Users don't want to roam the aisles at Circuit City looking for a spellchecker for the right version of the word processor, I agree.
That doesn't mean that a pluggin interface isn't a good idea though.
The larger a project gets the harder it is to manage. You can a hundred people who can break the build due to a typo, or whose code is running in the same process and can walk all over the app. Not good.
Design the app with a pluggin architecture and test the hell out of the interface. Then you have a stand-alone executable program (perhaps just in a DLL) that gets loaded when you want to spell-check. Because it *only* checks spelling it's small and quick, nobody would notice any lag, and if it crashes the main app says 'Spell check failed - sorry', it doesn't crash and lose your unsaved work.
This then removes five people from the one-hundred who can accidently break the whole build and moves them into a smaller project whose development can continue in parallel. The added benefit is that it's then easier to ship this pluggin with the email client and the browser, instead of reinventing the wheel.
Photoshop does most of its own filters as stand-alone functions through the same filter interface that third-party developers use and it works for them.
As long as Slashdot carries all the stories about the Monopoly that owns Linux trying to intentionally build incompatibilities into Linux to keep it from working with any other products. The stories about Linus dancing around shouting "Developers! Developers! Developers!". The stories about how Alan Cox was being flown around the world offering sweetheart deals to huge companies in order to keep them from considering alternatives.
Oh, and don't forget about the exposes of how the Business Software Alliance performs unannounced searches of businesses, shutting down running machines and having untrained flunkies search for any unlicensed copies of Linux. Don't forget to detail how receipts for the product don't seem to count as proof of purchase - an unlicensed copy of Linux (one sold for different hardware doesn't count!) can cost your company $25k or more in "damages", which thankfully can be waived if you just sign the exclusive software purchase deal for the next ten years and agree to periodic audits...
Also, how during the middle of a federal anti-trust lawsuit the people in charge of writing Linux wrote about using any means necessary to kill the competition.
Oh yeah, Linus and Linux don't seem to generate that kind of news.
Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe Microsoft has so many negative articles written about it because they actually do these things?
Perhaps the comparison to HTML didn't add anything, but your answer didn't explain why Word can't reveal codes.
Sure, they don't store a code before and after a word, but that word has a pointer to a style, etc, etc. But when they print it they can figure out to say 'Bold this next word' before printing it, so obviously they can do it.
My biggest beef with Word is that it does things without asking and the cause is often a line or two away. I pasted a section of text just above a chapter heading (in an area I could type in without problem) and the following chapter heading became plain text. I could delete all of the new text and it wouldn't fix the problem. I re-applied the chapter heading style and was then stuck with a double-high space I couldn't delete without losing the chapter heading. Ugh! Or the time is complained the file was corrupt when I opened it and when I tried to print, because of a table that was broken. Fine, except that I'd never used tables in the document. I had to do a manual binary search, cutting and pasting into new documents, to find the broken section in the original. It was a zero-space glitch at the end of a line. If I selected from bottom up it showed as a few spaces on the end of the text, if I selected top down it didn't show anything. I had to delete the word on either side of it and retype it to get rid of the stupid thing.
Sure, I can work around all of this. When I need to use Word I do get the job done, but why is it this fragile? Why do you have to pamper it? Because, evidently, they can't write a freaking word processor properly. (If they can't figure out a way to reveal codes, they're not doing it right.)
Word embodies everything I hate about MS's OS. Sure, if it works, it works well. If it doesn't work there isn't much recourse past format and reinstall because you can't force any settings.
Getting my double-monitor setup working for ouputting to my projector was a nightmare in Windows and it still doesn't work. Not to tout Linux, but while it was some work all the settings the GUIs made were stored in a file and I could just backup the file when it was working and restore to go back to a known state. In Windows I had it working and then went into the display properties to *check* settings, not to change anything. As soon as I did the screen flickered and the refresh rate changed (old CRT projectors are fussy) and 'cancel' didn't. Worse, doing what I did before didn't seem to work because the other dialogs insisted the refresh rate hadn't changed. (The projector's 'signal info' display confirmed that it had.) After a couple of reboots the original settings seemed to work when I reapplied them.
My point is that some of it is financially possible, but it sounds too hard and management nixes it because it's on System Admin's budget but would save money for Tech Support, etc.
My experience in companies is that each little department is willing to torpedo the whole in order to look better personally. IMHO, companies tend to lack a broad view of the whole lifecycle of the product/service.
That's like saying that it doesn't matter to you that your mutual fund's books are open and they can be audited simply because you aren't an accountant and could never do the audit yourself. If the books are open others can and will do audits, which you benefit from.
Just as security companies build their reputation by finding bugs in windows, programmers build their reputation by finding (and fixing) bugs in open source. A friend of mine's resume lists his contributions to Linux. Nothing huge, a fix or two in the kernel and some cleanup in some other project, but it looks pretty cool on a programmer's resume. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes work going on with open source because it's open.
Then there's the benefit of not being locked into any open source. Of having a recourse (even if it involves hiring a contractor) when some critical piece of software breaks. Of knowing that you don't depend on something that may be end-of-lifed. The BSA provides another huge benefit to open source - knowing you'll never be sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars because you copied a HD from a dying computer and didn't properly wipe the old drive.
Going with closed-source products is a business risk akin to going with a product where you couldn't second-source any of the components. Don't buy into the ideology, simply analyze the situation and all of the potential risks. If you consider training costs don't listen to MS FUD, realize that users need help in going from Win98 to WinXP too.
This little technicality is unlikely to change the validity of the EULA. Of course, if the lawyers got the idea that someone might not have seen the EULA they'd make you click through it in order to logon.
With the large ammount of government subsidies they've collected over the years they're only privately owned by technicality.
Besides, the government currently regulates what information businesses can collect and share. It's reasonable that they maintain their own private black list, nobody forces a bar to serve a troublesome customer, but when they start to share this data with law enforcement and credit agencies they aren't so free as they would like.
Anyways, the biggest reason the airlines want to demand ID is because they claim tickets are non-transferable. They charge up to 4x the early-booking price for last-minute tickets. If you could buy them on EBay from someone who bought early they'd lose the ability to dictate their fares and silly restrictions (must stay a weekend, can't use half of each of two round-trip tickets, etc). As soon as this gets taken to court by someone with the cash to stick it out till the end it'll be rules to fall under the doctrine of first sale like almost everything else on the planet and then the airlines won't have the huge financial incentive to ask for ID. Not that I think the airlines are lazy and corrupt, grown corpulent on taxpayer-funded handouts, or anything...
So make the name voluntary. You, wanting your parents to know, would provide a real name and contact info.
The whole ID-to-fly thing came out because the airlines don't want you to be able to resell tickets. They jack the prices up up the last minute and they don't want a free market where they'd have to compete with resold tickets. Poor babies probably just need more government subsidies.
I don't think asking for ID really helps security. Nobody is going to send a convicted criminal to hijack a plane, at least without fake ID, so all it provides is a corpse inventory. I'd really rather not give up the ability to remain anonymous in trade for that small bit of convenience.
That's the issue - if they can't prove you purchased the ticket they can't make sure you didn't sell it. Imagine if they actually had to provide an honest service like everyone else...
The problem though is that many companies don't see that while a security person costs money, they'll save more by being proactive. If you pay for bandwidth (likely part of your pricing structure) you'll find the drop from eliminating spam and worms to be well worth while. If you provide tech support you can save costly calls.
What annoying is when the knee-jerk response of "keep the customer" overwhelms any discussion of the value of the customer. Management wanted to give this spammer a ton of chances because he kept coming up with some sad story, despite the ton of bandwidth he burned and the blackhole threats we got because of him.
If everything came off of the same budget sheet and all you had to do to justify expenses was to show the corresponding loss you'd remove, this would be trivial. Instead they'll pay you a day's wages to do trivial stuff instead of expensing a $20 kinkos visit, yet refuse to allow you to budget some time for security.
"They made it more secure - the rate increase pays for the guy who runs the security"
Doesn't seem too hard, but maybe my grandma is smarter than yours.
This kind of security is well worth it. ISPs that take a few basic precautions sit back and laugh as their competitors get ravaged by the worm of the week, while zombied windows boxes spam everyone and get the whole ISP blackholed, etc.
You pay one person to keep up on the script-kiddy tools and you block the ports they tend to use, or program your router to drop certain scanning packets, making it look like the computers you host are immune to the bug. Trivial stuff really.
If you want to get fancy you can try some sort of warning system that gives you an overview of what your users are doing. If you see that 1/3 of your users are loading a webpage at the same company you might be witnessing a DDoS attack, if one address is scanning your IP range you might want to start dropping their packets.
A little bit of forethought makes everything run much smoother, once you start taking precautions you'll find that despite the cost of the employee time you'll save money overall. Not in a way that short-sighted management (the type who don't understand backups and standby servers) will understand though, so you need to be at a clued company or be good at making proposals.
Let's boycott them by not linking to them. The way Google ranks a page is partly by the popularity of the site. If less people link to ZD they'll show up lower in the rankings.
Like a reverse google-bomb. Less powerful because anyone can post a link, whereas only people who already had ZD links can remove them, but it's still worth a try.
Or, just google-bomb "Ziff Davis" by linking to the page describing their over-zealous legal team. Let people find them, just make sure that damaging information is the first thing they find.
I read that as, "I'll be happy to shoot down any ideas you are willing to share. Please give me a target."
That's a risk we all take. I meant it though, as "I don't think it can be done, but I'm willing to listen before I judge it."
The voter coercion protection you propose sounds good enough - some people might slip through, but we're aiming for better, not perfect.
The receipt doesn't seem to offer much though. You prove that they've got that secret hash associated with your vote, but you still can't really prove that a vote was thrown.
Not enough people are going to keep their receipts to ever prove anything. The case will be something like 45% A, 55% B, and "they" will miscast just enough B votes to make A win. If you (a B voter) go in with your receipt they'll say "Yup, that's a valid vote for B", and they'll say that to the first 49.9% of the voters, it's only after all of them are accounted for that they won't be able to admit to more B votes - the case where you prove fraud. You'd need close to 100% compliance with B voters to show that close elections were rigged. Even if A had 1% and B 99%, you'd still need 50% + 1 B voters to prove that the vote was rigged in A's favor.
This assumes that these people would all come forward and allow news cameras in the special verification booth with them to record all of these 'You voted for B' reports - if the booths were truly private there wouldn't need to be any relation between the number of votes and the reported results. As long as B was recorded to have 1 vote, you don't know that anyone else voted for him.
I doubt you can. Ways that work, that is, and give useful auditability and maintain anonimity, AND don't allow voter coercion. Better minds have nigh unto proven the impossibility of this.
I'm interested in hearing them though, if you want to explain your ideas, I'll even offer suggestions and possible problems.
If the old system has any type of output at all you've got a few options. There's a system designed by Xerox that uses a system of alternating / and \ marks to store data. It scales well, you can either print it out with a standard font (doable by even a daisy-wheel of ball printer) or so small that it appears to be a uniform gray shading. The data is encoded such that you can lose any given percentage of it (you choose the redundancy) and still read the data. The software would need to be custom written for the specific obsolete machine, but it's pretty easy to do. Then you OCR it (the alternating slashes are trivially easy) and read it in on a PC.
If the machine or the storage device is dead, rent time on someone else's machine and do the same thing as above.
Sure, data is the important thing, but it's not impossible. I saw an apple 2 program that sent data to a PC's serial port by toggling the joystick port (one bit per port, four ports, I think) in a specific pattern over a custom cable that they provided a diagram of. You could always do a hex dump of the data and take a picture of each screen (automate it) and OCR it in...
My only concern with a system that had the verification machine on the ballot box is that you want to be able to see your vote enter the box, not a complicated machine that could fake ballots to substitute. Also, you want a scanner that you don't lose your vote in, for when you make a mistake...
An adaption on what I said before then is 1) the voting machine/vote marking machine, 2) the vote checking/optionally extra-marking machine, and 3) a small scanner that couldn't contain fake ballots through which you put your vote into the ballot box.
Ideally you could see the card both entering and exiting the scanner at the same time, to see it's the same card, and see it drop completely (transparent neck on the ballot box?) away from the scanner.
In other words, introduce no new threats of ballot replacement, while getting the benefits of all-electronic voting.
So basically you advocate sex education rather than sexual intercourse at a young age?
Erm, somewhat. I certainly advocate sex ed, but I also advocate letting people have the option to explore and that does include the chance to have intercourse, not the expectation that the child will.
My reasons for this are:
1) You can't stop them from having sex without stopping all normal experimentation which I feel is helpful.
2) I feel people need to have the freedom to experiment a bit in order to make mature choices when they lose their safety net.
Thus, because I feel experimentation is essential, and that you lose the ability to experiment if your guardian is so paranoid about the "worst case" scenario, I feel that we should accept that some children will have sex. To lessen the risk for them we should educate everyone and make them as safe as possible - assuming there was a well-tested birth control suitable for the 8-16 age range, I would advocate giving it to children to increase safety.
I don't see myself as advocating wild child sex, but advocating realism - they will do it, doing it is natural, preventing it by overwhelming control (as opposed to reasoned discussion) will simply delay their mistakes till you lose control.
However, unlike you, I don't think that cultures frown upon what feels good, but rather frown upon certain acts because of their potential effects, real or imagined
Sure, everyone thinks they're being rational. But many cultures/religions forbid masturbation which doesn't, according to modern health professionals, have any negative consequences. (Leaving out obvious silly extremes.)
I think you'd find that many religions/cultures would frown on you giving your daughter a partly-clothed backrub and many would be aghast at the idea of spreading vapo-rub on her chest.
The pre-printed blank is probably the cheapest and easiest. The way this is handled in Canada is that the ballot box is in front of the polling officials. You stuff your own folded cardboard ballot into the box. If you tell them you made a mistake they dispose of your card - ideally shredding. There is no red/green light, you simple either follow their instructions ("put the complete ballot in the box and you're done") or ask for another.
I think there's also value in having a second machine in the polling booth, a separate validator - to detect the hanging chad issue. It would mark next to the first hole punch with an ink blot and another hole punch, for example, and you'd check that the (optional) display showed the right info, and that the mark it made was in the right place on the card (next to the other mark).
Maybe the verification machine could punch a hole in the corner of the card (seen even when folded for privacy) to indicate you'd properly checked that ballot. If you hadn't, they'd stop you when you were about to stuff the ballot into the box.
The official counting would then use the same type of machine that was in the ballot booth for verification, so ideally it'd have the same failings (and thus warn of potential problems).
As for preventing ballot stuffing, I think you keep track of the number of cards issued, those shredded, and the number properly entered into the ballot box. For physical security you use something like a night-deposit box at a bank, where you can't reach past the hatch. If the ballots were stuck shot (tab a into slot b, or tape, or whatever) they could fall into a clear box, making it easier to monitor for tampering.
1) There's no system to verify that punch-card machines produce legible ballots - see the hanging chad issue. Having a second machine to verify that (with the same system used to count final votes) means you don't get ignored on a technicality.
2) Ideally the software used would have a government-mandated GUI (this could go for the paper ballots as well) and would at a minimum double-check your selection. "Did you mean to vote for 'Ross Perot' (Y/N)." Even if there was confusion in the order of candidates you hopefully will read the name (also printed on the ballot it marks) and see if it's what you want.
I think you want to require that the paper be in the box for the vote to count. My ideal system would be one fancy touchscreen, full-color, braille labelled, etc, machine, and one of the final vote counting machines (or something with the exact same sensor), and a final cardboard box you drop the ballots into.
The first machine is all user friendly and helps people fill in the right boxes.
The second machine verifies that your vote was recorder in a way that will count - it eliminates the hanging chad problem. If it accepts it, it'll be counted at the end, if it doesn't, you start again with a new ballot and fixed machine.
The second machine can provide the end-of-election tentative results and the final results wait for someone to arrange the votes into a neat pile and feed into a card reader for the actual binding count.
Any paper that leaves is a vote that doesn't count - vote buying can't be enforced. Any vote that isn't properly marked doesn't make it past the official scanner machine, and any vote that does make it passed is guaranteed to have worked in an official scanner and should be redundantly marked to enable human oversite later if it fails a later check. The initial mark might be borderline, but one or more of the other three (or so) marks on the same line should be adequate to decide voter intent.
I really like the simplicity of the cardboard box, but I understand the need for better verification (hanging chads in florida) and voter assistance - some of the ballots contain many issues - anyone could miss one accidently.
Bycicles? When was the last time someone got pregnant or got AIDS from riding a bycicle?
When's the last time anyone you know broke their neck having sex? Kids get hit by cars and killed, fall going over jumps, and otherwise risk life and limb regularly on bikes.
Either low risk of fatality is acceptable, or it's not.
You are trying to redefine sex as something without consequence, but the reality is that it does have consequences.
As does everything. It need only have few enough consequences. That's up to everyone individually - I know people who bike on major roads in the city, a risk I wouldn't take.
You said that there's no problem with 12-year olds having sex, so the burden of proof is on you.
Not that there can be no problems, just that there are no fundamental problems with it. Anyone could be raped, a child moreso, but that doesn't mean that all sex is dangerous.
Listen, I'm not advocating that children has sex with just anyone. You wouldn't let your kid play with cherry bombs but you might allow sparklers - in the yard, away from the trees, with an adult nearby. You similarly wouldn't let just anyone have sex with your child and when you did, or thought that your child wanted to experiment you'd want to make sure you were available to help, that your child understood safety, and that you'd screened out the obvious dangers.
Don't give me this "worse case scenario" junk
It's the scenario with the most risks. Like riding a bike on the street. It's the last thing you want an unprepared child to do. I'm not saying that I don't want my kid to be able to ride a bike on the streets - it's the only legal way in most areas - just that I don't want them doing it before I feel they're ready.
(only a sick mind would consider child-parent backrubs sexual)
Not at all. There was a time (and there are still places) where a male parent giving a backrub to a child in private would be considered either abusive, or likely to be abusive. It's a cultural thing. My point is that you have your limits of good touching and bad touching, which aren't those of other cultures (or other people in the "same" culture). Are your feelings about sex more universally right?
I don't consider them to be abusive, but they are an important part of sex and I don't see a huge moral line between one and the other. Part of sexuality is exploring the sensations of your body, caused by yourself or someone else. The good feelings this can cause are why some cultures frown on these sorts of contact between unmarried people (or even then sometimes).
Slashdot Mirror
Users don't want to roam the aisles at Circuit City looking for a spellchecker for the right version of the word processor, I agree.
That doesn't mean that a pluggin interface isn't a good idea though.
The larger a project gets the harder it is to manage. You can a hundred people who can break the build due to a typo, or whose code is running in the same process and can walk all over the app. Not good.
Design the app with a pluggin architecture and test the hell out of the interface. Then you have a stand-alone executable program (perhaps just in a DLL) that gets loaded when you want to spell-check. Because it *only* checks spelling it's small and quick, nobody would notice any lag, and if it crashes the main app says 'Spell check failed - sorry', it doesn't crash and lose your unsaved work.
This then removes five people from the one-hundred who can accidently break the whole build and moves them into a smaller project whose development can continue in parallel. The added benefit is that it's then easier to ship this pluggin with the email client and the browser, instead of reinventing the wheel.
Photoshop does most of its own filters as stand-alone functions through the same filter interface that third-party developers use and it works for them.
As long as Slashdot carries all the stories about the Monopoly that owns Linux trying to intentionally build incompatibilities into Linux to keep it from working with any other products. The stories about Linus dancing around shouting "Developers! Developers! Developers!". The stories about how Alan Cox was being flown around the world offering sweetheart deals to huge companies in order to keep them from considering alternatives.
Oh, and don't forget about the exposes of how the Business Software Alliance performs unannounced searches of businesses, shutting down running machines and having untrained flunkies search for any unlicensed copies of Linux. Don't forget to detail how receipts for the product don't seem to count as proof of purchase - an unlicensed copy of Linux (one sold for different hardware doesn't count!) can cost your company $25k or more in "damages", which thankfully can be waived if you just sign the exclusive software purchase deal for the next ten years and agree to periodic audits...
Also, how during the middle of a federal anti-trust lawsuit the people in charge of writing Linux wrote about using any means necessary to kill the competition.
Oh yeah, Linus and Linux don't seem to generate that kind of news.
Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe Microsoft has so many negative articles written about it because they actually do these things?
Perhaps the comparison to HTML didn't add anything, but your answer didn't explain why Word can't reveal codes.
Sure, they don't store a code before and after a word, but that word has a pointer to a style, etc, etc. But when they print it they can figure out to say 'Bold this next word' before printing it, so obviously they can do it.
My biggest beef with Word is that it does things without asking and the cause is often a line or two away. I pasted a section of text just above a chapter heading (in an area I could type in without problem) and the following chapter heading became plain text. I could delete all of the new text and it wouldn't fix the problem. I re-applied the chapter heading style and was then stuck with a double-high space I couldn't delete without losing the chapter heading. Ugh! Or the time is complained the file was corrupt when I opened it and when I tried to print, because of a table that was broken. Fine, except that I'd never used tables in the document. I had to do a manual binary search, cutting and pasting into new documents, to find the broken section in the original. It was a zero-space glitch at the end of a line. If I selected from bottom up it showed as a few spaces on the end of the text, if I selected top down it didn't show anything. I had to delete the word on either side of it and retype it to get rid of the stupid thing.
Sure, I can work around all of this. When I need to use Word I do get the job done, but why is it this fragile? Why do you have to pamper it? Because, evidently, they can't write a freaking word processor properly. (If they can't figure out a way to reveal codes, they're not doing it right.)
Word embodies everything I hate about MS's OS. Sure, if it works, it works well. If it doesn't work there isn't much recourse past format and reinstall because you can't force any settings.
Getting my double-monitor setup working for ouputting to my projector was a nightmare in Windows and it still doesn't work. Not to tout Linux, but while it was some work all the settings the GUIs made were stored in a file and I could just backup the file when it was working and restore to go back to a known state. In Windows I had it working and then went into the display properties to *check* settings, not to change anything. As soon as I did the screen flickered and the refresh rate changed (old CRT projectors are fussy) and 'cancel' didn't. Worse, doing what I did before didn't seem to work because the other dialogs insisted the refresh rate hadn't changed. (The projector's 'signal info' display confirmed that it had.) After a couple of reboots the original settings seemed to work when I reapplied them.
Microsoft products in a nutshell.
My point is that some of it is financially possible, but it sounds too hard and management nixes it because it's on System Admin's budget but would save money for Tech Support, etc.
My experience in companies is that each little department is willing to torpedo the whole in order to look better personally. IMHO, companies tend to lack a broad view of the whole lifecycle of the product/service.
That's like saying that it doesn't matter to you that your mutual fund's books are open and they can be audited simply because you aren't an accountant and could never do the audit yourself. If the books are open others can and will do audits, which you benefit from.
Just as security companies build their reputation by finding bugs in windows, programmers build their reputation by finding (and fixing) bugs in open source. A friend of mine's resume lists his contributions to Linux. Nothing huge, a fix or two in the kernel and some cleanup in some other project, but it looks pretty cool on a programmer's resume. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes work going on with open source because it's open.
Then there's the benefit of not being locked into any open source. Of having a recourse (even if it involves hiring a contractor) when some critical piece of software breaks. Of knowing that you don't depend on something that may be end-of-lifed. The BSA provides another huge benefit to open source - knowing you'll never be sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars because you copied a HD from a dying computer and didn't properly wipe the old drive.
Going with closed-source products is a business risk akin to going with a product where you couldn't second-source any of the components. Don't buy into the ideology, simply analyze the situation and all of the potential risks. If you consider training costs don't listen to MS FUD, realize that users need help in going from Win98 to WinXP too.
You could ask them to check for ID, or check a secret code, or whatever. If they offer to check ID that's one thing, if they demand ID that's another.
This little technicality is unlikely to change the validity of the EULA. Of course, if the lawyers got the idea that someone might not have seen the EULA they'd make you click through it in order to logon.
With the large ammount of government subsidies they've collected over the years they're only privately owned by technicality.
Besides, the government currently regulates what information businesses can collect and share. It's reasonable that they maintain their own private black list, nobody forces a bar to serve a troublesome customer, but when they start to share this data with law enforcement and credit agencies they aren't so free as they would like.
Anyways, the biggest reason the airlines want to demand ID is because they claim tickets are non-transferable. They charge up to 4x the early-booking price for last-minute tickets. If you could buy them on EBay from someone who bought early they'd lose the ability to dictate their fares and silly restrictions (must stay a weekend, can't use half of each of two round-trip tickets, etc). As soon as this gets taken to court by someone with the cash to stick it out till the end it'll be rules to fall under the doctrine of first sale like almost everything else on the planet and then the airlines won't have the huge financial incentive to ask for ID. Not that I think the airlines are lazy and corrupt, grown corpulent on taxpayer-funded handouts, or anything...
So make the name voluntary. You, wanting your parents to know, would provide a real name and contact info.
The whole ID-to-fly thing came out because the airlines don't want you to be able to resell tickets. They jack the prices up up the last minute and they don't want a free market where they'd have to compete with resold tickets. Poor babies probably just need more government subsidies.
I don't think asking for ID really helps security. Nobody is going to send a convicted criminal to hijack a plane, at least without fake ID, so all it provides is a corpse inventory. I'd really rather not give up the ability to remain anonymous in trade for that small bit of convenience.
That's the issue - if they can't prove you purchased the ticket they can't make sure you didn't sell it. Imagine if they actually had to provide an honest service like everyone else...
The problem though is that many companies don't see that while a security person costs money, they'll save more by being proactive. If you pay for bandwidth (likely part of your pricing structure) you'll find the drop from eliminating spam and worms to be well worth while. If you provide tech support you can save costly calls.
What annoying is when the knee-jerk response of "keep the customer" overwhelms any discussion of the value of the customer. Management wanted to give this spammer a ton of chances because he kept coming up with some sad story, despite the ton of bandwidth he burned and the blackhole threats we got because of him.
If everything came off of the same budget sheet and all you had to do to justify expenses was to show the corresponding loss you'd remove, this would be trivial. Instead they'll pay you a day's wages to do trivial stuff instead of expensing a $20 kinkos visit, yet refuse to allow you to budget some time for security.
"They made it more secure - the rate increase pays for the guy who runs the security"
Doesn't seem too hard, but maybe my grandma is smarter than yours.
This kind of security is well worth it. ISPs that take a few basic precautions sit back and laugh as their competitors get ravaged by the worm of the week, while zombied windows boxes spam everyone and get the whole ISP blackholed, etc.
You pay one person to keep up on the script-kiddy tools and you block the ports they tend to use, or program your router to drop certain scanning packets, making it look like the computers you host are immune to the bug. Trivial stuff really.
If you want to get fancy you can try some sort of warning system that gives you an overview of what your users are doing. If you see that 1/3 of your users are loading a webpage at the same company you might be witnessing a DDoS attack, if one address is scanning your IP range you might want to start dropping their packets.
A little bit of forethought makes everything run much smoother, once you start taking precautions you'll find that despite the cost of the employee time you'll save money overall. Not in a way that short-sighted management (the type who don't understand backups and standby servers) will understand though, so you need to be at a clued company or be good at making proposals.
Clumsy on the ground, graceful in flight, and held in great esteem by other bullfinches?
Let's boycott them by not linking to them. The way Google ranks a page is partly by the popularity of the site. If less people link to ZD they'll show up lower in the rankings.
Like a reverse google-bomb. Less powerful because anyone can post a link, whereas only people who already had ZD links can remove them, but it's still worth a try.
Or, just google-bomb "Ziff Davis" by linking to the page describing their over-zealous legal team. Let people find them, just make sure that damaging information is the first thing they find.
id Software lost $2.75 million to record-breaking piracy on the weekend before Doom 3's release. Thanks, guys!
Your sig is a joke right? You don't really believe that, do you?
I read that as, "I'll be happy to shoot down any ideas you are willing to share. Please give me a target."
That's a risk we all take. I meant it though, as "I don't think it can be done, but I'm willing to listen before I judge it."
The voter coercion protection you propose sounds good enough - some people might slip through, but we're aiming for better, not perfect.
The receipt doesn't seem to offer much though. You prove that they've got that secret hash associated with your vote, but you still can't really prove that a vote was thrown.
Not enough people are going to keep their receipts to ever prove anything. The case will be something like 45% A, 55% B, and "they" will miscast just enough B votes to make A win. If you (a B voter) go in with your receipt they'll say "Yup, that's a valid vote for B", and they'll say that to the first 49.9% of the voters, it's only after all of them are accounted for that they won't be able to admit to more B votes - the case where you prove fraud. You'd need close to 100% compliance with B voters to show that close elections were rigged. Even if A had 1% and B 99%, you'd still need 50% + 1 B voters to prove that the vote was rigged in A's favor.
This assumes that these people would all come forward and allow news cameras in the special verification booth with them to record all of these 'You voted for B' reports - if the booths were truly private there wouldn't need to be any relation between the number of votes and the reported results. As long as B was recorded to have 1 vote, you don't know that anyone else voted for him.
I doubt you can. Ways that work, that is, and give useful auditability and maintain anonimity, AND don't allow voter coercion. Better minds have nigh unto proven the impossibility of this.
I'm interested in hearing them though, if you want to explain your ideas, I'll even offer suggestions and possible problems.
If the old system has any type of output at all you've got a few options. There's a system designed by Xerox that uses a system of alternating / and \ marks to store data. It scales well, you can either print it out with a standard font (doable by even a daisy-wheel of ball printer) or so small that it appears to be a uniform gray shading. The data is encoded such that you can lose any given percentage of it (you choose the redundancy) and still read the data. The software would need to be custom written for the specific obsolete machine, but it's pretty easy to do. Then you OCR it (the alternating slashes are trivially easy) and read it in on a PC.
If the machine or the storage device is dead, rent time on someone else's machine and do the same thing as above.
Sure, data is the important thing, but it's not impossible. I saw an apple 2 program that sent data to a PC's serial port by toggling the joystick port (one bit per port, four ports, I think) in a specific pattern over a custom cable that they provided a diagram of. You could always do a hex dump of the data and take a picture of each screen (automate it) and OCR it in...
Not true! The politicians are perfectly willing to be bribed by a single person, as long as that person has enough money.
My only concern with a system that had the verification machine on the ballot box is that you want to be able to see your vote enter the box, not a complicated machine that could fake ballots to substitute. Also, you want a scanner that you don't lose your vote in, for when you make a mistake...
An adaption on what I said before then is 1) the voting machine/vote marking machine, 2) the vote checking/optionally extra-marking machine, and 3) a small scanner that couldn't contain fake ballots through which you put your vote into the ballot box.
Ideally you could see the card both entering and exiting the scanner at the same time, to see it's the same card, and see it drop completely (transparent neck on the ballot box?) away from the scanner.
In other words, introduce no new threats of ballot replacement, while getting the benefits of all-electronic voting.
So basically you advocate sex education rather than sexual intercourse at a young age?
Erm, somewhat. I certainly advocate sex ed, but I also advocate letting people have the option to explore and that does include the chance to have intercourse, not the expectation that the child will.
My reasons for this are:
1) You can't stop them from having sex without stopping all normal experimentation which I feel is helpful.
2) I feel people need to have the freedom to experiment a bit in order to make mature choices when they lose their safety net.
Thus, because I feel experimentation is essential, and that you lose the ability to experiment if your guardian is so paranoid about the "worst case" scenario, I feel that we should accept that some children will have sex. To lessen the risk for them we should educate everyone and make them as safe as possible - assuming there was a well-tested birth control suitable for the 8-16 age range, I would advocate giving it to children to increase safety.
I don't see myself as advocating wild child sex, but advocating realism - they will do it, doing it is natural, preventing it by overwhelming control (as opposed to reasoned discussion) will simply delay their mistakes till you lose control.
However, unlike you, I don't think that cultures frown upon what feels good, but rather frown upon certain acts because of their potential effects, real or imagined
Sure, everyone thinks they're being rational. But many cultures/religions forbid masturbation which doesn't, according to modern health professionals, have any negative consequences. (Leaving out obvious silly extremes.)
I think you'd find that many religions/cultures would frown on you giving your daughter a partly-clothed backrub and many would be aghast at the idea of spreading vapo-rub on her chest.
The pre-printed blank is probably the cheapest and easiest. The way this is handled in Canada is that the ballot box is in front of the polling officials. You stuff your own folded cardboard ballot into the box. If you tell them you made a mistake they dispose of your card - ideally shredding. There is no red/green light, you simple either follow their instructions ("put the complete ballot in the box and you're done") or ask for another.
I think there's also value in having a second machine in the polling booth, a separate validator - to detect the hanging chad issue. It would mark next to the first hole punch with an ink blot and another hole punch, for example, and you'd check that the (optional) display showed the right info, and that the mark it made was in the right place on the card (next to the other mark).
Maybe the verification machine could punch a hole in the corner of the card (seen even when folded for privacy) to indicate you'd properly checked that ballot. If you hadn't, they'd stop you when you were about to stuff the ballot into the box.
The official counting would then use the same type of machine that was in the ballot booth for verification, so ideally it'd have the same failings (and thus warn of potential problems).
As for preventing ballot stuffing, I think you keep track of the number of cards issued, those shredded, and the number properly entered into the ballot box. For physical security you use something like a night-deposit box at a bank, where you can't reach past the hatch. If the ballots were stuck shot (tab a into slot b, or tape, or whatever) they could fall into a clear box, making it easier to monitor for tampering.
1) There's no system to verify that punch-card machines produce legible ballots - see the hanging chad issue. Having a second machine to verify that (with the same system used to count final votes) means you don't get ignored on a technicality.
2) Ideally the software used would have a government-mandated GUI (this could go for the paper ballots as well) and would at a minimum double-check your selection. "Did you mean to vote for 'Ross Perot' (Y/N)." Even if there was confusion in the order of candidates you hopefully will read the name (also printed on the ballot it marks) and see if it's what you want.
I think you want to require that the paper be in the box for the vote to count. My ideal system would be one fancy touchscreen, full-color, braille labelled, etc, machine, and one of the final vote counting machines (or something with the exact same sensor), and a final cardboard box you drop the ballots into.
The first machine is all user friendly and helps people fill in the right boxes.
The second machine verifies that your vote was recorder in a way that will count - it eliminates the hanging chad problem. If it accepts it, it'll be counted at the end, if it doesn't, you start again with a new ballot and fixed machine.
The second machine can provide the end-of-election tentative results and the final results wait for someone to arrange the votes into a neat pile and feed into a card reader for the actual binding count.
Any paper that leaves is a vote that doesn't count - vote buying can't be enforced. Any vote that isn't properly marked doesn't make it past the official scanner machine, and any vote that does make it passed is guaranteed to have worked in an official scanner and should be redundantly marked to enable human oversite later if it fails a later check. The initial mark might be borderline, but one or more of the other three (or so) marks on the same line should be adequate to decide voter intent.
I really like the simplicity of the cardboard box, but I understand the need for better verification (hanging chads in florida) and voter assistance - some of the ballots contain many issues - anyone could miss one accidently.
Bycicles? When was the last time someone got pregnant or got AIDS from riding a bycicle?
When's the last time anyone you know broke their neck having sex? Kids get hit by cars and killed, fall going over jumps, and otherwise risk life and limb regularly on bikes.
Either low risk of fatality is acceptable, or it's not.
You are trying to redefine sex as something without consequence, but the reality is that it does have consequences.
As does everything. It need only have few enough consequences. That's up to everyone individually - I know people who bike on major roads in the city, a risk I wouldn't take.
You said that there's no problem with 12-year olds having sex, so the burden of proof is on you.
Not that there can be no problems, just that there are no fundamental problems with it. Anyone could be raped, a child moreso, but that doesn't mean that all sex is dangerous.
Listen, I'm not advocating that children has sex with just anyone. You wouldn't let your kid play with cherry bombs but you might allow sparklers - in the yard, away from the trees, with an adult nearby. You similarly wouldn't let just anyone have sex with your child and when you did, or thought that your child wanted to experiment you'd want to make sure you were available to help, that your child understood safety, and that you'd screened out the obvious dangers.
Don't give me this "worse case scenario" junk
It's the scenario with the most risks. Like riding a bike on the street. It's the last thing you want an unprepared child to do. I'm not saying that I don't want my kid to be able to ride a bike on the streets - it's the only legal way in most areas - just that I don't want them doing it before I feel they're ready.
(only a sick mind would consider child-parent backrubs sexual)
Not at all. There was a time (and there are still places) where a male parent giving a backrub to a child in private would be considered either abusive, or likely to be abusive. It's a cultural thing. My point is that you have your limits of good touching and bad touching, which aren't those of other cultures (or other people in the "same" culture). Are your feelings about sex more universally right?
I don't consider them to be abusive, but they are an important part of sex and I don't see a huge moral line between one and the other. Part of sexuality is exploring the sensations of your body, caused by yourself or someone else. The good feelings this can cause are why some cultures frown on these sorts of contact between unmarried people (or even then sometimes).