I thought about that, but you don't want to make it too easy to use dos skills in unix or people will never learn about all the new features and will be doing things in an awkward way. It's like people who use C pre-processor macros to let them write C with a Pascal syntax. It's more comfortable at first but it's never 100% perfect so you need to learn C to know when it's not or deal with what seem to be random errors, and it limits how far you can go. (For instance, you can't overlap C macros and C->Pascal macros properly.)
But, you want to transition people easily... It's hard to say what the right ammount of hand-holding is.
My guess would be to write an untar script that called 'file' to identify the type of compression and to handle a few other snags, but otherwise to pass parameters directly so they didn't have to learn a different tar syntax, just a simplified one. That way there's nothing to unlearn when they go to a machine without simple-tar, but they don't have to jump feet-first into the deep end.
The majority of them claim to be Christian or believe in some sort of God..
Depends on the studies you read. I've read apparently valid studies (as in, not paid for by Athiests of America or anything) that show church attendance down around 20%, with maybe 70% of people saying that identify with a religion but don't practice it. That can be interpreted as a majority being religion, or a minority being religious.
That was never my claim. My point is that most of them think that prayer is to some extent effective and that there is someone up there who might be listening.
I never said I thought you shouldn't be allowed to pray. I simply said you shouldn't be allowed to skip proven treatments in favor of prayer. (Some sects are against even blood transfusions, which are as close to proven as you can get.)
That's where the issue gets difficult because the child is part of their family and will have been brought up with those beliefs. Do you decide you know better and pull the child out, thereby possibly going against its wishes and certainly overruling the freedom of religion for the family, but possibly saving the child's life in the process?
If it's a choice between saving the child's life and letting the parent indoctrinate them in a religion it's not a hard choice...
We don't let people kill their children. We charge them with manslaughter and murder when they leave them in a hot car or let them play with guns, why is killing them by refusing treatment different?
Let's say that it was deemed necessary that you bring your child up with a good sense of morals and society as a whole decides that means going to church every week. As an atheist, you want nothing to do with it and refuse to go...
The issue isn't as much one of choice of religion, but choice of life-saving (or threatening) treatment. If baptism was proven 98% effective in saving the life of someone with massive blood loss and I was fighting the baptism in favour of something useless, like say chiropractic care, I'd be in the wrong. I realize I didn't use your scenario, I'm not trying to twist things around, but I honestly don't think it applies here.
Actions based on religious belief or lack thereof already have special protection. I could not be forced to sit an exam on a Sunday. Neither could a Jew or a Seventh Day Adventist on a Saturday.
You wouldn't be forced to take a Sunday exam by a school, but a judge wouldn't have any problems with throwing you into jail over the weekend.
It is a system of belief, so I think it would fall under the same protection fo atheism and Christianity in freedom of religion.
Yeah, that's what I was saying. No matter what you claim as the justification for your system of belief, the state has no place in your head regulating it. It's not until thoughts become actions that you become accountable.
I'm sure the CEOs of all the failed businesses, the ones who lost everything, wish they'd pumped and dumped, they'd be millionaires now instead of broke.
And I bet there's a lot more of them than there are Bill Gates in the world.
A successful business model is subjective. To the employee, it's something that provides them with a long-term job. To a crooked CEO, it's whatever allows them to bail out in a year with the most money.
It's debatable if a majority of North Americans believe in prayer, but it's certainly not true that a majority or even a significant minority believe that prayer is more effective than medical treatment.
And yes, actions are motivated by belief; this doesn't mean we don't (or shouldn't) regulate actions. What if I believe that I deserve your posessions more than you do? Let's say it's my religious belief (prove otherwise) that god wants me to make this right (by taking your things for myself)... Ditto if the example was that I thought someone needed to be killed. Clearly our laws don't allow for this, no matter how much I believe I'm in the right. Few people in jail believe they deserve to be there but we still lock them up.
Seeing as I'm not willing to hold more stock in religious beliefs that other beliefs I don't think actions based on religious beliefs deserve special protection. It would be unfair if you could claim to be religious and your ideas would be protected but I'm an athiest so the same idea when I have it wouldn't be protected.
Then there's the issue of where to classify something like Buddhism? It's not a religion, though it's often incorrectly referred to as such; it's more of a philosophy or suggestions for a way of life. But there are some christians who claim that's all their religion is...
The idea is that the OS can trap that key sequence and applications can't. If you press c-a-d the dialog that responds is from the operating system, and thus trustworthy.
If you're using a semi-public terminal and you're afraid someone has put a password grabbing program on it, you can bypass it like this.
There's a sysrequest command for this in Linux. At a text console you type alt-SysRq-k (I think) and it'll kill everything running on that virtual console, returning you to an authentic login prompt.
It used to be a common trick to write a program that looked like a login screen, gathered names and passwords, and then attempted to log the user in, but only after logging these passwords for the cracker to use.
Sure, a lot of people would disagree but I challenge them to provide evidence to support their views. Suggesting that I'm wrong simply because a lot of people do not agree with me is the fallacy of the majority.
As for their guilt, the law says that it is a crime to watch someone die and not give them reasonable aid. This can pretty obviously be seen to cover not taking your children to the hospital.
The seperation of church and state means that the government won't tell you which religion you may belong to, and that laws that discriminate against a specific religion.
Note that this does not mean the law will let religious people do whatever they claim their religion requires. If your religion requires killing non-believers you'll still be charged with murder for doing so. The key here is that people's beliefs aren't being legislated, but their actions are.
Microsoft is keeping old dos commands. Nobody bitched about it because, like old Linux commands, nobody but the old-timers has to use them. Most of the new distros default to graphical boot. You and your mom never have to see a scary command-line again. Use the graphical tools and they'll do everything for you.
Or, if you insist on changing command-line tools, why not make a new compressor program that has gzip and bzip built in, along with auto-detection, etc, etc. Call it newtar, or even better, archiver. It won't break anyone's tar-using scripts, and it'll let you use your funky syntax.
btw, as an admin, I disagree about rewriting scripts. Mucking with things that work is a great way to break something. You should read the script, and know what they do, but unless they're really crufty, you should leave them alone.
If christians would have the decency to die off, like the followers of the norse religions, we'd look at christian beliefs in a tolerant way, like most people think of greek myths as funny stories, not silly examples of what real people were dumb enough to believe.
BC and AD are reminders that right now, there's a huge number of droolers out there who actually believe in this stuff. That's really annoying. Thor and Odin aren't reminders of this because nobody believes in them anymore.
Trust me, you'd be just as ridiculed if you were a muslim, or anything else.
No, the general feeling is that all religious people are morons, christians are just the loudest and most common (locally) so most of the North American anti-religion sentiment is expresses as anti-christian sentiment.
Nothing personal, all those other religious people are kooks too.
"Science" is the concept of examining evidence and basing rational theories on the evidence, then testing and refining those theories.
Religion is irrational. It's about "faith" which essentially means, making theories with no evidence. In many religions people are actively discouraged from closely examining the evidence and the beliefs of the church.
For a religious institute (or one whose name identifies it as such) to provide seemingly reasonable coverage of a scientific issue, including going so far as to embrace the theory of evolution, is amazing.
We don't act amazed when the NYT has a story with some scientific merit because rational behaviour is expected.
Because you have to take reasonable steps to protect your children. Prayer is useless because there isn't a god. Thus, doing nothing for your child but praying is the same as doing nothing for your child.
Medical problems require medical treatment.
I think they should treat the parents like murderers in cases where they refuse to allow their children to have treatment for religious reasons, including seeking the death penalty in states that have it. It's no better than poisoning your children.
Some locksmiths do just that in high-crime areas, or low-crime areas that have had a sudden rash of B&Es.
They go door-to-door telling people about the weaknesses of their locks, etc, and offer, for a hefty fee, to fix them. It might be scary learning that your door locks are swiss cheese, but that's not the locksmith's fault.
That, of course, is the ideal goal. Especially if the wamprats taking over isn't an explicit result of less orcs, but just what happens naturally as the result of a few simple heuristics like, if there's a 10% food surplus, start to breed. If the population density is greater than.3 orcs / square mile, move.
Ideally this would work for the economy as well, so that when many orcs were being killed, the abundance of orc weapons on the market drops the price, reducing the incentive for people to go fight them.
Quests could also be tied to this. There could be a "Stop the Encroaching Orcs" quest when the population rises above a certain level.
How about just not designing the game badly in the first place?
Why do monsters come back in set locations? Why do monsters come back when someone is watching?
If I were writing an "orc camp" for EQ, what I'd do is make the buildings and stuff an overlay, so they could be placed anywhere. When spawning an orc camp, I'd pick a location that nobody where nobody had been for a while, and the orcs would appear there. They're in tents after all, they found a quiet spot and set up their camp...
Then, when a player comes in and kills them, the destroyed camp stays there for a certain period of time after the last person sees it. If you camp there for a day, you won't see anything but a dead orc camp. Meanwhile, the people roaming the hills around will find a secluded spot with a new orc camp...
There are some things, like a dungeon (fixed location) that this won't work for, but there's no reason they can't spawn an identical dungeon at the same spot, for the next group of adventurers. If you go as a group, you get the same dungeon, if you arrive seperately you could perhaps either choose the one your clanmates are in, or a new one. Each one respawns monsters seperately, and if you camp in one everyone else can still get into one and adventure around you.
It's not totally realistic, but neither are respawning monsters, and I think my changes would make the game a lot more fun.
If you've ever worked in an office, with a boss who is being pressured to release a product, you know why something needs outside audits if it's supposed to be secure.
If this is a regular project, up for bid, it's going to be as absolutely horrid as they can get away with. You know, trillion bit encryption, rotating one-time pads, etc, etc. All the snake-oil you can shake a stick at.
Open source doesn't guarantee security, but I wouldn't trust corporate-produced security unless it's open source.
The voting mechanism in use in Canada is very open source. They give you a piece of cardboard and let you stand in a little room with a pencil. You mark the square directly corresponding to the person you want to vote for, fold the ballot in half, and walk out into the open, and drop your ballot, into the same cardboard-box-with-a-slit-in-the-top as everyone else. Representatives from every party are there, as well as any voters who want to simply watch the process.
Later, the box is taken to a room with the same multi-party auditors and opened. In plain view of everyone, ballots are counted into different piles.
I won't accept a voting machine until every stage of the process is as auditable as that cardboard box with paper ballots. You can have fancy ways of printing those ballots if you wish, but they need to be clear and human readable. You can electronically count my vote for up-to-the-minute poll results, but the authoritative answer has to the the paper, or something just as auditable to the average Joe.
Not getting into the issue about capitalism and its benefits/faults, I don't see why everything has to be run on a similar system.
The government doesn't currently contract-out IRS audits, though I'm sure there are many firms that would bid on the job. We also don't contract-out counting of votes. Why should we make a business of writing the software for voting machines?
And, as for the open source aspect of this... What's really so hard? I envision a cheap PC with a touch-screen, some html, a web-form or two, a label printer for the ballot, and a database back-end to keep track of the unofficial figures. Basically an online poll, with a "For Dummies" interface and with printed results. Admittedly, this is for the easier "paper is real, machine totals are just for faster results" style of voting machine, but I think we're a long way from trusting totally electronic voting systems.
This could be strengthened against many attacks by:
1) Printing ballots with a signed hash of a timestamp and the vote, or something, to make it harder to pre-print ballots and bring them along.
2) Sending these signatures, along with totals, to a server every five or ten votes, to make it harder to tamper with in isolation.
3) Bundling a hundred votes at a time with a printout of the expected totals, then bundling a bag of ten of these smaller bags, etc. This would make random spot-checks easier. Look at a bag of 1000, add up the totals of the smaller bags, pick one at random to audit, count it...
Palladium is mainly about preventing the user from tampering. The binary containts a signed hash from the author. If the OS can't verify the signed hash it prevents it from running, or at least prevents it from accessing protected media like the DVD drive, or your encrypted music, etc.
Nothing in Palladium was designed to help users. It doesn't even help stop email viruses as they claim, because they're almost all exploits of "properly signed" software. Even if Palladium was did stop viruses, all it'd do is stop them from playing your DRMed MP3s while they wiped your drive and emailed your personal documents across the net.
The big problem with DRM to protect a voting machine is that if the software and hardware are done by the same company, there's no extra safety. You could be somewhat sure their software wasn't tampered with, except by them, but the problem here is that we don't trust "them".
Well, say it however you wish. What I mean by "act as if the claim is false" is to ignore it. Don't dance through the streets laughing about the nonexistance of god, just live your life as if the claim was never made.
First, the "money pumped back into the economy" statement. You think that the customers would have burnt that, or put it in their matress if they hadn't bought swedish-made penis pumps? I doubt it. They'd have bought the next product advertised on the shopping network, or sold at the checkout at Walmart.
Second, the "free speech" issue. If you lie to my employees to get them to stamp your mail with my bulk-mailing code it's not free speech, it's fraud. I won't shut you down because of what your mail says, but because you want me to foot the bill for it. Also, your right to free speech doesn't obligate me to listen. If you have to lie about the subject and sender to get people to listen, it's likely they don't want to hear you.
You're right, one database would be easier to police. Queries could be written to let people view only the appropriate information for their job, and with no duplicated data, stopping errors would be easier.
But do you really think anyone in charge of this wouldn't have a way for law enforcement to easily access all the data?
If I trusted the government, I'd like this system more than others because it could be secured. If pigs could fly.
The biblical quote is saying that if you're not specifically against "us", you're for us. Bush's quote said that if you're not specifically for us, you're against us. If we assume that anything other than the polar opposites exists, then there is a large difference.
Both views lump everything at one extreme or the other. The difference is that one is inclusive and the other, exclusive.
If he's going to be religious, I wish he'd do it right.
Having more applications will help Linux. Whatever ensures the most, in the long term, is the best. I don't think that Wine will hurt us in the long term, as you do.
My company has already begun to test our windows apps under Wine. We're not going to do anything to break that compatibility, even if it means we won't adopt new MS APIs. If anyone is hurt here, I think it's MS. They've lost the ability to drag us around to new incompatible systems. Their API has become a commodity, available from other vendors (wine) and we're not going to "upgrade" to a proprietary version.
There might not be a huge number of Photoshop users in Linux, but I doubt that Adobe is going to break compatibility for them. These are pretty influential customers after all. That means that MS is no longer the only x86 Photoshop platform, and Photoshop is a destination app; one you buy a machine to be able to run.
Hell, if Adobe has to break Wine compatibility in the future, it'll probably be in their best interests to help patch wine to run the new version of Photoshop.
I didn't say "... to believe that the claim is false until you can get proof."
I said, and note the difference, "...to act as if the claim is false..."
You can never know, in a mathematically precise way, if an untestable claim is true. That means that we'll never have an answer to the god question. There's no test for the existance of god, you can't know if a god exists or not.
What you can do is choose not to act as if there is a god.
Saying that you should accept Pascal's wager and act as if there is a god, despite lack of proof, is like saying that you should act as if all unverified claims are true. Do you worship all the possible gods, just because some people believe in them? Do you wear a tinfoil hat because the illuminati might be listening in on your thoughts? Do you leave a bowl of milk out for the fairies, and cookies for santa?
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I thought about that, but you don't want to make it too easy to use dos skills in unix or people will never learn about all the new features and will be doing things in an awkward way. It's like people who use C pre-processor macros to let them write C with a Pascal syntax. It's more comfortable at first but it's never 100% perfect so you need to learn C to know when it's not or deal with what seem to be random errors, and it limits how far you can go. (For instance, you can't overlap C macros and C->Pascal macros properly.)
But, you want to transition people easily... It's hard to say what the right ammount of hand-holding is.
My guess would be to write an untar script that called 'file' to identify the type of compression and to handle a few other snags, but otherwise to pass parameters directly so they didn't have to learn a different tar syntax, just a simplified one. That way there's nothing to unlearn when they go to a machine without simple-tar, but they don't have to jump feet-first into the deep end.
The majority of them claim to be Christian or believe in some sort of God..
Depends on the studies you read. I've read apparently valid studies (as in, not paid for by Athiests of America or anything) that show church attendance down around 20%, with maybe 70% of people saying that identify with a religion but don't practice it. That can be interpreted as a majority being religion, or a minority being religious.
That was never my claim. My point is that most of them think that prayer is to some extent effective and that there is someone up there who might be listening.
I never said I thought you shouldn't be allowed to pray. I simply said you shouldn't be allowed to skip proven treatments in favor of prayer. (Some sects are against even blood transfusions, which are as close to proven as you can get.)
That's where the issue gets difficult because the child is part of their family and will have been brought up with those beliefs. Do you decide you know better and pull the child out, thereby possibly going against its wishes and certainly overruling the freedom of religion for the family, but possibly saving the child's life in the process?
If it's a choice between saving the child's life and letting the parent indoctrinate them in a religion it's not a hard choice...
We don't let people kill their children. We charge them with manslaughter and murder when they leave them in a hot car or let them play with guns, why is killing them by refusing treatment different?
Let's say that it was deemed necessary that you bring your child up with a good sense of morals and society as a whole decides that means going to church every week. As an atheist, you want nothing to do with it and refuse to go...
The issue isn't as much one of choice of religion, but choice of life-saving (or threatening) treatment. If baptism was proven 98% effective in saving the life of someone with massive blood loss and I was fighting the baptism in favour of something useless, like say chiropractic care, I'd be in the wrong. I realize I didn't use your scenario, I'm not trying to twist things around, but I honestly don't think it applies here.
Actions based on religious belief or lack thereof already have special protection. I could not be forced to sit an exam on a Sunday. Neither could a Jew or a Seventh Day Adventist on a Saturday.
You wouldn't be forced to take a Sunday exam by a school, but a judge wouldn't have any problems with throwing you into jail over the weekend.
It is a system of belief, so I think it would fall under the same protection fo atheism and Christianity in freedom of religion.
Yeah, that's what I was saying. No matter what you claim as the justification for your system of belief, the state has no place in your head regulating it. It's not until thoughts become actions that you become accountable.
I'm sure the CEOs of all the failed businesses, the ones who lost everything, wish they'd pumped and dumped, they'd be millionaires now instead of broke.
And I bet there's a lot more of them than there are Bill Gates in the world.
A successful business model is subjective. To the employee, it's something that provides them with a long-term job. To a crooked CEO, it's whatever allows them to bail out in a year with the most money.
It's debatable if a majority of North Americans believe in prayer, but it's certainly not true that a majority or even a significant minority believe that prayer is more effective than medical treatment.
And yes, actions are motivated by belief; this doesn't mean we don't (or shouldn't) regulate actions. What if I believe that I deserve your posessions more than you do? Let's say it's my religious belief (prove otherwise) that god wants me to make this right (by taking your things for myself)... Ditto if the example was that I thought someone needed to be killed. Clearly our laws don't allow for this, no matter how much I believe I'm in the right. Few people in jail believe they deserve to be there but we still lock them up.
Seeing as I'm not willing to hold more stock in religious beliefs that other beliefs I don't think actions based on religious beliefs deserve special protection. It would be unfair if you could claim to be religious and your ideas would be protected but I'm an athiest so the same idea when I have it wouldn't be protected.
Then there's the issue of where to classify something like Buddhism? It's not a religion, though it's often incorrectly referred to as such; it's more of a philosophy or suggestions for a way of life. But there are some christians who claim that's all their religion is...
The idea is that the OS can trap that key sequence and applications can't. If you press c-a-d the dialog that responds is from the operating system, and thus trustworthy.
If you're using a semi-public terminal and you're afraid someone has put a password grabbing program on it, you can bypass it like this.
There's a sysrequest command for this in Linux. At a text console you type alt-SysRq-k (I think) and it'll kill everything running on that virtual console, returning you to an authentic login prompt.
It used to be a common trick to write a program that looked like a login screen, gathered names and passwords, and then attempted to log the user in, but only after logging these passwords for the cracker to use.
Sure, a lot of people would disagree but I challenge them to provide evidence to support their views. Suggesting that I'm wrong simply because a lot of people do not agree with me is the fallacy of the majority.
As for their guilt, the law says that it is a crime to watch someone die and not give them reasonable aid. This can pretty obviously be seen to cover not taking your children to the hospital.
The seperation of church and state means that the government won't tell you which religion you may belong to, and that laws that discriminate against a specific religion.
Note that this does not mean the law will let religious people do whatever they claim their religion requires. If your religion requires killing non-believers you'll still be charged with murder for doing so. The key here is that people's beliefs aren't being legislated, but their actions are.
Microsoft is keeping old dos commands. Nobody bitched about it because, like old Linux commands, nobody but the old-timers has to use them. Most of the new distros default to graphical boot. You and your mom never have to see a scary command-line again. Use the graphical tools and they'll do everything for you.
Or, if you insist on changing command-line tools, why not make a new compressor program that has gzip and bzip built in, along with auto-detection, etc, etc. Call it newtar, or even better, archiver. It won't break anyone's tar-using scripts, and it'll let you use your funky syntax.
btw, as an admin, I disagree about rewriting scripts. Mucking with things that work is a great way to break something. You should read the script, and know what they do, but unless they're really crufty, you should leave them alone.
If christians would have the decency to die off, like the followers of the norse religions, we'd look at christian beliefs in a tolerant way, like most people think of greek myths as funny stories, not silly examples of what real people were dumb enough to believe.
BC and AD are reminders that right now, there's a huge number of droolers out there who actually believe in this stuff. That's really annoying. Thor and Odin aren't reminders of this because nobody believes in them anymore.
Trust me, you'd be just as ridiculed if you were a muslim, or anything else.
No, the general feeling is that all religious people are morons, christians are just the loudest and most common (locally) so most of the North American anti-religion sentiment is expresses as anti-christian sentiment.
Nothing personal, all those other religious people are kooks too.
"Science" is the concept of examining evidence and basing rational theories on the evidence, then testing and refining those theories.
Religion is irrational. It's about "faith" which essentially means, making theories with no evidence. In many religions people are actively discouraged from closely examining the evidence and the beliefs of the church.
For a religious institute (or one whose name identifies it as such) to provide seemingly reasonable coverage of a scientific issue, including going so far as to embrace the theory of evolution, is amazing.
We don't act amazed when the NYT has a story with some scientific merit because rational behaviour is expected.
Because you have to take reasonable steps to protect your children. Prayer is useless because there isn't a god. Thus, doing nothing for your child but praying is the same as doing nothing for your child.
Medical problems require medical treatment.
I think they should treat the parents like murderers in cases where they refuse to allow their children to have treatment for religious reasons, including seeking the death penalty in states that have it. It's no better than poisoning your children.
Some locksmiths do just that in high-crime areas, or low-crime areas that have had a sudden rash of B&Es.
They go door-to-door telling people about the weaknesses of their locks, etc, and offer, for a hefty fee, to fix them. It might be scary learning that your door locks are swiss cheese, but that's not the locksmith's fault.
That, of course, is the ideal goal. Especially if the wamprats taking over isn't an explicit result of less orcs, but just what happens naturally as the result of a few simple heuristics like, if there's a 10% food surplus, start to breed. If the population density is greater than .3 orcs / square mile, move.
Ideally this would work for the economy as well, so that when many orcs were being killed, the abundance of orc weapons on the market drops the price, reducing the incentive for people to go fight them.
Quests could also be tied to this. There could be a "Stop the Encroaching Orcs" quest when the population rises above a certain level.
How about just not designing the game badly in the first place?
Why do monsters come back in set locations? Why do monsters come back when someone is watching?
If I were writing an "orc camp" for EQ, what I'd do is make the buildings and stuff an overlay, so they could be placed anywhere. When spawning an orc camp, I'd pick a location that nobody where nobody had been for a while, and the orcs would appear there. They're in tents after all, they found a quiet spot and set up their camp...
Then, when a player comes in and kills them, the destroyed camp stays there for a certain period of time after the last person sees it. If you camp there for a day, you won't see anything but a dead orc camp. Meanwhile, the people roaming the hills around will find a secluded spot with a new orc camp...
There are some things, like a dungeon (fixed location) that this won't work for, but there's no reason they can't spawn an identical dungeon at the same spot, for the next group of adventurers. If you go as a group, you get the same dungeon, if you arrive seperately you could perhaps either choose the one your clanmates are in, or a new one. Each one respawns monsters seperately, and if you camp in one everyone else can still get into one and adventure around you.
It's not totally realistic, but neither are respawning monsters, and I think my changes would make the game a lot more fun.
If you've ever worked in an office, with a boss who is being pressured to release a product, you know why something needs outside audits if it's supposed to be secure.
If this is a regular project, up for bid, it's going to be as absolutely horrid as they can get away with. You know, trillion bit encryption, rotating one-time pads, etc, etc. All the snake-oil you can shake a stick at.
Open source doesn't guarantee security, but I wouldn't trust corporate-produced security unless it's open source.
The voting mechanism in use in Canada is very open source. They give you a piece of cardboard and let you stand in a little room with a pencil. You mark the square directly corresponding to the person you want to vote for, fold the ballot in half, and walk out into the open, and drop your ballot, into the same cardboard-box-with-a-slit-in-the-top as everyone else. Representatives from every party are there, as well as any voters who want to simply watch the process.
Later, the box is taken to a room with the same multi-party auditors and opened. In plain view of everyone, ballots are counted into different piles.
I won't accept a voting machine until every stage of the process is as auditable as that cardboard box with paper ballots. You can have fancy ways of printing those ballots if you wish, but they need to be clear and human readable. You can electronically count my vote for up-to-the-minute poll results, but the authoritative answer has to the the paper, or something just as auditable to the average Joe.
Not getting into the issue about capitalism and its benefits/faults, I don't see why everything has to be run on a similar system.
The government doesn't currently contract-out IRS audits, though I'm sure there are many firms that would bid on the job. We also don't contract-out counting of votes. Why should we make a business of writing the software for voting machines?
And, as for the open source aspect of this... What's really so hard? I envision a cheap PC with a touch-screen, some html, a web-form or two, a label printer for the ballot, and a database back-end to keep track of the unofficial figures. Basically an online poll, with a "For Dummies" interface and with printed results. Admittedly, this is for the easier "paper is real, machine totals are just for faster results" style of voting machine, but I think we're a long way from trusting totally electronic voting systems.
This could be strengthened against many attacks by:
1) Printing ballots with a signed hash of a timestamp and the vote, or something, to make it harder to pre-print ballots and bring them along.
2) Sending these signatures, along with totals, to a server every five or ten votes, to make it harder to tamper with in isolation.
3) Bundling a hundred votes at a time with a printout of the expected totals, then bundling a bag of ten of these smaller bags, etc. This would make random spot-checks easier. Look at a bag of 1000, add up the totals of the smaller bags, pick one at random to audit, count it...
Palladium is mainly about preventing the user from tampering. The binary containts a signed hash from the author. If the OS can't verify the signed hash it prevents it from running, or at least prevents it from accessing protected media like the DVD drive, or your encrypted music, etc.
Nothing in Palladium was designed to help users. It doesn't even help stop email viruses as they claim, because they're almost all exploits of "properly signed" software. Even if Palladium was did stop viruses, all it'd do is stop them from playing your DRMed MP3s while they wiped your drive and emailed your personal documents across the net.
The big problem with DRM to protect a voting machine is that if the software and hardware are done by the same company, there's no extra safety. You could be somewhat sure their software wasn't tampered with, except by them, but the problem here is that we don't trust "them".
The same people we don't trust to write code would be implementing the DRM measures, and there's even less chance of the DRM being open and auditable.
Well, say it however you wish. What I mean by "act as if the claim is false" is to ignore it. Don't dance through the streets laughing about the nonexistance of god, just live your life as if the claim was never made.
First, the "money pumped back into the economy" statement. You think that the customers would have burnt that, or put it in their matress if they hadn't bought swedish-made penis pumps? I doubt it. They'd have bought the next product advertised on the shopping network, or sold at the checkout at Walmart.
Second, the "free speech" issue. If you lie to my employees to get them to stamp your mail with my bulk-mailing code it's not free speech, it's fraud. I won't shut you down because of what your mail says, but because you want me to foot the bill for it. Also, your right to free speech doesn't obligate me to listen. If you have to lie about the subject and sender to get people to listen, it's likely they don't want to hear you.
You're right, one database would be easier to police. Queries could be written to let people view only the appropriate information for their job, and with no duplicated data, stopping errors would be easier.
But do you really think anyone in charge of this wouldn't have a way for law enforcement to easily access all the data?
If I trusted the government, I'd like this system more than others because it could be secured. If pigs could fly.
The biblical quote is saying that if you're not specifically against "us", you're for us. Bush's quote said that if you're not specifically for us, you're against us. If we assume that anything other than the polar opposites exists, then there is a large difference.
Both views lump everything at one extreme or the other. The difference is that one is inclusive and the other, exclusive.
If he's going to be religious, I wish he'd do it right.
Having more applications will help Linux. Whatever ensures the most, in the long term, is the best. I don't think that Wine will hurt us in the long term, as you do.
My company has already begun to test our windows apps under Wine. We're not going to do anything to break that compatibility, even if it means we won't adopt new MS APIs. If anyone is hurt here, I think it's MS. They've lost the ability to drag us around to new incompatible systems. Their API has become a commodity, available from other vendors (wine) and we're not going to "upgrade" to a proprietary version.
There might not be a huge number of Photoshop users in Linux, but I doubt that Adobe is going to break compatibility for them. These are pretty influential customers after all. That means that MS is no longer the only x86 Photoshop platform, and Photoshop is a destination app; one you buy a machine to be able to run.
Hell, if Adobe has to break Wine compatibility in the future, it'll probably be in their best interests to help patch wine to run the new version of Photoshop.
I didn't say "... to believe that the claim is false until you can get proof."
I said, and note the difference, "...to act as if the claim is false..."
You can never know, in a mathematically precise way, if an untestable claim is true. That means that we'll never have an answer to the god question. There's no test for the existance of god, you can't know if a god exists or not.
What you can do is choose not to act as if there is a god.
Saying that you should accept Pascal's wager and act as if there is a god, despite lack of proof, is like saying that you should act as if all unverified claims are true. Do you worship all the possible gods, just because some people believe in them? Do you wear a tinfoil hat because the illuminati might be listening in on your thoughts? Do you leave a bowl of milk out for the fairies, and cookies for santa?
So you believe in a invisible pink unicorn, just on the off chance?
Keep your faith to yourself.