Agreed, 100%. It's just that all this was also achievable with a simple 64, at a far more decent price at the time (I was fourteen then, the money really did count).
Ouch, commodore-128, featuring CP/M right after DOS won the battle.It still hurts thinking about the money I spent while all I used was the commodore 64 capabilities. At least it had a floppy drive, that was so cool!
My response was mainly there to point at the far-fetchedness of your particular conspiracy theory. Obviously there are many ways to tamper with any election scheme, only yours was no more likely than mine. Another response pinpoints the cause: what if people check the receipts in the ballot box?
As to making sure that the counts between machine and receipts aren't different, this could easily be done by performing random checks, prefereably with random machines/receipt combinations being selected *after* the election. You could probably get away with checking no more than 1% of the machines/vote boxes, to get an indication of the honesty of the elections. This should of course be done by an independent body consisting of all interested parties. If discrepencies are found, start recalculating all and find the fraudster.
Unfortunately this does not seem to be the plan in California. Given the shoddy history of elections in the US, it's time to make some real advances in voting. Maybe let the UN in to check procedures, like they do with other countries that have a poor track record of honest elections.
Or you could dig a tunnel under the vote station and use a saw to make a hole under the box where all the paper votes are kept. Then when a paper gets fed to the box, you will take it and replace it with another vote of your liking. Don't forgot to wear a tinfoil hat during the operation.
Just make sure that the paper votes are counted after the elections for a random selection of voting machines. If large discrepencies are found, redo the elections, put Diebold in jail.
Excuse me, I said East-India companies, plural. There was also the Dutch East-India company which had its own navy and was interestingly enough the first publically traded company in the world.
You're absolutely right and the grandparent is a moron. The most powerful counterexample to the government-free economy is history, where companies used to have their own armies (East-India companies to be exact). Would you feel comfortable with Microsoft having an army that they could employ at will? No matter how powerful Tove is, Linus wouldn't last a day.
So.NET is a method to create software? And you can do web-based, thick client as well as architecture with it? Thank you for your very precise posting pinpointing exactly what novelties.NET brings to the computing world to us poor basement dwellers that don't have any experience with it. We'll sure try now.
The article ends with an answer of roughly 11 meter per second. Given some a priori reasoning about the universality of the metric system and the Answer, we can deduce that the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow quite likely is a bit higher, namely 11 2/3 meter per second. This comfortably equates to 42 kilometers per hour, and the circle is closed.
Yep, did that, worked flawlessly. Ran knoppix-installer (not knx-hdinstall!), replaced/etc/apt/sources.list with my own preferences (plain debian mirror sid, some stuff for java), ran dist-upgrade and done.
Not the most important bit. It would however avoid music providers to assume that MS-formats can be handled by all their customer. Yet another step away from the MS-only internet.
9/11 would have happened anyway, Al-Quada's attack was against the US, not Bush. The thing Gore probably would have avoided is making the majority of the world smirk when another gung-ho cowboy hits the Iraqian sand. This includes the US (former?) allies in Europe. The economy? I doubt politics has that much influence on the mass-psychoses that seem to drive the economy.
Nope, not being hated more after 9/11 than before is the only thing I would expect Gore to have accomplished.
First of all, self-preservation is a fairly strong instinct you can count on in such a situation. As the article rightly points out, you should more fear the mechanic or the overseer to think "fuck it" if he sees that the left wing can fall of in mid-flight any flight now. He will not be on board when that happens. Why not pay him the 250K and the pilot a 100?
Funny, this example is exactly why CVS is cumbersome to use: you should do the 'cvs update' FIRST, so that you don't overwrite other peoples changes to the code you were working on. After resolving possible conflicts, commit.
Although they were first, it's just banking and private enterprise in Italy. As far as I know (but hey, I'm Dutch), the first 'modern' corporation was the Dutch East-Indies Company, complete with public stocks and stock market. Not uncharactaristically for a corporation, this company's line of business was sail to what's now Indonesia, plant a small army, kill a few natives, and subsequently 'buy' spices.
Hey dude, you just succeeded in explaining how chess computers work. This has however no bearing on the optimality of the approach. You would probably still need a brain (not mind!) the size of a few universes to store all possibilities. Remember, seemingly hopeless branches might still lead to a forced win.
It might be more worthwhile that an effort is made to figure out which parts of OSS are likely infringing on particular patents and subsequently use significantly different, nonpatented alternatives. Think about the issues with LZW (GIF) and this causing OSS to use gzip instead. This would greatly reduce the risk of Microsoft suddenly attacking OSS with thousands of patent violation which would immobilize it for possibly a few years. If well-documented changes are made to circumvent patents, such a scenario would be moot.
Given enough eyes, all patents can be read, understood, and circumvented.
Yes, but the fact that the question might be the hardest part, does not mean it is actually protected by patents, nor that it should be. If you scan patent databases you will find tons of patents of the good old engineering kind that each solve exactly the same problem in different innovative ways. No one is/was for instance able to patent the general device for recording television programs, though you will find tons of patents on how to do this with ever increasing effectiveness, using newer and better technology. Imagine the question on how to wash clothes without doing manual labor being patentable, the question how to talk of large distances, the question of letting a machine do automatic calculations, the question how to send data fast over a cable. Imagine that coming up with the idea of a beowulf cluster and a single implementation would mean that anyone with competing implementations would have to pay the one that came up with the idea.
So, yes, coming up with the right question is the hard part, yet it is not a good idea to be able to protect utility in itself. This would make progress impossible. Unfortunately it seems the USPO thinks differently.
and seventyone minutes later someone has 'shared' this 'imperfect' copy digitally on KaZaa. Luckily he had a good recording device, so the real degradation of quality happened when he made an mp3 out of it.
I think that most of this utter confusion in the United States about whether corporations have 'free speech' or if yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theater should be allowed, or countless other issues, is caused by this extremely wide-covering word 'speech' that lies at the heart of the freedom. It seems that this 'free speech' USians think they enjoy is the freedom of 'uttering things', whatever these things are.
In Europe, where I come from, there is no such thing as 'free speech'. What citizens do enjoy is the 'freedom of expressing their opinion'. Expressing ones opinion is quite more constrained than all-encompassing 'speech', but I do have the feeling that this is exactly what is originally meant by 'free speech'.
Think of the advantages of using this. In Europe it is absurd to even consider that selling washing powder has anything to do with anyone's opinion. Corporations can have opinions (for instance that laying off people should be made easy under the law), but commercials and sales talks are no such things, and it is weird from our perspective that you guys even consider this seriously. If I however want to express my dislike of any person or party, on whatever grounds, that is my opinion and is respected. Yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theater is also pretty straightforward. 'Fire', speech as it may be, can hardly be construed as being an opinion. Is code 'speech'? Maybe, it sure isn't an opinion.
Following Slashdot for a while, most borderline cases about which 'speech' should be free or not, lies exactly between the line of expressing one's opinion vs. other utterances. Personally I think 'freedom of speech' should lie closer to 'freedom of expressing ones opinion' than to this weird 'freedom to make arbitrary utterances'. It seems many here think the latter is the important part, I disagree. It's the freedom to speak our minds freely without fear of being prosecuted that makes up our freedom.
Hmm, I'm not sure that unbiasedness and noticing logical contradictions should exclude each other. Noticing logical fallacies do not need arguing against, just noticing them should be enough.
If they were to say 'See, microsoft is lying', that would be biased, however noticing that 'These two positions of microsoft seem to contradict each other' only shows that the reporter can actually think logically. That this is missed in the article does indeed show that thinking logically is rare in itself in journalism.
And no, using logic is not expressing an opinion. In fact, you can patent this nowadays.
Just checked out Knoppix on a new laptop and noticed there wasn't any APM (APCI) support built in the kernel. Does anyone work on a cd to be used for a basic working linux install on a laptop?
Slashdot Mirror
China's great wall before taking inflation into account?
Agreed, 100%. It's just that all this was also achievable with a simple 64, at a far more decent price at the time (I was fourteen then, the money really did count).
Ouch, commodore-128, featuring CP/M right after DOS won the battle.It still hurts thinking about the money I spent while all I used was the commodore 64 capabilities. At least it had a floppy drive, that was so cool!
As to making sure that the counts between machine and receipts aren't different, this could easily be done by performing random checks, prefereably with random machines/receipt combinations being selected *after* the election. You could probably get away with checking no more than 1% of the machines/vote boxes, to get an indication of the honesty of the elections. This should of course be done by an independent body consisting of all interested parties. If discrepencies are found, start recalculating all and find the fraudster.
Unfortunately this does not seem to be the plan in California. Given the shoddy history of elections in the US, it's time to make some real advances in voting. Maybe let the UN in to check procedures, like they do with other countries that have a poor track record of honest elections.
Or you could dig a tunnel under the vote station and use a saw to make a hole under the box where all the paper votes are kept. Then when a paper gets fed to the box, you will take it and replace it with another vote of your liking. Don't forgot to wear a tinfoil hat during the operation.
Just make sure that the paper votes are counted after the elections for a random selection of voting machines. If large discrepencies are found, redo the elections, put Diebold in jail.
Excuse me, I said East-India companies, plural. There was also the Dutch East-India company which had its own navy and was interestingly enough the first publically traded company in the world.
Temperature might be low, but how much air is there at 10,0000 feet? You do need plenty of molecules to exchange the heat with, right?
You're absolutely right and the grandparent is a moron. The most powerful counterexample to the government-free economy is history, where companies used to have their own armies (East-India companies to be exact). Would you feel comfortable with Microsoft having an army that they could employ at will? No matter how powerful Tove is, Linus wouldn't last a day.
So .NET is a method to create software? And you can do web-based, thick client as well as architecture with it? Thank you for your very precise posting pinpointing exactly what novelties .NET brings to the computing world to us poor basement dwellers that don't have any experience with it. We'll sure try now.
The article ends with an answer of roughly 11 meter per second. Given some a priori reasoning about the universality of the metric system and the Answer, we can deduce that the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow quite likely is a bit higher, namely 11 2/3 meter per second. This comfortably equates to 42 kilometers per hour, and the circle is closed.
Yep, did that, worked flawlessly. Ran knoppix-installer (not knx-hdinstall!), replaced /etc/apt/sources.list with my own preferences (plain debian mirror sid, some stuff for java), ran dist-upgrade and done.
Not the most important bit. It would however avoid music providers to assume that MS-formats can be handled by all their customer. Yet another step away from the MS-only internet.
Nope, not being hated more after 9/11 than before is the only thing I would expect Gore to have accomplished.
First of all, self-preservation is a fairly strong instinct you can count on in such a situation. As the article rightly points out, you should more fear the mechanic or the overseer to think "fuck it" if he sees that the left wing can fall of in mid-flight any flight now. He will not be on board when that happens. Why not pay him the 250K and the pilot a 100?
Funny, this example is exactly why CVS is cumbersome to use: you should do the 'cvs update' FIRST, so that you don't overwrite other peoples changes to the code you were working on. After resolving possible conflicts, commit.
Funny this, it seems that Apple always provides by far the fastest hardware to run OS X. Amazing.
Hey dude, you just succeeded in explaining how chess computers work. This has however no bearing on the optimality of the approach. You would probably still need a brain (not mind!) the size of a few universes to store all possibilities. Remember, seemingly hopeless branches might still lead to a forced win.
Given enough eyes, all patents can be read, understood, and circumvented.
So, yes, coming up with the right question is the hard part, yet it is not a good idea to be able to protect utility in itself. This would make progress impossible. Unfortunately it seems the USPO thinks differently.
and seventyone minutes later someone has 'shared' this 'imperfect' copy digitally on KaZaa. Luckily he had a good recording device, so the real degradation of quality happened when he made an mp3 out of it.
In Europe, where I come from, there is no such thing as 'free speech'. What citizens do enjoy is the 'freedom of expressing their opinion'. Expressing ones opinion is quite more constrained than all-encompassing 'speech', but I do have the feeling that this is exactly what is originally meant by 'free speech'.
Think of the advantages of using this. In Europe it is absurd to even consider that selling washing powder has anything to do with anyone's opinion. Corporations can have opinions (for instance that laying off people should be made easy under the law), but commercials and sales talks are no such things, and it is weird from our perspective that you guys even consider this seriously. If I however want to express my dislike of any person or party, on whatever grounds, that is my opinion and is respected. Yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theater is also pretty straightforward. 'Fire', speech as it may be, can hardly be construed as being an opinion. Is code 'speech'? Maybe, it sure isn't an opinion.
Following Slashdot for a while, most borderline cases about which 'speech' should be free or not, lies exactly between the line of expressing one's opinion vs. other utterances. Personally I think 'freedom of speech' should lie closer to 'freedom of expressing ones opinion' than to this weird 'freedom to make arbitrary utterances'. It seems many here think the latter is the important part, I disagree. It's the freedom to speak our minds freely without fear of being prosecuted that makes up our freedom.
If they were to say 'See, microsoft is lying', that would be biased, however noticing that 'These two positions of microsoft seem to contradict each other' only shows that the reporter can actually think logically. That this is missed in the article does indeed show that thinking logically is rare in itself in journalism.
And no, using logic is not expressing an opinion. In fact, you can patent this nowadays.
Just checked out Knoppix on a new laptop and noticed there wasn't any APM (APCI) support built in the kernel. Does anyone work on a cd to be used for a basic working linux install on a laptop?