No, the digital equivalent of a "No tresspassing" sign is to simply take the site offline. They want tresspassers, that's their business. They just don't want anyone pointing the way.
Being Dutch all I can do is say... [sigh] Belgians [/sigh]
What keeps on surprising me however, is that the US is the only Western country I know that has a problem with organizing the vote. It's not an issue of scale, as voting really distributes well. Given my knowledge of the US voting system and the system in place in countries where it does work, two main differences jump out that are true in other countries, but not in the US. Maybe fix these.
Everyone registered as a citizen gets a voting ticket by regular mail well before the election. This ticket you need to bring to the voting office and can be checked against ID. No differences between states here
There's one single voting system for the entire nation.
Of course, this goes against the 'States' part of the 'United States', but then again, the reputation of the fairness of the US elections is currently seen as a bit lower than that of Uganda.
It is telling that you assume that the 2006 election will be very crooked a few months before it happens. Time maybe to do something about it? The 2004 election however went largely uncontested; for the good of the country? Much good it did.
It is however very interesting that the US form of voting is so extremely sensitive to fraud and other irregularities. Nothing of this scale has, as far as I know, ever happened in any other country in the Western world. Are the American politicians that much more corrupt, or does the simple process of counting votes go beyond the capabilities of the American populace?
No-one is forced to use their products, except perhaps when they willingly sign contracts to that effect.
Not entirely true. Network effects remember? We're currently in a state where, if I want to have a job that involves a computer in some way, I am forced to use a Windows machine at work. Nothing else is allowed, nor supported. That's just the way things are.
Also, if I want to work from home from time to time, I need a Windows machine at home as well, or bring a company laptop. Getting on the company network? Windows is supported. Open Office is still not good enough to interoperate painlessly with an MS office culture(*).
So: if I want a job, I better know how to use Windows. If I want to have the freedom to work from home, I'd better have Windows(**). Bottom line: two license fees for Microsoft per office drone.
(*) Again a network effect: it's completely acceptable to say that MS-Office has a problem with opening something that it saved itself, as everyone has encountered that. However, telling that you have a problem with using Ooffice opening an MS document will not be appreciated, to put it mildly.
(**) The 'I' in the above is not me: I'm perfectly happy with my own linux notebook, smuggle it into the office illegally, and rdesktop into my actual XP workstation which is hidden in some cupboard somewhere else. Part-time employee, part-time academic gives some privileges.
Hmm, Gates and Buffet are the exception, not the rule. The Bush family is a prime example: this is a family from which the current living generations are all born in wealth. Especially with abolishing the so-called 'death tax' by the same family, the next 10 generations are saved from actually doing an honest days work in their lives. They will simply not run out of money! There are many more of such families in the US, and each have an interest (and the money and power) to keep it that way. Currently the US is breeding a new aristocracy, in which a founder of the family in some distant past made his great fortune, and subsequently, many generations profit from it. American dream?
I always marvel at the people who think the only way to preserve a free market is for the government to intervene in it.
Without government intervention, Standard Oil would be the only oil company in the United States, asking 10 bucks a gallon. You would still be paying AT&T both for local and non-local calls. Cable would also be controlled by a singly company. There would be three banks, that would determine the prices of their products collaboratively. You would have many networks, all controlled by Fox. General Electric would do all the engineering (having eaten up Honeywell and Schlumberger), Sony would control the entertainment industry, and Microsoft would be Microsoft.
You're mistaken. Take a look at the assertion you object to: "with Linux you are free to choose... and with Windows you are not". And before that you come with an example of bundling in SuSe, one of many Linux distributions. You are free to choose SuSe, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, Mandriva, Slackware, LFS, Etcetrix, Etcetrix, Etcetrix. This freedom of choice invalidates whatever point you're trying to make here. To spell it out: bundling is okay, monopolistic bundling is not.
The reasoned response is that by not bowing to the demands of the Chinese government, the internet savy part of the Chinese population get a near constant reminder that they're being censored. If somewhere the pedia is mentioned and they cannot access it, it's clear that their government, in their zeal for blocking 'harmful' content, are also blocking very unharmful stuff.That's extremely valuable information right there.
And of course, there are always books to get information from. The internet is convenient, but in no way the only source of information on any subject. Given my experience with Chinese students in the past, maybe they should block the entire internet for a while so that their students actually learn to lookup and digest stuff in a library for a change. The next student that hands in a paper lifted verbatim from Wikipedia is going to feel the sheer weight of the Brittanica hurled at him with the speed of a charging penguin!
As improbable as it may sound, the European justice system is quite different from the USA one. While the USA demands from its corporations to follow only the letter of the law, the European system has no difficulties with asking corporations to follow its spirit. So here's the clash: the EU demands from MS to stop abusing its monopoly, starting with stopping to tie in customers to MS media formats (the bundling issue), and tying their servers to their desktops (the protocol issue). MS, being an American company, with American lawyers, take the letter of the ruling, and tries to get as much wiggle room as they can see in this ruling. They are actively seeking to give out the protocols in such a way that they are of no use to anyone. Their WM-unbundling strategy has culminated in a defunct version of Windows that noone wants. All correct according to the letter, so the American laywers think they're ok.
The EU sees this, and concludes that MS is not following the ruling, and gets another fine.
So, from an European perspective the ruling is crystal clear: stop abusing your monopoly! Apart from the exact steps in the ruling (stop bundling media player and open up the documentation of your protocols) this includes finding new, hithero undiscovered methods of leveraging monopoly power. What the EU is basically saying is that they expect MS to behave like a responsible adult and cooperate, not like a spoiled child. Of course this is incomprehensible in the US corporate culture.
Analogy: parent says to kid: "Stop tormenting your brother! Don't you ever dare to kick him again!". The kid subsequently complies by hitting his brother, arguing: "You said nothing about not hitting him!". Should the parent have been crystal clear and enumerate all the possible ways he cannot torment his brother, or is the parent justified in given out a punishment? The latter apparently not in the US.
So, for MS to avoid being fined, they will have to simply stop taking deliberate steps that will leverage their monopoly and actively seek ways for others to work with their servers (opening up). The corporate strategy of MS is however bent on dominating through their various monopolies, and has not changed. What it boils down to is that the EU demands from MS to change their way of doing business. They're not doing it, thus MS can expect more trouble from the EU.
The big difference between bank accounts and votes is that the votes are secret and non-verifiable even to the voter. If something goes wrong with bank accounts, the owner of the account will notice and most likely complain. As the voter, for good reason, cannot verify that his individual vote (account) is counted correctly, there's a huge difference in verification mechanics between the two systems.
Can anyone explain to me what the advantage of punch card machines are above simple pencil and paper voting? I've never seen any country outside of the US that uses such a cumbersome system. Counts don't really go quicker with the same accuracy as instead of having people look at a piece of paper to see where a pencil mark is, you have university professors making distinctions between hanging chads and pregnant chads to decide upon the 'intention' of the voter. What bullshit. Why have punch card machines been invented for voting? What problem did they attempt to solve, and how well do they solve it?
In principle, size of the population doesn't matter. It's irrelevant if you have 500 million or 500 billion votes to count, as long as you have the same percentage of the population doing the counting. All the other points are valid however, but I'm pretty sure that the politicians in India are already carefully studying how their American compadres are rigging the system. You may find that the political views of the assorted intelligence of Bengalore and Hyderabad will find a promising place into the political system of India pretty soon.
I'm sorry, but what genius figured out that punch-cards are the way to go for voting? We'll put people in front of some complicated machinery that they're not comfortable with and everything will be swell? No, punch cards are in the same league as electronic voting: automation for the sake of automation, not improving anything.
A real paper voting system would not require anything but a paper ballot and, gasp, a pencil. Yes, this is possible! These ballots are then counted by hand. With close to 300 million Americans, you can probably find some people to count the votes? The reliance on easily corruptable machinery for mundane tasks such as ballot counting has backfired so enormously that it's time to get back to the basics. One man, one piece of paper, one pencil, one vote.
Ah, but this is particularly about wireless (beside the tangential issue of lions hunting in the desert). In that case there are not millions of attackers, but just a few. On the wild internets however, to outsmart your neighbour, you have to outsmart those millions of other boxes. Yes a stringent firewall is necessary. On my home wireless however: I can survive the attacks of my neighbours and the occasional war-driver will target my neighbours first. Anybody that is out there to get me specifically: there are probably better ways.
Out of general interest, I read this thread. It starts out with a guy complaining that Joerg didn't respond to email. When Joerg appears, he states that he did respond to the email, the next day. Then all hell breaks loose and everybody is immediately on Joerg's case. There's obviously a lot of historical resentment here, but this particular discussion doesn't really paint Joerg in a bad light.
Two guys were walking through the desert, when suddenly a lion pops up and starts thundering towards them. One of the guys takes off his backpack, takes his sneakers out and starts putting them on. The other guys looks at him in disgust: "you don't think you're going to outrun that lion, don't you!?". The guys answers: "I don't need to outrun the lion, I only have to outrun you".
In other words, I keep the security of my wireless always just a tiny bit tighter than that of my neighbour; making sure that he's easier picking.
So you say that the American, German, English, French, Dutch, Argentinian, Brazilian,...,...,...,..., system of representative democracy should not be described by the word 'democracy'. That general word is reserved for the form of government that was in vogue in a small city state, 2.5 millenia ago (and in small kantons in Switzerland). Sorry dude, but in the real world we'll be using the general form for the general case. I.e., if we're talking about modern age governments, 'democracy' always means 'representative democracy'. We can reserve the word 'direct democracy' for the exception: Switzerland.
Try to rig the inertial damper into current scientific theory and we're talking. Without them, warp is of not much use, at least, if you don't like the crew to be splattered on the walls everytime entering warp.
As the opponent is part of the AI's environment, the Hutter AI would be able to outmanouver the opponent in this particular scheme. Given that the Hutter AI needs complete knowledge of the environment, this is of no great difficulty. Actually calculating a Hutter AI is difficult however, as the thing is intrinsically incomputable.
The scenario that you sketch is actually addressed by Hutter in his technical tutorial-like report.
Checking young an male is one thing, but Muslim? What do you expect, that every young male gets a yellow sign in his passport whenever he goes to a mosque or something?
My country has a firm Constitution that sets limits, boundaries and guidelines for those governing. It is ruled by a small group of people who were selected to run the government according to their best judgement. Most of them are elected, one is not, we call her Queen. Do I live in a Constitutional Republic?
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Being Dutch all I can do is say ... [sigh] Belgians [/sigh]
Everyone registered as a citizen gets a voting ticket by regular mail well before the election. This ticket you need to bring to the voting office and can be checked against ID. No differences between states here
There's one single voting system for the entire nation.
Of course, this goes against the 'States' part of the 'United States', but then again, the reputation of the fairness of the US elections is currently seen as a bit lower than that of Uganda.
It is however very interesting that the US form of voting is so extremely sensitive to fraud and other irregularities. Nothing of this scale has, as far as I know, ever happened in any other country in the Western world. Are the American politicians that much more corrupt, or does the simple process of counting votes go beyond the capabilities of the American populace?
Not entirely true. Network effects remember? We're currently in a state where, if I want to have a job that involves a computer in some way, I am forced to use a Windows machine at work. Nothing else is allowed, nor supported. That's just the way things are.
Also, if I want to work from home from time to time, I need a Windows machine at home as well, or bring a company laptop. Getting on the company network? Windows is supported. Open Office is still not good enough to interoperate painlessly with an MS office culture(*).
So: if I want a job, I better know how to use Windows. If I want to have the freedom to work from home, I'd better have Windows(**). Bottom line: two license fees for Microsoft per office drone.
(*) Again a network effect: it's completely acceptable to say that MS-Office has a problem with opening something that it saved itself, as everyone has encountered that. However, telling that you have a problem with using Ooffice opening an MS document will not be appreciated, to put it mildly.
(**) The 'I' in the above is not me: I'm perfectly happy with my own linux notebook, smuggle it into the office illegally, and rdesktop into my actual XP workstation which is hidden in some cupboard somewhere else. Part-time employee, part-time academic gives some privileges.
Hmm, Gates and Buffet are the exception, not the rule. The Bush family is a prime example: this is a family from which the current living generations are all born in wealth. Especially with abolishing the so-called 'death tax' by the same family, the next 10 generations are saved from actually doing an honest days work in their lives. They will simply not run out of money! There are many more of such families in the US, and each have an interest (and the money and power) to keep it that way. Currently the US is breeding a new aristocracy, in which a founder of the family in some distant past made his great fortune, and subsequently, many generations profit from it. American dream?
The difference between capitalism and communism is that with capitalism, man is exploiting man. With communism, it's the other way around.
Without government intervention, Standard Oil would be the only oil company in the United States, asking 10 bucks a gallon. You would still be paying AT&T both for local and non-local calls. Cable would also be controlled by a singly company. There would be three banks, that would determine the prices of their products collaboratively. You would have many networks, all controlled by Fox. General Electric would do all the engineering (having eaten up Honeywell and Schlumberger), Sony would control the entertainment industry, and Microsoft would be Microsoft.
Free market? Think not.
You're mistaken. Take a look at the assertion you object to: "with Linux you are free to choose ... and with Windows you are not". And before that you come with an example of bundling in SuSe, one of many Linux distributions. You are free to choose SuSe, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, Mandriva, Slackware, LFS, Etcetrix, Etcetrix, Etcetrix. This freedom of choice invalidates whatever point you're trying to make here. To spell it out: bundling is okay, monopolistic bundling is not.
And of course, there are always books to get information from. The internet is convenient, but in no way the only source of information on any subject. Given my experience with Chinese students in the past, maybe they should block the entire internet for a while so that their students actually learn to lookup and digest stuff in a library for a change. The next student that hands in a paper lifted verbatim from Wikipedia is going to feel the sheer weight of the Brittanica hurled at him with the speed of a charging penguin!
So, from an European perspective the ruling is crystal clear: stop abusing your monopoly! Apart from the exact steps in the ruling (stop bundling media player and open up the documentation of your protocols) this includes finding new, hithero undiscovered methods of leveraging monopoly power. What the EU is basically saying is that they expect MS to behave like a responsible adult and cooperate, not like a spoiled child. Of course this is incomprehensible in the US corporate culture.
Analogy: parent says to kid: "Stop tormenting your brother! Don't you ever dare to kick him again!". The kid subsequently complies by hitting his brother, arguing: "You said nothing about not hitting him!". Should the parent have been crystal clear and enumerate all the possible ways he cannot torment his brother, or is the parent justified in given out a punishment? The latter apparently not in the US.
So, for MS to avoid being fined, they will have to simply stop taking deliberate steps that will leverage their monopoly and actively seek ways for others to work with their servers (opening up). The corporate strategy of MS is however bent on dominating through their various monopolies, and has not changed. What it boils down to is that the EU demands from MS to change their way of doing business. They're not doing it, thus MS can expect more trouble from the EU.
The big difference between bank accounts and votes is that the votes are secret and non-verifiable even to the voter. If something goes wrong with bank accounts, the owner of the account will notice and most likely complain. As the voter, for good reason, cannot verify that his individual vote (account) is counted correctly, there's a huge difference in verification mechanics between the two systems.
Can anyone explain to me what the advantage of punch card machines are above simple pencil and paper voting? I've never seen any country outside of the US that uses such a cumbersome system. Counts don't really go quicker with the same accuracy as instead of having people look at a piece of paper to see where a pencil mark is, you have university professors making distinctions between hanging chads and pregnant chads to decide upon the 'intention' of the voter. What bullshit. Why have punch card machines been invented for voting? What problem did they attempt to solve, and how well do they solve it?
In principle, size of the population doesn't matter. It's irrelevant if you have 500 million or 500 billion votes to count, as long as you have the same percentage of the population doing the counting. All the other points are valid however, but I'm pretty sure that the politicians in India are already carefully studying how their American compadres are rigging the system. You may find that the political views of the assorted intelligence of Bengalore and Hyderabad will find a promising place into the political system of India pretty soon.
A real paper voting system would not require anything but a paper ballot and, gasp, a pencil. Yes, this is possible! These ballots are then counted by hand. With close to 300 million Americans, you can probably find some people to count the votes? The reliance on easily corruptable machinery for mundane tasks such as ballot counting has backfired so enormously that it's time to get back to the basics. One man, one piece of paper, one pencil, one vote.
yes, and they get mighty horny too!
Ah, but this is particularly about wireless (beside the tangential issue of lions hunting in the desert). In that case there are not millions of attackers, but just a few. On the wild internets however, to outsmart your neighbour, you have to outsmart those millions of other boxes. Yes a stringent firewall is necessary. On my home wireless however: I can survive the attacks of my neighbours and the occasional war-driver will target my neighbours first. Anybody that is out there to get me specifically: there are probably better ways.
Out of general interest, I read this thread. It starts out with a guy complaining that Joerg didn't respond to email. When Joerg appears, he states that he did respond to the email, the next day. Then all hell breaks loose and everybody is immediately on Joerg's case. There's obviously a lot of historical resentment here, but this particular discussion doesn't really paint Joerg in a bad light.
In other words, I keep the security of my wireless always just a tiny bit tighter than that of my neighbour; making sure that he's easier picking.
So you say that the American, German, English, French, Dutch, Argentinian, Brazilian, ..., ..., ..., ..., system of representative democracy should not be described by the word 'democracy'. That general word is reserved for the form of government that was in vogue in a small city state, 2.5 millenia ago (and in small kantons in Switzerland). Sorry dude, but in the real world we'll be using the general form for the general case. I.e., if we're talking about modern age governments, 'democracy' always means 'representative democracy'. We can reserve the word 'direct democracy' for the exception: Switzerland.
Try to rig the inertial damper into current scientific theory and we're talking. Without them, warp is of not much use, at least, if you don't like the crew to be splattered on the walls everytime entering warp.
The scenario that you sketch is actually addressed by Hutter in his technical tutorial-like report.
Checking young an male is one thing, but Muslim? What do you expect, that every young male gets a yellow sign in his passport whenever he goes to a mosque or something?
true
The guy that actually 0wnz your home computer would.
My country has a firm Constitution that sets limits, boundaries and guidelines for those governing. It is ruled by a small group of people who were selected to run the government according to their best judgement. Most of them are elected, one is not, we call her Queen. Do I live in a Constitutional Republic?