the PC with using thermal paste (i.e. there is a lot more "art" involved in using paste, applying the correct ammount, not too much or too little, spreading the paste evenly across the processor and/or heatsink). Because there is next to no skill needed to slap on a thermal heat pad (all they have to do is make sure it is alligned on the chip), it is much faster and thus cheaper to use the thermal pads on a production line.
They sell their parts with or without the training. I picked up a few parts myself for a T40 Thinkpad which had a bad network board (wired and wifi), and a broken PCMCIA slot cover. They have full video's and instructions on how to disasemble thier Thinkpad series, from removing the keyboard, to replacing the steel cage that houses the removable media bay.
Since we will be paying the tax for potential pirating, thus, pirating will be allowed since we already paid for it. Canada's courts said as much themselves that if you are going to charge everyone for that tax, then they are free to do the activity which the tax is paying to allow you to do. If you get sued by Universal after paying the tax, I would have a motion to dismiss on those grounds immediately.
Well, it takes me approx 1.5 hours to setup a new webserver from scratch (i.e. no OS installed, no formated or partitioned disks, etc., nothing), which runs Solaris 10 (I know, it is not OSS yet, but will be soon), my own custom compiled Apache from latest source release, PHP, and MySql.
Trying to figure out how that is more expensive then Windows. If anything, I just saved myself 6 hours of patching the OS from WindowsUpdate (update, reboot, update for the updates, reboot, update for the updates to the updates, reboot, update one more time, reboot, check that there are finally no more updates). That is correct everyone. Last time I installed Windows XP Pro, it took 4 windows update sessions before there were no more patches left, and it was an SP2 install disk as well, just imagine if you had the original WinXP Pro disk, add 2 more windows update rounds to that number (SP1 and then SP2).
This is a FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT in our entire country. Votes MUST COUNT, and the VOTING PROCESS MUST BE ACCURATE! It doesn't matter at all if this "might" not have affected the outcome. How will we even know if the outcome that is presented is correct without a valid audit? And how can there be a valid audit if there is no trail other then the known incorrect data? We KNOW for a FACT that the data is wrong. We KNOW for a FACT that there is no paper trail in the machine. And because of that, we KNOW for a FACT that ANY RESULTS which use THIS MACHINE or ANY OF THE SAME TYPE are also subject to KNOWN BAD DATA.
How do we know that 40 people didn't vote for the person on the defective machine? We DON'T know that.
My point is, that without a valid paper trail, which the voter can verify him or herself at the time the vote is cast, we will never have valid voting on electronic machines. I have noting against using an easy to use machine. It can be electronic or otherwise, but I want actualy, tangible, physical proof that my vote is set to whomever I picked. Any programmer or system administrator will tell you that there will always be bugs, flaws, and system failures that result in strange things happening. I don't want a fault piece a RAM to keep my vote from ever being reported. Voting is too important to not have a simple, easy to read paper print out that the voter can look at and verify that the vote was correct.
Oh come on. I would seriously consider this myself. The request in itself is assinine. You can easily boot up the computer with Knoopix, log on to hotmail and yahoo and view the spam. Once you do that, technically, it is the system you viewed and recieved the spam on. If however you deleted the mail already, well I suspect your case is screwed anyway.
No, they aren't the only manufacturer. They might be the ones to blame in this case, but the other companies like BFG, eVGA, and Gigabyte usually create their own customized boards, and don't simply use the reference board. The reference board may be the one that this problem occurs on, and ASUS might be the manufacturer of the reference board, but they most certainly are not the only manufacturer of boards.
Slashdot Mirror
See the thread: http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/ message?board.id=ps3&thread.id=808212&view=by_date _ascending&page=1
It has the full story.
Which is one of the reason why I and more than a million other people like Guitar Hero. I HATE Dance Dance, and Karaoke Revolution, and even most of the Drum Beat whatever. They are too, how should I say, flowery. Its freaking METAL! I don't want to see stupid butterflys, or pastel balls flowing on the screen. I want to see Gene Simmons's tongue, or Ozzy bitting heads off of doves or bats (did I say that this is heavy metal? I think I said that...).
You nailed it. I completely agree with you on that one. The entire interview was/is simply damage control. People are very upset that developers were changed on a great product/franchise without any reason at all, other then possibly corporate greed. When they were caught making that change sooner then they anticipated, they throw one of their PR "firefighters" out to put a "smiley" face on the situation. Trying to get everyone to see that the guys who just lost their jobs for being too good at them (and wanting to be paid appropriately) get dropped after making a crap load of cash for the franchise.
It physically keeps the MP3's on that device, and that device alone. Without access to being able to get the recording off the device, there is no need to create other methods to protect 2nd generation copying as there is no ability to copy it anywhere else. The copy never leaves the recording device to be distributable. The only way to do that would be to connect an analog recorder to the output of the device, which by the way, would also defeat the copy protections on any other SCMS device (hence the analog hole).
Actually color space and bit depth are intertwined. You can't fully display a certain color space without having the bit depth needed to reproduce all the color shades associated with the color space. I agree that 10 bit is very sufficient for TV use, but in the future, TV's and large monitors may very well converge, just as the convergence for media PC's is already happening now. This display technology is not limited to just TV's. It can and possibly will be used for other things such as graphics work and medical imaging.
Last displayed models had contrast in the millions, not tens of thousands... The reason, black is pretty much true black, i.e. no light emitted, only extremely limited bleed from pixels directly next to them due to the way the technology creates the light in the first place. LCD's have a backlight that can never really be gotten rid of until a per pixel backlight is created (or a per pixel block, i.e. every block of 4 or 16 pixels have their own controllable backlight).
The color space I believe is 24 bits, not the 10 bits that the best LCD have. This will really show itself when displaying colors in the magenta range.
I should be possible to place a refresh rate of 120Hz, but I do not know if they will do this. I think the limiting factor will be that they want to use the power savings of the set as a selling point, and having a refresh rate 2x the speed of the competition would mean you need to use almost 2x the power since that would mean sending 2x as many electrons through the nanotube guns of the emitters.
Viewing angles I believe are the same as for CRT based displays. It is essentially the same idea as a CRT, with the difference being that instead of a single gun that has magnets shape the electron gun waveform output to scan across the entire screen, the SED displays have 3 guns for each pixel (one for each of the sub-pixel colors). They still use an electron to excite a phosphor to emit a photon. The only difference is that the electrons are now being channeled and aimed using a nano-tube structure.
So it is truly the best of all worlds in terms of TV display technology, thin as a plasma, weight as a LCD, contrast and color space of the best CRTs, viewing angles of CRTs, resolution of LCDs/CRTs, and better power usage then any of them. Technically, it has the potential to blow away everything. But we all know that technology alone will not win the war. Cost considerations, usability, and reliability will all play a major role (as well as the ability to manufacture).
Truthfully, go take some art lessons. You will be surprised that it just might help you out. Even just a few weeks of lessons might be enough to train your "eye" so that you can better understand what looks good and how to go about accomplishing that task. I had several classes when I was in 6-10th grade at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. They had summer programs as well as weekend programs for people interested in learning. Those courses really helped me out a lot when I was younger (I'm graduated from college now and have been working several full time for several years). I do not personally get to do a lot of graphics anymore, but from time to time, I do get the chance. It helps that I also took classes in computer graphics programming in college and know a lot of the theory of what to do (i.e. color spaces to use, proper techniques to scale images and points, etc., all of which have come in handy as I have written programs to do things like re-scale and shift click-maps for images (long story, but basically the application that made the image click maps would always generate the html code so that it was shifted several pixels in both the x and y planes as well as scaled .6 smaller in the x plane, and .63 in the y plane, so I wrote a program to read in the html page and correct all the image map coordinates by appropriate amounts)). So long story short, some local colleges and local art schools will have several classes that they offer which will give you some basic idea of how to start.
As for flash and animation, well, I highly suggest leaving that up to people who have spent several years of their lives taking training in the subject. It can be very difficult to work with. Especially dealing with the different versions of flash in existance and coding/drawing the frame movements. You would be surprised how bad some flash can look and how poorly it will perform if you do not do it correctly (there are always many ways to skin a cat, but in flash only 2 or them will run nicely).
LEDs are here. Even MythBusters did an episode on lights and costs. In it, they created a testing device to simulate the abuse a light takes turning on/off with it cycling every 2 minutes. After 2 weeks in that, only the LED lights still worked, traditional, florescent, and CFL's all stopped working by that point, with traditional going first, the regular florescents and the CFL's going approx the same time (the edge went to the CFL's). The LEDs also produced more lumens per watt power consumption as well as used the lest amount of energy to turn on, whereas the traditional florescents had a 7x power spike for turn on, and the traditionals had a 1.5x spike, even the CFL's had a power spike. Everything says to use LED lights now.
WOOHOOO...
Now that said. How do we know it will reduce quality of works created on the system itself? From my understanding, unless the media files themselves have a form of DRM on them, they won't be treated any differently then any other normal file. If you create it yourself as it seems that you would be if you are a marketing/promotion firm, then the protection is whatever you decide the protection will be. Just like in Linux/Unix, if you give it world read/write, well then anyone can read it and modify it. If you lock it down, well, then it is locked down.
... would be a better solution. I am pretty sure the electrical arch that will form on any/all electrically conductive material would be more then enough to fry the sensitive chips.
LOL... that would have been funny. Man, now I need to install that game again. I havn't played it in a while (last time was when they added the patch to hack networks, not just systems).
AllofMP3.com pays the correct proceeds under Russian law to ROMS (Russian Organization for Multimedia and Digital Systems a.k.a. similar to the RIAA in Russia). ROMS is a non-for-profit organization that handles all copyright payment transactions in Russia, including collecting for foreign interests. All the money is held until it is requested by the appropriate parties with proof that they are the correct owners of the copyrighted material. All requests can also be retro-active requests for payment, (i.e. if you have been the owner of the work, and have not received your cut for the last 4 years, you simply request that you receive your payments for the entire time that you have been the copyright owner).
The RIAA knows this and so do their member groups. The issue is that they do not want to request the payment because they think doing so will give legitimacy to places like AllofMP3.com who are following the Russian rules to copyright payments. The RIAA does not like the Russian rules and seeks to circumvent them. By not requesting for their payments they are trying to use that as a means for the lawsuit(s) you are now witness to over the last few months against different Russian sites.
I mean seriously, I am glad ROT13 is only a useful text encryption format. Because with data, well, ROT13 a hex encoded byte... Doesn't decrypt too well with another ROT13 does it...
...since linking to anything copyrighted is now illegal, unless the page specifically tells you that you that you have the right to link to it or unless it is specifically stated that the page is not copyrighted, you can't link to anything other then pages you own the copyright to without getting express permission from the holders.
... just not Windows :D
Lets see, can anyone say Sparc and RISC? Anyway, if you mean x86_64, then, yes, you pretty much will be purchasing a 64bit capabile processor, as all but the mobile lines are now x86_64 from both Intel and AMD. However, as you have noted, Windows XP-64 is another issue. MS decided that they were going to test out some of their lockdown controls for drivers and hardware, basically a test run for when they release Vista so they could work out some of the more nasty "features" *cough* bugs *cough* that they want to introduce. As a result, all drivers must pass windows certification before being released, which is a hell of paperwork and processes to have done, especially when new hardware is so dependent on their drivers being updated (look at GPUs for instance where you might have a new driver every other week). This introduces a huge delay into those updates being released, and thus many companies simply do not deal with the hassle involved. They might release one version of the driver for Windows XP-64, but it most definitely is not maintained anywhere near as often as the 32bit XP driver branch. Again, all because MS wanted to see what kind of issues this would cause in their upcomming OS, Vista.
I usually don't like advertising a site, but just about everything you are looking to do can be done with stuff found on www.smarthome.com. From automatic water-pipe cut-off devices, to intricated temperature and environmental controls. Just look around. It can and will get expensive, but the water-pipe cut-offs are worth it the first time they engage and stop a problem before it is a problem.
It is very simple, well, seemingly so. I would bring an elementary school math teacher and a professional engineer along with a nice big chart/slideshow that shows the conversion from cents to dollars step by step and that .002 cents = .00002 dollars with the whole to convert cents to dollars rule of moving the decimal point two places to the left from an elementary school math book scanned in on the chart/slideshow. And if there is confusion as to that, then have the elementary school math teacher start teaching the lesson on converting cents to dollars and the lesson on how fractions of a cent can be used to calculate a fraction of a dollar. And finally have the professional engineer who is certified by the state (thus needs to understand fraction and decimal place mathematics) certify the correct conversion of the number (or a finance professor from a local college who might be interested in studying the lack of knowledge and understanding many people have when it comes to money).
As long as there is a clip mechanism for the heatsink to be held in place (and the heatsink makes full contact to the processor), you can use thermal paste instead of the pad. The only reason most laptops (and desktops) even use thermal pads is because it is a lot more difficult to mass produce the PC with using thermal paste (i.e. there is a lot more "art" involved in using paste, applying the correct ammount, not too much or too little, spreading the paste evenly across the processor and/or heatsink). Because there is next to no skill needed to slap on a thermal heat pad (all they have to do is make sure it is alligned on the chip), it is much faster and thus cheaper to use the thermal pads on a production line.
They sell their parts with or without the training. I picked up a few parts myself for a T40 Thinkpad which had a bad network board (wired and wifi), and a broken PCMCIA slot cover. They have full video's and instructions on how to disasemble thier Thinkpad series, from removing the keyboard, to replacing the steel cage that houses the removable media bay.
Knoppix is my personal favorite, but I deal with a lot of linux/unix x86 hardware which can be easily fixed using this software.
However if you deal with Windows systems, look to keep "The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows" in you list. http://www.ubcd4win.com/
LinuxDefender Live is also another good one to have.
Since we will be paying the tax for potential pirating, thus, pirating will be allowed since we already paid for it. Canada's courts said as much themselves that if you are going to charge everyone for that tax, then they are free to do the activity which the tax is paying to allow you to do. If you get sued by Universal after paying the tax, I would have a motion to dismiss on those grounds immediately.
Well, it takes me approx 1.5 hours to setup a new webserver from scratch (i.e. no OS installed, no formated or partitioned disks, etc., nothing), which runs Solaris 10 (I know, it is not OSS yet, but will be soon), my own custom compiled Apache from latest source release, PHP, and MySql.
Trying to figure out how that is more expensive then Windows. If anything, I just saved myself 6 hours of patching the OS from WindowsUpdate (update, reboot, update for the updates, reboot, update for the updates to the updates, reboot, update one more time, reboot, check that there are finally no more updates). That is correct everyone. Last time I installed Windows XP Pro, it took 4 windows update sessions before there were no more patches left, and it was an SP2 install disk as well, just imagine if you had the original WinXP Pro disk, add 2 more windows update rounds to that number (SP1 and then SP2).
This is a FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT in our entire country. Votes MUST COUNT, and the VOTING PROCESS MUST BE ACCURATE! It doesn't matter at all if this "might" not have affected the outcome. How will we even know if the outcome that is presented is correct without a valid audit? And how can there be a valid audit if there is no trail other then the known incorrect data? We KNOW for a FACT that the data is wrong. We KNOW for a FACT that there is no paper trail in the machine. And because of that, we KNOW for a FACT that ANY RESULTS which use THIS MACHINE or ANY OF THE SAME TYPE are also subject to KNOWN BAD DATA.
How do we know that 40 people didn't vote for the person on the defective machine? We DON'T know that.
My point is, that without a valid paper trail, which the voter can verify him or herself at the time the vote is cast, we will never have valid voting on electronic machines. I have noting against using an easy to use machine. It can be electronic or otherwise, but I want actualy, tangible, physical proof that my vote is set to whomever I picked. Any programmer or system administrator will tell you that there will always be bugs, flaws, and system failures that result in strange things happening. I don't want a fault piece a RAM to keep my vote from ever being reported. Voting is too important to not have a simple, easy to read paper print out that the voter can look at and verify that the vote was correct.
Oh come on. I would seriously consider this myself. The request in itself is assinine. You can easily boot up the computer with Knoopix, log on to hotmail and yahoo and view the spam. Once you do that, technically, it is the system you viewed and recieved the spam on. If however you deleted the mail already, well I suspect your case is screwed anyway.
No, they aren't the only manufacturer. They might be the ones to blame in this case, but the other companies like BFG, eVGA, and Gigabyte usually create their own customized boards, and don't simply use the reference board. The reference board may be the one that this problem occurs on, and ASUS might be the manufacturer of the reference board, but they most certainly are not the only manufacturer of boards.