I disagree with this. I've been running a very small internet business for a few years now, and have about 1000 customers so far; out of those 1000, about 150 have hotmail.com addresses, while only about 40 have aol.com addresses. The customers aren't really computer experts either, so it's a crowd where I'm not surprised to have AOL users, but still, there's lots more hotmail users. In fact, there's actually more hotmail users than Yahoo users, of which there's about 120. Not surprisingly, Gmail tops the list, at over 230. The rest is things like comcast.net (a little over 30, close to the aol.com number in fact), roadrunner.com, etc. along with some business email addresses and various other ISPs, large and small.
People outside the US wouldn't need to block US users; only other US users would need to use this option. It's not like the MAFIAA is going to go over to Latvia or wherever and start suing people there.
However, there probably are similar groups in other countries that might sue people there. So instead of just blocking US users, the real objective is to block uploading to other users in your own country, whatever it may be (Canada, UK, etc.), if your country's MAFIAA-equivalent is in the business of suing BitTorrent users.
And finally, acquiring people is nice, but in most country, people are free to leave a company at will, and I am prety sure there is lots of example of people leaving after being acquired ( I think Oracle/Sun is a prime example of that, given some problem that some managers at Oracle caused ).
There indeed are plenty of examples of that (and yes, Oracle/Sun is the poster child), however I don't think the dummies running companies and making these decisions actually take this into account very much. Oracle obviously didn't, in their extreme arrogance. In fact, I'm sure it's the exception rather than the rule anyway; most people stick with the job they have unless there's something about it they really don't like, or they get an offer that's too good to refuse elsewhere (and they usually have to go looking for it, meaning there's something they're not happy with at their current job). As long as the acquisition doesn't screw things up too bad, they probably don't result in many resignations, unless it's pretty obvious the acquisition is being done with the objective of gutting the company and getting rid of everyone. I think Oracle is an exception.
The problem with this is that the whole system doesn't work unless people are sharing.
What's needed is an option in clients to not upload to other users who have IP addresses in the USA. Even better would be a public list of IP blocks used by the MAFIAA, so those can be blacklisted automatically by the clients.
Anything can make it to court. I can sue you for annoying me on Slashdot if I want. It won't go far, as it'd be dismissed right away, but it'd get to court.
Anyway, don't forgot point #2: they're in RUSSIA. The US legal system has no jurisdiction there, and they tend to be pretty lax about legal matters over there.
It depends on exactly how old you are, and what kind of genetics you have. If you're 70, even if you're super-rich, you likely only have about 15-20 years left at the most, and a lot of that is going to be just puttering around a golf course. You're not going to miss that much if you decide to risk that for a trip to the Moon and you don't succeed in returning.
Try this: go skydiving, and forget to pull the ripcord so you die. Then, get your family to sue the skydiving company. See how far it goes.
Or better yet, go travel to Russia, and go skydiving there. Get yourself killed, and then see if your family can sue the skydiving company there. Good luck with that.
Health requirements? I don't think those apply in Russia. Also, John Glenn was able to ride on the Shuttle when he was older than that.
Finally, a passenger dying on takeoff isn't a financial liability. It should be obvious that anyone who goes up on one of these trips would sign a waiver. We're talking about sending people to the moon here, this isn't something where standard consumer-protection laws apply, and again, don't forget we're talking about Russia here. Where else do you think they're going to launch these things from? Florida? This is little different from skydiving, which, in case you didn't realize, is basically taking your life into your hands and insurance and such don't apply (if you die while skydiving, your life insurance won't pay, and if you survive a skydiving accident, your health insurance won't pay). Even in America, it's totally possible to sign away all liability on risky stunts.
When you're 60+ years old and have tons of money, but not that much time left on the Earth, you don't really worry so much about the risk of such ventures. Just being able to go to the Moon is a once-in-a-lifetime thing and only a very tiny number of people have even done it so far. Just like it wouldn't be that hard to find people willing to take a one-way trip to Mars despite the extreme risk there, I don't think they'll have much trouble finding people willing to take the risk of traveling to the Moon in a recycled Soviet capsule (esp. if they can do it once successfully to prove they can do it). The question is if they'll find enough people with the required funds willing to do it; however, the Russians didn't have that much trouble finding rich people willing to spend $20M on a ticket to LEO, so it's possible.
Who cares about sustainability with business? Lots of businesses have no such need; they get in, make a bunch of money, and that's the end of it; as long as the owners are able to walk away with a pile of cash, that's good enough for them.
Not all businesses need to continue to grow without end. That's mainly a requirement of publicly-traded companies because shareholders expect it, but private businesses operate very differently.
If these business owners think they can get a few dozen rich people to pony up $150M apiece for Moon tickets, at a claimed 50% profit margin thanks to recycled Soviet hardware, that's a nice hunk of profit to walk away with after 5 years or so.
Most cars are made from steel because it's cheap, easy to work with (welding), and its properties are extremely well-understood. Some cars are starting to be made with partial or all-aluminum chasses, because it weighs less and isn't that much more expensive and they've developed better joining techniques in recent years (for a long time, it was hard to weld it), so its cost is justified for, say, a $50+k Audi or Lotus. Very, very few cars are made with carbon fiber, and it's all about cost and manufacturability: the cost is not cheap for the materials, but even worse is the labor, because CF has to be made by hand, there's no such thing as automated manufacturing of carbon fiber products. So it makes sense for a $1.2 million Ferrari Enzo, but that's about it. Even then, such cars usually don't have only CF for their chasses, they employ various different materials in a composite; I believe a lightweight aluminum honeycomb core material is frequently used.
This actually parallels with PHP from what I can tell. PHP is like steel: it's super cheap (you can get $4/month hosting plans with PHP all over the place; good luck finding a Java host for that), it's easy to work with for non-experts and get something working decently, and the alternatives all have serious drawbacks. Java is something like carbon fiber: it's expensive as hell (you'd probably need a dedicated host for it, and the monthly costs are probably quite high for something like that) and doing simple things in it isn't that simple. Like you said about the car tire blog, making a little widget to show an odometer or something to visitors will be fast in PHP, not so much in Java unless you're a Java expert already. The others aren't much better; I don't see a lot of web hosting plans with Ruby or Python.
With PHP, all I have to do is drop in a.php file, put some <?php tags in my HTML, and it works. Can I do that with Python or Ruby?
This is a very important point that all the elitists here keep forgetting about. Want to set up a small, low-volume website on the cheap? There's a ton of less-than $5/month shared hosting providers out there, and all they seem to support are Perl and PHP, so PHP is the choice by default. I keep seeing posts here saying "use Python!", but I don't see much support for Python in the cheap hosting providers, let alone Java.
Um... USA and Canada, and I'd be surprised if Europe wasn't exactly the same way. What did you think that ATM/debit card was, a high-tech NFC system or something?
If you don't trust the people running the polling station to not stuff the ballot box (in a case where you're using paper ballots), then this is really moot.
Of course, I guess with paper ballots, you can put some simple checks into the system to detect tampering, like only having a specific number of ballots printed and using magnetic ink so they're not easily duplicated. Detecting e-voting tampering would be much more difficult. Even so, by making sure that no one (or two) person is allowed access to the machines without supervision, it should be possible to minimize the possibility of tampering. Surely there's checks like that in place with regular paper voting too.
Yes, but that's a different issue altogether. If you're trying to protect a computer from people doing unauthorized things to it, like plugging in USB drives and infecting it with malware, or taking out the hard drive and copying or altering it, that's easy, you just lock it up the way an ATM does. If you're worried about authorized people (who have keys to the machine's cabinet) tampering with the vote, that's a whole separate problem, and a good reason that proprietary machines from private companies should never, ever be used.
I think some other posters here have a good point that this whole thing really can't work very well. Technically, it could, but the potential for abuse is too great; while you could use encryption to keep things anonymous as you say, the problem is that very few people really understand that, so basically the population is trusting a very small number of people that the voting system is fair and not rigged. We've now tried electronic voting with private companies, and it's been a disaster, because these companies can't be trusted, and in most cases aren't even technically competent. Sure, some good engineers and encryption experts could get together and assemble a really good voting system, but they're not; they're all working at other places, and instead we have crappy companies like Sequoia slapping together some piece-of-shit systems that can't be trusted at all. With plain paper ballots, we don't have this problem: any bunch of regular citizens can get access to the ballots and count them themselves. Sure, it's slow, but it doesn't take an expert to do it, and you don't have the keys to democracy in the hands of some private corporation that may have a vested interest in who wins.
It's not that common, but occasionally people DO go into embassies and ask for asylum. What exactly would be the point of that if they're not able to leave? Other posters here have already remarked that diplomatic-flagged vehicles are sovereign, for this very reason.
That's because ATMs are stuck using 70s or 80s technology, namely easily-copied mag-stripe cards with crappy 4-digit PINs, with no encryption used at all. It's not the fault of the ATMs, it's because the whole industry refuses to move to a more secure access device. It's amazing that more money isn't stolen every day.
There's no requirement that voting machines use the same crappy access mechanism. In fact, the access mechanism would be totally different, because of the anonymity requirement; I'm just guessing, but if it's like the elections (which only use optically-scanned cards) I've voted in, you first have to go past one panel of people with your state ID so they can verify you're registered to vote in that precinct and cross your name off, and then they give you a card so you can vote on an anonymous form or machine. With e-voting, they'd just need to give you some sort of access card, or even not at all, just let you use the machine since only verified voters should be allowed to walk up to it and make a vote. It's not like these e-voting machines will be out in dark parking lots at night with anyone allowed to walk up to them.
You don't give the voters access to the whole machine, you only give them access to the touchscreen monitor, and maybe some kind of keypad. If you were to be believed, then we wouldn't be able to use ATMs.
Now of course, as the other poster noted, this means you can't do stupid things like have USB or SD/MMC ports that are user-accessible.
When we talk about having "physical access" to a machine, that means the WHOLE machine, as in a desktop PC where you can put your hands on the tower case, plug in USB devices, open the side panel, unplug the hard drive and put it in another system to access it, etc. Having the system locked inside a kiosk where you'd need a plasma torch to open it, and only having a touchscreen accessible to users, is NOT the same thing.
It's not that difficult, but it does require a team of competent engineers, so it does require some money and time. Apparently, the company the Irish government purchased these machines from lacks that.
Sorry, but as bad as that experience may be, it's not worthy of getting the courts involved. If the shemale tries to physically force him/her/itself on you, then you've got a case.
False dilemma. It's not a question of a lifetime in Ecuador vs. a small bit of time in a Swedish jail. It's a question of a lifetime in Ecuador vs. a lifetime in a pound-me-in-the-ass USA prison, or worse, torture in Guantanamo.
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I disagree with this. I've been running a very small internet business for a few years now, and have about 1000 customers so far; out of those 1000, about 150 have hotmail.com addresses, while only about 40 have aol.com addresses. The customers aren't really computer experts either, so it's a crowd where I'm not surprised to have AOL users, but still, there's lots more hotmail users. In fact, there's actually more hotmail users than Yahoo users, of which there's about 120. Not surprisingly, Gmail tops the list, at over 230. The rest is things like comcast.net (a little over 30, close to the aol.com number in fact), roadrunner.com, etc. along with some business email addresses and various other ISPs, large and small.
People outside the US wouldn't need to block US users; only other US users would need to use this option. It's not like the MAFIAA is going to go over to Latvia or wherever and start suing people there.
However, there probably are similar groups in other countries that might sue people there. So instead of just blocking US users, the real objective is to block uploading to other users in your own country, whatever it may be (Canada, UK, etc.), if your country's MAFIAA-equivalent is in the business of suing BitTorrent users.
And finally, acquiring people is nice, but in most country, people are free to leave a company at will, and I am prety sure there is lots of example of people leaving after being acquired ( I think Oracle/Sun is a prime example of that, given some problem that some managers at Oracle caused ).
There indeed are plenty of examples of that (and yes, Oracle/Sun is the poster child), however I don't think the dummies running companies and making these decisions actually take this into account very much. Oracle obviously didn't, in their extreme arrogance. In fact, I'm sure it's the exception rather than the rule anyway; most people stick with the job they have unless there's something about it they really don't like, or they get an offer that's too good to refuse elsewhere (and they usually have to go looking for it, meaning there's something they're not happy with at their current job). As long as the acquisition doesn't screw things up too bad, they probably don't result in many resignations, unless it's pretty obvious the acquisition is being done with the objective of gutting the company and getting rid of everyone. I think Oracle is an exception.
The problem with this is that the whole system doesn't work unless people are sharing.
What's needed is an option in clients to not upload to other users who have IP addresses in the USA. Even better would be a public list of IP blocks used by the MAFIAA, so those can be blacklisted automatically by the clients.
Anything can make it to court. I can sue you for annoying me on Slashdot if I want. It won't go far, as it'd be dismissed right away, but it'd get to court.
Anyway, don't forgot point #2: they're in RUSSIA. The US legal system has no jurisdiction there, and they tend to be pretty lax about legal matters over there.
It depends on exactly how old you are, and what kind of genetics you have. If you're 70, even if you're super-rich, you likely only have about 15-20 years left at the most, and a lot of that is going to be just puttering around a golf course. You're not going to miss that much if you decide to risk that for a trip to the Moon and you don't succeed in returning.
What exactly are you talking about?
Try this: go skydiving, and forget to pull the ripcord so you die. Then, get your family to sue the skydiving company. See how far it goes.
Or better yet, go travel to Russia, and go skydiving there. Get yourself killed, and then see if your family can sue the skydiving company there. Good luck with that.
Health requirements? I don't think those apply in Russia. Also, John Glenn was able to ride on the Shuttle when he was older than that.
Finally, a passenger dying on takeoff isn't a financial liability. It should be obvious that anyone who goes up on one of these trips would sign a waiver. We're talking about sending people to the moon here, this isn't something where standard consumer-protection laws apply, and again, don't forget we're talking about Russia here. Where else do you think they're going to launch these things from? Florida? This is little different from skydiving, which, in case you didn't realize, is basically taking your life into your hands and insurance and such don't apply (if you die while skydiving, your life insurance won't pay, and if you survive a skydiving accident, your health insurance won't pay). Even in America, it's totally possible to sign away all liability on risky stunts.
When you're 60+ years old and have tons of money, but not that much time left on the Earth, you don't really worry so much about the risk of such ventures. Just being able to go to the Moon is a once-in-a-lifetime thing and only a very tiny number of people have even done it so far. Just like it wouldn't be that hard to find people willing to take a one-way trip to Mars despite the extreme risk there, I don't think they'll have much trouble finding people willing to take the risk of traveling to the Moon in a recycled Soviet capsule (esp. if they can do it once successfully to prove they can do it). The question is if they'll find enough people with the required funds willing to do it; however, the Russians didn't have that much trouble finding rich people willing to spend $20M on a ticket to LEO, so it's possible.
Who cares about sustainability with business? Lots of businesses have no such need; they get in, make a bunch of money, and that's the end of it; as long as the owners are able to walk away with a pile of cash, that's good enough for them.
Not all businesses need to continue to grow without end. That's mainly a requirement of publicly-traded companies because shareholders expect it, but private businesses operate very differently.
If these business owners think they can get a few dozen rich people to pony up $150M apiece for Moon tickets, at a claimed 50% profit margin thanks to recycled Soviet hardware, that's a nice hunk of profit to walk away with after 5 years or so.
Most cars are made from steel because it's cheap, easy to work with (welding), and its properties are extremely well-understood. Some cars are starting to be made with partial or all-aluminum chasses, because it weighs less and isn't that much more expensive and they've developed better joining techniques in recent years (for a long time, it was hard to weld it), so its cost is justified for, say, a $50+k Audi or Lotus. Very, very few cars are made with carbon fiber, and it's all about cost and manufacturability: the cost is not cheap for the materials, but even worse is the labor, because CF has to be made by hand, there's no such thing as automated manufacturing of carbon fiber products. So it makes sense for a $1.2 million Ferrari Enzo, but that's about it. Even then, such cars usually don't have only CF for their chasses, they employ various different materials in a composite; I believe a lightweight aluminum honeycomb core material is frequently used.
This actually parallels with PHP from what I can tell. PHP is like steel: it's super cheap (you can get $4/month hosting plans with PHP all over the place; good luck finding a Java host for that), it's easy to work with for non-experts and get something working decently, and the alternatives all have serious drawbacks. Java is something like carbon fiber: it's expensive as hell (you'd probably need a dedicated host for it, and the monthly costs are probably quite high for something like that) and doing simple things in it isn't that simple. Like you said about the car tire blog, making a little widget to show an odometer or something to visitors will be fast in PHP, not so much in Java unless you're a Java expert already. The others aren't much better; I don't see a lot of web hosting plans with Ruby or Python.
With PHP, all I have to do is drop in a .php file, put some <?php tags in my HTML, and it works. Can I do that with Python or Ruby?
This is a very important point that all the elitists here keep forgetting about. Want to set up a small, low-volume website on the cheap? There's a ton of less-than $5/month shared hosting providers out there, and all they seem to support are Perl and PHP, so PHP is the choice by default. I keep seeing posts here saying "use Python!", but I don't see much support for Python in the cheap hosting providers, let alone Java.
Um... USA and Canada, and I'd be surprised if Europe wasn't exactly the same way. What did you think that ATM/debit card was, a high-tech NFC system or something?
If you don't trust the people running the polling station to not stuff the ballot box (in a case where you're using paper ballots), then this is really moot.
Of course, I guess with paper ballots, you can put some simple checks into the system to detect tampering, like only having a specific number of ballots printed and using magnetic ink so they're not easily duplicated. Detecting e-voting tampering would be much more difficult. Even so, by making sure that no one (or two) person is allowed access to the machines without supervision, it should be possible to minimize the possibility of tampering. Surely there's checks like that in place with regular paper voting too.
Yes, but that's a different issue altogether. If you're trying to protect a computer from people doing unauthorized things to it, like plugging in USB drives and infecting it with malware, or taking out the hard drive and copying or altering it, that's easy, you just lock it up the way an ATM does. If you're worried about authorized people (who have keys to the machine's cabinet) tampering with the vote, that's a whole separate problem, and a good reason that proprietary machines from private companies should never, ever be used.
I think some other posters here have a good point that this whole thing really can't work very well. Technically, it could, but the potential for abuse is too great; while you could use encryption to keep things anonymous as you say, the problem is that very few people really understand that, so basically the population is trusting a very small number of people that the voting system is fair and not rigged. We've now tried electronic voting with private companies, and it's been a disaster, because these companies can't be trusted, and in most cases aren't even technically competent. Sure, some good engineers and encryption experts could get together and assemble a really good voting system, but they're not; they're all working at other places, and instead we have crappy companies like Sequoia slapping together some piece-of-shit systems that can't be trusted at all. With plain paper ballots, we don't have this problem: any bunch of regular citizens can get access to the ballots and count them themselves. Sure, it's slow, but it doesn't take an expert to do it, and you don't have the keys to democracy in the hands of some private corporation that may have a vested interest in who wins.
It's not that common, but occasionally people DO go into embassies and ask for asylum. What exactly would be the point of that if they're not able to leave? Other posters here have already remarked that diplomatic-flagged vehicles are sovereign, for this very reason.
Would you then go out to breakfast with your rapist if you were really made they had sex with you while you were asleep?
That's because ATMs are stuck using 70s or 80s technology, namely easily-copied mag-stripe cards with crappy 4-digit PINs, with no encryption used at all. It's not the fault of the ATMs, it's because the whole industry refuses to move to a more secure access device. It's amazing that more money isn't stolen every day.
There's no requirement that voting machines use the same crappy access mechanism. In fact, the access mechanism would be totally different, because of the anonymity requirement; I'm just guessing, but if it's like the elections (which only use optically-scanned cards) I've voted in, you first have to go past one panel of people with your state ID so they can verify you're registered to vote in that precinct and cross your name off, and then they give you a card so you can vote on an anonymous form or machine. With e-voting, they'd just need to give you some sort of access card, or even not at all, just let you use the machine since only verified voters should be allowed to walk up to it and make a vote. It's not like these e-voting machines will be out in dark parking lots at night with anyone allowed to walk up to them.
Wrong.
You don't give the voters access to the whole machine, you only give them access to the touchscreen monitor, and maybe some kind of keypad. If you were to be believed, then we wouldn't be able to use ATMs.
Now of course, as the other poster noted, this means you can't do stupid things like have USB or SD/MMC ports that are user-accessible.
When we talk about having "physical access" to a machine, that means the WHOLE machine, as in a desktop PC where you can put your hands on the tower case, plug in USB devices, open the side panel, unplug the hard drive and put it in another system to access it, etc. Having the system locked inside a kiosk where you'd need a plasma torch to open it, and only having a touchscreen accessible to users, is NOT the same thing.
It's not that difficult, but it does require a team of competent engineers, so it does require some money and time. Apparently, the company the Irish government purchased these machines from lacks that.
Sorry, but as bad as that experience may be, it's not worthy of getting the courts involved. If the shemale tries to physically force him/her/itself on you, then you've got a case.
Nope. He can get in an Ecuadoran-flagged limo and take an Ecuadoran jet to Ecuador. The UK can't touch anyone in a diplomatic limo.
False dilemma. It's not a question of a lifetime in Ecuador vs. a small bit of time in a Swedish jail. It's a question of a lifetime in Ecuador vs. a lifetime in a pound-me-in-the-ass USA prison, or worse, torture in Guantanamo.
If you're going to redefine a word to be something totally different than what everyone else uses, then scare quotes are entirely appropriate.
Get over yourself.