The famous passage in 2 Peter 3:8 about counting is, "But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance."
From this, Camping concludes, "1 day = 1,000 years", which of course is not at all what Peter meant, so his whole theory is trash. Amazing that people let themselves be mislead by such obviously erroneous readings of the Bible.
According to The Origins of our Modern Calendar", in 1582 10 days were dropped from the calendar to account for a centuries-long accumulation of a rounding error in calculating the length of a year (Caesar calculated a year to be 365.25 days long, but it's actually 365.2422 days.) Ever since then, we've been adjusting one day every 4 years, but that has it's own rounding problems too, resulting in 1 day of error every 3,000 years.
Mod parent up -- we should look at this from a security/convenience angle. Dropbox offers many conveniences such as automatic versioning, backups, synchronization, cross-platform etc., and at a price that just about anyone can afford. For 99.9% of my files, I'm content with my files being encrypted by Dropbox, and de-duped as needed. It's the equivalent of locking my car -- not enough protection against a pro, but enough to make someone else an easier target. All my truly private files are locally encrypted before being stored in Dropbox. Best of both worlds: security and convenience.
Wait, wait, the "tea party [is] calling the shots"?! I'm a member of the Northern Virginia Tea Party and no one told ME I was calling the shots. Dang! Must've missed the memo.
The closest we get to calling the shots is deciding what colors to put on our hand-lettered signs for the next rally.
12. Under which section(s) of the law is your request authorized, and what are the names and contact information of the DHS agents who are requesting that this action be taken?
Thanks for the link. He answered my big question, which was why one sees letters seemingly appear and disappear as the zoom level changes. Answer: some letters are part of different mask layers, and masks being monochrome are either all on or all off.
Another question that I expect to be asked: Why aren't all of the letters in the masks? The masks are only monochrome and act like a stencil. A single color is applied based on the masked regions. The fact that some letters are not in the masks shows that the images were scanned in and not everything dark is actually black. There is a significant amount of black, suggesting color correction or possibly OCR-based letter extraction during the scanning or conversion to PDF. I've seen this in other PDF documents, so this does not strike me as odd.
"Until very recently, if every professional news organization in the nation examined a charge and found it baseless, it was — for all intents and purposes — dropped. "
Yes, until very recently, a few mass media companies controlled the news, and if they collectively decided something wasn't news-worthy anymore, it was dropped. Happily, we have the internet now, and can talk among ourselves without being told what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
By the way, has any "professional news organization" actually dug into the latest birth certificate and examined it, professionally? I've read countless stories like this one about how crazy and all alternate-reality those Birthers are, but actual investigations by electronic document specialists? None that I've seen.
I think anyone who downloads and inspects the long-form certificate PDF [whitehouse.gov] from the whitehouse web site will be struck as I was by its many peculiarities. Not being a PDF expert, I have no idea how to interpret what I'm seeing, but it certainly doesn't look like any other PDF I've seen.
I'm guessing the justification would be that inspecting your data is merely the electronic equivalent of searching your possessions and your person.
It is an interesting question: what is the legal status of your data? Is it your "possession"? Can having certain types of data be considered an illegal act? Can possession of data make one dangerous to others?
True religion has absolutely nothing to fear from people who question things. Go ahead and wonder how Jesus did what he did, and try to imagine how you could copy it. Jesus' signs and works were given precisely so you would believe that he was really, truly God's son, because no one else could have done what he did.
The signs are pretty impressive: fed thousands from a handful loaves and fishes (twice); walked on water; calmed storms with a word; healed diseases at a touch, including the hearing and seeing of people born deaf and blind; and raised people from the dead (including himself), to name just a few.
You figure out how to do any of those, you let me know how that works out. At some point, you've got to decide whether these claimed signs are just hooey, or Jesus really was who he said he was.
Why would you think that? Ben Franklin's comment on why he contributed the design of his stove patent free has pretty obvious roots in the teachings of Timothy about not being in love with money. Read the cited articles and seefor yourself.
The fact that this post was marked offtopic tells me that perhaps your avg SL reader ought to get out a bit more. Not everything of worth comes from the left side of the brain...
If anyone teaches false doctrines and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, he is conceited and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions and constant friction between men of corrupt mind, who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain.
But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
DRM (Digital Rights Managed) files: DRM protects the number and types of locations that songs can be played from. Because of these restrictions the Amazon MP3 Uploader and Amazon Cloud Player do not support these file types.
Non-MP3 and non-AAC formats: The Amazon MP3 Uploader and Amazon Cloud Player only support a select number of file formats. See below for a complete list of formats we support and a list of some of the files formats that we do not. To find out how to convert music into a file format we support, use your preferred media player.
Over 100 MB: Uploading files that are over 100 MB in size is currently not supported. If you have music files of this size that you would like to add to Cloud Player we recommend you re-encode them at a lower bit rate to reduce the file size. To find out how to convert music into a file format we support, use your preferred media player.
Miscellaneous audio types: Ringtones, podcasts, audio books, and other non-music audio files are not supported by the Amazon MP3 Uploader.
Playlist without eligible music: Playlists that contain only files with any of the above problems or that contain no music are not eligible for Upload. The following is a list of supported file formats and some of the unsupported file formats. Unsupported files will not show up in the Uploader as they are not available for upload.
Supported file formats
.mp3 -- Standard non-DRM file format (Includes Amazon MP3 Store purchased files)
.m4a -- AAC files (Includes iTunes store purchased files)
Unsupported file formats
.wma -- Windows Media Audio files
.m4p -- DRM AAC files
.wav -- Uncompressed music files
.ac3 -- Dolby Digital audio files
.ogg -- Ogg Vorbis audio files
.ape -- Lossless Monkey audio files
.flac -- Free Lossless Audio Codec files
It will be interesting to see how well Amazon stands up to the inevitable court challenges. For music purchased from AmazonMP3, they are certainly on very solid ground, since they can prove that the Cloud Drive user is the purchaser; if Amazon has the legal right to download you the MP3 you just bought, they certainly have the right to download it for you again. The music industry has already taken their (very generous) cut in that case. You paid for it, you get to use it.
Playing back non-AmazonMP3 files is where I think it gets a little sticky.
I don't see anything nefarious about this FOIA request. The author is a public employee, and his emails are public records. Here's the text of the request, in full:
From: Stephan Thompson [mailto:SThompson@wisgop.org] Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 2:37 PM To: Dowling, John Subject: Open Records Request
Dear Mr. Dowling,
Under Wisconsin open records law, we are requesting copies of the following items:
Copies of all emails into and out of Prof. William Cronon’s state email account from January 1, 2011 to present which reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell.
We are making this request under Chapter 19.32 of the Wisconsin state statutes, through the Open Records law. Specifically, we would like to cite the following section of Wis. Stat. 19.32 (2) that defines a public record as “anything recorded or preserved that has been created or is being kept by the agency. This includes tapes, films, charts, photographs, computer printouts, etc.”
Thank you for your prompt attention, and please make us aware of any costs in advance of preparation of this request.
Sincerely,
Stephan Thompson
If there's anything "chilling" about this request, I sure don't see it. When you write a blog article that is critical of a political party, and get over a half-million hits within days, you should expect a little attention from the people you're poking a stick at.
I like the way the Boy Scouts handle this sort of risk. Far better to be prepared for problems and to know what to do in a dicey situation, rather than try to insulate oneself from all harm (which cannot be done, in any event.) I didn't find it very hard hard to teach my kids how to be safe on the Internet.
I would not put a blanket prohibition on keylogging, however. If a child deliberately lies about his online activities, is actively seeking out bad things on the Internet, and has been caught in the act more than once, then monitoring is called for. Then, it's really more about the lying than it is about the Internet.
If anyone who is skeptical of evolution is deemed to be "anti-science", then this conversation is over before it has even begun. Can't we do better?
The problem I have with the theory are the proposed mechanisms for adaptation. Some of the mechanisms, such as survival of the fittest, seem well able to adapt an existing species with a fully-formed, existing biology. This is something you can test and prove or disprove in the field from actual data.
It is much less clear how this mechanism could have created life in the first instance. Life forms are constructed of systems-of-systems (e.g., the "eye" is not just a single thing, it is part of an entire system of sight), and "survival of the fittest" is obviously not up to the task of explaining how these systems came to be. You can't select on something that does't exist yet.
The alternative proposed mechanism, random mutation of genes coupled with selection, has a big problem both with ordering (selection can't work until it has something to select on), and with the unbelievably low probabilities that have been calculated for everything happening "just so" in order for life to exist as we know it.
To the rational non-scientist, these things bother me. They certainly don't add up to a "slam dunk" for evolution as currently described. It feels like something is as yet undiscovered, and certainly some things are unexplained.
So, if the price we have to pay to improve the theory is to allow skeptics to pound on it, then then I say bring it on. Science ought to have nothing to fear from skepticism. Kids are plenty smart enough to tell religion from science (remember when you were a kid?), so we should have nothing to fear on that front, either.
The government does not generate income, it spends income. Government is always on the "expense" side of the economic ledger. It may be a good expense (infrastructure) or a poor expense (mad-house spending on homeland security), but it's still an expense.
In addition, it is always an "expensive" expense. That is, the government takes its income from the private sector profits which already include the cost of doing business, extracts its own overhead cost, and then uses the remainder to create a job. The dollars are thus double-encumbered with overhead.
Lastly, government jobs are not "lasting" in the sense that private jobs are. Hiring one government person doesn't generate any income to hire two more, as it would in the private sector; it always stays an expense, each and every time another person is added to the roles.
Therefore, it is vital to strictly limit government spending just to those expenses which no other organization can make.
Gigahertz-class CPU, integrated full HD 1080p encode and decode, 6MP image captures, integrated audio processing engine, advanced 3D graphics. Renders 45Million triangles-per-second. Includes 802.11n wireless, Bluetooth 3.0, HDMI, USB 2.0, 3G Baseband, SD/MMC card, and camera. It is powerful enough to simultaneously decode 4 1080p video streams at a time. Some videos of an early reference design here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s17KwfzTFY
The agent lists the basis for the forfeiture on page 66 of the affidavit. U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2323 allows the U.S. government to seize "Any property used, or intended to be used, in any manner or part to commit or facilitate the commission of [the following offenses]:" 506 of title 17, or section 2318, 2319, 2319A, 2319B, or 2320, or chapter 90 section 2318, 2319, 2319A, 2319B, or 2320.
I found the affidavit to be pretty sound, and the evidence was fairly damming. I don't think this will ultimately stop the pirates, however, as a close study of the affidavit will give you all the ideas you need to run a pirate site that obeys the letter of the law, but not the spirit.
The problem here is the working group wants to limit participation to UN member states only. However, the group's charter says that members ought to be composed of "governments, the private sector, and civil society" , according to this ISOC letter.
I signed the petition and commented that as the value of the Internet is based on the contributions of everyone, it is manifestly unfair not to have open representation in a forum discussing the future of the Internet.
I am completely in line with the Commish on this one. We need to stop pretending that the Internet is anything other than a telecommunications service. That means operators have some obligation to be a common carrier of information, regardless of source.
It's not the same type of telecommunication service as a telephone network, to be sure, so you can't use exactly the same rules to regulate both services. But what the Internet is NOT is an "information" service, it's current, erroneous, regulatory category. Information services -- i.e. applications -- run on top of telecommunications services -- i.e., information technology.
This IT vs. Application distinction is just as important in the sphere of regulations as it is in the sphere of physical deployment. It serves exactly the same function: it separates concerns, so we can independently couple things together in ways we haven't envisioned yet, using innovations that haven't been invented yet by companies that have yet to be founded.
Without loose regulatory coupling, the entire Internet will become just another Apple iTunes Store experience.
Let's take this up a level of abstraction. What categories of one's life need a formal organizational approach? My list:
- Time. Couldn't live for a week without a calendaring system
- Secured Private Data (credentials, SSN, etc.)
- Personal Notes. Info I want to remember, ideas I need to jot down, interesting websites.
- Useful Files. Things I need to access to in multiple contexts, such as ebooks, tax returns, etc.
I don't keep a To Do list, nor Bookmarks; these things are covered by managing Time and Personal Notes.
As to technology, I try to find things that span all the platforms of mobile, home, and work currently at use. Increasingly, that's becoming cloud-based apps. Services such as Dropbox have become indispensible.
Hulu blocks Google TV, too, just like the mainstream media companies. And, Hulu has already worked around the user agent string issue, and blocks Google TV configured as "Generic" or natively -- and it took them all of 1 day to do it. While they were working on this patch to "improve" their service, people were able to watch Hulu perfectly fine. So, there's no technical rationale, it's pure business.
I, for one, completely don't understand the reluctance. Google TV doesn't stop ads from showing up, or go around paywalls, its just a browser like any other. There's no difference in how much money a site can make through Google TV or a traditional desktop PC.
It sounds like pure envy, to me. Google's got the drop on the rest of the industry, and they don't want it to get any bigger. So, throw the customer under the bus. Why not? They're just customers, who cares about 'em anyway?
I agree with practically everything you're saying. I am an Officer of Election (poll worker) in Fairfax City, Virginia, and a software architect by trade. A well-designed, well-executed PKI-based voting system running on hardened systems *would* be more reliable than what we have. In fact, it would be overkill.
People would be pleasantly surprised, I think, at how extensive our internal audit controls are. We monitor the count of voters using two separate systems. We call in the running totals every hour, where they are recorded in a third system. At the end of the day, the dozens or so poll workers all inspect the tallies and physically sign the print outs, and one copy gets sealed and sent to the court house.
What this means is that to successfully corrupt the vote, you'd have to corrupt all the poll workers, the registrar, and somehow keep people from reading the court's copies. It would not be easy.
Let me assure you we are not ANYONE'S "stooges" -- especially not the political parties, who we tend to dislike rather strongly because they can be such jerks at election time, which makes our jobs that much harder. We are 100% volunteer, usually retired.
What makes pure internet voting problematical is that we don't have nearly the same opportunity to do any of the human-based auditing that makes the system work. The computer systems we are using now are far less secure than what you are proposing, but we don't need them to be that tight. We need them to be auditable.
The way the government sees it, they are the public, representatively, so when they negotiate with Big Content, they're really negotiating for me and you. Of course, that's not the way the public sees it. Only 11% of the people trust Congress. They see Big Govt more as an adversary, like Big Content.
It would be better if the government simply set rules that apply to everyone equally, and for the benefit of everyone, equally. Anything less, and you are picking winners and losers. To do that, they don't need to "negotiate" with individual parties at all.
Slashdot Mirror
The famous passage in 2 Peter 3:8 about counting is, "But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance."
From this, Camping concludes, "1 day = 1,000 years", which of course is not at all what Peter meant, so his whole theory is trash. Amazing that people let themselves be mislead by such obviously erroneous readings of the Bible.
According to The Origins of our Modern Calendar", in 1582 10 days were dropped from the calendar to account for a centuries-long accumulation of a rounding error in calculating the length of a year (Caesar calculated a year to be 365.25 days long, but it's actually 365.2422 days.) Ever since then, we've been adjusting one day every 4 years, but that has it's own rounding problems too, resulting in 1 day of error every 3,000 years.
Mod parent up -- we should look at this from a security/convenience angle. Dropbox offers many conveniences such as automatic versioning, backups, synchronization, cross-platform etc., and at a price that just about anyone can afford. For 99.9% of my files, I'm content with my files being encrypted by Dropbox, and de-duped as needed. It's the equivalent of locking my car -- not enough protection against a pro, but enough to make someone else an easier target. All my truly private files are locally encrypted before being stored in Dropbox. Best of both worlds: security and convenience.
Wait, wait, the "tea party [is] calling the shots"?! I'm a member of the Northern Virginia Tea Party and no one told ME I was calling the shots. Dang! Must've missed the memo.
The closest we get to calling the shots is deciding what colors to put on our hand-lettered signs for the next rally.
12. Under which section(s) of the law is your request authorized, and what are the names and contact information of the DHS agents who are requesting that this action be taken?
Thanks for the link. He answered my big question, which was why one sees letters seemingly appear and disappear as the zoom level changes. Answer: some letters are part of different mask layers, and masks being monochrome are either all on or all off.
Good to know.
Mod parent up!
Yes, until very recently, a few mass media companies controlled the news, and if they collectively decided something wasn't news-worthy anymore, it was dropped. Happily, we have the internet now, and can talk among ourselves without being told what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
By the way, has any "professional news organization" actually dug into the latest birth certificate and examined it, professionally? I've read countless stories like this one about how crazy and all alternate-reality those Birthers are, but actual investigations by electronic document specialists? None that I've seen.
I think anyone who downloads and inspects the long-form certificate PDF [whitehouse.gov] from the whitehouse web site will be struck as I was by its many peculiarities. Not being a PDF expert, I have no idea how to interpret what I'm seeing, but it certainly doesn't look like any other PDF I've seen.
I'm guessing the justification would be that inspecting your data is merely the electronic equivalent of searching your possessions and your person.
It is an interesting question: what is the legal status of your data? Is it your "possession"? Can having certain types of data be considered an illegal act? Can possession of data make one dangerous to others?
True religion has absolutely nothing to fear from people who question things. Go ahead and wonder how Jesus did what he did, and try to imagine how you could copy it. Jesus' signs and works were given precisely so you would believe that he was really, truly God's son, because no one else could have done what he did.
The signs are pretty impressive: fed thousands from a handful loaves and fishes (twice); walked on water; calmed storms with a word; healed diseases at a touch, including the hearing and seeing of people born deaf and blind; and raised people from the dead (including himself), to name just a few.
You figure out how to do any of those, you let me know how that works out. At some point, you've got to decide whether these claimed signs are just hooey, or Jesus really was who he said he was.
Why would you think that? Ben Franklin's comment on why he contributed the design of his stove patent free has pretty obvious roots in the teachings of Timothy about not being in love with money. Read the cited articles and seefor yourself.
The fact that this post was marked offtopic tells me that perhaps your avg SL reader ought to get out a bit more. Not everything of worth comes from the left side of the brain...
If anyone teaches false doctrines and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, he is conceited and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions and constant friction between men of corrupt mind, who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain.
But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
1 Timothy 6:3-10 New International Version
From the Amazon MP3 Uploader App Help page:
Files not supported by the Uploader
The following is a list of supported file formats and some of the unsupported file formats. Unsupported files will not show up in the Uploader as they are not available for upload.
Supported file formats
Unsupported file formats
It will be interesting to see how well Amazon stands up to the inevitable court challenges. For music purchased from AmazonMP3, they are certainly on very solid ground, since they can prove that the Cloud Drive user is the purchaser; if Amazon has the legal right to download you the MP3 you just bought, they certainly have the right to download it for you again. The music industry has already taken their (very generous) cut in that case. You paid for it, you get to use it.
Playing back non-AmazonMP3 files is where I think it gets a little sticky.
I don't see anything nefarious about this FOIA request. The author is a public employee, and his emails are public records. Here's the text of the request, in full:
If there's anything "chilling" about this request, I sure don't see it. When you write a blog article that is critical of a political party, and get over a half-million hits within days, you should expect a little attention from the people you're poking a stick at.
I like the way the Boy Scouts handle this sort of risk. Far better to be prepared for problems and to know what to do in a dicey situation, rather than try to insulate oneself from all harm (which cannot be done, in any event.) I didn't find it very hard hard to teach my kids how to be safe on the Internet. I would not put a blanket prohibition on keylogging, however. If a child deliberately lies about his online activities, is actively seeking out bad things on the Internet, and has been caught in the act more than once, then monitoring is called for. Then, it's really more about the lying than it is about the Internet.
If anyone who is skeptical of evolution is deemed to be "anti-science", then this conversation is over before it has even begun. Can't we do better?
The problem I have with the theory are the proposed mechanisms for adaptation. Some of the mechanisms, such as survival of the fittest, seem well able to adapt an existing species with a fully-formed, existing biology. This is something you can test and prove or disprove in the field from actual data.
It is much less clear how this mechanism could have created life in the first instance. Life forms are constructed of systems-of-systems (e.g., the "eye" is not just a single thing, it is part of an entire system of sight), and "survival of the fittest" is obviously not up to the task of explaining how these systems came to be. You can't select on something that does't exist yet.
The alternative proposed mechanism, random mutation of genes coupled with selection, has a big problem both with ordering (selection can't work until it has something to select on), and with the unbelievably low probabilities that have been calculated for everything happening "just so" in order for life to exist as we know it.
To the rational non-scientist, these things bother me. They certainly don't add up to a "slam dunk" for evolution as currently described. It feels like something is as yet undiscovered, and certainly some things are unexplained.
So, if the price we have to pay to improve the theory is to allow skeptics to pound on it, then then I say bring it on. Science ought to have nothing to fear from skepticism. Kids are plenty smart enough to tell religion from science (remember when you were a kid?), so we should have nothing to fear on that front, either.
The government does not generate income, it spends income. Government is always on the "expense" side of the economic ledger. It may be a good expense (infrastructure) or a poor expense (mad-house spending on homeland security), but it's still an expense.
In addition, it is always an "expensive" expense. That is, the government takes its income from the private sector profits which already include the cost of doing business, extracts its own overhead cost, and then uses the remainder to create a job. The dollars are thus double-encumbered with overhead.
Lastly, government jobs are not "lasting" in the sense that private jobs are. Hiring one government person doesn't generate any income to hire two more, as it would in the private sector; it always stays an expense, each and every time another person is added to the roles.
Therefore, it is vital to strictly limit government spending just to those expenses which no other organization can make.
Gigahertz-class CPU, integrated full HD 1080p encode and decode, 6MP image captures, integrated audio processing engine, advanced 3D graphics. Renders 45Million triangles-per-second. Includes 802.11n wireless, Bluetooth 3.0, HDMI, USB 2.0, 3G Baseband, SD/MMC card, and camera. It is powerful enough to simultaneously decode 4 1080p video streams at a time. Some videos of an early reference design here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s17KwfzTFY
The agent lists the basis for the forfeiture on page 66 of the affidavit. U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2323 allows the U.S. government to seize "Any property used, or intended to be used, in any manner or part to commit or facilitate the commission of [the following offenses]:" 506 of title 17, or section 2318, 2319, 2319A, 2319B, or 2320, or chapter 90 section 2318, 2319, 2319A, 2319B, or 2320.
I found the affidavit to be pretty sound, and the evidence was fairly damming. I don't think this will ultimately stop the pirates, however, as a close study of the affidavit will give you all the ideas you need to run a pirate site that obeys the letter of the law, but not the spirit.
The problem here is the working group wants to limit participation to UN member states only. However, the group's charter says that members ought to be composed of "governments, the private sector, and civil society" , according to this ISOC letter.
I signed the petition and commented that as the value of the Internet is based on the contributions of everyone, it is manifestly unfair not to have open representation in a forum discussing the future of the Internet.
I am completely in line with the Commish on this one. We need to stop pretending that the Internet is anything other than a telecommunications service. That means operators have some obligation to be a common carrier of information, regardless of source.
It's not the same type of telecommunication service as a telephone network, to be sure, so you can't use exactly the same rules to regulate both services. But what the Internet is NOT is an "information" service, it's current, erroneous, regulatory category. Information services -- i.e. applications -- run on top of telecommunications services -- i.e., information technology.
This IT vs. Application distinction is just as important in the sphere of regulations as it is in the sphere of physical deployment. It serves exactly the same function: it separates concerns, so we can independently couple things together in ways we haven't envisioned yet, using innovations that haven't been invented yet by companies that have yet to be founded.
Without loose regulatory coupling, the entire Internet will become just another Apple iTunes Store experience.
Let's take this up a level of abstraction. What categories of one's life need a formal organizational approach? My list:
- Time. Couldn't live for a week without a calendaring system
- Secured Private Data (credentials, SSN, etc.)
- Personal Notes. Info I want to remember, ideas I need to jot down, interesting websites.
- Useful Files. Things I need to access to in multiple contexts, such as ebooks, tax returns, etc.
I don't keep a To Do list, nor Bookmarks; these things are covered by managing Time and Personal Notes.
As to technology, I try to find things that span all the platforms of mobile, home, and work currently at use. Increasingly, that's becoming cloud-based apps. Services such as Dropbox have become indispensible.
Hulu blocks Google TV, too, just like the mainstream media companies. And, Hulu has already worked around the user agent string issue, and blocks Google TV configured as "Generic" or natively -- and it took them all of 1 day to do it. While they were working on this patch to "improve" their service, people were able to watch Hulu perfectly fine. So, there's no technical rationale, it's pure business.
I, for one, completely don't understand the reluctance. Google TV doesn't stop ads from showing up, or go around paywalls, its just a browser like any other. There's no difference in how much money a site can make through Google TV or a traditional desktop PC.
It sounds like pure envy, to me. Google's got the drop on the rest of the industry, and they don't want it to get any bigger. So, throw the customer under the bus. Why not? They're just customers, who cares about 'em anyway?
I agree with practically everything you're saying. I am an Officer of Election (poll worker) in Fairfax City, Virginia, and a software architect by trade. A well-designed, well-executed PKI-based voting system running on hardened systems *would* be more reliable than what we have. In fact, it would be overkill.
People would be pleasantly surprised, I think, at how extensive our internal audit controls are. We monitor the count of voters using two separate systems. We call in the running totals every hour, where they are recorded in a third system. At the end of the day, the dozens or so poll workers all inspect the tallies and physically sign the print outs, and one copy gets sealed and sent to the court house.
What this means is that to successfully corrupt the vote, you'd have to corrupt all the poll workers, the registrar, and somehow keep people from reading the court's copies. It would not be easy.
Let me assure you we are not ANYONE'S "stooges" -- especially not the political parties, who we tend to dislike rather strongly because they can be such jerks at election time, which makes our jobs that much harder. We are 100% volunteer, usually retired.
What makes pure internet voting problematical is that we don't have nearly the same opportunity to do any of the human-based auditing that makes the system work. The computer systems we are using now are far less secure than what you are proposing, but we don't need them to be that tight. We need them to be auditable.
The way the government sees it, they are the public, representatively, so when they negotiate with Big Content, they're really negotiating for me and you. Of course, that's not the way the public sees it. Only 11% of the people trust Congress. They see Big Govt more as an adversary, like Big Content.
It would be better if the government simply set rules that apply to everyone equally, and for the benefit of everyone, equally. Anything less, and you are picking winners and losers. To do that, they don't need to "negotiate" with individual parties at all.