Yes, your damned right it should withstand the abuses that an ATM on the street might have to endure, since the ballot box is used to select government officials whom, in the course of their duties, are going to be spending my tax money.
With ATMs, the manufacturers, the owners, and the maintainers all have a strong and direct incentive to keep them secure. It's also relatively easy to quantify the damage from an ATM breach. Furthermore, the end users of ATMs don't really care that much if some machine across the country gets compromised and all the slips of paper are removed.
With voting machines, none of this is true. No single person or group can be trusted with the keys to the kingdom. It's impossible to quantify the potential damage an insecure system can do, and everybody is affected by a breach anywhere.
Then, one day, I will, and the "Law of Magical Excellent Driving" that I've been asserting has been an invisible hand guiding my car around has been violated. Oh noes! How could this have happened?! How did this law which had protected my safety for all those years suddenly fail to apply?...
You can't ignore the fact that you would be a different driver today if your "Law of Magical Excellent Driving" had not upheld itself. If you were regularly involved in accidents, that would affect your opinions of buying new vs used and buying Volvos vs Yugos.
The fact that Moore's "Law" has upheld for decades with such consistency has allowed people to safely assume it will continue to do so. It's that assumption that allows people to take different paths and accept different risks than a more volatile progression would have made feasible.
You are right that is not a law like the laws of physics, but if it behaves like one, the difference is largely semantic.
Its a Republican hatchet job, just like Martha Stewart. She was sent to jail over $50,000. She's worth what? Tens of millions, Hundreds, Billions? Do you really believed she intended to defraud share holders out of a pissy 50 grand?
Yes, of course she did. She just did not consider it fraud.
Do you really think most wealthy people get and remain wealthy by staying well within the boundaries of both the spirit and letter of the law? No, they push the envelopes, legal and otherwise. The grass is greener where fewer graze, and all that.
Starting from a similar situation, can a phone company be considered an accessory because someone used the pay phone they provided on the side of a building?
The phone company is a "common carrier". That basically means that because they are willing to jump through certain hoops, the public agrees to not hold them liable for the content of the information they carry. The downside for them is losing quite of bit of freedom and choice in providing their service.
You, as an individual, are not a common carrier. You haven't taken the required steps to become one. You are not absolved of responsibility for the content of information traveling across networks you control.
Dell would release PCs running XP without all the other crap it might be worth buying one. Maybe...
You do realize that all that nagware crap subsidizes the cost of the hardware, don't you? All that crap is exactly why Dells are worth buying. One wipe, which I'd be doing anyways, and it's all gone.
Yeah, but when the printer costs $50, and a new manufacturer ink cartridge costs $45
Officemax/Staples/CompUSA/etc sometimes have inkjets for $30 w/ a $30 mail-in rebate. Just buy a new printer, and when the initial cartridge runs out, toss the printer and get a new one.
If you have the means to fly on a sufficiently regular basis that in-flight phone access is important to you, then you certainly have the means to live somewhere closer to civilization. Having fewer options as a consumer when you live in the boonies is not exactly a new issue, either.
The administration (not just this one but any one in the future) can call up the CIA/FBI, tell them that they have reason to believe you are a terrorist and you will be put in jail with no access to a lawyer, no phone call, no trial, nothing. You will stay there indefinitely.
All that has changed is the label:
Before terrorists, it was desegregationists. Before desegregationists, it was communists. Before communists, it was anarchists. Before anarchists, it was unionists. Before unionists, it was feminists Before feminists, it was secessionists Before secessionists, it was abolitionists Before abolitionists, it was transcendentalists. Before transcendentalists, it was restorationists. Before restorationists, it was monarchists.
Before you worry about losing your rights, stop for a moment and ask if you ever really had them in the first place. The world changes much more slowly than it appears.
This difference between the rich and the poor in China is staggering. I know people from China, and they say the rich people are very rich. They drive around in expensive cars, and send their kids to Canadian schools who charge tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition. These children also have their own expensive cars. Even if there is only %0.01 rich people (it's probably much higher), that's still 100000 people. If you ask me, they aren't doing too well.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. The income distribution in China is similar to that of the US.
The calculus is pretty straightforward...which one of the following is more costly?
1) Inability to work without a reliable connection. 2) Dealing with the risk of theft, drive crash, maintenance of backups at the user level, etc.
It's also an old question. Just because we are using browsers instead of X terminals doesn't make much difference. The answer to which was better was and will remain, "it depends". Different strokes for different folks.
TFA is really short on technical details, but it sounds to me as though SET is just a re-design of DHT. Still, I imagine SET support will be in the next builds of all the major bittorrent clients if it ends up being worth something.
As TFA current describes things, I'm really struggling to find a use for this feature that does not involve copyright infringement. The rightsholders for "legitimate" p2p traffic already have a strong incentive to act as a central authority for low-bandwidth meta-data.
I think this is a solution for a problem that lies primarily with pirated files. I wouldn't be surprised if Bittorrent stayed far away from it.
1h 45m from install to having a working, up to date and configured system running http, https, php, java, tomcat, mysql, mail server, ftp server, remote X access
Connect a fresh Windows ME box to the net and you can get all that in 1 minute and 45 seconds.
"who owns these songs? I rather suspect it isn't the artists any more."
Ownership? That's easy. Everybody who has heard the song shares in joint ownership.
You are probably more interested in who retains the various rights to the song, such as the right to copy, the right to distribute, the right to publish, the right to sell and resell copies, the rights to trancode, transcribe, or translate, the rights to create derivative works, etc.
All of these rights will mostly likely be retained by lots of different holders. You can count them all up and declare whoever has the most as the winner and grant them the title of "owner", but doing so is pretty meaningless.
Real estate serves as a decent analogy to intellectual property. You can't actually own land, only the title to that land. With the ownership of a title comes certain exclusive rights, but don't get fooled into believing you actually own the land itself, or you'll be in for a rude awakening when your city council approves construction of a highway through your kingdom.
IP works in a similar fashion...once something is published, the "ownership" becomes too distributed to be mean meaningful because there is no longer any exclusive possession.
Monopoly is also a lot more brilliant a game than most people think.
In the 1930's Monopoly was brilliant. In contrast with modern games, its flaws are thrown in sharp relief.
Game design: 1) It is an elimination game with a platykurtic expected duration distribution. If you are going to knock players out, you need a strongly defined endpoint. 2) Deal-making games are more interesting with more players; deal-making games with elimination get less interesting as the game progresses. 3) It has indeterminant length and lacks a fair withdrawal procedure. If the game can run overlong, players need a exit that doesn't throw the game. 4) The decision tree is sparse, and the most important decisions occur early. The endgame is not much different than the end of Snakes & Ladders.
Game mechanics: 1) 'Roll & Move' includes a completely unnecessary step. Customized dice could replace the entire token track. 2) Keeping score to four-digit precision serves no purpose when player decisions only have two-digit granularity. Player spend too much time tracking what they cannot control.
Components: 1) The gameboard wastes a colossal amount of space. Games that waste real estate can less easily be enjoyed at the players' convenience. 2) Paper money is inferior to plastic chips for the required transactions. Modern games with similar MSRP have a far greater production quality.
Monopoly is the Model T of boardgames, a revolutionary product that has truly earned a place of honor in any museum. You may enjoy driving antique cars, but you'll have little success convincing others they offer a superior ride than modern designs.
Yes, I did RTFA and I read the relevant text of the bill (section 247(C)9). The languange doesn't differentiate between platform software and software specific to the e-voting task.
I read the bill too. All it did was remind me of this old automobile law:
The Locomotive Act 1865 set a speed limit of 4 mph in the country and 2 mph in towns. The 1865 Act also provided for the then famous "man with a red flag". Walking 60 yards ahead of each vehicle, a man with a red flag or lantern enforced a walking pace, and warned horse riders and horse drawn traffic of the approach of a self propelled machine. http://www.nationalnumbers.co.uk/number-plate-hist ory.htm
While most of the requirements listed by the bill seem like good ideas, I get the impression the actual purpose of this bill is to make deployment of e-voting machines sufficiently onerous to make the whole idea pointless. Once you enforce the hobbling every potential advantage an e-voting system may have, you can rest secure with any existing investments you may have in the companies manufacturing existing machines. The pessimist in me wonders if Mr. Rush Holt has already planned for that exact scenario.
Further, I'd argue that connecting to a central server with a CD key is not proof against piracy.
It's not about "connecting to a central server" that fights piracy, it's changing the payment scheme to a method that gives both parties an incentive to play fair. I think a pay-to-play scheme will win in the long run on simple economic efficiency.
Option A) Player pays full fare up-front for a bug-ridden game and assumes developer will release patches in the future. Option B) Player pirates enhanced version (no DRM) and developer holds their breath awaiting payment for inferior copy. Option C) Player and developer engage in ongoing tit-for-tat, exchanging partial payments for patches and additional content.
The first two options both have several variants and variables, such as demos, brand reputation, extra box goodies, lawsuits, delayed purchases, etc., but all of those will either increase cost-of-entry or decrease market efficiency. In both of the first two cases, one party must pay extra to counterbalance the incentive for the other party to shirk, a perverse incentive inherent in the payment schemes.
With option C, the player provides a constant revenue stream for as long as they are interested in the game. The developer uses that revenue to maintain player interest as long as it is profitable. This has occurred historically with expansion packs to games, but it was not until widespread broadband availability that the system was sufficiently fluid to handle small incremental tits-and-tats with efficiency. XBox Live has really pushed forward in this direction with their point system.
The only thing special about MMORPGs and low piracy is that they fall more naturally into Option C, where there is less economic incentive for piracy.
but I'm somehow not shedding many tears over this issue.
It's really a mess in educational software land. About 2/3rds of the web based edu apps we support on campus work in one browser, and one browser only. Sometimes it's Firefox, sometimes it's IE. Some apps are even pegged to a specific version for no apparent reason. We have to fake different UA strings in different labs just to get this stuff to run.
Don't get me started with the Adobe DRM crap that every edu app has fallen in love with. It's really easy on the users when they need to use two different browsers to get to different parts of the same frickin' website. Ugh.
So you need to first come up with a good reason or reasons as to why a Windows desktop doesn't work for you.
That's a very backwards approach to getting work done.
Let your users list the tools with which they work most effectively. Then you cross tools off the list if and only if you have a very good reason or reasons to not provide those tools.
"We provide Windows because we are a Windows shop" really is the tail wagging the dog.
You can argue morale issues until you are blue in the face, network security should trump that in 99% of those cases.
That's a classic example of IT narrowmindedness. If the employees no longer care, no technical measures will secure your data. Security is everybody's business, not just yours. People will naturally protect that which they care about. No morale = no security.
As you seem to be from the school of "a good firing will fix anything". Hopefully for your own sake your boss wises up and uses a 'good firing' to adjust your attitude, because I doubt anything else will penetrate that skull.
There comes a time where you have to decide whether it's better to save $5 for yourself, or spend it so that somebody else has a job.
To put it another way, there comes a time when you have to decide whether it's better to become a member of the lending class or to remain a member of the borrowing class.
I'd argue that the top paid/"ranked" employees weren't giving good personal service. They may have been good at making the customer think they were getting good personal service.
There is no difference between the two. If you don't understand that, get out of sales for your own career's sake.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, your damned right it should withstand the abuses that an ATM on the street might have to endure, since the ballot box is used to select government officials whom, in the course of their duties, are going to be spending my tax money.
With ATMs, the manufacturers, the owners, and the maintainers all have a strong and direct incentive to keep them secure. It's also relatively easy to quantify the damage from an ATM breach. Furthermore, the end users of ATMs don't really care that much if some machine across the country gets compromised and all the slips of paper are removed.
With voting machines, none of this is true. No single person or group can be trusted with the keys to the kingdom. It's impossible to quantify the potential damage an insecure system can do, and everybody is affected by a breach anywhere.
Then, one day, I will, and the "Law of Magical Excellent Driving" that I've been asserting has been an invisible hand guiding my car around has been violated. Oh noes! How could this have happened?! How did this law which had protected my safety for all those years suddenly fail to apply? ...
You can't ignore the fact that you would be a different driver today if your "Law of Magical Excellent Driving" had not upheld itself. If you were regularly involved in accidents, that would affect your opinions of buying new vs used and buying Volvos vs Yugos.
The fact that Moore's "Law" has upheld for decades with such consistency has allowed people to safely assume it will continue to do so. It's that assumption that allows people to take different paths and accept different risks than a more volatile progression would have made feasible.
You are right that is not a law like the laws of physics, but if it behaves like one, the difference is largely semantic.
Its a Republican hatchet job, just like Martha Stewart. She was sent to jail over $50,000. She's worth what? Tens of millions, Hundreds, Billions? Do you really believed she intended to defraud share holders out of a pissy 50 grand?
Yes, of course she did. She just did not consider it fraud.
Do you really think most wealthy people get and remain wealthy by staying well within the boundaries of both the spirit and letter of the law? No, they push the envelopes, legal and otherwise. The grass is greener where fewer graze, and all that.
Only political science and social work majors use "betterment" when the rest of the English-speaking world would use "improvement".
Why? It's a perfectly cromulent word.
Starting from a similar situation, can a phone company be considered an accessory because someone used the pay phone they provided on the side of a building?
The phone company is a "common carrier". That basically means that because they are willing to jump through certain hoops, the public agrees to not hold them liable for the content of the information they carry. The downside for them is losing quite of bit of freedom and choice in providing their service.
You, as an individual, are not a common carrier. You haven't taken the required steps to become one. You are not absolved of responsibility for the content of information traveling across networks you control.
Dell would release PCs running XP without all the other crap it might be worth buying one. Maybe...
You do realize that all that nagware crap subsidizes the cost of the hardware, don't you? All that crap is exactly why Dells are worth buying. One wipe, which I'd be doing anyways, and it's all gone.
Yeah, but when the printer costs $50, and a new manufacturer ink cartridge costs $45
Officemax/Staples/CompUSA/etc sometimes have inkjets for $30 w/ a $30 mail-in rebate. Just buy a new printer, and when the initial cartridge runs out, toss the printer and get a new one.
The whole industry pricing structure is insane.
If you have the means to fly on a sufficiently regular basis that in-flight phone access is important to you, then you certainly have the means to live somewhere closer to civilization. Having fewer options as a consumer when you live in the boonies is not exactly a new issue, either.
Life is choices.
So why 'Volumes', not 'Areas'?
It looked better in print.
The administration (not just this one but any one in the future) can call up the CIA/FBI, tell them that they have reason to believe you are a terrorist and you will be put in jail with no access to a lawyer, no phone call, no trial, nothing. You will stay there indefinitely.
All that has changed is the label:
Before terrorists, it was desegregationists.
Before desegregationists, it was communists.
Before communists, it was anarchists.
Before anarchists, it was unionists.
Before unionists, it was feminists
Before feminists, it was secessionists
Before secessionists, it was abolitionists
Before abolitionists, it was transcendentalists.
Before transcendentalists, it was restorationists.
Before restorationists, it was monarchists.
Before you worry about losing your rights, stop for a moment and ask if you ever really had them in the first place. The world changes much more slowly than it appears.
This difference between the rich and the poor in China is staggering. I know people from China, and they say the rich people are very rich. They drive around in expensive cars, and send their kids to Canadian schools who charge tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition. These children also have their own expensive cars. Even if there is only %0.01 rich people (it's probably much higher), that's still 100000 people. If you ask me, they aren't doing too well.
_ coefficient.png
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. The income distribution in China is similar to that of the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World_Map_Gini
We are talking about your wirless router that you did not secure in accordance with well publicized standards.
The standard clearly states that if you don't encrypt your connection, well, guess what, every body can connect.
If you install a lock on your front door improperly, everybody can enter your house. It does not mean they have a right to enter your house.
The calculus is pretty straightforward...which one of the following is more costly?
1) Inability to work without a reliable connection.
2) Dealing with the risk of theft, drive crash, maintenance of backups at the user level, etc.
It's also an old question. Just because we are using browsers instead of X terminals doesn't make much difference. The answer to which was better was and will remain, "it depends". Different strokes for different folks.
TFA is really short on technical details, but it sounds to me as though SET is just a re-design of DHT. Still, I imagine SET support will be in the next builds of all the major bittorrent clients if it ends up being worth something.
As TFA current describes things, I'm really struggling to find a use for this feature that does not involve copyright infringement. The rightsholders for "legitimate" p2p traffic already have a strong incentive to act as a central authority for low-bandwidth meta-data.
I think this is a solution for a problem that lies primarily with pirated files. I wouldn't be surprised if Bittorrent stayed far away from it.
1h 45m from install to having a working, up to date and configured system running http, https, php, java, tomcat, mysql, mail server, ftp server, remote X access
Connect a fresh Windows ME box to the net and you can get all that in 1 minute and 45 seconds.
"who owns these songs? I rather suspect it isn't the artists any more."
Ownership? That's easy. Everybody who has heard the song shares in joint ownership.
You are probably more interested in who retains the various rights to the song, such as the right to copy, the right to distribute, the right to publish, the right to sell and resell copies, the rights to trancode, transcribe, or translate, the rights to create derivative works, etc.
All of these rights will mostly likely be retained by lots of different holders. You can count them all up and declare whoever has the most as the winner and grant them the title of "owner", but doing so is pretty meaningless.
Real estate serves as a decent analogy to intellectual property. You can't actually own land, only the title to that land. With the ownership of a title comes certain exclusive rights, but don't get fooled into believing you actually own the land itself, or you'll be in for a rude awakening when your city council approves construction of a highway through your kingdom.
IP works in a similar fashion...once something is published, the "ownership" becomes too distributed to be mean meaningful because there is no longer any exclusive possession.
Monopoly is also a lot more brilliant a game than most people think.
In the 1930's Monopoly was brilliant. In contrast with modern games, its flaws are thrown in sharp relief.
Game design:
1) It is an elimination game with a platykurtic expected duration distribution. If you are going to knock players out, you need a strongly defined endpoint.
2) Deal-making games are more interesting with more players; deal-making games with elimination get less interesting as the game progresses.
3) It has indeterminant length and lacks a fair withdrawal procedure. If the game can run overlong, players need a exit that doesn't throw the game.
4) The decision tree is sparse, and the most important decisions occur early. The endgame is not much different than the end of Snakes & Ladders.
Game mechanics:
1) 'Roll & Move' includes a completely unnecessary step. Customized dice could replace the entire token track.
2) Keeping score to four-digit precision serves no purpose when player decisions only have two-digit granularity. Player spend too much time tracking what they cannot control.
Components:
1) The gameboard wastes a colossal amount of space. Games that waste real estate can less easily be enjoyed at the players' convenience.
2) Paper money is inferior to plastic chips for the required transactions. Modern games with similar MSRP have a far greater production quality.
Monopoly is the Model T of boardgames, a revolutionary product that has truly earned a place of honor in any museum. You may enjoy driving antique cars, but you'll have little success convincing others they offer a superior ride than modern designs.
Yes, I did RTFA and I read the relevant text of the bill (section 247(C)9). The languange doesn't differentiate between platform software and software specific to the e-voting task.
t ory.htm
I read the bill too. All it did was remind me of this old automobile law:
The Locomotive Act 1865 set a speed limit of 4 mph in the country and 2 mph in towns. The 1865 Act also provided for the then famous "man with a red flag". Walking 60 yards ahead of each vehicle, a man with a red flag or lantern enforced a walking pace, and warned horse riders and horse drawn traffic of the approach of a self propelled machine.
http://www.nationalnumbers.co.uk/number-plate-his
While most of the requirements listed by the bill seem like good ideas, I get the impression the actual purpose of this bill is to make deployment of e-voting machines sufficiently onerous to make the whole idea pointless. Once you enforce the hobbling every potential advantage an e-voting system may have, you can rest secure with any existing investments you may have in the companies manufacturing existing machines. The pessimist in me wonders if Mr. Rush Holt has already planned for that exact scenario.
Further, I'd argue that connecting to a central server with a CD key is not proof against piracy.
It's not about "connecting to a central server" that fights piracy, it's changing the payment scheme to a method that gives both parties an incentive to play fair. I think a pay-to-play scheme will win in the long run on simple economic efficiency.
Option A) Player pays full fare up-front for a bug-ridden game and assumes developer will release patches in the future.
Option B) Player pirates enhanced version (no DRM) and developer holds their breath awaiting payment for inferior copy.
Option C) Player and developer engage in ongoing tit-for-tat, exchanging partial payments for patches and additional content.
The first two options both have several variants and variables, such as demos, brand reputation, extra box goodies, lawsuits, delayed purchases, etc., but all of those will either increase cost-of-entry or decrease market efficiency. In both of the first two cases, one party must pay extra to counterbalance the incentive for the other party to shirk, a perverse incentive inherent in the payment schemes.
With option C, the player provides a constant revenue stream for as long as they are interested in the game. The developer uses that revenue to maintain player interest as long as it is profitable. This has occurred historically with expansion packs to games, but it was not until widespread broadband availability that the system was sufficiently fluid to handle small incremental tits-and-tats with efficiency. XBox Live has really pushed forward in this direction with their point system.
The only thing special about MMORPGs and low piracy is that they fall more naturally into Option C, where there is less economic incentive for piracy.
but I'm somehow not shedding many tears over this issue.
It's really a mess in educational software land. About 2/3rds of the web based edu apps we support on campus work in one browser, and one browser only. Sometimes it's Firefox, sometimes it's IE. Some apps are even pegged to a specific version for no apparent reason. We have to fake different UA strings in different labs just to get this stuff to run.
Don't get me started with the Adobe DRM crap that every edu app has fallen in love with. It's really easy on the users when they need to use two different browsers to get to different parts of the same frickin' website. Ugh.
So you need to first come up with a good reason or reasons as to why a Windows desktop doesn't work for you.
That's a very backwards approach to getting work done.
Let your users list the tools with which they work most effectively. Then you cross tools off the list if and only if you have a very good reason or reasons to not provide those tools.
"We provide Windows because we are a Windows shop" really is the tail wagging the dog.
You can argue morale issues until you are blue in the face, network security should trump that in 99% of those cases.
That's a classic example of IT narrowmindedness. If the employees no longer care, no technical measures will secure your data. Security is everybody's business, not just yours. People will naturally protect that which they care about. No morale = no security.
As you seem to be from the school of "a good firing will fix anything". Hopefully for your own sake your boss wises up and uses a 'good firing' to adjust your attitude, because I doubt anything else will penetrate that skull.
Like making sure they regret buying your product when they did.
Yeah, because nobody could have predicted electronics to get better/faster/cheaper over the past year and a half.
There comes a time where you have to decide whether it's better to save $5 for yourself, or spend it so that somebody else has a job.
To put it another way, there comes a time when you have to decide whether it's better to become a member of the lending class or to remain a member of the borrowing class.
I'd argue that the top paid/"ranked" employees weren't giving good personal service. They may have been good at making the customer think they were getting good personal service.
There is no difference between the two. If you don't understand that, get out of sales for your own career's sake.