Don't you want to just be compensated and make the punishment so harsh to make others think twice before they try something similar? Why do you need to punish a single human?
So harsh as to make what "others" think twice? Other people? Gee, somehow I suspect that making the company pay up $500 billion dollars isn't exactly going to make Jim Bob (whether he's "evil" or just a "moron") quake in his shoes. What's the company going to do, fire him?
Corporations have become the shield from behind which evil people act with impunity.
The corporate veil needs to end. If a human made the decision to force software to install on my computer then that human needs to be held personally liable for it.
Until people are held liable for their actions, evil people will continue to act freely.
When I put the CD in the drive, I wanted to play some music, not install some software. It's YOUR analogy that's flawed.
How about this:
I run a bar and decide to get some live music, so I call up a group of musicians. A popular and very well known band, of course, I don't want to drive my patrons out. They tell me "sure, we'll come and play, just give us some money." So I send them a payment, and the day of the performance, they show up with a 50 page contract. "Just sign this and we'll be set". I look over it, and I see among it's provisions that they're going to firebomb the stage at the end of the show. I give them the contract back and tell them no.
should we all go around and change every gui so it can be used with a one button mouse and three keys on the keyboard? no! we should make it accessible to all
There is a huge difference between can be and must be.
And yet, unlike a car (which people can and do loan out), a bank account site could take fairly simple steps to provide a more-secure authentication method. But they don't.
Personally, I'm not a fan of making it the responsibility of the smart to defend the stupid from themselves, but some of these things are things even smart people can't defend against, like stupid webdesigners. (Not an isolated issue. Look at www.wamu.com, www.bankofamerica.com, www.chase.com, the main pages are not encrypted but they have a username/password box on it. Normally, it would post to a secure site, but browsers don't provide a mechanism for displaying that a given form on an insecure page is actually secure. If you went there, and someone was using DNS poisoning to redirect you to their version of the site, there would be no way of knowing until after you hit submit that you weren't where you were supposed to be.) The banks aren't going to do anything about it themselves, they know that "has a properly secured website" is below "good interest rate", "low monthly costs", etc. are the features their customers are looking for.
You know what I want from a bank? "Write-only" account numbers, so I can give my account number to HR for direct deposit confident in knowing that should the guy get fired, he can't drain my account and flee the country. That level of security isn't even a blip on the radar of these guys, and frankly, they don't care.
How's this for a completely off-the-cuff e-voting specification. It will allow for fast voting, fast counting, and a paper trail in between:
Computerized voting booth: User inserts a blank pre-printed ballot with one line for each position or proposal. The machine confirms that the ballot is loaded correctly (perhaps a notch in one corner) and displays the setup. (Step 0: blind users are assisted in plugging in headphones and instruction on location and purpose of the controls. Controls should have braille.) User selects a language (from this point on, interface is in the selected language), and then a font size (even if headphones are present... a "blind" user may actually just have impared vision and be capable of using the device with a large enough font size). The user then sees a list of "issues" and whether a vote has been selected. The first "issue" should be the option to vote straight ticket. When the user selects an issue (controls tbd, though I'm particularly fond of "prev, next, and enter", for a total of three keys). They will see a description of that issue in the appropriate language (ie, "President of the United States" or "Proposition 1: Raise Taxes"). Propositions should start with a very minimal description for this stage in order to prevent as much bias as possible. The full text of the proposition should then be available within the system in the language it will be implemented in (translating law is difficult and can be error-prone). Finally, a list of options which the user can navigate. All such lists should include a "no vote" option so that the user can return to the issue list without recording a vote. Selecting an option returns you to the issue list. At the bottom of the issue list is the option to confirm your vote. First, if not all issues have been voted on, a message will appear to indicate that some votes have not been cast, with the default setting as "return to voting". If the user chooses "confirm votes" again, they will be given a list of issues and their selected options. The default will again be to "return to voting". When the user chooses "Voting Complete, Print Ballot", their ballot card will be printed, one issue to a line in the form
President of the United States John Doe **** * ** US House of Representatives Dist 142 Susie Q * ** * ***
(ideally in columns, though width restraints may force this to occupy multiple rows. Plus, slashdot has really nerfed the ecode tag for formatting) etc. The machine resets for the next user, with no data saved. The user can then confirm that the ballot card is correct, and deposit the card in the box. If the user discovers an issue with their card, they can return it to the staff, have it destroyed, and be re-issued a blank card.
Now, the ballot boxes are securely transferred to the voting station as was done for years and years before the evoting craze, where they are processed by two machines. One, an optical sorter which can be configured to read the *** marks on any given line, and sort the ballots appropriately. The ballots are then fed into a counter, and the tally recorded for the appropriate person. At any time, someone can examine a sorted stack of ballots to confirm that the marks do match the person voted for (flipping through the stack while watching the name should be very quick to confirm). After counting, someone can confirm that the stack fed through the counter matches the name the count is awarded to. And, if necessary, the ballots can be recounted by hand by reading the human-readable portion of the ballot.
Design issue to confront: with preprinted ballot cards, how long does the card need to be in order to guarantee that every possible item can fit? How wide to ensure that people's names can be represented completely? Can printers be equipped to print and cut from a "roll" of cardstock (or any paper thicker than receipt paper which would never survive a mechanical sorter) to circumvent this issue? Can the printer ge
Don't worry, the first time someone tries to use it as a defense, the prosecutor will claim that they gave the cellphone to a friend to use as an alibi.
Well, to start with, I'd let the judge know that they really shouldn't use Word to keep notes like "defendant $5000, see about dismissal AM" in their court documents.
Other than that, there's a program that MS put out that will strip all the hidden stuff from documents.
Really, the problem with AJAX is that many of the developers and their users are trying to mix an "application" design paradigm with a connectionless browser design paradigm. AJAX breaks "back"? Of course it does. Applications don't have a "back" button, they have an "undo" button, and it performs a completely different operation from what the browser does when you hit back. If AJAX application developers want to not confuse their users, they force everything into a new window with no control bar, and provide undo buttons of its own. Of course it breaks bookmarking as well. Do you have a "bookmark" for the paragraph formatting dialog in Word? I thought not. Why should we care if Google can index it? Does google crawl World of Warcraft interfaces? I didn't think so either.
The author has clear gripes with the misuse of AJAX, but his claim that it should be banished to "Web2.0" companies and kept in permanent beta, never to be fed after midnight is a bit harsh for a technology that does one thing and does it well.
Aside from the fact that if it was so damn easy to replicate a chemical compound from scratch we'd already have Coca-Cola(tm) knockoffs that taste the exact same but without the 1000%+ markup (I have yet to have a "Big K" or whatever generic brand cola taste anywhere close), life would still go on: researchers (probably in an academic setting) would look for stuff because that's what they like to do. Many of them would probably even go back to curing diseases rather than attempting to invent the next wonder drug (read: dick enhancer).
And then there's the group of researchers who are starting trials on regrowing spinal and radial nerves using cells from the patient's sinus. The wonder treatments of the future may not be drugs at all, but you wouldn't believe it from listening to the pharmaceutical companies.
Hope you look forward to paying 10-20% more for your next car.
If it means not paying $50,000 in hospital costs for when the brakes fall off my car into the river, followed by the rest of my car, then I'm all for it. If it convinces people to use crash testing at speeds in excess of 5mph, then I'm all for it. If it just pads some guy's wallet while the company pretends their product is "safer", let's not.
I don't think "unspecified damages" are called for though. If they can't fix it, they should refund the purchase price of the console, games, and accessories. If someone claims "mental anguish", lets see some therapist bills.
Why haven't the judges declared that age restrictions on R movies (or even NC-17 movies) are unconstitutional?
Because MPAA ratings are voluntary. Nobody passed a law requiring age restrictions on R and NC-17 movies, the movie theatres got together and said "gee, if we let kids come in and see this stuff, people's heads will explode and we'll lose millions" and did so.
And gee, look at all this furor over these games. All these "advocates" have their panties in a bind... and all of the major retailers already have policies to card minors. Of course, these "advocates" have already proven themselves pretty much out of touch with the modern age, given their pit-bull like tendancy to clamp onto something and not let go until long after it's died and rotted away... how long were they beating the "Doom" dead horse? I recall "Quake" and "Doom" being harped on repeatedly after the Columbine shootings years after the games came out, long after "worse" games had been on the market.
Why are all of these age restrictions acceptable but the one involving video games is not?
So yeah, there are already perfectly good restrictions in place, based on a well-developed rating system that has only been "gamed" once (the disabled "hot coffee" stuff). Why should we accept the actions of a bunch of lawyers acting on the ravings of a group of people who appear to get their news from 5 years ago, as they create a bullshit "I know it when I see it" rating system to replace that?
The prioritization scheme is unneeded. If a web site is too slow, upgrade the link (it probably is not a bottleneck on the server processing, but it may be a bottleneck on the client).
Thats just it, they're not bottlenecking this on the server side. They're threatening content providers by telling them that if they don't pay extra directly to them, then Bell South customers will have to wait longer for their content. You could operate off of 10 OC3s directly from 3 different Tier-1 companies, but if you don't pay up to Bell, their DSL customers will be wondering just where the hell you got that 28.8 modem from in this day and age.
Speaking of battle animations, there should be user-selectable levels, say
Full animation - for those times when you're reading slashdot First time - ok, the summon spell was cool, but having seen it 3124 times, it's not cool anymore (option to reset everything to "unseen"?) Fast - I'm sure the summon spell is cool, but I don't have time for it. None - stationary stick figures pick commands and numbers appear over their heads.
Database encryption makes as much sense as drive encryption. Works great, unless they get it while it's running, and face it, the vast majority of database apps are not on a laptop that can walk away. When it comes down to "improving security" there are better things to throw money at than the processor and development time required to encrypt your database.
Firewalls, proper network design, proper user and access credentialing, proper system maintenance, even proper hardware decomissioning techniques, all of which are strictly maintained or at least implemented with multiple layers to mitigate the failure of that maintenance at any point (say, DOD wipe before you pull the drives out to be crushed, lest someone walk off with one. User access audit trails that allow you to detect improper access, and undo database changes done by whoever was using that account should someone's password get compromised) are going to go farther to protect your data than any encryption key hiding somewhere in your application, waiting to be read out of memory.
So, what? You want to track the movement of every single person in the country, on the off chance you might be able to datamine that database fast enough to save anyone?
You want to know what really kills us all? This winter's migratory birds fly across the country and our own ducks, geese, and eventually pidgeons pick up the bird flu. This spring, some homeless guy in NYC finds a dead bird behind a bench and wasted on cheap booze, proceeds to eat it. A few days later, he gets some sniffles and proceeds immediately to the hospital where he whips out his United Homeless Healthcare card and... wait, scratch that, he proceeds to the soup kitchen like he does every other day, where a cheerful highschool girl doing her best to improve the lives of everyone around her... wait make that a surly stoner on probation doing community service, proceeds to contract it and take it to school the next day.
A few weeks, some dead bums and a very sick highschool class later, doctors will finally figure out its the bird flu, and they'll scramble to try and figure out who the hell brought it in and who left with it, with no clue as to when it arrived. The CDC will whip out the database, name some names that sound good, and everyone will feel so much happier and safer now that the government has wasted billions of dollars and good will on nothing.
I suspect it's actually not mod_rewrite. More likely, they used either SetHandler on the / Location to have their CGI handle every request, or MultiViews and a lot of CGI scripts.
I personally don't think that the touch screens are going to be adding much but expense.
Thats because you're doing it wrong. Computerized voting could be used to give every voter ballots in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Swahili, and Mongolian Rock-Talk in their choice of font size. Computerized voting could be used to display the full text of a voting referendum. Computerized voting could do a lot of things.
But it doesn't. Why? All one needs is a machine with blank ballot paper, and pre-configured ballot mark positions, and the machine could print out the entire ballot filled in in a language that the voter can understand... with the right equipment, even in braille (the input phase could be spoken aloud into headphones, then the voter could check the ballot by touch).
you are saying, "yes, I'm quite happy with the way the world is".
I'm pissed off about the way the world is. That doesn't mean I should hide behind some corporate facade and throw around somebody else's cash while I demand fixes. Especially when I think companies (read: CxOs, since the "company" doesn't do anything) throwing around money that isn't theirs is part of the problem.
Which brings me back to the CxO's paying out-of-pocket. If I'm a widget-twirler at Cogs, Inc. why should my company be voicing my concerns? Especially when what the company is saying has nothing to do with what my concerns really are? We see this time and again, whether it's Unions taking my money only to turn around and give that money to some candidate or another or a corporation taking money (that for all I know, could have gone to the employees... or look at the situation from the shareholders' point of view, that's THEIR money being giving to somebody who the shareholder may or may not agree with) and giving it to some candidate or another. If you want to support a candidate, fine, but don't throw some other non-living entity's weight around just because you're in a position where you can abuse it.
In the end, I'd much rather that companies don't take a stand. Not about evolution, not about politics, not about anything else. The fewer companies that throw their weight around for whatever reason, good or bad, the more our country moves towards something representative of the desires of the human beings who live here.
I'm sure that many of the same CxOs who refused to risk their company's image put their own money in the pot. Now if only they'd do the same for everything else.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you want to just be compensated and make the punishment so harsh to make others think twice before they try something similar? Why do you need to punish a single human?
So harsh as to make what "others" think twice? Other people? Gee, somehow I suspect that making the company pay up $500 billion dollars isn't exactly going to make Jim Bob (whether he's "evil" or just a "moron") quake in his shoes. What's the company going to do, fire him?
Corporations have become the shield from behind which evil people act with impunity.
The corporate veil needs to end. If a human made the decision to force software to install on my computer then that human needs to be held personally liable for it.
Until people are held liable for their actions, evil people will continue to act freely.
Huh?
When I put the CD in the drive, I wanted to play some music, not install some software. It's YOUR analogy that's flawed.
How about this:
I run a bar and decide to get some live music, so I call up a group of musicians. A popular and very well known band, of course, I don't want to drive my patrons out. They tell me "sure, we'll come and play, just give us some money." So I send them a payment, and the day of the performance, they show up with a 50 page contract. "Just sign this and we'll be set". I look over it, and I see among it's provisions that they're going to firebomb the stage at the end of the show. I give them the contract back and tell them no.
Then they firebomb the stage.
should we all go around and change every gui so it can be used with a one button mouse and three keys on the keyboard? no! we should make it accessible to all
There is a huge difference between can be and must be.
Meditate upon this.
And yet, unlike a car (which people can and do loan out), a bank account site could take fairly simple steps to provide a more-secure authentication method. But they don't.
Personally, I'm not a fan of making it the responsibility of the smart to defend the stupid from themselves, but some of these things are things even smart people can't defend against, like stupid webdesigners. (Not an isolated issue. Look at www.wamu.com, www.bankofamerica.com, www.chase.com, the main pages are not encrypted but they have a username/password box on it. Normally, it would post to a secure site, but browsers don't provide a mechanism for displaying that a given form on an insecure page is actually secure. If you went there, and someone was using DNS poisoning to redirect you to their version of the site, there would be no way of knowing until after you hit submit that you weren't where you were supposed to be.) The banks aren't going to do anything about it themselves, they know that "has a properly secured website" is below "good interest rate", "low monthly costs", etc. are the features their customers are looking for.
You know what I want from a bank? "Write-only" account numbers, so I can give my account number to HR for direct deposit confident in knowing that should the guy get fired, he can't drain my account and flee the country. That level of security isn't even a blip on the radar of these guys, and frankly, they don't care.
Computerized voting booth: User inserts a blank pre-printed ballot with one line for each position or proposal. The machine confirms that the ballot is loaded correctly (perhaps a notch in one corner) and displays the setup. (Step 0: blind users are assisted in plugging in headphones and instruction on location and purpose of the controls. Controls should have braille.) User selects a language (from this point on, interface is in the selected language), and then a font size (even if headphones are present... a "blind" user may actually just have impared vision and be capable of using the device with a large enough font size). The user then sees a list of "issues" and whether a vote has been selected. The first "issue" should be the option to vote straight ticket. When the user selects an issue (controls tbd, though I'm particularly fond of "prev, next, and enter", for a total of three keys). They will see a description of that issue in the appropriate language (ie, "President of the United States" or "Proposition 1: Raise Taxes"). Propositions should start with a very minimal description for this stage in order to prevent as much bias as possible. The full text of the proposition should then be available within the system in the language it will be implemented in (translating law is difficult and can be error-prone). Finally, a list of options which the user can navigate. All such lists should include a "no vote" option so that the user can return to the issue list without recording a vote. Selecting an option returns you to the issue list. At the bottom of the issue list is the option to confirm your vote. First, if not all issues have been voted on, a message will appear to indicate that some votes have not been cast, with the default setting as "return to voting". If the user chooses "confirm votes" again, they will be given a list of issues and their selected options. The default will again be to "return to voting". When the user chooses "Voting Complete, Print Ballot", their ballot card will be printed, one issue to a line in the form
(ideally in columns, though width restraints may force this to occupy multiple rows. Plus, slashdot has really nerfed the ecode tag for formatting) etc. The machine resets for the next user, with no data saved. The user can then confirm that the ballot card is correct, and deposit the card in the box. If the user discovers an issue with their card, they can return it to the staff, have it destroyed, and be re-issued a blank card.
Now, the ballot boxes are securely transferred to the voting station as was done for years and years before the evoting craze, where they are processed by two machines. One, an optical sorter which can be configured to read the *** marks on any given line, and sort the ballots appropriately. The ballots are then fed into a counter, and the tally recorded for the appropriate person. At any time, someone can examine a sorted stack of ballots to confirm that the marks do match the person voted for (flipping through the stack while watching the name should be very quick to confirm). After counting, someone can confirm that the stack fed through the counter matches the name the count is awarded to. And, if necessary, the ballots can be recounted by hand by reading the human-readable portion of the ballot.
Design issue to confront: with preprinted ballot cards, how long does the card need to be in order to guarantee that every possible item can fit? How wide to ensure that people's names can be represented completely? Can printers be equipped to print and cut from a "roll" of cardstock (or any paper thicker than receipt paper which would never survive a mechanical sorter) to circumvent this issue? Can the printer ge
if Google could get you laid, you'd think I'd've heard about it by now...
o rg+m4w
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acraigslist.
Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.
Don't worry, the first time someone tries to use it as a defense, the prosecutor will claim that they gave the cellphone to a friend to use as an alibi.
Well, to start with, I'd let the judge know that they really shouldn't use Word to keep notes like "defendant $5000, see about dismissal AM" in their court documents.
Other than that, there's a program that MS put out that will strip all the hidden stuff from documents.
Really, the problem with AJAX is that many of the developers and their users are trying to mix an "application" design paradigm with a connectionless browser design paradigm. AJAX breaks "back"? Of course it does. Applications don't have a "back" button, they have an "undo" button, and it performs a completely different operation from what the browser does when you hit back. If AJAX application developers want to not confuse their users, they force everything into a new window with no control bar, and provide undo buttons of its own. Of course it breaks bookmarking as well. Do you have a "bookmark" for the paragraph formatting dialog in Word? I thought not. Why should we care if Google can index it? Does google crawl World of Warcraft interfaces? I didn't think so either.
The author has clear gripes with the misuse of AJAX, but his claim that it should be banished to "Web2.0" companies and kept in permanent beta, never to be fed after midnight is a bit harsh for a technology that does one thing and does it well.
Aside from the fact that if it was so damn easy to replicate a chemical compound from scratch we'd already have Coca-Cola(tm) knockoffs that taste the exact same but without the 1000%+ markup (I have yet to have a "Big K" or whatever generic brand cola taste anywhere close), life would still go on: researchers (probably in an academic setting) would look for stuff because that's what they like to do. Many of them would probably even go back to curing diseases rather than attempting to invent the next wonder drug (read: dick enhancer).
And then there's the group of researchers who are starting trials on regrowing spinal and radial nerves using cells from the patient's sinus. The wonder treatments of the future may not be drugs at all, but you wouldn't believe it from listening to the pharmaceutical companies.
Hope you look forward to paying 10-20% more for your next car.
If it means not paying $50,000 in hospital costs for when the brakes fall off my car into the river, followed by the rest of my car, then I'm all for it. If it convinces people to use crash testing at speeds in excess of 5mph, then I'm all for it. If it just pads some guy's wallet while the company pretends their product is "safer", let's not.
I don't think "unspecified damages" are called for though. If they can't fix it, they should refund the purchase price of the console, games, and accessories. If someone claims "mental anguish", lets see some therapist bills.
Why haven't the judges declared that age restrictions on R movies (or even NC-17 movies) are unconstitutional?
Because MPAA ratings are voluntary . Nobody passed a law requiring age restrictions on R and NC-17 movies, the movie theatres got together and said "gee, if we let kids come in and see this stuff, people's heads will explode and we'll lose millions" and did so.
And gee, look at all this furor over these games. All these "advocates" have their panties in a bind... and all of the major retailers already have policies to card minors. Of course, these "advocates" have already proven themselves pretty much out of touch with the modern age, given their pit-bull like tendancy to clamp onto something and not let go until long after it's died and rotted away... how long were they beating the "Doom" dead horse? I recall "Quake" and "Doom" being harped on repeatedly after the Columbine shootings years after the games came out, long after "worse" games had been on the market.
Why are all of these age restrictions acceptable but the one involving video games is not?
So yeah, there are already perfectly good restrictions in place, based on a well-developed rating system that has only been "gamed" once (the disabled "hot coffee" stuff). Why should we accept the actions of a bunch of lawyers acting on the ravings of a group of people who appear to get their news from 5 years ago, as they create a bullshit "I know it when I see it" rating system to replace that?
The prioritization scheme is unneeded. If a web site is too slow, upgrade the link (it probably is not a bottleneck on the server processing, but it may be a bottleneck on the client).
Thats just it, they're not bottlenecking this on the server side. They're threatening content providers by telling them that if they don't pay extra directly to them, then Bell South customers will have to wait longer for their content. You could operate off of 10 OC3s directly from 3 different Tier-1 companies, but if you don't pay up to Bell, their DSL customers will be wondering just where the hell you got that 28.8 modem from in this day and age.
Speaking of battle animations, there should be user-selectable levels, say
Full animation - for those times when you're reading slashdot
First time - ok, the summon spell was cool, but having seen it 3124 times, it's not cool anymore (option to reset everything to "unseen"?)
Fast - I'm sure the summon spell is cool, but I don't have time for it.
None - stationary stick figures pick commands and numbers appear over their heads.
but failing to make payments isn't theft.
So if I walk out the store without paying for the xbox, is that theft?
If I agree to pay $100 now, $300 later, then walk out the store with the xbox and disappear, is that not theft?
What's the difference, that I'm holding the xbox? You're forgetting the other 1/10th of the law.
especially defense of the weak when you are strong (saving people from genocide?)
I don't mind standing up for those who cannot, but somehow this has become perverted into "defending the stupid from themselves".
Database encryption makes as much sense as drive encryption. Works great, unless they get it while it's running, and face it, the vast majority of database apps are not on a laptop that can walk away. When it comes down to "improving security" there are better things to throw money at than the processor and development time required to encrypt your database.
Firewalls, proper network design, proper user and access credentialing, proper system maintenance, even proper hardware decomissioning techniques, all of which are strictly maintained or at least implemented with multiple layers to mitigate the failure of that maintenance at any point (say, DOD wipe before you pull the drives out to be crushed, lest someone walk off with one. User access audit trails that allow you to detect improper access, and undo database changes done by whoever was using that account should someone's password get compromised) are going to go farther to protect your data than any encryption key hiding somewhere in your application, waiting to be read out of memory.
So, what? You want to track the movement of every single person in the country, on the off chance you might be able to datamine that database fast enough to save anyone?
You want to know what really kills us all? This winter's migratory birds fly across the country and our own ducks, geese, and eventually pidgeons pick up the bird flu. This spring, some homeless guy in NYC finds a dead bird behind a bench and wasted on cheap booze, proceeds to eat it. A few days later, he gets some sniffles and proceeds immediately to the hospital where he whips out his United Homeless Healthcare card and... wait, scratch that, he proceeds to the soup kitchen like he does every other day, where a cheerful highschool girl doing her best to improve the lives of everyone around her... wait make that a surly stoner on probation doing community service, proceeds to contract it and take it to school the next day.
A few weeks, some dead bums and a very sick highschool class later, doctors will finally figure out its the bird flu, and they'll scramble to try and figure out who the hell brought it in and who left with it, with no clue as to when it arrived. The CDC will whip out the database, name some names that sound good, and everyone will feel so much happier and safer now that the government has wasted billions of dollars and good will on nothing.
Then the sun explodes. The End.
I suspect it's actually not mod_rewrite. More likely, they used either SetHandler on the / Location to have their CGI handle every request, or MultiViews and a lot of CGI scripts.
but I misunderstood the ad in the paper, and mistakenly applied for the position of "jolly good fellow".
I personally don't think that the touch screens are going to be adding much but expense.
Thats because you're doing it wrong. Computerized voting could be used to give every voter ballots in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Swahili, and Mongolian Rock-Talk in their choice of font size. Computerized voting could be used to display the full text of a voting referendum. Computerized voting could do a lot of things.
But it doesn't. Why? All one needs is a machine with blank ballot paper, and pre-configured ballot mark positions, and the machine could print out the entire ballot filled in in a language that the voter can understand... with the right equipment, even in braille (the input phase could be spoken aloud into headphones, then the voter could check the ballot by touch).
you are saying, "yes, I'm quite happy with the way the world is".
I'm pissed off about the way the world is. That doesn't mean I should hide behind some corporate facade and throw around somebody else's cash while I demand fixes. Especially when I think companies (read: CxOs, since the "company" doesn't do anything) throwing around money that isn't theirs is part of the problem.
Companies are always made up of human beings.
Which brings me back to the CxO's paying out-of-pocket. If I'm a widget-twirler at Cogs, Inc. why should my company be voicing my concerns? Especially when what the company is saying has nothing to do with what my concerns really are? We see this time and again, whether it's Unions taking my money only to turn around and give that money to some candidate or another or a corporation taking money (that for all I know, could have gone to the employees... or look at the situation from the shareholders' point of view, that's THEIR money being giving to somebody who the shareholder may or may not agree with) and giving it to some candidate or another. If you want to support a candidate, fine, but don't throw some other non-living entity's weight around just because you're in a position where you can abuse it.
In the end, I'd much rather that companies don't take a stand. Not about evolution, not about politics, not about anything else. The fewer companies that throw their weight around for whatever reason, good or bad, the more our country moves towards something representative of the desires of the human beings who live here.
I'm sure that many of the same CxOs who refused to risk their company's image put their own money in the pot. Now if only they'd do the same for everything else.