Two reasons - the first is most important. 1. Duverger's Law - first past the post voting system implies a two-party system, votes for a third party "don't count". Approval voting can resolve this and make third parties viable again. 2. The Libertarian Party has taken extreme stances to differentiate itself of late, becoming almost like the Constitution Party. Not ALL taxes are wrong, not ALL government funded programs are wrong. Government-funded medical research has saved thousands of lives and improved quality of life across the world. Many capital L Libertarians want to pull the plug.
One question I have: if communication between reporter and source is truly anonymous then how does any reporter know if the information is legitmate? At some point anonymity had better break down between reporter and source. Because when a reporter tells me something, which they say is news, I had better damn well know what their source is and know that it's legit, or they are going to be hard pressed to get me to believe a word of what they're saying.
As usual, technology offers a solution: pseudonymity. It's the central idea behind Wikipedia, and to a lesser extent Freenet. In the case of Freenet, it can be securely verifiable that a user is who they say they are through cryptography, yet near-impossible to know that user's identity beyond what they want you to know. In the case of reporters' sources, a pseudonymous user could give information, which at first the reporter is not obliged to believe since that reporter has no knowledge of the source. However, if that lead turns out to be verifiably accurate, the reporter can begin to establish trust with the source, and accept further leads as newsworthy. All this with complete plausible deniability of the identity of the source, even if the reporter's personal effects and communications devices are confiscated.
In practice, will we see reporters using this? No. It's a shame they don't, but unfortunately most people don't encrypt or even cryptographically sign their emails either, despite public key encryption having been freely available for 15 years, if you consider Phil Zimmerman's release of PGP in 1991 as the first freely available public key encryption. Incidentally, what's with Gmail not including even basic support for cryptographic signing/verification?
MusicBrainz is the service you're looking for; it's been around for a few years now and they're just coming out with a new beta for Linux and Windows users alike. Someone already mentioned iEatBrainz, the Mac variant.
Re:Slackers, timid kids and smart kids.
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 1
"We didn't really have this Interweb thing back then, but I probably would have geeked out a fair bit if I had the chance."
That's a very good point. Kids now and in the future are going to have a lot better chance to enrich themselves with things they haven't heard about in school, by just looking online for intellectually stimulating activity. I never really got into Linux until college because I only had dialup in high school and wasn't inclined to do more than download a floppy-size Linux distribution and try it out; if I'd had easy access to Ubuntu's ShipIt or a faster connection to download Linux ISOs I certainly would have switched then, and maybe even got involved with writing OSS. But my free time's a lot shorter these days, now that I'm in grad school.
Of course, the sorry state of Linux hardware support back then also played a role, and that's getting better too.
"2.) XP's image viewer is nice for viewing sequences of images."
I actually prefer IrfanView for this purpose on my W2K install. It has many more options than the built-in XP image viewer, such as lossless JPG rotation.
The problem is that there just isn't much good music left; almost all music produced lately is crap.
Your statement reminds me of the patent commissioner in 1899 saying "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Come on - it's not ALL crap. Maybe all RIAA music, fine, but there are tons of great indie albums out there. Listen to The Books' "The Lemon of Pink" lately? Death Cab for Cutie? Godspeed You! Black Emperor? Carbon Leaf? The Delgados? Boards of Canada? Look, the bands I've mentioned are my idea of good music and they might not match your tastes. But read Pitchfork's online reviews every now and then, you'll find some good indie music that you might like if you gave it a chance.
The real reason third parties don't work in the US is our first past the post (FPTP) voting system, otherwise known as Plurality voting. Duverger's Law posits that FPTP naturally leads to a two-party system. If we had ranked choice voting (RCV, also known as instant runoff voting, or IRV), those who prefer a libertarian candidate would be able to safely vote for this candidate and also choose a major party candidate to whom their vote could go if the libertarian candidate wasn't going to win. This would allow everyone to vote for the person they would most like to win.
I have heard there are tactical voting issues with RCV/IRV that are only solved with a true Condorcet method. If this is the case, then perhaps we should consider a different method - but IRV is certainly a huge step up from FPTP in terms of elimination of tactical voting.
IANAL, but you would go to jail for that, or pay a steep fine. Shooting a criminal in the act of fleeing - in other words, a criminal who poses no further threat to your personal safety, is crossing a line.
However, the argument generally used in a situation such as this is that if concealed carry is legal, someone around you may notice your plight and pull out their concealed weapon, making the situation much more difficult for the mugger. If the mugger then aims his gun at the person pointing the gun at him, that person has every right to shoot as they have been threatened.
I'm a big fan of the products sold by RipVan100. I first happened upon them when looking for batteries and a charger for my new digital camera, and since they seemed to rank pretty highly in reviews, I decided to buy them.
I still have the green Sanyo "industrial grade" cells I originally bought about 2 years ago, and I've been buying more since for other purposes. The charger (lightning pack 4000) is also excellent. I can't necessarily recommend the newer batteries they've stocked, but I definitely recommend the charger and the green-jacketed Sanyo batteries - they consistently perform well for me, and most reviews note that they perform BETTER than several NiMH battery brands with higher mAh numbers (they're only 1700 mAh).
BTW Never try an ironic arguement in a room full of christian's whose parents are in the military. They will believe you are serious when you say we should wipe out the Swedes because they are just too blond.
That's not an ironic argument (I'm not sure what one would sound like). That's sarcasm.
Next million dollar question: will Microsoft offer free upgrades to the PocketPC 2003 OS for those who purchased an Xscale device that is currently underutilized in the PocketPC 2002 OS?
And since I'm fairly sure they won't be free, will they at least be discounted?
I agree with you that it's gotten a lot harder for emulator programmers. However, I think the situation is even more bleak than you realize.
I have heard of emulators for these systems: MAME, NES, Gameboy, SNES, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, several minor consoles and N64. I don't know of workable emulators for any console released in the past 10 years aside from the N64 (correct me if I'm wrong on this) - I've heard of projects for dreamcast and gamecube, but neither one actually works for anything significant yet.
So I'd say the current situation is far from Gamecube being the _only_ console which hasn't been emulated--rather, it seems to be a trend that it takes much longer for modern consoles to be successfully emulated due to their complexity. Even consoles as old as the Sega Saturn have proven very difficult to emulate. I mean, when you're working with single 8- and 16-bit processor architectures, you're dealing with a project for emulation that is similar to projects most students might tackle in their first college computer architecture class. However, more sophisticated architectures present enough of a challenge that most wouldn't even bother with the task.
Well technically you educated me, but didn't provide me the means to produce the "gun", like the university is doing for these virus writers. And like I said, I don't necessarily agree with those who think the University should be held liable -- I'm just thinking about what might happen in a worst case.
There is also the question of what if some student manages to smuggle a virus out of the lab and releases it. Does the University's liability insurance cover any potential damage the virus might cause.
I was wondering this same thing myself...I would think the University would be partly liable in a court of law, though I don't really know if it should be. They are supplying the resources the student needs to create the virus, and educating them on how to do it. Now if they can show that they took every reasonable precaution to prevent it from getting out and the student still somehow snuck it out, then they might be OK--but consider the biological parallel: it's like showing someone how to make anthrax, giving them the means to do so, and then not having a secure lab environment, thus creating a hazard to the community.
Like I said though, it ultimately comes down to the student's will to pull the trigger, but considering that the University is supplying the gun...it's shaky ground.
I would think that it would be fairly trivial to get past any blocks of a certain P2P agent (with an upgrade of the software, that is)...is there some information about the protocol that makes each client unique, and constantly so; i.e., upgrades to the software cannot change this identifying bit of the protocol for the client?
Human rights groups in countries with authoritarian governments are often persecuted, their computers confiscated to get the names of their informants. Generally encryption (PGP/GPG) is sufficient in these cases to protect their data - unless the government is evil enough to torture them to reveal their private key/passphrase. In cases such as this, steganography allows plausible deniability.
For more information on the uses of encryption in human rights organizations, read these letters to Philip Zimmermann (the creator of PGP).
A good way to do this is to use software like PINs (which is open source, by the way), which stores your passwords using a 448-bit Blowfish algorithm, then lets you access them with a single password. Then, bring a password disk along with you so when you're on a public computer you can just insert it and copy your passwords from this program. Very simple and also prevents forgotten passwords.
Slashdot Mirror
no one is carrying the macbook air in their jeans pocket. what's a centimeter of thickness when you're dealing with a paper-sized object?
In a free market, buyers can choose to resell their goods once they've got their use out of them.
Two reasons - the first is most important. 1. Duverger's Law - first past the post voting system implies a two-party system, votes for a third party "don't count". Approval voting can resolve this and make third parties viable again. 2. The Libertarian Party has taken extreme stances to differentiate itself of late, becoming almost like the Constitution Party. Not ALL taxes are wrong, not ALL government funded programs are wrong. Government-funded medical research has saved thousands of lives and improved quality of life across the world. Many capital L Libertarians want to pull the plug.
One question I have: if communication between reporter and source is truly anonymous then how does any reporter know if the information is legitmate? At some point anonymity had better break down between reporter and source. Because when a reporter tells me something, which they say is news, I had better damn well know what their source is and know that it's legit, or they are going to be hard pressed to get me to believe a word of what they're saying.
As usual, technology offers a solution: pseudonymity. It's the central idea behind Wikipedia, and to a lesser extent Freenet. In the case of Freenet, it can be securely verifiable that a user is who they say they are through cryptography, yet near-impossible to know that user's identity beyond what they want you to know. In the case of reporters' sources, a pseudonymous user could give information, which at first the reporter is not obliged to believe since that reporter has no knowledge of the source. However, if that lead turns out to be verifiably accurate, the reporter can begin to establish trust with the source, and accept further leads as newsworthy. All this with complete plausible deniability of the identity of the source, even if the reporter's personal effects and communications devices are confiscated.
In practice, will we see reporters using this? No. It's a shame they don't, but unfortunately most people don't encrypt or even cryptographically sign their emails either, despite public key encryption having been freely available for 15 years, if you consider Phil Zimmerman's release of PGP in 1991 as the first freely available public key encryption. Incidentally, what's with Gmail not including even basic support for cryptographic signing/verification?
MusicBrainz is the service you're looking for; it's been around for a few years now and they're just coming out with a new beta for Linux and Windows users alike. Someone already mentioned iEatBrainz, the Mac variant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusicBrainz
http://musicbrainz.org/
"We didn't really have this Interweb thing back then, but I probably would have geeked out a fair bit if I had the chance."
That's a very good point. Kids now and in the future are going to have a lot better chance to enrich themselves with things they haven't heard about in school, by just looking online for intellectually stimulating activity. I never really got into Linux until college because I only had dialup in high school and wasn't inclined to do more than download a floppy-size Linux distribution and try it out; if I'd had easy access to Ubuntu's ShipIt or a faster connection to download Linux ISOs I certainly would have switched then, and maybe even got involved with writing OSS. But my free time's a lot shorter these days, now that I'm in grad school.
Of course, the sorry state of Linux hardware support back then also played a role, and that's getting better too.
And they have. The google toolbar offers a service called Google Compute which allows the user's computer to work on Folding@home units.
http://toolbar.google.com/dc/faq_dc.html
I actually prefer IrfanView for this purpose on my W2K install. It has many more options than the built-in XP image viewer, such as lossless JPG rotation.
Your statement reminds me of the patent commissioner in 1899 saying "Everything that can
be invented has been invented."
Come on - it's not ALL crap. Maybe all RIAA music, fine, but there are tons of great indie albums out there. Listen to The Books' "The Lemon of Pink" lately? Death Cab for Cutie? Godspeed You! Black Emperor? Carbon Leaf? The Delgados? Boards of Canada? Look, the bands I've mentioned are my idea of good music and they might not match your tastes. But read Pitchfork's online reviews every now and then, you'll find some good indie music that you might like if you gave it a chance.
The real reason third parties don't work in the US is our first past the post (FPTP) voting system, otherwise known as Plurality voting. Duverger's Law posits that FPTP naturally leads to a two-party system. If we had ranked choice voting (RCV, also known as instant runoff voting, or IRV), those who prefer a libertarian candidate would be able to safely vote for this candidate and also choose a major party candidate to whom their vote could go if the libertarian candidate wasn't going to win. This would allow everyone to vote for the person they would most like to win.
g
I have heard there are tactical voting issues with RCV/IRV that are only solved with a true Condorcet method. If this is the case, then perhaps we should consider a different method - but IRV is certainly a huge step up from FPTP in terms of elimination of tactical voting.
For reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPTP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_votin
As my new neighbors in Woostah would say, "smaaht-ass".
Beat me to it.
IANAL, but you would go to jail for that, or pay a steep fine. Shooting a criminal in the act of fleeing - in other words, a criminal who poses no further threat to your personal safety, is crossing a line.
However, the argument generally used in a situation such as this is that if concealed carry is legal, someone around you may notice your plight and pull out their concealed weapon, making the situation much more difficult for the mugger. If the mugger then aims his gun at the person pointing the gun at him, that person has every right to shoot as they have been threatened.
I think the idiom you're looking for is "putting the plow before the horse".
I still have the green Sanyo "industrial grade" cells I originally bought about 2 years ago, and I've been buying more since for other purposes. The charger (lightning pack 4000) is also excellent. I can't necessarily recommend the newer batteries they've stocked, but I definitely recommend the charger and the green-jacketed Sanyo batteries - they consistently perform well for me, and most reviews note that they perform BETTER than several NiMH battery brands with higher mAh numbers (they're only 1700 mAh).
That's not an ironic argument (I'm not sure what one would sound like). That's sarcasm.
Next million dollar question: will Microsoft offer free upgrades to the PocketPC 2003 OS for those who purchased an Xscale device that is currently underutilized in the PocketPC 2002 OS?
And since I'm fairly sure they won't be free, will they at least be discounted?
I agree with you that it's gotten a lot harder for emulator programmers. However, I think the situation is even more bleak than you realize.
I have heard of emulators for these systems: MAME, NES, Gameboy, SNES, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, several minor consoles and N64. I don't know of workable emulators for any console released in the past 10 years aside from the N64 (correct me if I'm wrong on this) - I've heard of projects for dreamcast and gamecube, but neither one actually works for anything significant yet.
So I'd say the current situation is far from Gamecube being the _only_ console which hasn't been emulated--rather, it seems to be a trend that it takes much longer for modern consoles to be successfully emulated due to their complexity. Even consoles as old as the Sega Saturn have proven very difficult to emulate. I mean, when you're working with single 8- and 16-bit processor architectures, you're dealing with a project for emulation that is similar to projects most students might tackle in their first college computer architecture class. However, more sophisticated architectures present enough of a challenge that most wouldn't even bother with the task.
Well technically you educated me, but didn't provide me the means to produce the "gun", like the university is doing for these virus writers. And like I said, I don't necessarily agree with those who think the University should be held liable -- I'm just thinking about what might happen in a worst case.
I was wondering this same thing myself...I would think the University would be partly liable in a court of law, though I don't really know if it should be. They are supplying the resources the student needs to create the virus, and educating them on how to do it. Now if they can show that they took every reasonable precaution to prevent it from getting out and the student still somehow snuck it out, then they might be OK--but consider the biological parallel: it's like showing someone how to make anthrax, giving them the means to do so, and then not having a secure lab environment, thus creating a hazard to the community.
Like I said though, it ultimately comes down to the student's will to pull the trigger, but considering that the University is supplying the gun...it's shaky ground.
Next up: jail all the ventriloquists.
Or this one (slight vulgarity).
I would think that it would be fairly trivial to get past any blocks of a certain P2P agent (with an upgrade of the software, that is)...is there some information about the protocol that makes each client unique, and constantly so; i.e., upgrades to the software cannot change this identifying bit of the protocol for the client?
Human rights groups in countries with authoritarian governments are often persecuted, their computers confiscated to get the names of their informants. Generally encryption (PGP/GPG) is sufficient in these cases to protect their data - unless the government is evil enough to torture them to reveal their private key/passphrase. In cases such as this, steganography allows plausible deniability.
For more information on the uses of encryption in human rights organizations, read these letters to Philip Zimmermann (the creator of PGP).
A good way to do this is to use software like PINs (which is open source, by the way), which stores your passwords using a 448-bit Blowfish algorithm, then lets you access them with a single password. Then, bring a password disk along with you so when you're on a public computer you can just insert it and copy your passwords from this program. Very simple and also prevents forgotten passwords.
In other words, if your post is more noise than signal, you're on the right track. ;)