Re:Does /. want endorsements from the NY Times?
on
Buggy Voting Machines
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Kerry got a record number of votes too. Frankly, Bush's support came primarily from the religious right and is therefore based on ignorant issues like opposition of gay marriage.
I saw many emails being circulated before the election, people urging the religious to gather up every religious person and drag them to the polls, in order to prevent the terrible evil that the democrats would bring.
Third-grade scare tactics. And if you look at the statistics of who votes, you can see that it's the ignorant (less schooling) and religious (christian only) who voted for Bush. Yay, the ignorant masses have grunted.
Did Clinton invade Iraq? No. So it's not hypocritical for him to have tried to keep from getting sent to war. Bush on the other hand wants to avoid the war himself while sending others into harms way.
And this volunteer army you go on about... Did they volunteer to serve and protect their country, or to go fight a war based on lies? Maybe it was short sighted of them, but they didn't sign up for a pointless war to back Dubya's revenge.
Those hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths mean something to me, as did the offensive policies of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Bush didn't lift a finger to help any of them - they only became his justification after he didn't catch Osama and didn't find the WMDs he lied about.
Note that I'm not saying this to support any other president or candidate - Bush is just worst.
All of the cases involving a EULA had complications - like the buyer had been warned of the license conditions and then it wasn't an EULA case, but a verbal contract case.
EULAs are pretty much the definition of unenforceable contracts. They're post-sale. That right there is pretty much the antithesis of a contract. There's a lot else wrong with them - some speculate that they're actually illegal because the click-throughs attempts to withhold the use of the software until you are forced to "agree" to an invalid contract.
Idiots say you shouldn't buy the game if you don't like it, then act like it's stupid that you didn't buy it. You randoids are like clones.
Steam sucks, companies that force you to deal with Steam-like systems won't get my business. Sucks less for me than for them - there are more games out than I can play anyways.
Nope, Valve is selling an unrestricted copy of the game with no limits applied to it. That EULA is post-sale and unenforcable. That is, if you buy a boxed copy. If you buy it online it depends on what you agree to before clicking 'purchase'.
You're a little mistaken on the license thing - you don't need one to use copyrighted material. And yes, copyright law specifically says this for computer software, including making copies inherent in the use of the product.
I bought Diablo 2 and when I tried to play it, it would work because I had a CD burner. I wrote them about the problem and they said that it was either because the game detected the burner and assumed it was a copy, or that the drive didn't support the copy protection.
They told me to get a new CD ROM, and that they didn't think it was a bug and wouldn't support me returning the game. Oh, and when I mentioned knowing that the game worked because I had used a crack temporarily they got mad and told me I was breaking the law. (This was a lie - "cracking" something you own is perfectly legal.)
They were fine with the idea that I was out $60 without any recourse. Bastards.
Since then I crack everything I buy (Which will never include a Blizzard game again) and never have to deal with the issue. Maybe you only play two games at a time and keep then handy. I own 80+ games and they fill a 200-disk binder - it takes a while to swap disks and it's not something I feel is worth doing.
They do this. Go to www.dpreview.com and read a review. They take pictures of test charts and show you pictures of how the camera handles very fine lines getting smaller and smaller. This is where you get color fringing, moire, bluriness, and artifacts as the camera tries to get some data out of the mess.
There were comparatively few Apple 2 computers and there are still businesses that will copy data off of old disks for you. Today with a computer in every home and people cranking out CD after CD there's a clear market for businesses to keep at least one network-connected machine with a CD reader (and spare parts to keep the machine running) for a long time. This isn't something that can happen overnight.
For the paranoid, you can print your data in a scheme Xerox "invented", a pattern of alternating slashes and backslashes, with an appropriate level of redundancy so you can lose any given number of the symbols (either every third symbol or every third page, etc) and still reconstruct the original data. This only depends on scanners (or a very dedicated person with a magnifying glass), very basic pattern recognition, and some math. The decryption information could fit on a single 8.5x11 sheet of paper with small type and should last as long as the English language. (Xerox intended this to be used very faintly, visible as nothing more than a slight graying of the background, and to contain a URL to the latest copy of the document. Even the smallest fragment (1cm^2, in any shape) would contain enough data to reconstruct the URL easily. The other form, for documents where finding the latest copy isn't as important, would contain the digital master encoded in the background, allowing for perfect "scans".)
How do you know who the vote is credited to? With paper ballots (not receipts - that's something different) you can hold the paper in your hands and inspect the markings, making sure that it's for your candidate. You then put that in a box, confident that a vote counter could do the same thing later and see the same markings you saw.
I don't believe that the computerized voting is doomed - ATMs seem fairly robust, but I don't trust it as far as I can throw it. Computerized voting needs to be only a way to present the choices and help the marking of the ballot, not the last black-box step.
Quite right. Well-designed paper isn't hard to use and the trail it leaves is well worth it.
Personally, I think the best bet is to have a touch-screen machine that spits out a punched card (pre-punched) for you to inspect, feed into the checking machine (which also provides the results, unless a manual recount is called for) and if you're satisfied that the second machine verifies the results of the first, it spits the card out into a locked box, or back into your hands if there's an error.
That way you get the theoretical benefits of a touch-screen. (I work doing UI design - I'm sure the first few generations of machines will be a huge step back.) You also get a paper ballot (recountable if needed) and you get to run it through the counting machine yourself and make sure it reads the same settings you put into the first machine, as well as make sure it's obvious for a visual recount.
Not really, you'd sort the hashes in order to make looking them up quick - this means that password 'aaaa' and 'aaab' would likely be half the file apart. In other words, too random for the compression algorithm to take advantage of. Of course, you're only going passwords which are letters+numbers, so that's only 5.2 bits of data per byte and will compress fairly well because of that, but not as well as a list of 'aaaa' 'aaab' 'aaac' etc.
The point of offering copyright protection is that society gets to use the work when it comes out of protection - we help the authors in order to encourage them to create more works that eventually become ours.
Copyright is currently instituted by dishonest and dirty judges (See 2600, linking to DeCSS case, where the judge used to work for Time Warner) at the command of their corporate masters. Money talks.
"Lost a million dollars". Yeah, and the tooth-fairy plays online. Sure.
I think you're looking for "Made $1M less than they predicted". Wah. Life sucks, nobody is as rich as they want to be.
I for one will never buy the game. Anything that can be remotely terminated (like Quake3 auth servers going down) isn't something I really own, and I'm not going to pay for someware if I don't own it in a useful way.
Publishers whine about piracy but you only have their word for registrations and sales going up when piracy protection is used. As far as anyone else can see, 80% of piracy is done by people who have spindles full of games they play once or twice. Hardly millions in lost revenue - that would require someone who would have paid had the software not been free.
Is that really so unreasonable? If someone enters your house without your permission and without announcing themselves, what's the chance they have good motives?
I think that to do this though you need to make a reasonable effort to keep people out and need to actually fear for your safety. Leaving the door unlocked and shooting the neighbor who sticks his head in to ask you a question in unreasonable.
Firemen and police (usually) announce themselves before entering. And perhaps a few dead policemen who didn't would be a good wake-up call about no-knock warrants.
Fuck Direct TV. Let's hope they go broke from this. When they proved they were willing to destroy the lives of innocents in order to slow the spread of hacked cards I lost all sympathy for them.
Hopefully they go out of business ASAP and take the execs with them. There's some serious evil in a huge corp extorting thousands of dollars through people via the courts. I hope some exec wakes up and finds out a bank error wiped out his life savings.
Then do the people of Iraq a favor and vote against Bush. The guy's a lunatic and needs to be put down like Ol' Yeller. The longer *you* leave him in power by whining about how you want the system to work, the more people he kills.
Wake up and smell reality. It stinks, but it *is*. A vote for anyone other than Kerry is a vote for Bush. (And the other way too.) However, Kerry isn't a religious nutjob with a vendetta.
If you can find it, you can destroy it. Bunkers aren't the defense they used to be. The first sign of an invasion would be simultaneous strikes on every bunker and long-range military base in NK.
Spoiled ballots have a bit of an effect to anyone who cares - neither of the parties currently sharing power. But if it gets very high it might get mentioned in the news or something.
Sure, a Nader vote got environmental awareness. And a war in Iraq. Good job.
And no, a vote doesn't always mean a candidate wins or loses. In certain systems your vote for Green (let's assume) might not elect your Green candidate but, when combined with the other 2% of the country who voted Green, would get you aproximately 2% of the seats. That's a non-wasted vote. Your vote always has a direct impact on how many seats you get.
I don't know why anyone in the USA even bothers showing up, it's such a farce.
But, for example, I dislike Bush's actions much more than I dislike what I think Kerry would do. Now, even hating both, I would vote Dem to hurt Bush. If I really didn't care about either outcome, I'd vote my choice I guess.
I'd question pretty seriously any morals that didn't let me make the obvious choice of getting rid of someone like Bush. (YMMV, you may like the guy...)
Voting in the USA is like getting a ballot saying "Do you want the Republican or the Democrat?" Ignore the rest of the text, it's just a distraction. Change the system if you can, but while it's here, understand how it works.
Slashdot Mirror
Kerry got a record number of votes too. Frankly, Bush's support came primarily from the religious right and is therefore based on ignorant issues like opposition of gay marriage.
I saw many emails being circulated before the election, people urging the religious to gather up every religious person and drag them to the polls, in order to prevent the terrible evil that the democrats would bring.
Third-grade scare tactics. And if you look at the statistics of who votes, you can see that it's the ignorant (less schooling) and religious (christian only) who voted for Bush. Yay, the ignorant masses have grunted.
Did Clinton invade Iraq? No. So it's not hypocritical for him to have tried to keep from getting sent to war. Bush on the other hand wants to avoid the war himself while sending others into harms way.
And this volunteer army you go on about... Did they volunteer to serve and protect their country, or to go fight a war based on lies? Maybe it was short sighted of them, but they didn't sign up for a pointless war to back Dubya's revenge.
Those hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths mean something to me, as did the offensive policies of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Bush didn't lift a finger to help any of them - they only became his justification after he didn't catch Osama and didn't find the WMDs he lied about.
Note that I'm not saying this to support any other president or candidate - Bush is just worst.
All of the cases involving a EULA had complications - like the buyer had been warned of the license conditions and then it wasn't an EULA case, but a verbal contract case.
EULAs are pretty much the definition of unenforceable contracts. They're post-sale. That right there is pretty much the antithesis of a contract. There's a lot else wrong with them - some speculate that they're actually illegal because the click-throughs attempts to withhold the use of the software until you are forced to "agree" to an invalid contract.
Idiots say you shouldn't buy the game if you don't like it, then act like it's stupid that you didn't buy it. You randoids are like clones.
Steam sucks, companies that force you to deal with Steam-like systems won't get my business. Sucks less for me than for them - there are more games out than I can play anyways.
Nope, Valve is selling an unrestricted copy of the game with no limits applied to it. That EULA is post-sale and unenforcable. That is, if you buy a boxed copy. If you buy it online it depends on what you agree to before clicking 'purchase'.
You're a little mistaken on the license thing - you don't need one to use copyrighted material. And yes, copyright law specifically says this for computer software, including making copies inherent in the use of the product.
If they're like Blizzard, they don't give a shit.
I bought Diablo 2 and when I tried to play it, it would work because I had a CD burner. I wrote them about the problem and they said that it was either because the game detected the burner and assumed it was a copy, or that the drive didn't support the copy protection.
They told me to get a new CD ROM, and that they didn't think it was a bug and wouldn't support me returning the game. Oh, and when I mentioned knowing that the game worked because I had used a crack temporarily they got mad and told me I was breaking the law. (This was a lie - "cracking" something you own is perfectly legal.)
They were fine with the idea that I was out $60 without any recourse. Bastards.
Since then I crack everything I buy (Which will never include a Blizzard game again) and never have to deal with the issue. Maybe you only play two games at a time and keep then handy. I own 80+ games and they fill a 200-disk binder - it takes a while to swap disks and it's not something I feel is worth doing.
They do this. Go to www.dpreview.com and read a review. They take pictures of test charts and show you pictures of how the camera handles very fine lines getting smaller and smaller. This is where you get color fringing, moire, bluriness, and artifacts as the camera tries to get some data out of the mess.
There were comparatively few Apple 2 computers and there are still businesses that will copy data off of old disks for you. Today with a computer in every home and people cranking out CD after CD there's a clear market for businesses to keep at least one network-connected machine with a CD reader (and spare parts to keep the machine running) for a long time. This isn't something that can happen overnight.
For the paranoid, you can print your data in a scheme Xerox "invented", a pattern of alternating slashes and backslashes, with an appropriate level of redundancy so you can lose any given number of the symbols (either every third symbol or every third page, etc) and still reconstruct the original data. This only depends on scanners (or a very dedicated person with a magnifying glass), very basic pattern recognition, and some math. The decryption information could fit on a single 8.5x11 sheet of paper with small type and should last as long as the English language. (Xerox intended this to be used very faintly, visible as nothing more than a slight graying of the background, and to contain a URL to the latest copy of the document. Even the smallest fragment (1cm^2, in any shape) would contain enough data to reconstruct the URL easily. The other form, for documents where finding the latest copy isn't as important, would contain the digital master encoded in the background, allowing for perfect "scans".)
If you offer a deal, stick to it. I don't see what the effort is, other than to feel like you shafted another customer.
I'd expect an intelligently run store to expect people to try to price match when there's an advertised price matching policy.
But I forget how modern business works - anything you haven't bilked from the customer is profit they've stolen from you.
How do you know who the vote is credited to? With paper ballots (not receipts - that's something different) you can hold the paper in your hands and inspect the markings, making sure that it's for your candidate. You then put that in a box, confident that a vote counter could do the same thing later and see the same markings you saw.
I don't believe that the computerized voting is doomed - ATMs seem fairly robust, but I don't trust it as far as I can throw it. Computerized voting needs to be only a way to present the choices and help the marking of the ballot, not the last black-box step.
Quite right. Well-designed paper isn't hard to use and the trail it leaves is well worth it.
Personally, I think the best bet is to have a touch-screen machine that spits out a punched card (pre-punched) for you to inspect, feed into the checking machine (which also provides the results, unless a manual recount is called for) and if you're satisfied that the second machine verifies the results of the first, it spits the card out into a locked box, or back into your hands if there's an error.
That way you get the theoretical benefits of a touch-screen. (I work doing UI design - I'm sure the first few generations of machines will be a huge step back.) You also get a paper ballot (recountable if needed) and you get to run it through the counting machine yourself and make sure it reads the same settings you put into the first machine, as well as make sure it's obvious for a visual recount.
Not really, you'd sort the hashes in order to make looking them up quick - this means that password 'aaaa' and 'aaab' would likely be half the file apart. In other words, too random for the compression algorithm to take advantage of. Of course, you're only going passwords which are letters+numbers, so that's only 5.2 bits of data per byte and will compress fairly well because of that, but not as well as a list of 'aaaa' 'aaab' 'aaac' etc.
I liked some of the forts, but I was always in it for the complex game modes and the non-symetrical maps. Way more to learn.
He probably means, QuakeWorld:Team Fortress. He's old-school.
Ahhh, them was the days. QWTF on Canalzone or one of the other non-fort type maps. Bliss!
The point of offering copyright protection is that society gets to use the work when it comes out of protection - we help the authors in order to encourage them to create more works that eventually become ours.
Copyright is currently instituted by dishonest and dirty judges (See 2600, linking to DeCSS case, where the judge used to work for Time Warner) at the command of their corporate masters. Money talks.
"Lost a million dollars". Yeah, and the tooth-fairy plays online. Sure.
I think you're looking for "Made $1M less than they predicted". Wah. Life sucks, nobody is as rich as they want to be.
I for one will never buy the game. Anything that can be remotely terminated (like Quake3 auth servers going down) isn't something I really own, and I'm not going to pay for someware if I don't own it in a useful way.
Publishers whine about piracy but you only have their word for registrations and sales going up when piracy protection is used. As far as anyone else can see, 80% of piracy is done by people who have spindles full of games they play once or twice. Hardly millions in lost revenue - that would require someone who would have paid had the software not been free.
A typo is an accident, much the same as going to the wrong house on a dark night, or trying to save the fucktard inside when a fire breaks out.
Is that really so unreasonable? If someone enters your house without your permission and without announcing themselves, what's the chance they have good motives?
I think that to do this though you need to make a reasonable effort to keep people out and need to actually fear for your safety. Leaving the door unlocked and shooting the neighbor who sticks his head in to ask you a question in unreasonable.
Firemen and police (usually) announce themselves before entering. And perhaps a few dead policemen who didn't would be a good wake-up call about no-knock warrants.
Fuck Direct TV. Let's hope they go broke from this. When they proved they were willing to destroy the lives of innocents in order to slow the spread of hacked cards I lost all sympathy for them.
Hopefully they go out of business ASAP and take the execs with them. There's some serious evil in a huge corp extorting thousands of dollars through people via the courts. I hope some exec wakes up and finds out a bank error wiped out his life savings.
Then do the people of Iraq a favor and vote against Bush. The guy's a lunatic and needs to be put down like Ol' Yeller. The longer *you* leave him in power by whining about how you want the system to work, the more people he kills.
Wake up and smell reality. It stinks, but it *is*. A vote for anyone other than Kerry is a vote for Bush. (And the other way too.) However, Kerry isn't a religious nutjob with a vendetta.
If you can find it, you can destroy it. Bunkers aren't the defense they used to be. The first sign of an invasion would be simultaneous strikes on every bunker and long-range military base in NK.
Ethics, shmethics, do you want Bush to win?
Spoiled ballots have a bit of an effect to anyone who cares - neither of the parties currently sharing power. But if it gets very high it might get mentioned in the news or something.
Sure, a Nader vote got environmental awareness. And a war in Iraq. Good job.
And no, a vote doesn't always mean a candidate wins or loses. In certain systems your vote for Green (let's assume) might not elect your Green candidate but, when combined with the other 2% of the country who voted Green, would get you aproximately 2% of the seats. That's a non-wasted vote. Your vote always has a direct impact on how many seats you get.
I don't know why anyone in the USA even bothers showing up, it's such a farce.
But, for example, I dislike Bush's actions much more than I dislike what I think Kerry would do. Now, even hating both, I would vote Dem to hurt Bush. If I really didn't care about either outcome, I'd vote my choice I guess.
I'd question pretty seriously any morals that didn't let me make the obvious choice of getting rid of someone like Bush. (YMMV, you may like the guy...)
Voting in the USA is like getting a ballot saying "Do you want the Republican or the Democrat?" Ignore the rest of the text, it's just a distraction. Change the system if you can, but while it's here, understand how it works.