Well, if they vote without having to out of loyalty, they're not much different than the hundreds of millions of Americans who vote against their own interests out of party loyalty. And Americans don't have the excuse of inadequate education to think these things through. Shortsighted laziness is a universal asset to political manipulators.
The solution, of course, is better education, and more democratic media. Not just more education, and not in schools, and not centralized media. But people communicating with each other better, better able to check into lies spread among them. That lets people organize themselves, better than the political orgs that are against them. Because though it's easy to be poor some places, it's better not to be poor everywhere. The more people individually find out how to change that for themselves, the harder it is to keep them down with candy.
FWIW, how much is the income tax, or total other taxes, in addition to the IVA? And is anything excluded from the IVA?
How do they buy your votes, if the voting is still secret? I guess that people too lame to vote without being paid might just vote for whoever buys their "vote" (their showing at the polls, anyway), even if they don't have to, maybe because that's the only candidate who's name they can recognize.
The obvious solution is for the government to let anyone with a stamped DNI ride public transit, or even private transit where the public isn't any good, for free, with a free ticket or two. And give everyone something like $5 with their vote. The government can pay for it with the fines on people caught not voting.
I wonder how much of these telecom giveaways, including this half-handed "deregulation" that will let telcos do to the rest of the Internet what they did to DSL competitors (ie. kill it), and the NSA spying immunity, are grabbed because telcos just have all kinds of evidence incriminating politicians fool enough to talk openly on their phones?
Such a power can never be broken. Not with the existing generation of crooked politicos, with no relief in the foreseeable future.
Thanks for that detailed walkthru of an Argentinian Election Day. Satisfying to the curiosity.
But how is that a "problem"? Sounds like the vote buyer can, at most, enforce the legally mandatory voting by the seller. Which means that all that can be sold is one's escape from one's voting obligation, which sounds like a great way to "privatize" enforcement of the voting obligation. Though why the buyer would pay for such a privilege, seeing the DNI stamp, is beyond me. At least, in such a scattered way as selling the enforcement on eBay.
Though it does all add up to an interesting "Get Out the Vote" system in the US, where $millions are spent every election, without nearly the same reliable results as getting a receipt from the voter for their participation, in exchange for maybe a dollar or two. Such a system might get the poor to represent in the election better, which might drive the competing classes to do so themselves.
I get the joke. TFA also mentioned that one seller's photo shows them holding a glass up to the camera, implying an alcohol toast, implying a nonserious person or offer.
But so much journalism is some kind of coded implication that it's heavy labor to sort out all the joke articles from the serious ones. Especially when so many of the stories are preposterous, yet true, yet extremely important (like digital voting).
I bet the BBC edited some of the info that made it clear that it's a joke. Like the impossibility of enforcing the "sale", as I described. Which makes the story itself more part of the mass media's work to discredit verified voting by (unaccountably) implying that "Internet + voting" = "vote buying".
So I sell my vote on eBay. You buy it, I get your money. Then I don't vote, or vote however I want. What do you do about it? You can't even prove that I didn't "deliver".
This scenario is one of the most elementary scams avoided by the anonymous secret ballots available for centuries. Any fool who buys these unprovable votes should just send me a fat PayPal load right now.
Whichever anonymous twit over at the BBC News / Americas who wrote that article ignored that basic fact of this story.
Yeah, I did ask this "wise" community, which nearly entirely couldn't even figure out that it's the notifier, not the updater, that isn't working well. On the day the distro is released, and my notifier isn't showing, and the release is a Slashdot story, I'd think that just asking a question, then agreeing with the credible answer
Oh, and my notifier still wasn't notifying me, even though the Software Sources polling timer was "Daily", and it had been more than 24h since the new distro was available (and known to my update-mananger). I opened and closed the S-S dialog without any change, but then I opened it again, changed one preference, and on close was warned that the client state needed to be synced with the server. Which took several minutes, and left the dialog frozen, but without any "busy" cursor. So I clicked its window close icon, was warned that it wasn't finished, but couldn't tell whether it was just frozen in a loop, so I closed it anyway. I opened it again, toggled a preference, closed it, was warned the state needed syncing, accepted, waited a minute or so. And then finally got a notifier icon. That's crap software design.
But of course it's my fault, not the software's. Me and maybe several million other people with exactly my problem. With "smart" Ubuntu experts like you, no wonder its in the state its in.
Everyone reading this message should hit their site, view their source, and report to them that you've just violated their indefensible terms. Hopefully, they'll sue each and every one of us, and go broke frivolously.
You're likely right. We'll see tomorrow. I'm not in an urgent rush to upgrade the minute the distro is available - the "early adopter" traffic is bad enough. But a silent notifier might have been silent forever. The notifier doesn't seem to expose any properties that I can set like "check now" or "check every N minutes". So it needs upgrading.
In a sea of noise from people not even understanding the problem I clearly set out, yours was the only reasonable answer. Now I expect to get a flood of snarky "fix it yourself for 8.04" flames from the hapless crowd.
I save as DOC and XLS formats because I don't want to have to convert the files when I share them. Since I'm using only the common features, I don't lose anything in the "foreign" format. Often I want to just email someone quick a spreadsheet, and I don't want to take 10x as long to open the OO.o doc in OO.o, Save As, clean up, and then maintain two different formats of the same doc as I revise it in collaboration with the people with whom I'm sharing it.
If those OO.o files were really proper objects, rather than just data, they could expose an "Attach As..." function that calls OO.o code when an email (or other) process sends them a message to attach to an outgoing email (or whatever). Such "OO" (Object Oriented) functionality could make all these file formats just a transient state, with objects stored in whatever native state they want, and interacting with any app compatible with their roster of interchange formats.
If I launch the update-manager manually, it knows the distro upgrade is available, and offers it to me. But it's not showing the icon on the Desktop to notify me to launch u-m. This looks like a design flaw in u-m.
You're a jerkoff, Anonymous Coward. If it were truly "impossible", then running the u-m manually like I said wouldn't work, though I said it did.
The point of the notification icon is that the system's ready state is pushed to the user for activation, rather than the user wasting all that time polling it with the menu access to u-m all the time until it's hit.
The vast majority of users just find out through some other means than a notification icon, like this Slashdot story or the onerous polling process. By which time there is an upgrade available, if they heard about it, but not as soon as it's available, so they're working with the unimproved version longer than they have to.
You really have no basis for conceited condescension when you can't even figure out what the notification icon is for. It's so basic. There's certainly one "fellow" Ubuntu user of whom I don't think much: you. And now I'm going to turn that into not thinking of you at all.
First of all, "how come" is a perfectly good question to ask. Unless the person reading it is an uptight fanboy.
Secondly, your attempt to bash Apple and Microsoft irrelevantly while dismissing my perfectly legitimate question (about an obvious design flaw in Ubuntu) is proof that you are that uptight fanboy.
Take your obnoxious idiocy elsewhere. The millions of us who also would like the update-manager to work properly don't care what you type. We just want to use Ubuntu without wasting a lot of time working for it, rather than it working for us.
That's not my problem (which is that the u-m isn't notifying me of the available distro upgrade), but it does point at another shortcoming of the system. Why doesn't APT include a BitTorrent protocol interface that upgrades can try, other than just the HTTP and FTP protocols? The torrents are already part of the upgrade process, at least for distros and downloadable discs. Why not include their protocol, now that the content for the protocol and the virtual network of connectible nodes is widely operational?
A tiny fraction of users skip distro upgrades. In fact, the biannual upgrades are one of the primary reasons for Ubuntu's huge popularity. Many times more of us would like to see the icon when there's a distro upgrade. The vast majority of us would have to manually monitor arbitrary reports of the release, and manually run u-m checking if it's available all through the projected release date, until it worked. That's an insane sacrifice of most people's time in exchange for avoiding a minor annoyance by a tiny minority.
If you want to wait, the icon could have a preference to wait for either the next upgrade, or a specified one.
It's impossible for users to know we should run u-m manually when a new distro is out, the part of the process that's far from "easy enough".
Did your Desktop automatically show you an upgrade icon without you running an app to find out whether one's available, or did you know it was available and launch u-m? Because I'm complaining about the notifier.
The problem, exactly, is exactly as I said. The u-m Desktop icon doesn't indicate that there's a distro upgrade available. So I have to know somehow that there's an upgrade available, and then manually start the u-m. That's the entire point of having the u-m icon appear when upgrades are ready.
And the other problem is, as I said, that lots of those "Gutsy" apps aren't necessarily Gutsy, they're just packaged that way. Many don't depend on anything that isn't in Feisty, though there are some complex dependencies on packages that are upgraded to meet the Gutsy deadline. Towards the Gutsy release date, but still in advance of the full Gutsy release, those less dependent apps should start offering to upgrade. Which would in turn take a lot of the load off the upgrade process on the date the full distro upgrade is released.
(sudo update-manager -c) works, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the upgrade-manager telling me that its monitoring has found a distro upgrade.
If users don't read Slashdot, how are they supposed to know to look for a new version, to run the command? That's what the u-m icon is for.
How come my Feisty (Ubuntu v7.04) update-manager doesn't know that there's a new distro upgrade available? There should be an icon in my Desktop panel offering a 1-click upgrade if I want.
I think it's weird that all the different apps, especially OS supporting apps, that are upgraded in the new release aren't demanding to be upgraded, even retaining the previous OS version without upgrading it, if dependencies allow (which is usually mostly the case for most apps that don't depend on a new kernel or something).
The Ubuntu upgrade system should offer steady upgrades between milestone OS releases, as it does, but much steadier. The OS release date should be more a convenient watermark, a snapshot with more through testing that developers use as a target, rather than an exclusive release that leaves users of previous OS version behind.
Yes, that is exactly the kind of info I was looking for. I'm a little skeptical that the PC requirements are only a "Pentium 1.2GHz+/128MB", but that means the PC+card are not only cheap, but fanless, which is good for putting near my TV. Since the card is $129, and Firewire is cheap, the entire box could probably be under $500, including a biggish HD for caching video playback content.
Do you know what they mean by
# Accelerated HDTV support with nVidia video cards. # Accelerated IDCT and Motion Compensation with GeForce4 Mx cards # Accelerated Motion Compensation with GeForce4 TI cards
Is it worth paying for a more expensive card to get any/all those features?
Thanks!
BTW, I wonder what will happen with the new FCC requirement that forces TWC to unbundle all set-top boxes. Doesn't that law imply that TWC competitors have to have HD decryption keys? Like me, perhaps?
this 10-terabits-per-square-inch goal, which would enable a 40-terabyte hard drive.'
It could also enable a 750-gigabyte 1" radius HD, if they're really clever. Which could serve the Bluetooth wristphone/player we've all been waiting for. So we can stop referring to that mobile multimedia terminal as a "phone", and again more accurately as a "watch".
What's the best PC HW to drive my 50" HDMI TV, that costs under $1000 and runs a Linux PVR like MythTV, and works on NYC TimeWarner cable?
And can it seamlessly include a Web browser for fullscreen YouTube (and similar) Internet video, and play video files from my HD as well as my DVD (and Blu-Ray) player?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if they vote without having to out of loyalty, they're not much different than the hundreds of millions of Americans who vote against their own interests out of party loyalty. And Americans don't have the excuse of inadequate education to think these things through. Shortsighted laziness is a universal asset to political manipulators.
The solution, of course, is better education, and more democratic media. Not just more education, and not in schools, and not centralized media. But people communicating with each other better, better able to check into lies spread among them. That lets people organize themselves, better than the political orgs that are against them. Because though it's easy to be poor some places, it's better not to be poor everywhere. The more people individually find out how to change that for themselves, the harder it is to keep them down with candy.
FWIW, how much is the income tax, or total other taxes, in addition to the IVA? And is anything excluded from the IVA?
How do they buy your votes, if the voting is still secret? I guess that people too lame to vote without being paid might just vote for whoever buys their "vote" (their showing at the polls, anyway), even if they don't have to, maybe because that's the only candidate who's name they can recognize.
The obvious solution is for the government to let anyone with a stamped DNI ride public transit, or even private transit where the public isn't any good, for free, with a free ticket or two. And give everyone something like $5 with their vote. The government can pay for it with the fines on people caught not voting.
I wonder how much of these telecom giveaways, including this half-handed "deregulation" that will let telcos do to the rest of the Internet what they did to DSL competitors (ie. kill it), and the NSA spying immunity, are grabbed because telcos just have all kinds of evidence incriminating politicians fool enough to talk openly on their phones?
Such a power can never be broken. Not with the existing generation of crooked politicos, with no relief in the foreseeable future.
Thanks for that detailed walkthru of an Argentinian Election Day. Satisfying to the curiosity.
But how is that a "problem"? Sounds like the vote buyer can, at most, enforce the legally mandatory voting by the seller. Which means that all that can be sold is one's escape from one's voting obligation, which sounds like a great way to "privatize" enforcement of the voting obligation. Though why the buyer would pay for such a privilege, seeing the DNI stamp, is beyond me. At least, in such a scattered way as selling the enforcement on eBay.
Though it does all add up to an interesting "Get Out the Vote" system in the US, where $millions are spent every election, without nearly the same reliable results as getting a receipt from the voter for their participation, in exchange for maybe a dollar or two. Such a system might get the poor to represent in the election better, which might drive the competing classes to do so themselves.
I get the joke. TFA also mentioned that one seller's photo shows them holding a glass up to the camera, implying an alcohol toast, implying a nonserious person or offer.
But so much journalism is some kind of coded implication that it's heavy labor to sort out all the joke articles from the serious ones. Especially when so many of the stories are preposterous, yet true, yet extremely important (like digital voting).
I bet the BBC edited some of the info that made it clear that it's a joke. Like the impossibility of enforcing the "sale", as I described. Which makes the story itself more part of the mass media's work to discredit verified voting by (unaccountably) implying that "Internet + voting" = "vote buying".
If you untwisted that comment from its oscillations between sarcasm and straight talk we might be able to discuss it.
So I sell my vote on eBay. You buy it, I get your money. Then I don't vote, or vote however I want. What do you do about it? You can't even prove that I didn't "deliver".
This scenario is one of the most elementary scams avoided by the anonymous secret ballots available for centuries. Any fool who buys these unprovable votes should just send me a fat PayPal load right now.
Whichever anonymous twit over at the BBC News / Americas who wrote that article ignored that basic fact of this story.
Yeah, I did ask this "wise" community, which nearly entirely couldn't even figure out that it's the notifier, not the updater, that isn't working well. On the day the distro is released, and my notifier isn't showing, and the release is a Slashdot story, I'd think that just asking a question, then agreeing with the credible answer
Oh, and my notifier still wasn't notifying me, even though the Software Sources polling timer was "Daily", and it had been more than 24h since the new distro was available (and known to my update-mananger). I opened and closed the S-S dialog without any change, but then I opened it again, changed one preference, and on close was warned that the client state needed to be synced with the server. Which took several minutes, and left the dialog frozen, but without any "busy" cursor. So I clicked its window close icon, was warned that it wasn't finished, but couldn't tell whether it was just frozen in a loop, so I closed it anyway. I opened it again, toggled a preference, closed it, was warned the state needed syncing, accepted, waited a minute or so. And then finally got a notifier icon. That's crap software design.
But of course it's my fault, not the software's. Me and maybe several million other people with exactly my problem. With "smart" Ubuntu experts like you, no wonder its in the state its in.
Everyone reading this message should hit their site, view their source, and report to them that you've just violated their indefensible terms. Hopefully, they'll sue each and every one of us, and go broke frivolously.
You're likely right. We'll see tomorrow. I'm not in an urgent rush to upgrade the minute the distro is available - the "early adopter" traffic is bad enough. But a silent notifier might have been silent forever. The notifier doesn't seem to expose any properties that I can set like "check now" or "check every N minutes". So it needs upgrading.
In a sea of noise from people not even understanding the problem I clearly set out, yours was the only reasonable answer. Now I expect to get a flood of snarky "fix it yourself for 8.04" flames from the hapless crowd.
I save as DOC and XLS formats because I don't want to have to convert the files when I share them. Since I'm using only the common features, I don't lose anything in the "foreign" format. Often I want to just email someone quick a spreadsheet, and I don't want to take 10x as long to open the OO.o doc in OO.o, Save As, clean up, and then maintain two different formats of the same doc as I revise it in collaboration with the people with whom I'm sharing it.
If those OO.o files were really proper objects, rather than just data, they could expose an "Attach As..." function that calls OO.o code when an email (or other) process sends them a message to attach to an outgoing email (or whatever). Such "OO" (Object Oriented) functionality could make all these file formats just a transient state, with objects stored in whatever native state they want, and interacting with any app compatible with their roster of interchange formats.
If I launch the update-manager manually, it knows the distro upgrade is available, and offers it to me. But it's not showing the icon on the Desktop to notify me to launch u-m. This looks like a design flaw in u-m.
You're a jerkoff, Anonymous Coward. If it were truly "impossible", then running the u-m manually like I said wouldn't work, though I said it did.
The point of the notification icon is that the system's ready state is pushed to the user for activation, rather than the user wasting all that time polling it with the menu access to u-m all the time until it's hit.
The vast majority of users just find out through some other means than a notification icon, like this Slashdot story or the onerous polling process. By which time there is an upgrade available, if they heard about it, but not as soon as it's available, so they're working with the unimproved version longer than they have to.
You really have no basis for conceited condescension when you can't even figure out what the notification icon is for. It's so basic. There's certainly one "fellow" Ubuntu user of whom I don't think much: you. And now I'm going to turn that into not thinking of you at all.
First of all, "how come" is a perfectly good question to ask. Unless the person reading it is an uptight fanboy.
Secondly, your attempt to bash Apple and Microsoft irrelevantly while dismissing my perfectly legitimate question (about an obvious design flaw in Ubuntu) is proof that you are that uptight fanboy.
Take your obnoxious idiocy elsewhere. The millions of us who also would like the update-manager to work properly don't care what you type. We just want to use Ubuntu without wasting a lot of time working for it, rather than it working for us.
That's not my problem (which is that the u-m isn't notifying me of the available distro upgrade), but it does point at another shortcoming of the system. Why doesn't APT include a BitTorrent protocol interface that upgrades can try, other than just the HTTP and FTP protocols? The torrents are already part of the upgrade process, at least for distros and downloadable discs. Why not include their protocol, now that the content for the protocol and the virtual network of connectible nodes is widely operational?
Where are the instructions for knowing the upgrade is available when the "upgrade notifer" icon doesn't appear to tell the user?
A tiny fraction of users skip distro upgrades. In fact, the biannual upgrades are one of the primary reasons for Ubuntu's huge popularity. Many times more of us would like to see the icon when there's a distro upgrade. The vast majority of us would have to manually monitor arbitrary reports of the release, and manually run u-m checking if it's available all through the projected release date, until it worked. That's an insane sacrifice of most people's time in exchange for avoiding a minor annoyance by a tiny minority.
If you want to wait, the icon could have a preference to wait for either the next upgrade, or a specified one.
It's impossible for users to know we should run u-m manually when a new distro is out, the part of the process that's far from "easy enough".
Did your Desktop automatically show you an upgrade icon without you running an app to find out whether one's available, or did you know it was available and launch u-m? Because I'm complaining about the notifier.
The problem, exactly, is exactly as I said. The u-m Desktop icon doesn't indicate that there's a distro upgrade available. So I have to know somehow that there's an upgrade available, and then manually start the u-m. That's the entire point of having the u-m icon appear when upgrades are ready.
And the other problem is, as I said, that lots of those "Gutsy" apps aren't necessarily Gutsy, they're just packaged that way. Many don't depend on anything that isn't in Feisty, though there are some complex dependencies on packages that are upgraded to meet the Gutsy deadline. Towards the Gutsy release date, but still in advance of the full Gutsy release, those less dependent apps should start offering to upgrade. Which would in turn take a lot of the load off the upgrade process on the date the full distro upgrade is released.
(sudo update-manager -c) works, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the upgrade-manager telling me that its monitoring has found a distro upgrade.
If users don't read Slashdot, how are they supposed to know to look for a new version, to run the command? That's what the u-m icon is for.
How come my Feisty (Ubuntu v7.04) update-manager doesn't know that there's a new distro upgrade available? There should be an icon in my Desktop panel offering a 1-click upgrade if I want.
I think it's weird that all the different apps, especially OS supporting apps, that are upgraded in the new release aren't demanding to be upgraded, even retaining the previous OS version without upgrading it, if dependencies allow (which is usually mostly the case for most apps that don't depend on a new kernel or something).
The Ubuntu upgrade system should offer steady upgrades between milestone OS releases, as it does, but much steadier. The OS release date should be more a convenient watermark, a snapshot with more through testing that developers use as a target, rather than an exclusive release that leaves users of previous OS version behind.
Do you know what they mean by
Is it worth paying for a more expensive card to get any/all those features?
Thanks!
BTW, I wonder what will happen with the new FCC requirement that forces TWC to unbundle all set-top boxes. Doesn't that law imply that TWC competitors have to have HD decryption keys? Like me, perhaps?
It could also enable a 750-gigabyte 1" radius HD, if they're really clever. Which could serve the Bluetooth wristphone/player we've all been waiting for. So we can stop referring to that mobile multimedia terminal as a "phone", and again more accurately as a "watch".
Yeah: submit a lot more tech stories and comments yourself, and urge your friends to do so.
That's what an open blog is like.
Or maybe another tech market crash to make geekery unpopular again and drive off the posers.
What's the best PC HW to drive my 50" HDMI TV, that costs under $1000 and runs a Linux PVR like MythTV, and works on NYC TimeWarner cable?
And can it seamlessly include a Web browser for fullscreen YouTube (and similar) Internet video, and play video files from my HD as well as my DVD (and Blu-Ray) player?