This veers dangerously close to a "me too" post. These are most definitely worthless assets. "Protecting" them is probably a net loss. You have to pay someone to track down abadonware. Then someone has to send cease and desist orders. In noncompliance cases, you have to drag them to court. All of these actions would normally be carried out by attorneys, who are not a cheap investment.
Corporations with abandonware issues should spin this better. Tell the shareholders "We believe that the costs involved in litigating these issues grossly exceeds the potential damages we may recover."
IANAL but I know corporations are NOT required to pursue all pointless legal actions with reckless abadon. Ignoring abandonware is like settling a questionable discrimination claim - you decide it isn't worth the effort to pursue legal action. I don't know of any shareholder lawsuits over these type of issues, where a company determines
Jon gets the idea right, the movies wrong. Aliens features an almighty company. Gattaca has to do with the de facto effects of institutionalized discrimination - everything happens because companies discriminate against the genetically unfit. Running Man is about the media (a corporate monster if you've ever seen one) taking over justice. It's a pretty common theme in science fiction, largely because it has some plausibility. Look at Microsoft, the MPAA, the RIAA. They're watered-down versions of these villian companies. They operate ammorally and outside of the norms of law, having bought the makers of laws. I could insert some George W flamebait here, but I'll resist. It looks like we get 4 years for that at least.
I think he wants to mention William Gibson as an example, he did so in a talk I heard him give, but Gibson doesn't make movies. Johny Mnemonic is a movie of a Gibson story. It features a corporation preventing a disease cure for profits.
I do this all the time. Did anyone else see the Marxist subtext in Blade or is just me?
Would you go see a Keanu Reeves movie to be enlightened? "No of course not, he's a shitty actor." Point made.
All sci-fi presents potential futures. Some are worth thinking about. These movies take current trends to their logical extremes - Gattaca, Aliens, Johny Mnemonic, etc. Some are dystopian, others aren't.
No, the comparison is ridiculous. A computer is intuitively more complex than a refrigerator.
The complexity of a computer is on par with what: a car, an airplane, maybe.
Both have very high failure rates compared to simpler machines. Both have high rates of failures with unkown causes, where a fix is applied without knowing why it's needed.
Think about it. All cars need regular maintenance. New cars have equipment failures at fairly high rates. Old cars have even higher failure rates. We keep taking cars to the mechanic for repairs, we don't complain that our cars should never have problems.
Computers are even worse, because we often expect more out the older ones than they're supposed to give. A Pentium I with 16 MB of memory running Win98 and relatively new applications is gonna crash. If I took an old car and regularly drove it as fast the speedometer would go it would also experience regular failures.
With aircraft, failure is avoided/minimized by labor. Aircraft undergo insane preventive maintenance - including an occassional complete tear-down (computer equivalent- reintsall the OS and everything else). If a commercial/military aircraft develops any problems in flight, it is immediately taken out of service for maintenance. So a mission-critical machine is closer to an aircraft than a car - it's prone to failure, but plenty of resources are devoted to combatting this problem.....
We need to accept that IT is a failure-prone industry, just like aviation, automobiles, insturmentation, etc. We need to draw lessons from the failure-prone industries, not the failure-free ones. How do these people keep failures to an acceptable level? How to they deal with them when they occur, so the effects are minimized? "How do act like cheap plastic toy makers and achieve.000001% failure rates?" is not the question we should be asking.
Airplanes require tremendous amounts of maintenance to achieve this level of stability!!! A small aircraft requires 10-20 to inspect before each flight. Aircraft have complete engine teardowns so many hundred/thousand hours. This is expensive and is justifiable only in light of the harms associated with aircraft failure. The cheapest aircraft you can buy will cost in the 6-7 figure range.
Cars are a much better comparision. Cars fail all the time, new ones included. They're very complex, but we put up with it. They also cost a reasonable amount of money. It's a tradeoff. With the exception of some mission critical machines, computers are like cars, not airplanes.
For the very paranoid, mark lines would also be helpful. Take a marker/pen and make a little mark where the parts of the case and keyboard meet up. You'll know if anyone opened it because the line won't match up anymore.
Well, assuming quantum data transmission gets anywhere, the opposite will occur. All transmissions will be totally secure. Quantum data transmission would prevent sniffing. It relies on the Hesenberg Uncertanity principle which states we can't observe certain quantum phenomena without changing them. Thus all packet-sniffers and the like would be detected instantly - the message on the other end would be garbled.
So if I encrypt my session key and send it along a quantum channel (encrypted with RSA) it's true that someone can intercept the message and easily decrypt the session key with a quantum computer. But the recipient will know that something's up, and I will never send the actual data.
In other industries this is called "refining" and "perfecting".
This is all to true. In some manufacturing processes, you end with lots of defective parts. Think about how many defective components get thrown away in electronics manufacturing. I would think that the number of defective components increases as the complexity of the component increases....
Software is unique because:
1) all the components must work properly (many of them are going to be complex)
2) you make each component exactly once, so if things don't work out you have to fix it.
So large amounts of debugging time should be expected.
Let's say I have a website where I review movies...
I want to use a short excerpt from a movie as a form of criticism. People do this all the time today - watch Siskel & Ebert, ET, etc.
Under the DMCA, I can't post a brief MPEG containing a couple seconds of a film to a website even though I clearly have a fair use right to do so. (Assume I own the DVD.)
The stock reply is that I get permission from the copyright holder, but would a copyright holder grant permission to excerpt a work for a negative review? Probably not.
You see, he suffers from the same problems that so many other authors of his time did. They were all very nuts, and right-wing nuts at that. Almost to a man they supported Vietnam, guns, and other very un-HUMAN things (since that seems to be the theme of lots of these posts, the humanity of science-fiction).
This is a rather shitty criticism of dead/old authors. To require someone to confrom to your 21st century political norms in order to be a good author is ridiculous. You'll never be able to read a book that's more than 10 years old. The further back in time you go, the less likely you are to find authors with acceptable beliefs - I highly doubt you'd enjoy Shakespeare, Dickens, Dante, etc.
Again, it's hard to tell from reading a strong-state based fantasy whether we're talking about a liberal fanstasy or a conservative one.
Yeah, I remember that line too. I'm going to make the standard defense for dead authors with these problems - they were a product of the society they lived in. At the same time, Stranger advances the idea that it's OK for women to be comfortable with their sexuality. You see this a lot in books that contain ideas who time hasn't come - unconventional ideas about a subject with a few throwback passages. Hemingway uses the word "nigger" quite a bit but is still a great author...
I'm also gonna use the standard example - Shakespeare. IMHO, old Will wrote some of the most powerful and meaningful stories in the English language. Shakespeare was at times very foward thinking - he cast the first black protaganist in English literature. But he has a 16th century view of women - not very good at times. Does this make all of his writing crap? I think not.
Is Heinlen a cooky leftist or a right-wing wacko? From his works we could infer he is a believer in subordination to a strong or weak state, a believer in a promiscous society, a believer in religion or an atheist....
But it doesn't work. Science fiction is often set in a radically different world, in terms of culture, politics, and economics. Good science fiction is often set in a world that does not correspond to an existing one - an anarchist society, a post-capitalist economy, whatever.
Trying to map these grand worlds back onto our society is hard/impossible. The problem is that politics is a circle.
The "left" is sometimes associated with a strong state - socialism. It's also sometimes associated with a weak state - civil liberties. The "right" is sometimes associated with a weak state - lassez-faire economics. But the same end of the political spectrum is occupied by the Religous Right and public morality for all. We really are pretty confused.
The black and white worlds of science fiction often feature a benevolent strong state ("Starship Troopers" maybe - "Star Trek" definitely) so they seem on face to be socialist paradises. Everyone of merit serves the state in some capacity. But are we at the Far Right or the Far Left?
And is the described society good or bad? You can frequently make a case either way. Take the broken, corporatized worlds of William Gibson where the nation-state has atrophied. They're a libertarian's dream and a socialist's nightmare. But to decide if Gibson is a socialist or a libertarian you have to decide whether they're good or bad - not an easy question.
Then we have to decide if the described society is something the author advocates or just a plot device....
. The fact that we think we know but truly do not know the meaning of 'grok' highlights this stark difference between our race and the Martians (a concept that is fundamental to their race, but does not have a true equivalent in ours).
Heinlen makes a valid point - any alien culture would be so different from our own that we couldn't begin to understand them. Arthur C. Clarke's Rama books make the same point - humans find an alien space ship/thing and they don't find any life, any sign of communication - the book has a dead end. We just wouldn't understand.
Gore didn't complain about that possibility. Now we come to the interesting proposition that Gore may have won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote. Now (gasp!) Gore doesn't think that the electoral system is fair.
1) The Bush folks were ready and willng to claim that Bush should be president if he did not won the electoral vote but not the popular vote. Read it on the NYT, can't find it again.
2)Either way, the system sucks. The electoral college was hacked by Andrew Jackson. He convinced states to select their electors by popular vote so the president would be effectively selected by popular vote. What we're experiencing right now is the failure state of a hacked system - the popular vote winner is supposed to win when you run Electoral 2.0.
If state-by-state votes actually matter, why not go back to having state legislatures select the electors?
Additionally, a real failure of the electoral college would do real damage. Imagine a president who lost the popular vote by a sizable margin - say 5%. This prez would have no authority, he would probably face a Congress skewed heavily against him, etc. A more extreme failure state - the total turkey president - is an argument by itself to scrap the electoral college system.
On to the subject of the dimpled chad and all that. There were ballots that were clearly punched through for all other offices but "dimpled" for president. Was this voter incapable of punching the holes? I think not.
This is where W. pisses me off. He signs a law in TX supporting the "dimpled chad" standard and then goes back and opposes it once it might hurt him. Either way, do you really think that a hole punch will work 100% of the time?
As far as the whole military absentee ballot thing goes, Gore just managed to upset the people who risk their lives for this nation. Probably not a very good plan...
The idea that the military is a Republican instituition is more than a little insulting - we have a proud tradition of nonpartisanship. Our obligation is to obey the commander in chief. If you enjoy your right to vote, then you should to see the military stay as far away from politics as possible.
I don't know if ballots with a late postmark/no postmark should be counted - how can we know that someone didn't decide to vote after they saw how close the election was?
On an added note, in Palm Beach County, FL a local news station took that "butterfly ballot" and replaced the candidates with cartoon characters. They then asked small children which circle to mark to vote for a particular character. Guess what? They figured it out... (and, keep in mind, that ballot was approved by the Democrats, published in the newspaper, and sent to the home of every registered voter prior to the election.)
1) It's easy to figure out a confusing form once someone tells you how. Studies have demonstrated that young kids are actually better at these kind of visual relations than old folks.
2) This is awfully mean to old folks. I'm sorry that you now need 20/20 vision to vote and that only the young and able get to pick a president.
1. Improperly configured, the system acquires far too much traffic.
2. The system lacks an audit trail to determine who configured it.
So, when Carnivore snoops on entire groups or ISPs we will never know who to blame. This seems like a feature to me. The system can be used illegally without accountability.
This would not be as big of a problem were it not for the wall of silence. Law enforcement is the most crooked segment of American society - "honest cop" is an oxymoron. So any system that relies on "trust me" is pretty bad. As it's set up right now, it is much more than likely will be misused. Who did it will remain a mystery, since law enforcement personnel have a dubious sense of right and wrong when it comes to protecting their own. Recent studies indicate 80% of patrolmen admit to lying in court. Instances of police misconduct are insanely common, they just can't be front-page news in our corporate media.
For those of you interested, Nancy Kress wrote a novel called "Beggars in Spain" about genetically engineered people who don't ever need to sleep. They obviously have quite an advantage over regular humans, but they never dream.....
(Both Fatbrain and Amazon are not link-cooperative with it - it may be possible to get a direct link, but maybe it's 3:30 AM and I'm too tired to remember how - SORRY!)
I have not read it, but I did read the short story it's based upon, which won a Hugo/Nebula a couple years back. The short version ws a very good read, so the book is probably quite good too.
The article is talking about your ability to remember info, not to continue thinking. Assuming you already know how to code, caffeine acts as a stimulant and keeps you from feeling drowsy. Now, I wouldn't pick up "Teach yourself x in y days" and short myself on sleep, assuming the article is correct.
I am sad to say that I know several rec studies majors. Their academic life is a joke - they can get good grades by cracking open a book, and decent grades by going to class. I also know a couple theater types, who are quite talented, but they spend relatively little improvint that talent. And while I'll admit I have no creative ability and couldn't do it myself, i think I spend much more time coding, solving equations, whatever, than they do reading and rehearsing, etc.
Also, remember the workload in your lib ed classes? Always seemed a lot easier, didn't it? At least that's what I got out of it.
At the same time, snobbiness doesn't get you anywhere - there's always someone who can claim to have a tougher degree from a tougher school. You can spend your life looking down on the lib ed majors, but you're pretty sad if that's your primary source of satisfaction.
Yep, I'm their target market - college student. I have a very fat pipe, don't have much money, don't pay for electricity, and will do anything to make a couple bucks if it doesn't work.
Unlike the "pay to surf" people, these folks are offering to pay for something of value and you can't cheat w/ a little program that pretends to move the mouse every 3 minutes.
I have an old 486, almost ten years old, which still gets some occassional use, email checking, etc. when my PIII is in pieces. Let's assume this had started in 1991 and Win 3.11/95 were both subscription based OSes. It would have probably cost less to buy the OS in the first place, yes, but the I would still be paying money every to use Win95 for a couple days/year. Anyone want to claim this would be a good alternative?
I don't know about the EFF(ff) argument about source code being speech.. when you get into issues of freedom of speech (well.. in the US anyways) - i think you'll find that not all speech is productive, and that speech is powerful (has the power of life and death,..)
. If you look at source code more like a recipe (and sure you can print, reword, speak and sing recipes if you want.. "2 cups of butter 8 pounds of eggs"..) - but the intent (once again subjective) of a recipe is mostly different from many casual conversations in that it involves specific instructions on how to create/destroy something which is a different class of speech than saying "I think you suck because foo blah gah gump"..
IANAL BIKFTM (I am not a lawyer but I know far too many)
I've given this a lot of thought and it seems clear that code is speech, even code with an illegal purpose. Why?
1) Code is a "recipe" written in a format not necessarily ideal for human communication. But these formats have long been considered protected speech. The best example is sheet music, the closest thing to code that's been around for a long time (means nothing to most, isn't a human language, but in the round hands it has tremendous meaning and power). Sheet music is definitely speech - so is a play, a piece of clothing (which makes a statement about who you are), so is a equation/algorithm, etc. Source code seems to definitely fall in the same vein.
2) Speech which provides instructions on how to bad things is protected. Examples: Anarchist's cookbook, discourses on lock-picking, publicly available military manuals, etc. A couple years back a guy wrote a book on how to be an effective hit man and he won court challenges on the grounds all his book did was tell how to be a hit man; it did not encourage it, and was therefore protected speech. On a less extreme level, I noticed a very bad book on "how to be a hacker" at my local library - it provided the material purely for informational purposes according to the editor's note. If such things are protected speech, why isn't code which has a legitmate use?
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This veers dangerously close to a "me too" post. These are most definitely worthless assets. "Protecting" them is probably a net loss. You have to pay someone to track down abadonware. Then someone has to send cease and desist orders. In noncompliance cases, you have to drag them to court. All of these actions would normally be carried out by attorneys, who are not a cheap investment.
Corporations with abandonware issues should spin this better. Tell the shareholders "We believe that the costs involved in litigating these issues grossly exceeds the potential damages we may recover."
IANAL but I know corporations are NOT required to pursue all pointless legal actions with reckless abadon. Ignoring abandonware is like settling a questionable discrimination claim - you decide it isn't worth the effort to pursue legal action. I don't know of any shareholder lawsuits over these type of issues, where a company determines
Jon gets the idea right, the movies wrong. Aliens features an almighty company. Gattaca has to do with the de facto effects of institutionalized discrimination - everything happens because companies discriminate against the genetically unfit. Running Man is about the media (a corporate monster if you've ever seen one) taking over justice. It's a pretty common theme in science fiction, largely because it has some plausibility. Look at Microsoft, the MPAA, the RIAA. They're watered-down versions of these villian companies. They operate ammorally and outside of the norms of law, having bought the makers of laws. I could insert some George W flamebait here, but I'll resist. It looks like we get 4 years for that at least.
I think he wants to mention William Gibson as an example, he did so in a talk I heard him give, but Gibson doesn't make movies. Johny Mnemonic is a movie of a Gibson story. It features a corporation preventing a disease cure for profits.
I do this all the time. Did anyone else see the Marxist subtext in Blade or is just me?
Would you go see a Keanu Reeves movie to be enlightened? "No of course not, he's a shitty actor." Point made.
All sci-fi presents potential futures. Some are worth thinking about. These movies take current trends to their logical extremes - Gattaca, Aliens, Johny Mnemonic, etc. Some are dystopian, others aren't.
No, the comparison is ridiculous. A computer is intuitively more complex than a refrigerator.
.000001% failure rates?" is not the question we should be asking.
The complexity of a computer is on par with what: a car, an airplane, maybe.
Both have very high failure rates compared to simpler machines. Both have high rates of failures with unkown causes, where a fix is applied without knowing why it's needed.
Think about it. All cars need regular maintenance. New cars have equipment failures at fairly high rates. Old cars have even higher failure rates. We keep taking cars to the mechanic for repairs, we don't complain that our cars should never have problems.
Computers are even worse, because we often expect more out the older ones than they're supposed to give. A Pentium I with 16 MB of memory running Win98 and relatively new applications is gonna crash. If I took an old car and regularly drove it as fast the speedometer would go it would also experience regular failures.
With aircraft, failure is avoided/minimized by labor. Aircraft undergo insane preventive maintenance - including an occassional complete tear-down (computer equivalent- reintsall the OS and everything else). If a commercial/military aircraft develops any problems in flight, it is immediately taken out of service for maintenance. So a mission-critical machine is closer to an aircraft than a car - it's prone to failure, but plenty of resources are devoted to combatting this problem.....
We need to accept that IT is a failure-prone industry, just like aviation, automobiles, insturmentation, etc. We need to draw lessons from the failure-prone industries, not the failure-free ones. How do these people keep failures to an acceptable level? How to they deal with them when they occur, so the effects are minimized? "How do act like cheap plastic toy makers and achieve
Airplanes require tremendous amounts of maintenance to achieve this level of stability!!! A small aircraft requires 10-20 to inspect before each flight. Aircraft have complete engine teardowns so many hundred/thousand hours. This is expensive and is justifiable only in light of the harms associated with aircraft failure. The cheapest aircraft you can buy will cost in the 6-7 figure range.
Cars are a much better comparision. Cars fail all the time, new ones included. They're very complex, but we put up with it. They also cost a reasonable amount of money. It's a tradeoff. With the exception of some mission critical machines, computers are like cars, not airplanes.
For the very paranoid, mark lines would also be helpful. Take a marker/pen and make a little mark where the parts of the case and keyboard meet up. You'll know if anyone opened it because the line won't match up anymore.
Read this in a book once, don't actually do it.
Well, assuming quantum data transmission gets anywhere, the opposite will occur. All transmissions will be totally secure. Quantum data transmission would prevent sniffing. It relies on the Hesenberg Uncertanity principle which states we can't observe certain quantum phenomena without changing them. Thus all packet-sniffers and the like would be detected instantly - the message on the other end would be garbled.
So if I encrypt my session key and send it along a quantum channel (encrypted with RSA) it's true that someone can intercept the message and easily decrypt the session key with a quantum computer. But the recipient will know that something's up, and I will never send the actual data.
That's a whole different problem.
Alternatively, just ask any Linux-related question....
In other industries this is called "refining" and "perfecting".
This is all to true. In some manufacturing processes, you end with lots of defective parts. Think about how many defective components get thrown away in electronics manufacturing. I would think that the number of defective components increases as the complexity of the component increases....
Software is unique because:
1) all the components must work properly (many of them are going to be complex)
2) you make each component exactly once, so if things don't work out you have to fix it.
So large amounts of debugging time should be expected.
Let's say I have a website where I review movies...
I want to use a short excerpt from a movie as a form of criticism. People do this all the time today - watch Siskel & Ebert, ET, etc.
Under the DMCA, I can't post a brief MPEG containing a couple seconds of a film to a website even though I clearly have a fair use right to do so. (Assume I own the DVD.)
The stock reply is that I get permission from the copyright holder, but would a copyright holder grant permission to excerpt a work for a negative review? Probably not.
Heinlein is the Hemingway of sci fi (apologies to Hemingway).
I honestly think Hemingway would have liked Heinlen's books - they normally feature that formulaic 'Heingway Hero' almost exactly.
You see, he suffers from the same problems that so many other authors of his time did. They were all very nuts, and right-wing nuts at that. Almost to a man they supported Vietnam, guns, and other very un-HUMAN things (since that seems to be the theme of lots of these posts, the humanity of science-fiction).
This is a rather shitty criticism of dead/old authors. To require someone to confrom to your 21st century political norms in order to be a good author is ridiculous. You'll never be able to read a book that's more than 10 years old. The further back in time you go, the less likely you are to find authors with acceptable beliefs - I highly doubt you'd enjoy Shakespeare, Dickens, Dante, etc.
Again, it's hard to tell from reading a strong-state based fantasy whether we're talking about a liberal fanstasy or a conservative one.
Yeah, I remember that line too. I'm going to make the standard defense for dead authors with these problems - they were a product of the society they lived in. At the same time, Stranger advances the idea that it's OK for women to be comfortable with their sexuality. You see this a lot in books that contain ideas who time hasn't come - unconventional ideas about a subject with a few throwback passages. Hemingway uses the word "nigger" quite a bit but is still a great author...
I'm also gonna use the standard example - Shakespeare. IMHO, old Will wrote some of the most powerful and meaningful stories in the English language. Shakespeare was at times very foward thinking - he cast the first black protaganist in English literature. But he has a 16th century view of women - not very good at times. Does this make all of his writing crap? I think not.
Is Heinlen a cooky leftist or a right-wing wacko? From his works we could infer he is a believer in subordination to a strong or weak state, a believer in a promiscous society, a believer in religion or an atheist....
But it doesn't work. Science fiction is often set in a radically different world, in terms of culture, politics, and economics. Good science fiction is often set in a world that does not correspond to an existing one - an anarchist society, a post-capitalist economy, whatever.
Trying to map these grand worlds back onto our society is hard/impossible. The problem is that politics is a circle.
The "left" is sometimes associated with a strong state - socialism. It's also sometimes associated with a weak state - civil liberties. The "right" is sometimes associated with a weak state - lassez-faire economics. But the same end of the political spectrum is occupied by the Religous Right and public morality for all. We really are pretty confused.
The black and white worlds of science fiction often feature a benevolent strong state ("Starship Troopers" maybe - "Star Trek" definitely) so they seem on face to be socialist paradises. Everyone of merit serves the state in some capacity. But are we at the Far Right or the Far Left?
And is the described society good or bad? You can frequently make a case either way. Take the broken, corporatized worlds of William Gibson where the nation-state has atrophied. They're a libertarian's dream and a socialist's nightmare. But to decide if Gibson is a socialist or a libertarian you have to decide whether they're good or bad - not an easy question.
Then we have to decide if the described society is something the author advocates or just a plot device....
. The fact that we think we know but truly do not know the meaning of 'grok' highlights this stark difference between our race and the Martians (a concept that is fundamental to their race, but does not have a true equivalent in ours).
Heinlen makes a valid point - any alien culture would be so different from our own that we couldn't begin to understand them. Arthur C. Clarke's Rama books make the same point - humans find an alien space ship/thing and they don't find any life, any sign of communication - the book has a dead end. We just wouldn't understand.
A few thoughts:
Gore didn't complain about that possibility. Now we come to the interesting proposition that Gore may have won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote. Now (gasp!) Gore doesn't think that the electoral system is fair.
1) The Bush folks were ready and willng to claim that Bush should be president if he did not won the electoral vote but not the popular vote. Read it on the NYT, can't find it again.
2)Either way, the system sucks. The electoral college was hacked by Andrew Jackson. He convinced states to select their electors by popular vote so the president would be effectively selected by popular vote. What we're experiencing right now is the failure state of a hacked system - the popular vote winner is supposed to win when you run Electoral 2.0.
If state-by-state votes actually matter, why not go back to having state legislatures select the electors?
Additionally, a real failure of the electoral college would do real damage. Imagine a president who lost the popular vote by a sizable margin - say 5%. This prez would have no authority, he would probably face a Congress skewed heavily against him, etc. A more extreme failure state - the total turkey president - is an argument by itself to scrap the electoral college system.
On to the subject of the dimpled chad and all that. There were ballots that were clearly punched through for all other offices but "dimpled" for president. Was this voter incapable of punching the holes? I think not.
This is where W. pisses me off. He signs a law in TX supporting the "dimpled chad" standard and then goes back and opposes it once it might hurt him. Either way, do you really think that a hole punch will work 100% of the time?
As far as the whole military absentee ballot thing goes, Gore just managed to upset the people who risk their lives for this nation. Probably not a very good plan...
The idea that the military is a Republican instituition is more than a little insulting - we have a proud tradition of nonpartisanship. Our obligation is to obey the commander in chief. If you enjoy your right to vote, then you should to see the military stay as far away from politics as possible.
I don't know if ballots with a late postmark/no postmark should be counted - how can we know that someone didn't decide to vote after they saw how close the election was?
On an added note, in Palm Beach County, FL a local news station took that "butterfly ballot" and replaced the candidates with cartoon characters. They then asked small children which circle to mark to vote for a particular character. Guess what? They figured it out... (and, keep in mind, that ballot was approved by the Democrats, published in the newspaper, and sent to the home of every registered voter prior to the election.)
1) It's easy to figure out a confusing form once someone tells you how. Studies have demonstrated that young kids are actually better at these kind of visual relations than old folks.
2) This is awfully mean to old folks. I'm sorry that you now need 20/20 vision to vote and that only the young and able get to pick a president.
This a case where the bugs really are a feature.
IITR finds 2 problems:
1. Improperly configured, the system acquires far too much traffic.
2. The system lacks an audit trail to determine who configured it.
So, when Carnivore snoops on entire groups or ISPs we will never know who to blame. This seems like a feature to me. The system can be used illegally without accountability.
This would not be as big of a problem were it not for the wall of silence. Law enforcement is the most crooked segment of American society - "honest cop" is an oxymoron. So any system that relies on "trust me" is pretty bad. As it's set up right now, it is much more than likely will be misused. Who did it will remain a mystery, since law enforcement personnel have a dubious sense of right and wrong when it comes to protecting their own. Recent studies indicate 80% of patrolmen admit to lying in court. Instances of police misconduct are insanely common, they just can't be front-page news in our corporate media.
For those of you interested, Nancy Kress wrote a novel called "Beggars in Spain" about genetically engineered people who don't ever need to sleep. They obviously have quite an advantage over regular humans, but they never dream.....
(Both Fatbrain and Amazon are not link-cooperative with it - it may be possible to get a direct link, but maybe it's 3:30 AM and I'm too tired to remember how - SORRY!)
I have not read it, but I did read the short story it's based upon, which won a Hugo/Nebula a couple years back. The short version ws a very good read, so the book is probably quite good too.
I know a dot-com millionare - he sold his company to IBM just in time :)
His motto for life: "Sleep is for the weak". It seemed to work pretty well for him.....
The article is talking about your ability to remember info, not to continue thinking. Assuming you already know how to code, caffeine acts as a stimulant and keeps you from feeling drowsy. Now, I wouldn't pick up "Teach yourself x in y days" and short myself on sleep, assuming the article is correct.
I am sad to say that I know several rec studies majors. Their academic life is a joke - they can get good grades by cracking open a book, and decent grades by going to class. I also know a couple theater types, who are quite talented, but they spend relatively little improvint that talent. And while I'll admit I have no creative ability and couldn't do it myself, i think I spend much more time coding, solving equations, whatever, than they do reading and rehearsing, etc.
Also, remember the workload in your lib ed classes? Always seemed a lot easier, didn't it? At least that's what I got out of it.
At the same time, snobbiness doesn't get you anywhere - there's always someone who can claim to have a tougher degree from a tougher school. You can spend your life looking down on the lib ed majors, but you're pretty sad if that's your primary source of satisfaction.
Yep, I'm their target market - college student. I have a very fat pipe, don't have much money, don't pay for electricity, and will do anything to make a couple bucks if it doesn't work.
Unlike the "pay to surf" people, these folks are offering to pay for something of value and you can't cheat w/ a little program that pretends to move the mouse every 3 minutes.
I have an old 486, almost ten years old, which still gets some occassional use, email checking, etc. when my PIII is in pieces. Let's assume this had started in 1991 and Win 3.11/95 were both subscription based OSes. It would have probably cost less to buy the OS in the first place, yes, but the I would still be paying money every to use Win95 for a couple days/year. Anyone want to claim this would be a good alternative?
I don't know about the EFF(ff) argument about source code being speech .. when you get into issues of freedom of speech (well .. in the US anyways) - i think you'll find that not all speech is productive, and that speech is powerful (has the power of life and death, ..)
.. "2 cups of butter 8 pounds of eggs" ..) - but the intent (once again subjective) of a recipe is mostly different from many casual conversations in that it involves specific instructions on how to create/destroy something which is a different class of speech than saying "I think you suck because foo blah gah gump" ..
. If you look at source code more like a recipe (and sure you can print, reword, speak and sing recipes if you want
IANAL BIKFTM (I am not a lawyer but I know far too many)
I've given this a lot of thought and it seems clear that code is speech, even code with an illegal purpose. Why?
1) Code is a "recipe" written in a format not necessarily ideal for human communication. But these formats have long been considered protected speech. The best example is sheet music, the closest thing to code that's been around for a long time (means nothing to most, isn't a human language, but in the round hands it has tremendous meaning and power). Sheet music is definitely speech - so is a play, a piece of clothing (which makes a statement about who you are), so is a equation/algorithm, etc. Source code seems to definitely fall in the same vein.
2) Speech which provides instructions on how to bad things is protected. Examples: Anarchist's cookbook, discourses on lock-picking, publicly available military manuals, etc. A couple years back a guy wrote a book on how to be an effective hit man and he won court challenges on the grounds all his book did was tell how to be a hit man; it did not encourage it, and was therefore protected speech. On a less extreme level, I noticed a very bad book on "how to be a hacker" at my local library - it provided the material purely for informational purposes according to the editor's note. If such things are protected speech, why isn't code which has a legitmate use?
Friedman has suggested we set up a unity government, similar to what parlimentary states do in wartime. It's explained in the article here.
His basic idea: If Bush wins, he should make Clinton sec of state, Gore sec of interior, Nunn sec of defense, etc...
If Gore wins, he should make Powell sec of state, Bush sec of education, Cheney sec of Defense, etc...
This would reflect the will of the voters - a perfect split. It would also force the parties to cooperate. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.