Elections are a complicated thing. No wonder there are problems. Consider that you want each individual to vote in such a manner that the vote is anonymous, so people can't blackmail each other, etc., but at the same time, you only want each individual to vote at most once. Also, you want to prevent all kinds of fraud from taking place.
There is a better solution than the current methods, in my opinion. Part of the solution is good training. Perhaps when the voter registration and voter cards go out, a mini-DVD could come with it, so people can watch a video of how the voting process works. There would also be written material. Furthermore, the voting machines themselves would talk interactively, with written instructions as well, to make the system as foolproof as possible.
It would work like this: You go into the voting booth. Each candidate or proposition that you vote for would appear one at a time on a display screen. As you vote for each item, it will tell you to confirm that this is the vote you intended to make. At the end of this process, a screen containing all your votes would appear, giving you a final chance to validate everything or go back to fix a mistake. Then, as you accept the vote, a printed paper ballot would be printed with the appropriate vote information, and you would be able to view it through a thick glass window, to make sure that what's printed on the paper matches what you voted for on the screen. This is the final time to make changes - choose to make a change and the ballot is visibly shredded and you get to try again. Choose to accept and the ballot is visibly inserted into a voting box.
The computer system would keep track of all the votes, with results available immediately. The ballots would be counted by hand in the following days or weeks, as before, so as to verify the system's results. This would be foolproof.
Viruses are definitely part of the umbrella concept we often call "security." I've heard it mentioned many times that Macs do not suffer from viruses because they have a smaller market share, and virus authors invest their time into attacking more dominant systems. People who say this generally go on to say that as the Mac gains a larger market share, the number of viruses available for it will grow. I think this is of little consequence.
Macs are based on UNIX. It's not faked to appear like UNIX, it is actually UNIX. The permissions system means that a common virus could damage a user's home directory, but the system for the most part would remain unaffected, including other users. It is still possible to write root-kit style viruses that take advantages of subtle bugs in the operating system and other software to gain control of the system, but this is significantly more complicated to do, and IIRC it was Theo from the OpenBSD project who said that attacks like this require many steps that often must take advantage of many vulnerabilities to elevate priviledges, and by fixing even one bug, a whole category of vulnerabilities (even if other bugs remain) becomes inaccessible to a would-be attacker. This, in addition to much of the code underlying OS X being available for hacking up by anybody, in addition to other projects actually hacking on this code (improvements from projects like Samba, Apache, GCC, FreeBSD, even various Linux projects, make it into Darwin and OS X.... and most of all the fact that users don't run as administrators, all of these reasons make it much less likely that viruses could be as damaging as on Windows.
we restrict Internet access, but in a smart way. All parts of the Internet are available before work, after work, during breaks, and during lunch. The firewall restricts access to many sites at other times. However, the firewall shuts off 15 minutes before any break starts and kicks in 15 minutes after the break is over. So employees know it's not allowed to waste time online during work hours, but they still have a sense of responsibility about it. If you're 15 minutes into work time and the connection craps out on certain sites, you know you've broken the rules. It isn't usually a problem.
MS is always causing problems. How is it possible that a "small" company (in comparison to MS) like Apple is able to produce an incredible operating system and entire suites of applications for home, work, and pro, and it is incredibly stable, while MS, with significantly more resources and market share, and a more powerful position in the industry, cannot make something half as good?
I think the free software community needs to get everyone together, along with lots of money and resources, and create a country somewhere in the world that has free software friendly laws.
This country doesn't need to be very big. It just needs to have room for some enormous data centers. Everything would be based here, and countries like Brazil or the US would have no say in what's being hosted on the servers based there.
Then, there would be no such thing as Google having to succumb to government pressure.
I bet there won't be a device in existance that can actually read the chip that will be embedded in these passports. I say that because my Permanent Resident card (greencard) is supposedly the most advanced ID card ever made, with all kinds of weird embedded information and whatnot, making it impossible to counterfeit. Or at least that's the theory, because although they spend ridiculous amounts of money to make these cards contain all that personal information, there is reportedly not a machine in existance that can read the information off the card. Typical government nonsense. It's like trying to invent the modem with enough funds to build just one.
And if we're already on the subject of the government, why are they spending all this money to make sure passports can't be faked, greencards can't be faked, etc., if there is absolutely positively nothing being done to stop the flood of immigrants, criminals, drugs, and terrorists that are crossing our totally unprotected borders into this country every day? Every time this issue comes up, idiots say it's racism. Sorry, it's not racism to stop people and things that shouldn't be here illegally from coming here illegally.
What the heck are they thinking? This is an extremely popular show that has been running practically forever. The story line is usually very well developed. It is usually very interesting, and makes the audience actually care about the characters. Why would they want to cancel this show?
It reminds me of the time when there used to be a show called Vengeance Unlimited on UPN-13. This show was on every Thursday night. It was pretty much the only show my family watched, and it always brought my family together on Thursday evenings. So what did the idiot execs at UPN-13 do? They cancelled it so they could replace it with America's Funniest Pets, a stupid, retarded, dumb, idiotic show that has no merit and is a waste of television airwaves.
So this is what they're doing now with SG1. They'll probably replace it with something really retarded.
It looks like nobody is ever going to trust AOL again after this debacle. What a mess for AOL. What a mess for the 200,000 some people whose searches were given to the whole world to look at gleefully and laugh at them. This is so embarassing.
It's like Linus Torvalds, creator of the free operating system Linux, said once:
"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it." So this idea is similar to some degree.
No one knows where the moon's from. H2G2 (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) says where the Earth came from, but I don't recall any info about the moon.
How can Poker be better to test IA than Chess? Isn't Poker a random game of chance, where Chess is a game of strategy and tactics? I don't get it.
Honor our soldiers in battle
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Who cares if a soldier listens to an iPod? You know, my school sent a shipping container full of books of all kinds to our soldiers in Iraq. They deserve a whole lot more than that for their efforts and for risking their lives for your benefit.
What? You're not a U.S. citizen, you say? Support our troops anyway, because their work is still saving your life, no matter what country you're from.
It's really quite simple. You build a water wheel. Water spills on it, turning a generator. The water spills below, where a pump, powered by the generator, pumps it back onto the top of the water wheel. Voila! Instant perpetumobile!
And all these idiot scientists think there's no such thing as perpetual motion.
By us having written this End User License Agreement (EULA), you have agreed to be bound by its terms.
The world is not a Dilbert strip...
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If you work in a big corporation, chances are that there's an official organization chart, with personnel at all sorts of levels. Unofficially, there's a complicated web of an organization chart that goes on behind the scenes. People talk to one another. Some people work hard and do their best to do a good job, but don't get anywhere in life. Other people don't do such a great job, but spend their time figuring out how the game works at their particular organization, and then play the game and move up the corporate ladder. This is a problem if you're the former, and an advantage if you're the latter.
But that can be avoided! If, instead of working at a large company, you seek out a small fledgling business to work at, you will find that the benefits are proportional to the results and not to politics. A small business, especially one with 20 employees at the most, cannot afford to play these political games. These businesses are usually owner-operated, and the owner cares about moving forward in life. That's why he is taking the tremendous risk and creating jobs for his employees. These organizations usually have one boss, around whom the whole business revolves. There might be one other manager, but usually, everyone runs around the boss asking questions and finding out what he wants them to do. This is the perfect business to work in, if you're a people-person. You go over there, and start at whatever level you can get. Since there aren't thousands of employees, the owner of the business will quickly see how you learn and operate. If you do a good job, you'll find yourself earning a lot of trust and capability in the company. Your opinions will be heard. And if you can be a team member, not just by doing your job, but by learning a bit about everyone's job, learning how the owner thinks, what he wants to accomplish, etc., you can take a lot of that pressure off the owner.
By doing all of this, you can help the business grow in terms of profit, which will make it grow into a larger company. Eventually, that means the office will become a Dilbert strip, or something out of Office Space. You'll have a Lumberg working under you a few levels down. But who cares? At this point, you will have helped the U.S. economy, you will have created jobs, you will have grown the company into something successful and long lasting, and you will be at a high position at the top, earning a high salary, and no doubt owning a good portion of the stock. You'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
HP believes bringing its information-technology employees together in the office will make them swifter and smarter and allow them to be more effective
Kind of like in those IBM advertisements in magazines where the guy goes crazy and duct tapes the entire office staff together. That'll certainly make everyone collaborate better.
And please understand that my desire is not out of love for Symantec. I hate Symantec. It is a defective company. It's just that I hate Microsoft a million billion trillion times more, and I would like to see Vista delayed for as long as possible, to allow the following to take place:
Free software will have yet more time available to catch up in areas that Microsoft controls, and to exceed the quality of Microsoft software, both in features and stability
Apple will have more time to improve Mac OS X, so that all the Microsoft, even with all its "me too" features that were copied from Apple, will be even farther behind Apple by the time the suit is over.
Microsloth. Where do you want to crash and have data loss and blue screens of death and viruses and spam and spyware and malware and bloat and bugs and other headaches that you won't have with Linux or Mac OS X today?
Being that we produce real time systems for control, we have a company policy that ALL software we use for development, and all libraries that we license for use in our products, must either come with 100% source code that we can build ourselves, or be developed in-house. This is because, after decades of problems with products and libraries that didn't come with source, our management decided that it would rather take longer to get products to market than suffer the problems and subtle unfixable bugs that are caused by closed source software.
We believe that the only way the world can successfully advance in the field of computer software is by eventually replacing all closed source systems with open source ones.
Take an example of Apple's recent success with Mac OS X. This software, although it contains tons of closed source code, is based on open source code and contains literally hundreds and hundreds of free software packages. Apple would never have succeeded in creating such a feature-rich operating system in the time it took to make it without the availability and use of such open source code.
This is why this Linspire debacle is happening. People know that although the expedient thing to do is to continue using closed source proprietary stuff, the correct thing to do is to get ourselves off that addiction and on to some better software.
This PROVES that you do not need fossil fuels to power your automobile. Within a few months, vehicles like this will come to market, and the worldwide demand for oil should plummet. Gasoline will cost five cents per gallon, AFTER government taxes of 38 cents per gallon. (Because the gasoline companies will pay YOU to take their gas.)
It's sad to see so many of my compatriots being turned into lemmings. Perhaps they'll wake up and smell the Apple pie in the sky--and realize they've been taken for a ride.
Dude, what in the fsckin label fword dw 0000h are you talking about?! First of all, OS X is a UNIX based operating system (with a perfectly good user interface layer like no other UNIX has) that is rock solid in comparison to any other desktop OS, that supports all modern standards that 99% of the computing world expects on a computer. And does nearly all of its tasks better than a comparable computer running the latest Windows OS. Not to mention that you can run 99% of your UNIX programs on it. Only trouble is, since many of us are stuck using one or two Windows applications that we MUST have (unless you can show me a Linux or Mac version of Mastercam), so we are stuck using a PC-based laptop with Windows and running some *BSD or Linux in VMware. It doesn't make sense to carry TWO laptops around just so you can have a Mac.
So what does Apple do? They switch to x86, which suddenly makes it possible to run other widely available OSes on the machines. What does that do? I can use all my favorite UNIX, Apple, and Java programs on the Mac, I can run the non-CPU-hogging Windows programs in QEMU, except at blazing speeds on x86 compared to the speeds on the G4 thanks to QEMU accelerator (why emulate x86 on x86?), and I can reboot into Windows to run Mastercam.
There is only ONE more thing I need on the Mac, and I won't need this boot thing at all: VMware for Mac OS X. If that ever becomes available, I'll never use a PC again and I'll never dual boot again.
OS X. Because friends don't let friends run GNOME.
Wow, and here we thought that 640k is enough for everybody!
Each time the capacity of hard drives goes up a few gigs, I think back to the day in the mid 90's when I got my first "gig" hard drive for $500. Wow, it was the most incredible thing to be one of the first people in my neighborhood to have so much storage... I didn't think I'd ever run out of that much space. And today, the OS won't even fit into such a thing.
But let's put this huge capacity into perspective: Having once had to reverse engineer an obsolete 3.5" floppy drive to repair an obsolete piece of industrial machinery that was down (the customer couldn't afford to replace the whole machine because of a failed floppy drive, and the OS loads from floppy of all things), I learned that this contraption, which was on the market in the 80's, was really incredible, if you take a step back and think about it for a minute. Then, all it takes is a moment to realize that hard disk drives are several orders of magnitude more complex. First, the density of a floppy drive is nothing compared to that of a hard disk even from a decade ago, and secondly, the linear motion of the reading head on a floppy is controlled by a simple stepper motor, whereas the round motion of the reading heads on a hard drive is controlled by servo. I mean, just stop to think about it for a moment. All those gigs of MP3s, videos, and pr0n on someone's hard drive, and what an incredible piece of engineering behind them.
So much time was wasted by so many individuals trying to figure this thing out, and so many reams of paper were published about the darn thing, and then it turns out that there is a TYPO in the darn thing?!??!!?!
Slashdot Mirror
There is a better solution than the current methods, in my opinion. Part of the solution is good training. Perhaps when the voter registration and voter cards go out, a mini-DVD could come with it, so people can watch a video of how the voting process works. There would also be written material. Furthermore, the voting machines themselves would talk interactively, with written instructions as well, to make the system as foolproof as possible.
It would work like this: You go into the voting booth. Each candidate or proposition that you vote for would appear one at a time on a display screen. As you vote for each item, it will tell you to confirm that this is the vote you intended to make. At the end of this process, a screen containing all your votes would appear, giving you a final chance to validate everything or go back to fix a mistake. Then, as you accept the vote, a printed paper ballot would be printed with the appropriate vote information, and you would be able to view it through a thick glass window, to make sure that what's printed on the paper matches what you voted for on the screen. This is the final time to make changes - choose to make a change and the ballot is visibly shredded and you get to try again. Choose to accept and the ballot is visibly inserted into a voting box.
The computer system would keep track of all the votes, with results available immediately. The ballots would be counted by hand in the following days or weeks, as before, so as to verify the system's results. This would be foolproof.
Macs are based on UNIX. It's not faked to appear like UNIX, it is actually UNIX. The permissions system means that a common virus could damage a user's home directory, but the system for the most part would remain unaffected, including other users. It is still possible to write root-kit style viruses that take advantages of subtle bugs in the operating system and other software to gain control of the system, but this is significantly more complicated to do, and IIRC it was Theo from the OpenBSD project who said that attacks like this require many steps that often must take advantage of many vulnerabilities to elevate priviledges, and by fixing even one bug, a whole category of vulnerabilities (even if other bugs remain) becomes inaccessible to a would-be attacker. This, in addition to much of the code underlying OS X being available for hacking up by anybody, in addition to other projects actually hacking on this code (improvements from projects like Samba, Apache, GCC, FreeBSD, even various Linux projects, make it into Darwin and OS X.... and most of all the fact that users don't run as administrators, all of these reasons make it much less likely that viruses could be as damaging as on Windows.
we restrict Internet access, but in a smart way. All parts of the Internet are available before work, after work, during breaks, and during lunch. The firewall restricts access to many sites at other times. However, the firewall shuts off 15 minutes before any break starts and kicks in 15 minutes after the break is over. So employees know it's not allowed to waste time online during work hours, but they still have a sense of responsibility about it. If you're 15 minutes into work time and the connection craps out on certain sites, you know you've broken the rules. It isn't usually a problem.
MS is always causing problems. How is it possible that a "small" company (in comparison to MS) like Apple is able to produce an incredible operating system and entire suites of applications for home, work, and pro, and it is incredibly stable, while MS, with significantly more resources and market share, and a more powerful position in the industry, cannot make something half as good?
This country doesn't need to be very big. It just needs to have room for some enormous data centers. Everything would be based here, and countries like Brazil or the US would have no say in what's being hosted on the servers based there.
Then, there would be no such thing as Google having to succumb to government pressure.
And if we're already on the subject of the government, why are they spending all this money to make sure passports can't be faked, greencards can't be faked, etc., if there is absolutely positively nothing being done to stop the flood of immigrants, criminals, drugs, and terrorists that are crossing our totally unprotected borders into this country every day? Every time this issue comes up, idiots say it's racism. Sorry, it's not racism to stop people and things that shouldn't be here illegally from coming here illegally.
It reminds me of the time when there used to be a show called Vengeance Unlimited on UPN-13. This show was on every Thursday night. It was pretty much the only show my family watched, and it always brought my family together on Thursday evenings. So what did the idiot execs at UPN-13 do? They cancelled it so they could replace it with America's Funniest Pets, a stupid, retarded, dumb, idiotic show that has no merit and is a waste of television airwaves.
So this is what they're doing now with SG1. They'll probably replace it with something really retarded.
It looks like nobody is ever going to trust AOL again after this debacle. What a mess for AOL. What a mess for the 200,000 some people whose searches were given to the whole world to look at gleefully and laugh at them. This is so embarassing.
No, and no. Four questions left.
I only asked five questions.
Is it a trick? Is it a ploy to start a war. Those are separate questions.
I find it strange that Microsoft would invite these folks over. What, suddenly they want to interoperate with everything?
"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it." So this idea is similar to some degree.
No one knows where the moon's from. H2G2 (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) says where the Earth came from, but I don't recall any info about the moon.
How can Poker be better to test IA than Chess? Isn't Poker a random game of chance, where Chess is a game of strategy and tactics? I don't get it.
What? You're not a U.S. citizen, you say? Support our troops anyway, because their work is still saving your life, no matter what country you're from.
And all these idiot scientists think there's no such thing as perpetual motion.
By us having written this End User License Agreement (EULA), you have agreed to be bound by its terms.
But that can be avoided! If, instead of working at a large company, you seek out a small fledgling business to work at, you will find that the benefits are proportional to the results and not to politics. A small business, especially one with 20 employees at the most, cannot afford to play these political games. These businesses are usually owner-operated, and the owner cares about moving forward in life. That's why he is taking the tremendous risk and creating jobs for his employees. These organizations usually have one boss, around whom the whole business revolves. There might be one other manager, but usually, everyone runs around the boss asking questions and finding out what he wants them to do. This is the perfect business to work in, if you're a people-person. You go over there, and start at whatever level you can get. Since there aren't thousands of employees, the owner of the business will quickly see how you learn and operate. If you do a good job, you'll find yourself earning a lot of trust and capability in the company. Your opinions will be heard. And if you can be a team member, not just by doing your job, but by learning a bit about everyone's job, learning how the owner thinks, what he wants to accomplish, etc., you can take a lot of that pressure off the owner.
By doing all of this, you can help the business grow in terms of profit, which will make it grow into a larger company. Eventually, that means the office will become a Dilbert strip, or something out of Office Space. You'll have a Lumberg working under you a few levels down. But who cares? At this point, you will have helped the U.S. economy, you will have created jobs, you will have grown the company into something successful and long lasting, and you will be at a high position at the top, earning a high salary, and no doubt owning a good portion of the stock. You'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
Kind of like in those IBM advertisements in magazines where the guy goes crazy and duct tapes the entire office staff together. That'll certainly make everyone collaborate better.
And please understand that my desire is not out of love for Symantec. I hate Symantec. It is a defective company. It's just that I hate Microsoft a million billion trillion times more, and I would like to see Vista delayed for as long as possible, to allow the following to take place:
- Free software will have yet more time available to catch up in areas that Microsoft controls, and to exceed the quality of Microsoft software, both in features and stability
- Apple will have more time to improve Mac OS X, so that all the Microsoft, even with all its "me too" features that were copied from Apple, will be even farther behind Apple by the time the suit is over.
Microsloth. Where do you want to crash and have data loss and blue screens of death and viruses and spam and spyware and malware and bloat and bugs and other headaches that you won't have with Linux or Mac OS X today?If you drive behind a car running sewage bio diesel, will it smell like poo poo?
This will give new meaning to the "farting buses" in James Schuyler's excellent work of poetry, A Few Days.
We believe that the only way the world can successfully advance in the field of computer software is by eventually replacing all closed source systems with open source ones.
Take an example of Apple's recent success with Mac OS X. This software, although it contains tons of closed source code, is based on open source code and contains literally hundreds and hundreds of free software packages. Apple would never have succeeded in creating such a feature-rich operating system in the time it took to make it without the availability and use of such open source code.
This is why this Linspire debacle is happening. People know that although the expedient thing to do is to continue using closed source proprietary stuff, the correct thing to do is to get ourselves off that addiction and on to some better software.
This PROVES that you do not need fossil fuels to power your automobile. Within a few months, vehicles like this will come to market, and the worldwide demand for oil should plummet. Gasoline will cost five cents per gallon, AFTER government taxes of 38 cents per gallon. (Because the gasoline companies will pay YOU to take their gas.)
Dude, what in the fsckin label fword dw 0000h are you talking about?! First of all, OS X is a UNIX based operating system (with a perfectly good user interface layer like no other UNIX has) that is rock solid in comparison to any other desktop OS, that supports all modern standards that 99% of the computing world expects on a computer. And does nearly all of its tasks better than a comparable computer running the latest Windows OS. Not to mention that you can run 99% of your UNIX programs on it. Only trouble is, since many of us are stuck using one or two Windows applications that we MUST have (unless you can show me a Linux or Mac version of Mastercam), so we are stuck using a PC-based laptop with Windows and running some *BSD or Linux in VMware. It doesn't make sense to carry TWO laptops around just so you can have a Mac.
So what does Apple do? They switch to x86, which suddenly makes it possible to run other widely available OSes on the machines. What does that do? I can use all my favorite UNIX, Apple, and Java programs on the Mac, I can run the non-CPU-hogging Windows programs in QEMU, except at blazing speeds on x86 compared to the speeds on the G4 thanks to QEMU accelerator (why emulate x86 on x86?), and I can reboot into Windows to run Mastercam.
There is only ONE more thing I need on the Mac, and I won't need this boot thing at all: VMware for Mac OS X . If that ever becomes available, I'll never use a PC again and I'll never dual boot again.
OS X. Because friends don't let friends run GNOME.
Dude, I don't know what you're chugging, but I just finished pounding six Guinnesses.... So it must be the alcohol talking.
Each time the capacity of hard drives goes up a few gigs, I think back to the day in the mid 90's when I got my first "gig" hard drive for $500. Wow, it was the most incredible thing to be one of the first people in my neighborhood to have so much storage... I didn't think I'd ever run out of that much space. And today, the OS won't even fit into such a thing.
But let's put this huge capacity into perspective: Having once had to reverse engineer an obsolete 3.5" floppy drive to repair an obsolete piece of industrial machinery that was down (the customer couldn't afford to replace the whole machine because of a failed floppy drive, and the OS loads from floppy of all things), I learned that this contraption, which was on the market in the 80's, was really incredible, if you take a step back and think about it for a minute. Then, all it takes is a moment to realize that hard disk drives are several orders of magnitude more complex. First, the density of a floppy drive is nothing compared to that of a hard disk even from a decade ago, and secondly, the linear motion of the reading head on a floppy is controlled by a simple stepper motor, whereas the round motion of the reading heads on a hard drive is controlled by servo. I mean, just stop to think about it for a moment. All those gigs of MP3s, videos, and pr0n on someone's hard drive, and what an incredible piece of engineering behind them.
That's ridiculous!