Excellent simple explanation of the beauty of paper ballots. In any sensible setting (lacking truckloads of armed goons stealing ballot boxes etc) you can't beat paper ballots and scrutineers overseeing the counting. Plus you can actually go back and recount.
Of course voting technology is the least of the problems with our current electoral and government systems.
It has long been acknowledged that the "Best Seller" lists limit themselves to certain genres anyhow. For instance, romances and science fiction books which actually outsell many mainstream "best sellers" simply don't appear on the big best seller lists.
I tend to think of best seller lists as being of interest to people buying books in airports, and not much else.
I very happily gave up on man pages (and variants thereof) years ago because they were too obtuse and circular to be useful to me, a mere end user. Early on I figured out that the basic rule of man pages was that the one you need relied on you already having read and digested fifteen others, each of which relied on you having read an digested fifteen others.... actually finding what you needed was an endless exercise in frustration.
Every time a story like this pops up I find it impossible to not fire up Bittorrent, visit the Pirate Bay, and download something that the entertainment mega corps have already made a gazillion dollars selling.
It's been a few years since I worked down there, but EAS always seemed like pretty primitive tech. One of the last remaining bastions of serial printer ports as I recall. It is (or was a few years ago) ugly, annoying, tended to chop the ends off of messages, and many of the weather service alerts either were for somewhere entirely remote from us, or were so garbled that they were incomprehensible.
I'm entirely unsurprised that it's easy to hack in to EAS.
Our consumers told us they are looking for an alternative to traditional morning beverages
"You idiots keep on drinking coffee, tea, or water in the morning, which gives us no profit! So yet again we'll try to sell you on soda pop for breakfast...."
What is this? The third or fourth time they've tried this? I'm waiting for the Pepsi as a bed time drink on your night table....
Will people argue strenuously against having more paid holidays. You folks really do love punishment don't you?
(I'll take Newfoundland, which includes St Patrick's Day as a holiday)
(Here in BC the Liberal government, desperate to do anything that might rescue a few votes, has launched a February holiday called "Family Day." I guess that it goes without saying this comes after years of hacking away at any program that actually benefited real working class families.)
(And of course, in Vancouver Chinese New Year is in fact a pretty big deal. Maybe we'll celebrate Family Day by going out for Dim Sum.)
Last week I ran into the first site that actually REQUIRED a punctuation character in the password. My immediate thought was of the time a couple of years ago when I seemed to keep running into sites that refused to accept my firstname.lastname@gmail.com, address when I tried to register because no e-mail address would have a period in it.
Honestly it feels to me that the whole username/password regime is on its last legs, and is about to collapse under its own weight.
I really don't want biometrics, but I could certainly live with a minimal RFID/NFC key (just like my car, or maybe my phone) that would authenticate me on whatever machine I'm using. If we need something, I want it easy and portable. Maybe a pinky ring with embedded chip?
Meanwhile I'll stick with one long complex tricky password for sites that actually matter (like banks); and another short snappy one for stuff like slashdot and forums that don't (90% of places). About four times a year I change them both to keep stuff fresh.
For everything else my password is "Forgot password? Click here to reset."
Even outside of the mainstream Canadian media, it seems like the new BB is getting a good reception and is moving out of stores. I'm guessing that a lot of people are like me: they buy a phone and keep it for at least a couple of years; they use it heavily for e-mail and related tasks; they don't care about "skins" or Angry Birds or iTunes or YouTube - they want a reliable tool.
I'm looking at the new Blackberrys to replace my Google phone not because I want or need BIS, but because I find the Nexus just isn't cut out for creating and handling information. By which I mean, writing an e-mail more than three sentences long.
I've been looking for BB reviews to get a better idea how well it will work for me, but until these Ars reviews have been frustrated by the fragmentary and biased nature of everything I've found. Between the anti-RIM bitching, and the BB fanboi commentards, there is bloody little useful information to be had.
At least now I know how it will play with Gmail, which I use pretty much exclusively. I think I read that the BB will work OK with Google calendar. I'm happy to finally get a reasonable idea of:
Real world battery life - not "if you turn off 4G." Battery with GPS, WIFI, and full phone function running.
How does the mapping and GPS compare to Google, or can I use Google's product on the phone?
Still to be answered:
How is the BB to use in cold or wet conditions - this is Canada after all, and the Nexus touchscreen can be pretty irritating in snow and ice.
Does the BB, unlike my JB powered Nexus, allow me turn off the shutter click?*
And, now that I think about it, and realizing that somewhere along the line I seem to have become a Linux geek, how flexible is this beast? What can I turn on or off? How rich are the settings that I can choose from? Will BB and/or the cel companies promise me regular and current software updates - unlike Android, where there are still ICS and even Honeycomb phones being sold!
*Yes, it matters to me. And please don't jump in with "But it's THE LAW in some places that you can't do that" unless you can offer a cite.
Look for some clue what's wrong. "Sorry! Our servers are down!" Find nothing
Look for a phone number to call them. Find nothing, or find that it's only open 10am to 2pm Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Or sit on perma-hold for twenty minutes
Look for a support e-mail address. Find an irritating web form that only works with a browser that you don't use
Two days later, post to every forum, blog, Facebook, and Twitter feed you can find in order to embarrass them publicly.
Stuff starts working again. No apology. No offer of credit.
OK, there are exceptions. I had a Breville appliance stop working and they were great. But that's really, really rare. On my list of companies that really suck: Google. Whether using a paid or unpaid service, it can be nearly impossible to find any way to contact anything resembling support, and in my experience Android bug reports go ignored more or less forever.
Dyson's brilliance is in marketing, not engineering. Who would have thought you could sell small appliances by marketing them the same way as a Mercedes... I'm waiting for the $700 Dyson toaster.
I don't know (or specifically care) if I'm among that quarter million users, but it would have been peachy keen if Twitter had taken five minutes to e-mail their friggin' users to tell them.
The way it used to work is radio stations would give public exposure to artists' work, and in turn if people liked it they'd go to a record store and buy a copy.
Uh, since the mid of the last century those radio stations paid royalties to ASCAP and BMI, who in turn paid the composers of the tunes being paid. Still do.
My phone/computer is primarily a work tool. I don't play Angry Birds. I don't watch videos much. I do e-mail, and texts, and use the web and web-enabled apps.
Android Jellybean feels more like it's designed for fun and games than real information handling.
If Blackberry feels like a nuts and bolts tool instead of an underpowered media/game box, I'll be all over it.
(FWIW, I think that this is where BB really screwed themselves - trying to sell to teenagers instead of focussing on their core demographic)
Wind is bumping up their rates as we speak, and coverage is still limited to inside some (not all) urban centers. As I understand it roaming outside of that is with Rogers (aka Satanic Scum Cel Co) and is a) crazy expensive and b) does not handover, just drops your signal until you dial again.
Can't think of anywhere with worse cellular options than Canada. I'm with Telus (aka The Other Satanic Scum Cel Co) and just discovered that adding 2 gigs of data to my existing 1 gig plan would jack my monthly bill from $50 to $75. And of course like everyone else, voicemail at Telus is an $8 to $10 dollar month option.
There are people who still use PayPal? Merchants or sites that encourage it? I can't recall the last time I came within spitting distance of PayPal for anything.
Then again, it's been several years since I went near e-Bay either.....
Arguably "privacy" does not mean what it might have forty years ago. Some of that is related directly to the way that Internet technology can retain data, and the ways that that data can be searched and manipulated.
That is something to be watched, and I've found myself more and more cautious about what I post on-line, but it's also a lot of what makes the modern Internet so damned useful.
I like it that Google usually can guess what I need. I like it that Amazon can suggest books or music that I actually would like to buy. I like that my smartphone is such a phenomenally handy tool, one that I use many times each day, and that would be nowhere near as useful without the might of Google behind it.
Hell, I like that I'm automagically logged into Slashdot every time I open up the site in my browser. It's handy.
Still, despite all of this, I do find Facebook's latest "creep" to be a bit uncomfortable. And yes, I'm one of those people who trusts Google, but who somehow don't trust Facebook. Hence the vast difference between what I'll trust to my Gmail account, and what I'll post to Facebook.
Still, despite the above, you have to accept that people's definition of "privacy" has changed. When I was growing up every house had an album full of photographs. If you came to visit our house we might show it to you, or we might not.
Now I have relatives who have literally thousands upon thousands of baby pictures, kid pictures, family pictures, videos, and God knows what else all posted to Facebook and accessible to hundreds of people. By their standards this is normal, and OK.
Instead of foaming at the mouth, or shrieking that no-one should ever be part of Facebook!!!, we should be figuring out how to manage a reasonable level of privacy in an age that will include Google, and Facebook, and all of those other fun and useful sites that we love.
ps - I can recall, back in the seventies and eighties, knowing people who refused to own a telephone - their arguments sounded pretty much the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Horribly misunderstood, but the inability to retain focus (aka scattered attention) can also point to depression.
Hint: Whatever you likely think depression is, it isn't.
Hint: Drugs plus the right therapy can fix it. "Fix" can mean: stop the drugs.
Hint: for everything else, lists work for me. Well, except for the three things at the very bottom that likely will never, ever be dealt with.
Excellent simple explanation of the beauty of paper ballots. In any sensible setting (lacking truckloads of armed goons stealing ballot boxes etc) you can't beat paper ballots and scrutineers overseeing the counting. Plus you can actually go back and recount.
Of course voting technology is the least of the problems with our current electoral and government systems.
It has long been acknowledged that the "Best Seller" lists limit themselves to certain genres anyhow. For instance, romances and science fiction books which actually outsell many mainstream "best sellers" simply don't appear on the big best seller lists.
I tend to think of best seller lists as being of interest to people buying books in airports, and not much else.
I very happily gave up on man pages (and variants thereof) years ago because they were too obtuse and circular to be useful to me, a mere end user. Early on I figured out that the basic rule of man pages was that the one you need relied on you already having read and digested fifteen others, each of which relied on you having read an digested fifteen others.... actually finding what you needed was an endless exercise in frustration.
Google + Forums is what real people rely on.
Every time a story like this pops up I find it impossible to not fire up Bittorrent, visit the Pirate Bay, and download something that the entertainment mega corps have already made a gazillion dollars selling.
It's been a few years since I worked down there, but EAS always seemed like pretty primitive tech. One of the last remaining bastions of serial printer ports as I recall. It is (or was a few years ago) ugly, annoying, tended to chop the ends off of messages, and many of the weather service alerts either were for somewhere entirely remote from us, or were so garbled that they were incomprehensible.
I'm entirely unsurprised that it's easy to hack in to EAS.
Our consumers told us they are looking for an alternative to traditional morning beverages
"You idiots keep on drinking coffee, tea, or water in the morning, which gives us no profit! So yet again we'll try to sell you on soda pop for breakfast...."
What is this? The third or fourth time they've tried this? I'm waiting for the Pepsi as a bed time drink on your night table....
Is my hard drive full? Can I delete a bunch of old downloaded crap and make space?
No? Buy another hard drive to add to or replace it.
I just know that a three terabyte drive is big enough that I'll never, ever fill it up!
Will people argue strenuously against having more paid holidays. You folks really do love punishment don't you?
(I'll take Newfoundland, which includes St Patrick's Day as a holiday)
(Here in BC the Liberal government, desperate to do anything that might rescue a few votes, has launched a February holiday called "Family Day." I guess that it goes without saying this comes after years of hacking away at any program that actually benefited real working class families.)
(And of course, in Vancouver Chinese New Year is in fact a pretty big deal. Maybe we'll celebrate Family Day by going out for Dim Sum.)
What? Android bad for corporate security? BYOD bad for corporate security?
Excuse me sir... {smile}
Last week I ran into the first site that actually REQUIRED a punctuation character in the password. My immediate thought was of the time a couple of years ago when I seemed to keep running into sites that refused to accept my firstname.lastname@gmail.com, address when I tried to register because no e-mail address would have a period in it.
Honestly it feels to me that the whole username/password regime is on its last legs, and is about to collapse under its own weight.
I really don't want biometrics, but I could certainly live with a minimal RFID/NFC key (just like my car, or maybe my phone) that would authenticate me on whatever machine I'm using. If we need something, I want it easy and portable. Maybe a pinky ring with embedded chip?
Meanwhile I'll stick with one long complex tricky password for sites that actually matter (like banks); and another short snappy one for stuff like slashdot and forums that don't (90% of places). About four times a year I change them both to keep stuff fresh.
For everything else my password is "Forgot password? Click here to reset."
Even outside of the mainstream Canadian media, it seems like the new BB is getting a good reception and is moving out of stores. I'm guessing that a lot of people are like me: they buy a phone and keep it for at least a couple of years; they use it heavily for e-mail and related tasks; they don't care about "skins" or Angry Birds or iTunes or YouTube - they want a reliable tool.
I'm looking at the new Blackberrys to replace my Google phone not because I want or need BIS, but because I find the Nexus just isn't cut out for creating and handling information. By which I mean, writing an e-mail more than three sentences long.
I've been looking for BB reviews to get a better idea how well it will work for me, but until these Ars reviews have been frustrated by the fragmentary and biased nature of everything I've found. Between the anti-RIM bitching, and the BB fanboi commentards, there is bloody little useful information to be had.
At least now I know how it will play with Gmail, which I use pretty much exclusively. I think I read that the BB will work OK with Google calendar. I'm happy to finally get a reasonable idea of:
Real world battery life - not "if you turn off 4G." Battery with GPS, WIFI, and full phone function running.
How does the mapping and GPS compare to Google, or can I use Google's product on the phone?
Still to be answered:
How is the BB to use in cold or wet conditions - this is Canada after all, and the Nexus touchscreen can be pretty irritating in snow and ice.
Does the BB, unlike my JB powered Nexus, allow me turn off the shutter click?*
And, now that I think about it, and realizing that somewhere along the line I seem to have become a Linux geek, how flexible is this beast? What can I turn on or off? How rich are the settings that I can choose from? Will BB and/or the cel companies promise me regular and current software updates - unlike Android, where there are still ICS and even Honeycomb phones being sold!
*Yes, it matters to me. And please don't jump in with "But it's THE LAW in some places that you can't do that" unless you can offer a cite.
OK, there are exceptions. I had a Breville appliance stop working and they were great. But that's really, really rare. On my list of companies that really suck: Google. Whether using a paid or unpaid service, it can be nearly impossible to find any way to contact anything resembling support, and in my experience Android bug reports go ignored more or less forever.
Dyson's brilliance is in marketing, not engineering. Who would have thought you could sell small appliances by marketing them the same way as a Mercedes... I'm waiting for the $700 Dyson toaster.
I don't know (or specifically care) if I'm among that quarter million users, but it would have been peachy keen if Twitter had taken five minutes to e-mail their friggin' users to tell them.
They're still busy suing little machine shops in BC: It's Metallica versus Metallica in the city
The way it used to work is radio stations would give public exposure to artists' work, and in turn if people liked it they'd go to a record store and buy a copy.
Uh, since the mid of the last century those radio stations paid royalties to ASCAP and BMI, who in turn paid the composers of the tunes being paid. Still do.
FWIW Servio and Plex couldn't seem to work with my Sony, but Wild Media Server did right out of the box.
Disclaimer: Cheap, but not free; really bizarre licencing terms; equally bizarre docs.
My phone/computer is primarily a work tool. I don't play Angry Birds. I don't watch videos much. I do e-mail, and texts, and use the web and web-enabled apps.
Android Jellybean feels more like it's designed for fun and games than real information handling.
If Blackberry feels like a nuts and bolts tool instead of an underpowered media/game box, I'll be all over it.
(FWIW, I think that this is where BB really screwed themselves - trying to sell to teenagers instead of focussing on their core demographic)
Wind is bumping up their rates as we speak, and coverage is still limited to inside some (not all) urban centers. As I understand it roaming outside of that is with Rogers (aka Satanic Scum Cel Co) and is a) crazy expensive and b) does not handover, just drops your signal until you dial again.
Can't think of anywhere with worse cellular options than Canada. I'm with Telus (aka The Other Satanic Scum Cel Co) and just discovered that adding 2 gigs of data to my existing 1 gig plan would jack my monthly bill from $50 to $75. And of course like everyone else, voicemail at Telus is an $8 to $10 dollar month option.
Yeah, right. Stephen Harper would happily sell his own mother to the Chinese... as he did with a big chunk of the tar-sands, over American objections.
A C-clamp?? Seriously. A FUCKING C-CLAMP?
What's the matter Haselton? Did you run out duct tape?
There are people who still use PayPal? Merchants or sites that encourage it? I can't recall the last time I came within spitting distance of PayPal for anything.
Then again, it's been several years since I went near e-Bay either.....
Wow. Talk about tempting fate....... some things you just shouldn't say out loud.
Well, perhaps not.
Arguably "privacy" does not mean what it might have forty years ago. Some of that is related directly to the way that Internet technology can retain data, and the ways that that data can be searched and manipulated.
That is something to be watched, and I've found myself more and more cautious about what I post on-line, but it's also a lot of what makes the modern Internet so damned useful.
I like it that Google usually can guess what I need. I like it that Amazon can suggest books or music that I actually would like to buy. I like that my smartphone is such a phenomenally handy tool, one that I use many times each day, and that would be nowhere near as useful without the might of Google behind it.
Hell, I like that I'm automagically logged into Slashdot every time I open up the site in my browser. It's handy.
Still, despite all of this, I do find Facebook's latest "creep" to be a bit uncomfortable. And yes, I'm one of those people who trusts Google, but who somehow don't trust Facebook. Hence the vast difference between what I'll trust to my Gmail account, and what I'll post to Facebook.
Still, despite the above, you have to accept that people's definition of "privacy" has changed. When I was growing up every house had an album full of photographs. If you came to visit our house we might show it to you, or we might not.
Now I have relatives who have literally thousands upon thousands of baby pictures, kid pictures, family pictures, videos, and God knows what else all posted to Facebook and accessible to hundreds of people. By their standards this is normal, and OK.
Instead of foaming at the mouth, or shrieking that no-one should ever be part of Facebook!!!, we should be figuring out how to manage a reasonable level of privacy in an age that will include Google, and Facebook, and all of those other fun and useful sites that we love.
ps - I can recall, back in the seventies and eighties, knowing people who refused to own a telephone - their arguments sounded pretty much the same.