Why not let the market take care of it? If these overly restrictive DRM terms turn off enough people then the market itself will force these companies to open up their systems more.
I agree, we should allow DRM in any form. This just needs automatically to revoke copyright and trade secret protection from any work which has had any form of DRM applied and patent and trade secret protection for any method that is used to protect the work. Trademark protection and enforcing their contracts is acceptable.
Why is this something we need to fight?
Well if you read the article, you will notice that they do not intend to expose their DRM schemes to the free market, they want to pass laws forcing everyone to implement their DRM scheme and they want the governments to also continue to give them multi-decade monopoly protections. They want to have their cake, eat it, and then force the me to pay for a cake police to prevent anyone else from me from eating cake too.
Gates is borderline evil and unethical but compitent and successful. Cheney/Bush is openly evil and incompitent. choose the lesser evil or choose cthulu.
So who exactly are you endorsing? Hitler was evil and competent and I'm assuming he would be an undesirable candidate. Chaney/Bush only have a few tens of thousands of people in detention camps. So are you saying a competent Gates would nab millions and so be more evil, or are you saying the "borderline evil" means he would just put a video camera in every bedroom and bathroom and so be marginally better than Chaney/Bush?
I choose cthulu in either case.
BTW In the last 12 elections I've only once chosen a candidate that won, and I regretted that vote. It was very much a lesser of two uber-villains Senate election. I doubt cthulu has much of a chance.:)
But many, especially many Slashdotters, oppose the whole notion of "owning ideas," as if it's some kind of fascist thought-police tactic.
Umm, because it is? The patent system was specifically set up to prevent the ownership of ideas and only allow practical embodiments of ideas to get limited protection from the capitalist system. It's only through a series of bad legal decisions by a court that has suffered from regulatory capture that we now have the thought-police we wanted to avoid.
I like to remind people that ownership isn't inherently dirty - it's the basis of our economy.
Ownership can be good, but you don't understand patents. Patents prevent you from excersizing your ownership rights. A patent prevents you from swinging side-to-side on your backyard swing because some else patented it a few years ago. It doesn't matter that you have been doing it for 40 years, you don't have any publications that talk about how you used to do it.
A capitalist solution to the problem patents were intended solve would only require the state to enforce contract law. Businesses could start an patent organization to which they would submit patents. Access to submitting and reading these patents would only be granted to businesses that signed a contract stating that they would not implement any of the patents published there without paying the organization that submitted the patent. Businesses that are not signatories to the agreement would not get to read the patents. What rules the organization makes regarding the length of the patents or what the threshold for getting a patent from this organization would be of no concern to the government, businesses would be free to not join the organization or to join a different patent organization.
Very few inventions can not be reverse engineered, so this system would probably only be relevant to a few semiconductor and chemical organizations. The rest of the business community would be freed from this soviet style system and would be free to pursue capatilism instead with much more free use of their property. Just because the US constitution allows the government to establish monopolies, it does not mean that it has to. It is long past the time where the government should divest the patent office. Sell it to IBM or Merck or GE, just don't force anyone to be part of this system. You will see it quickly improve as part of its efforts to attract members.
One of the fundamentals of Fundamentalism is that every word of the bible is literally true, especially the account of God creating the world in the first chapter of Genesis.
No, fundamentalists believe every word in the version of the bible authorized by Kind James of England. King James lifted the death penalty on importing English language versions of the bible written in Geneva by protestant refugees of the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary of England. But the death penalty for importing these bibles (or printing them locally) was only lifted so long as the copies didn't have footnotes or alternative translations along with some other conditions.
For a while what is now called the King James bible was also known as the "Geneva bible without notes" or the "Authorized Version". In fact it was much worse than the Geneva bible because the authorized version had to conform with Church of England orthodoxy rather than the most likely meaning of the words on the page whenever it was possible to twist the meaning of a passage to either establish the church, even though Jesus was very much against churches and temples, or to establish the rule of tirants (see James' title). Despite the fact that it was one of the worst translations of it's time and is the absolute worst today for deciphering the original meaning in the Hebrew and Greek, the fundamentalist still cling to it as their idol.
I think it is the height of hypocricy for the fundamentalists to call themselves Christians, as they oppose every basic principle of the religion. The members of the "700 Club" are no more Christians than Osama bin Laden is a space cowboy from the Mars colony. Unfortunately, I think the people who follow the snake-oil salesmen of "fundamentalist christianity" are a result of our piss-poor educational system producing infantalized adults who seek out anyone who will tell them how to organize their lives and the piss-poor educational system is self-sustaining now because the snake-oil salesmen know that to keep their flock they need to keep them and their children down and have been extreemely effective in hobbling schools that attempt to break away from the low standards of yesteryear.
Are you sure you understand how elections are run in Florida? I'm not sure which exact election you're talking about, as Katherine Harris hasn't been Secretary of State in Florida for years now, but in any case, Democratic leaning districts elect primarily Democrats to run their County Elections Board and it's the County Elections Board that is in charge of ensuring that the local voting machinery is properly setup.
Obviously I was referring to the 2000 elections. Florida Democrats were responsible for many problems in that election too, so don't think I give them a free pass. The particular problem here was that Kathy's office had the machines sent to them and they set them up to not reject spoilt ballots. The local elections board should have fixed this, they didn't. Maybe they saw it as a plus since the election lines would move more quickly, maybe they didn't realize their vote counting machines had been sabotaged. It doesn't matter what the local board did, it is ultimately the State of Florida which is responsible for the elections in that State. Well the federal government is responsible for maintaining a democratic form of government in each of the states, but I think we would all prefer that this hard power to disolve the Florida State constitution and forming a new government for the territory should only be exercised after the state is given every opportunity to fix its problems. I would hope the congress to reject electors from the State in a Presidential election before that type of solution is even contemplated.
If you want to speak as if you know something about how Florida elections operated in recent history you should at least familiarize yourself of the problems that have been the subject of lawsuits in recent elections.
Of course, your post reflects badly on my assertion that obvious voting fraud of the type Kathy practiced will backfire once the miscreants are found out, even if they are protected from legal prosecution by the pols they elect.
BTW I don't care whether an election fixer favors my candidate or the opposition's candidate, they don't favor my much larger interest in living in a democracy.
I mean, we all know that Florida voters have a perfect track record of meaningfully, unambiguously, carefully, and thoughtfully placing a mark next to the right name. Yes, the scanner will kick out the badly marked ones... but I seem to recall they've been down that road before.
The problem with these machines in Florida are well known. In Florida, Katherine Harris reprogrammed the machines in Democratic leaning districts to accept spoiled ballots while she kept the original program that rejected spoiled ballots in the Republican leaning districts. If you make that a crime with life in prison as the common penalty then presumably it won't happen very often, and when it does happen the evidence is available. And finally this kind of cheating only works in close elections, this kind of crime tends to lose you many more votes in the next election when you get caught. As for ballot design, this is easy to address. You simply come up with a State wide standard and adthere to it; if you want to redesign it the legislature needs get the approval of a majority of the voters in a plebiscite using the old ballot design. This is also self limiting in the same way as the voting machine biasing that Katherine Harris did is self limiting.
There are other ways to cheat in elections no matter what the technology is. You can have fewer voting workers or machines in districts that lean against your party so that there are longer lines in those districts. In some ways this is better than Florida style shenanigans, because it just looks like incompetence on the part of the election officials. You can also selectively invalidate the valid voter registration of people who you expect to vote against your candidate. This is an old technique has been used by Democrats as well, it is also self limiting as it creates a lot of pissed off voters in the next election (this type of cheating is the main reason we have voter registration in the first place). This was a problem in Florida and is actually addressed in HAVA, provisional ballots can limit the effectiveness of this technique.
What they hell is wrong with touch screen machines with a spit-out paper trail? Yeesh.
If done properly, nothing is wrong with this system. But I think the state legislatures of this country have shown that they are not up to the task of designing a completely new electoral system from scratch. Doing this properly means the ballot is printed and given to the voter, who then deposits it in a sealed clear box that remains in plain sight from the time it the polling place opens and box is empty, until the time every paper ballot has been counted and the polling place is closed to the public. You also have to design procedures for what to do when the machines are broken, this means having a preprinted ballot for every registered voter, plus some extras for spoiled ballots. This is much more expensive than an all paper system; I don't even know how much a braile ballot printer would cost if attached to every voting machine.
Network neutrality means you can't write a filter like this:
throttle protocol X
or this:
throttle protocol X unless connecting to partner Y
As long as you disclose it, it does not mean you can't write a rule like this:
throttle customer's connections if they use more than X bandwidth in Y time
So you can still throttle bittorrent as long as you discriminate based on bandwidth use and not based on the protocol or the host that the user is trying to connect to. The idea is that you don't want to kill innovative technology companies in the crib by blocking/throttling a particular service delivered over the internet. It's analogous to the free flow of cash in a capitalist society, except that it applies to bits. Network neutrality does not mean that the ISP has to provide the same level of service to all their customers. It is just a reinstatement of the principle of best-effort delivery that made the internet such a blockbuster success when compared to all the competing non-best-effort-delivery networks that died off in the 1990's.
The best analogy would probably be a Starbucks store which sold Bolivian and Java coffee, but whenever you ordered a Bolivian coffee they spit in the cup because the Java roaster had paid them to do that. Network neutrality just says that if they feel like spitting in the cups they must spit in both Bolivian and Java cups or must spit in your cup based on some other criteria such as the color of your clothing, the brand of deoderant you use, how often you buy coffee there, etc.
Basically anyone who says 200 k is slow is an asshole or living in a fantasy world. If you aren't downloading othe people's movies or video games 200 k is ok.
Hmm, I think 20 Mbps is slow, so I must be a super-duper asshole. Doing a day to day operation like 'svn up' would be incredibly slow on 0.2 Mbps, I can't image how long it would take to download security patches. I would think anybody connecting directly to the internet at that speed is probably a hazard to the internet as botnet node. If you are a botnet member doesn't that make you the asshole sending out all those stock scams and penis enlargement e-mails?
The problem is that you would be getting paid retail value for the power you are selling to the company. Looking from their point of view, you should actually have two meters, one to meter the power you buy from them at retail price, and another to meter the power you sell to them, at whatever price they buy power.
In New York the utility has the option of installing two meters, and only paying you a fraction of the retail value as a refund. For wind might be fair, but for solar you should actually be getting much more than retail from the utility since you are producing the most power when wholesale power is the costliest.
Otherwise, if everyone started generating their own power part of the time, the power company would go bankrupt.
I guess power deregulation hasn't made it to your state yet. Here in New York the traditional power utility doesn't generate much power, they get paid on a cost plus healthy profit basis. Their "costs" include the financing of borrowed money they paid directly to their shareholders. They can't fail to profit unless everyone disconnects from the grid. My local utility also hasn't maintained the power lines in close to 50 years and yet are defended by the local politicians whenever we have days long power outages and the citizens get upset.
In a sane world the local governments would build their own electrical delivery networks and kick the old local utility out of any right of way granted by the local government in the past, unless the utility is willing to pay a fair market value to for them. Then allow any power generating company connected to the network to sell electricity to any rate payer , like any flower shop in the city can sell to any customer and use the public roads to deliver the flowers. Power aggregators could buy the electricity from these small PV setups and sell it to their customers.
As a MythTV developer I'm as anti-broadcast flag as one could be, but I don't think I could support this bill.
While the broadcast flag was a travesty amoung quite a few travesties surrounding the ATSC standard the FCC needs to be able to impose standards on the industry. Without mandated standards the cable industry would fragment with each manufacturer of devices coming up with their own standards like Motorola and Scientific Atlanta and all the different access control device manufacturers did in the 1990's. At the moment the FCC is pushing OpenCable(TM). It is in fact anything but open, but it is marginally better for the consumer than the current state of things in the USA because it allows you to buy a box from Motorola, SA, or TiVo you are not locked into whichever one your cable company chooses for their entire system.
But under a different administration the FCC might push for something like Europe's DVB CAM standards which are a better trade-off between allowing broadcasters to encrypt copyrighted material+ and allowing consumers to watch the material as they please once they've paid for it. In Europe they allow broadcasters to encrypt the material but once the consumer decrypts it with the key they buy from the broadcaster the copyrighted material is now a normal video they can transfer to their laptop or iPod to watch there. With "Open" Cable the materials are locked in your OpenCable receiver and can only be transfered to other DRMed devices if the broadcaster specifically allows it.
This bill looks like it would bar the FCC from doing the only good thing it does do, promulgate technical standards. It would basically religate the FCC to enforcing government mandated censorship and to enforcing technical standards directly dictated by congress, i.e. laws written by companies that write the largest checks to legislators and their families. If get the FCC out of the business regulation business, it would be much more wise to have it give up it's monopoly regulation powers and hand those over to the FTC. The FTC could apply the same standards to telecommunications as it does to other industries and could be more effective without getting into nitti-gritty regulation of specific fees, etc. It could simply bar a cable company that used anti-competitive tactics from selling any content over their pipes, or prevent a content company from owning any cable in the ground.
If you want to pass a simple law that makes any future broadcast flag moot, pass a law that removes copyright protection* from any work where the a paying customer can not easily remove DRM from media without paying an additional fee. You would quickly see content producers begin to police the broadcasters to prevent them from implementing any unworkable and expensive "content protection" schemes. The broadcasters would instead do something smarter like embedding your subscriber ID in the file when it exits the CAM so that any bit-perfect or even decent looking copy could be traced back to the subscriber who originally lost control of it.
+As a guy with a liberterian bent I have no problem with allowing DRM without restriction when dealing with non-government protected creative works in a competitive landscape.
*Copyright protection is a very non-liberterian form of restriction on property that prevents you from improving your property once it begins to look like something someone else did in the last 150 years or so. We accept this restriction on our liberty because the term of the restriction is short and it presumably encourages the distibution of new ideas into the public domain. When DRM prevents the entry of a work into the public domain this alone makes copy rights on works "protected" in this manner troublesome. Combine that with the current term of copyright, which has actually lengthened in these last two hundred years instead of shortening as the means of distribution became cheaper, and extending any copyright protection to a DRMed work in this day and age is downright immoral.
The Constitution says "for limited time." That means that some sort of copyright expiration means is necessary in DRM, so that after the copyright expiration the medium becomes free and unencumbered - public domain. AFAIK there is NO expiration mechanism whatsoever in current DRM, therefore it violates the letter and spirit of the Constitution.
There is a very simple solution for this. We simply need to make it legal to break DRM schemes, and we need to pass a second law that says that copyrighted or patented works may not be transmitted or stored in an encrypted form once published. Then a publisher must choose whether to accept copyright protection for their work or use a DRM scheme of some sort to protect their work. If they choose to use a DRM scheme then they can force additional restrictions on the user of the work but can not sue anyone else that distibutes the work, if they choose copyright then they a legal monopoly to distrubute the work so retain the ability to sue anyone that distributes a copy of the copyrighted work.
I would also like to shorten copyright to something on the order of an initial 5 years; with an optional extension for an additional 5 years for $100,000 adjusted for inflation/deflation, but only if the author is still alive and wants to extend the copyright. It should also be illegal to force an author to extend their copyright under any contract; that should prevent the copyright holder from some of the abuse they are known to subject authors too. But I see this as a completely seperate issue from the DRM problem. Solving the copyright length issue will require negotiating international treaties, eliminating copyright protection from DRM works could be done in an hour by a vote of congress and a signature from the President.
Back in high school I attended a talk by Admiral Hopper where she passed around a wire about 30 centimeters long and explained to us "this is how far light, or any electromagnetic signal, can travel in one nanosecond." That illustration has always stayed with me, it helps to explain a lot of the limitations inherent in hardware now that CPU speeds have become so fast.
Through a vacum!
When traveling through a media like copper or silicon you can only reach about 2/3 of that speed.
Although I guess the point is the same. Light travels much more slowly than you might assume after watching all those hyperbolic PBS specials on Einstein.:)
Evidence ? Because none of the links I discovered (including court documents) - nor my memory from when it was actually happening - support your assertion.
Do you have a DOS 6.2 around the matching Windows 3.xx? Start with "grep Stac/*/*/*/*/*/*" DOS 6.22 won't work.. it was "cleansed". The patent suit allowed Stac to prevent MS-DOS from being distributed to the public until the problem was addressed.
I believe the string in win.exe was an error message; it was all over the internet at the time, but I just tried google and can't find it now. The web just starting back when this story was current so I'm not so surprised by this. Maybe you can find more info in a Nexis search...
You might also want to read Andrew Schulman's article in Dr Dobbs, May 1994...
BTW I'm not sure why you are still interested in this case, Microsoft has committed much worse offences against our nation's economic health than the Stacker incident. It's also going to be difficult to research since people like me have forgotten the details. But if you want to research this it's best to just get your hands on the executables. You can then break up the stacker binaries into snippets and search for those snippets in the Microsoft binaries, you can also run a decompiler and repeat, which may find more matches. You can also interview the expert witnesses in the case, they probably have notes on the facts that didn't show up in the lawsuit and can now talk about it.
According to the information I can locate, it was a patent infringement case. I haven't seen anything reliable that talks about copying source code (which would be copyright infringement).
They were caught because of the copyright infringement, you could see the Stacker strings in the win.exe with a simple text search. But they blamed this on a rogue programmer and the law is unfortunately much stronger for the plaintif in a patent case than a copyright case. The rogue programmer theory is believable to me at least, they had poached some talent from Stacker for staggering $$$ and they were presumably under a lot of pressure to deliver, and Microsoft was late on it's release deadline. I could see this slipping past their code review process, whatever it was at the time. They've only been caught infringing on copyright a handful of times and AFAIK in all cases except for the Stacker incident they had either hired outside contractors to write the code, or they had bought another company and a programmer they didn't hire themselves was the culprit, or code they had licensed for a limited time was still in the codebase after the license expired. In a company as large as and as prominent a target as Microsoft they seem to have relatively few slipups wrt copyright infringement.
Patents are another matter, there isn't a human being over the age of five that hasn't violated a number of patents. Ghandi was right, all patents should go the way of the patent on table salt.
Stac were killed by plummeting storage prices. Why would any sane person want to use risky compression (especially the whole-volume-in-a-file approach that Stacker and Stacker-like used) when they could just buy a bigger drive.
For the same reason that 95% of my 1.5 Terrabytes of data is compressed maybe? Disks are cheaper than ever, but they are still slow. Processors are relatively fast and can decompress the data quickly.
Even the NTFS file compression in Windows (which is implemented far more intelligently and less kludgily) is rarely used. Why would you bother, when hard disks are so cheap ?
See above. I don't use Microsoft Windows, but my impression is that this is something you have to enable for each directory you want to compress. A smart implementation would figure out which files would benefit on the speed of access metric from compression and would compress those files as a low priority background process. Most of my data is in a data specific compressed format, those files would not benefit from compression, but raw pictures from my cameras would, as would wav files from my audio captures.. To address the multiplied data loss from a single (or multiple) block failure all you need to do is add some FEC w/reordering, this would make the compressed files more reliable than the uncompressed ones.
Besides, I thought we'd all agreed that software patents were bad, mmkay ?
It was the clear copyright infingement that riled most people.
Microsoft copy-n-pasted the code!
Also, it was a depressing to see how badly our legal system handled the infraction, Stac was killed causing everyone there to lose their jobs and breaking up a good development team. The only relief was a few hundred million dollars for the investors in the company, much of which went to their lawyers. Stac probably would have become a multi-billion dollar company and today we might all have faster disk access through a clever mix of compression and better filesystems.
Of course copyright infringement isn't theft either. Stac might have survived if the management had thought more about keeping the operation going than worrying about the Microsoft lawsuit. They could have handed over the lawsuit handling to a few trusted people and gotten a good cash infusion down the road to help launch a future product. Instead news reports at the time indicated that they freaked out and then missplaced their business thinking caps.
This is why absentee ballots are always counted after regular votes are counted.
This is not the case in Ohio. The absentees were counted first. In order to prevent people voting again at the polls, the pollbook indicates that the person should vote with a provisional ballot if they ordered an absentee.
Ohio elections are run by idiots of the highest idiocy.
PS If they are not idiots, they are intentionally opposed to a democratic form of government. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here, which they may not deserve considering the dirty tricks they've used to prevent eligable voters from voting.
PS2 The landslide for Democrats in Ohio yesterday could mean electoral reform in Ohio, but only if Ohio's citizens insist on it. Democrats in New York City "reformed" away second and third parties so that they now hold almost every seat in the city legislature. If Ohio's citizens don't insist on really fixing the electoral system there the Democratic Party will just subvert the pro-Republican bias in the electoral system to be a pro-Democratic bias and won't actually fix serious systems problems like this absentee voting system designed to facilitate vote buying and voter intimidation.
Vote By Mail as practiced in Oregon is open to vote buying and voter intimidation.
I personally think the federal government should step in and remove all the canditates voted in (and overturn all the laws passed) since Vote By Mail was initiated in Oregon, under it's powers to ensure a democratic form of government in each state of the union.
Unlike absentee ballots Vote By Mail ballots are not invalidated by a vote on election day but are in leu of a real vote and so it does not have the same protection against vote buying as absentee ballots in other states do (where you can always sell your absentee and then override that ballot with a vote on election day.)
Everyone I talked to today noticed there were no exit pollsters this time. Last election most everyone complained about noticing a huge number of exit poll people outside the polling place asking everyone who they voted for...
Nothing this year.... were they banned?
They were not banned, exit polsters are essential to keep elections honest, but by necessity they strike randomly. You were just lucky/unlucky last time, 99% of precincts in any given election don't have exit pollsters, it was just your time last time. When they do strike they try very hard to get every X'th person exiting the polling place for the entire day so that they don't bias the sample by time of day. They may also even track how cooperative you are so they can balance the sample (cooperative people count less since they are more likely to cooperate so you get more responses).
As someone who basically agrees with you, something has been bothering me. How is this different from absentee ballots? Sure, you have to sign the back of the envelope, but can't he be with you watching to make sure you vote the "right" way?
Absentee ballots are problematic for this reason, but you can always go to your polling place on election day and vote a completely different ballot. This breaks down if a poll worker or election official is crooked or incompetent and lets anyone other than the people who see you go into the polling place know that you voted at your polling place (and hence overriding the potentially suspect absentee ballot).
Note: If you have ever voted absentee you probably got a set of envelopes and the outermost one had just your name on it, and the innermost one contained no identifying information. The outer envelope allows the vote counters to discard your absenteee ballot if your absentee ballot is invalidated, either because you voted at your polling place or for some other reason, the inner envelope without identifying information allows for an anonymous absentee ballot because it is placed in a ballot box with other ballots and mixed before counting. This is why absentee ballots are always counted after regular votes are counted.
Hypothetical situation: let's say it came to light that the 2000 presidential election (I don't think there were any electronic machines used in that one, but if there were, let's pretend that wasn't the case) was indeed rigged. Enough paper ballots were replaced to give Bush a slim lead (oh, 50K or whatever makes sense). Now what did that involve?
Not so hypothetical, how do you think Gore got those -50K votes in one Florida district?
Electronic tabulator...
Of course, he was a total idiot to conceed the election before reviewing the numbers, negative voting totals are always suspect... This was corrected because it was so obviously wrong, and because there was a paper record to correct it with. The Florida legislature has decided that in future cases like this the paper record must be ignored.
Face it, it's not foolproof. "Security through difficulty" is just as bad as "security through obscurity".
Paper ballots are not just "security through difficulty", though if you think about it this is how banks protect gold and cash. They are also have security through auditability. This means you can detect a set of suspect election ballots:
ballot box goes out of public view before/during counting = possible ballots tampering
two marks, one for each of the two canditates = possibly spoiled after voting
the X's have the same handwriting on many ballots = possible multiple voting Even if you can't determine the true intent of the voters in this case you can at least hold a new election in most cases, or in the case of a presidential election the state legislature can decide what electors to send to the electoral college.
With electronic voting machines which print a voter verified ballot, your only recourse to prevent ballot tampering is to watch that LEXAN(tm) ballot box like a hawk until the votes have been manually counted.
If the districts converting to electronic voting machines swore upon pain of death to protect that ballot box and count the votes printed out from the machines in full public view in the place of voting they might be almost as secure as paper ballots, except for being more suseptiple to local vote manipulation (which isn't a huge concern.) But this is not what these districts are doing, they are just going by what the computer tells them, and either not printing real auditable votes, or putting them in a locked box which goes out of public view before it is counted. In the last election plastic twist ties, the same brand and model as sold as the local hardware store, were used as the "seals" in my district. This is simply unacceptable.
Thankfully, I won't need their permission to give up my America citizenship. Actually, screw that. This is _our_ country, not theirs.
Actually... If you are in another country and want to renounce your US citizenship you need to visit the US Embassy and do it in person. This gives the bastards a chance to arrest you and ship you off to whatever secret prison or concentration camp they desire. If you don't renounce your citizenship and make any money in your country of refuge you still need to pay US taxes.
The revolution is happening _now_ folks. Umm no, and it will get a lot worse before it gets any better. Think 1940's with nukes.
And you are an idiot. The copyright laws certainly cover copying, that's why they are called COPYright laws. The act of downloading and running the program is COPYING.
You are an ignoramous. The copyright laws certainly cover copying, that's why they explicitly tell you that running a program or copying in other ways required for running it are not infringement.
This language dates from the 1980's because some software companies worried that if they copyrighted their software they would need a signed contract for every sale. They need not have worried because running the program was already covered under fair-use, which is another large portion of US law you should familiarize yourself with.
In they 1990's Congress added provisions to the code allowing you to transfer your music onto CD's and tapes. (And added a tax on music handling hardware and media which goes directly to the major labels.)
It's not just the sheer number of FP calculations that can be the problem. Once you get away from the first (or perhaps even second) level of rays, you end up losing coherence between neighbouring rays which causes memory page/cache thrashing. This is not a nice thing on a GPU.
Yep and you only get 100 million rays per second on a P4@3Ghz when you do four at a time (and the scene is relatively simple, this would be better stated as 200 million intersections). As soon as you lose coherence you drop to as little as 25 million rays per second. And the 100 number is probably using a binary subdivision of space, something like a kd-tree, for a GPU you would want grids as an acceleration structure, this means you need to do a lot more intersections.
But grids is it actually where it gets interesting, it means losing ray packet coherence is not such a big deal. You just do more intersections on a single ray, instead of intersecting one triangle with multiple rays...
Note: I didn't read the article, but I wrote a fast SIMD raytracer a few years ago.
lol - are you kidding me? This post gets modded "Informative", yet my reply (with the actual facts) gets modded "Overrated"? Not sure if someone defaced the Wikipedia article everybody got this misinformation from, but CRTs televisions cannot display 1080p (1920x1080), period. Go look it up somewhere else.
Hey kid, I threw away a monitor capable of twice that resolution last year. And I bought that monitor used for less than $250 (and have had similar monitors for years, Sony made the CRT, and various companies sold the monitors). I replaced it with a couple crappy 1920x1200 LCDs because I needed more room on my desk, not because there was any problem with the resolution. The LCDs are a pain because they are so blurry in comparison, and the color rendition is horrible (esp for the shaddows in movies). But for space they can't be beat.
Not that I recommend Plasma's over LCDs in most applications. In general the color rendition is better with Plasma's, but they consume too much power and suffer from burn-in. Plus dollar-per-pixel LCDs are cheaper. If you really care about picture quality you go with a 3 chip DLP projector in a darkened room, if you need it to work in a sunny room you go with a Plasma, otherwise you go with an LCD.
Back to reality, of course I know that what Bush and "his whitehouse" does will reflect heavily on the Republican party. But that doesn't mean that it should.
Yes is should.
If they support that criminal and have the gall to run, they have no moral compass.
The Congress has failed to impeach "the president" and try him for his crimes. Since the "Republicans" are in charge of both houses, any congress critter who has not left the party has implicitly endorsed this inaction and should be fired. Any "Democrat" who has supported the "Republicans", aka Hillary, should be fired. It is as simple as that. If any "Republican" doesn't want to be held responsible for the actions of their leaders should quit the party, and "Democrat" who wants to backpedal on their support for these criminals in power is shit out of luck.
BTW1 I sent in my change of party form last year to leave the Repulicrat party and the change won't be effective until next year. It has not endeared me to the Party that they prevent me from leaving.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not let the market take care of it? If these overly restrictive DRM terms turn off enough people then the market itself will force these companies to open up their systems more.
I agree, we should allow DRM in any form. This just needs automatically to revoke copyright and trade secret protection from any work which has had any form of DRM applied and patent and trade secret protection for any method that is used to protect the work. Trademark protection and enforcing their contracts is acceptable.
Why is this something we need to fight?
Well if you read the article, you will notice that they do not intend to expose their DRM schemes to the free market, they want to pass laws forcing everyone to implement their DRM scheme and they want the governments to also continue to give them multi-decade monopoly protections. They want to have their cake, eat it, and then force the me to pay for a cake police to prevent anyone else from me from eating cake too.
Gates is borderline evil and unethical but compitent and successful. Cheney/Bush is openly evil and incompitent. choose the lesser evil or choose cthulu.
:)
So who exactly are you endorsing? Hitler was evil and competent and I'm assuming he would be an undesirable candidate. Chaney/Bush only have a few tens of thousands of people in detention camps. So are you saying a competent Gates would nab millions and so be more evil, or are you saying the "borderline evil" means he would just put a video camera in every bedroom and bathroom and so be marginally better than Chaney/Bush?
I choose cthulu in either case.
BTW In the last 12 elections I've only once chosen a candidate that won, and I regretted that vote. It was very much a lesser of two uber-villains Senate election. I doubt cthulu has much of a chance.
But many, especially many Slashdotters, oppose the whole notion of "owning ideas," as if it's some kind of fascist thought-police tactic.
Umm, because it is? The patent system was specifically set up to prevent the ownership of ideas and only allow practical embodiments of ideas to get limited protection from the capitalist system. It's only through a series of bad legal decisions by a court that has suffered from regulatory capture that we now have the thought-police we wanted to avoid.
I like to remind people that ownership isn't inherently dirty - it's the basis of our economy.
Ownership can be good, but you don't understand patents. Patents prevent you from excersizing your ownership rights. A patent prevents you from swinging side-to-side on your backyard swing because some else patented it a few years ago. It doesn't matter that you have been doing it for 40 years, you don't have any publications that talk about how you used to do it.
A capitalist solution to the problem patents were intended solve would only require the state to enforce contract law. Businesses could start an patent organization to which they would submit patents. Access to submitting and reading these patents would only be granted to businesses that signed a contract stating that they would not implement any of the patents published there without paying the organization that submitted the patent. Businesses that are not signatories to the agreement would not get to read the patents. What rules the organization makes regarding the length of the patents or what the threshold for getting a patent from this organization would be of no concern to the government, businesses would be free to not join the organization or to join a different patent organization.
Very few inventions can not be reverse engineered, so this system would probably only be relevant to a few semiconductor and chemical organizations. The rest of the business community would be freed from this soviet style system and would be free to pursue capatilism instead with much more free use of their property. Just because the US constitution allows the government to establish monopolies, it does not mean that it has to. It is long past the time where the government should divest the patent office. Sell it to IBM or Merck or GE, just don't force anyone to be part of this system. You will see it quickly improve as part of its efforts to attract members.
One of the fundamentals of Fundamentalism is that every word of the bible is literally true, especially the account of God creating the world in the first chapter of Genesis.
No, fundamentalists believe every word in the version of the bible authorized by Kind James of England. King James lifted the death penalty on importing English language versions of the bible written in Geneva by protestant refugees of the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary of England. But the death penalty for importing these bibles (or printing them locally) was only lifted so long as the copies didn't have footnotes or alternative translations along with some other conditions.
For a while what is now called the King James bible was also known as the "Geneva bible without notes" or the "Authorized Version". In fact it was much worse than the Geneva bible because the authorized version had to conform with Church of England orthodoxy rather than the most likely meaning of the words on the page whenever it was possible to twist the meaning of a passage to either establish the church, even though Jesus was very much against churches and temples, or to establish the rule of tirants (see James' title). Despite the fact that it was one of the worst translations of it's time and is the absolute worst today for deciphering the original meaning in the Hebrew and Greek, the fundamentalist still cling to it as their idol.
I think it is the height of hypocricy for the fundamentalists to call themselves Christians, as they oppose every basic principle of the religion. The members of the "700 Club" are no more Christians than Osama bin Laden is a space cowboy from the Mars colony. Unfortunately, I think the people who follow the snake-oil salesmen of "fundamentalist christianity" are a result of our piss-poor educational system producing infantalized adults who seek out anyone who will tell them how to organize their lives and the piss-poor educational system is self-sustaining now because the snake-oil salesmen know that to keep their flock they need to keep them and their children down and have been extreemely effective in hobbling schools that attempt to break away from the low standards of yesteryear.
Are you sure you understand how elections are run in Florida? I'm not sure which exact election you're talking about, as Katherine Harris hasn't been Secretary of State in Florida for years now, but in any case, Democratic leaning districts elect primarily Democrats to run their County Elections Board and it's the County Elections Board that is in charge of ensuring that the local voting machinery is properly setup.
Obviously I was referring to the 2000 elections. Florida Democrats were responsible for many problems in that election too, so don't think I give them a free pass. The particular problem here was that Kathy's office had the machines sent to them and they set them up to not reject spoilt ballots. The local elections board should have fixed this, they didn't. Maybe they saw it as a plus since the election lines would move more quickly, maybe they didn't realize their vote counting machines had been sabotaged. It doesn't matter what the local board did, it is ultimately the State of Florida which is responsible for the elections in that State. Well the federal government is responsible for maintaining a democratic form of government in each of the states, but I think we would all prefer that this hard power to disolve the Florida State constitution and forming a new government for the territory should only be exercised after the state is given every opportunity to fix its problems. I would hope the congress to reject electors from the State in a Presidential election before that type of solution is even contemplated.
If you want to speak as if you know something about how Florida elections operated in recent history you should at least familiarize yourself of the problems that have been the subject of lawsuits in recent elections.
Of course, your post reflects badly on my assertion that obvious voting fraud of the type Kathy practiced will backfire once the miscreants are found out, even if they are protected from legal prosecution by the pols they elect.
BTW I don't care whether an election fixer favors my candidate or the opposition's candidate, they don't favor my much larger interest in living in a democracy.
I mean, we all know that Florida voters have a perfect track record of meaningfully, unambiguously, carefully, and thoughtfully placing a mark next to the right name. Yes, the scanner will kick out the badly marked ones... but I seem to recall they've been down that road before.
The problem with these machines in Florida are well known. In Florida, Katherine Harris reprogrammed the machines in Democratic leaning districts to accept spoiled ballots while she kept the original program that rejected spoiled ballots in the Republican leaning districts. If you make that a crime with life in prison as the common penalty then presumably it won't happen very often, and when it does happen the evidence is available. And finally this kind of cheating only works in close elections, this kind of crime tends to lose you many more votes in the next election when you get caught. As for ballot design, this is easy to address. You simply come up with a State wide standard and adthere to it; if you want to redesign it the legislature needs get the approval of a majority of the voters in a plebiscite using the old ballot design. This is also self limiting in the same way as the voting machine biasing that Katherine Harris did is self limiting.
There are other ways to cheat in elections no matter what the technology is. You can have fewer voting workers or machines in districts that lean against your party so that there are longer lines in those districts. In some ways this is better than Florida style shenanigans, because it just looks like incompetence on the part of the election officials. You can also selectively invalidate the valid voter registration of people who you expect to vote against your candidate. This is an old technique has been used by Democrats as well, it is also self limiting as it creates a lot of pissed off voters in the next election (this type of cheating is the main reason we have voter registration in the first place). This was a problem in Florida and is actually addressed in HAVA, provisional ballots can limit the effectiveness of this technique.
What they hell is wrong with touch screen machines with a spit-out paper trail? Yeesh.
If done properly, nothing is wrong with this system. But I think the state legislatures of this country have shown that they are not up to the task of designing a completely new electoral system from scratch. Doing this properly means the ballot is printed and given to the voter, who then deposits it in a sealed clear box that remains in plain sight from the time it the polling place opens and box is empty, until the time every paper ballot has been counted and the polling place is closed to the public. You also have to design procedures for what to do when the machines are broken, this means having a preprinted ballot for every registered voter, plus some extras for spoiled ballots. This is much more expensive than an all paper system; I don't even know how much a braile ballot printer would cost if attached to every voting machine.
Network neutrality means you can't write a filter like this:
throttle protocol X
or this:
throttle protocol X unless connecting to partner Y
As long as you disclose it, it does not mean you can't write a rule like this:
throttle customer's connections if they use more than X bandwidth in Y time
So you can still throttle bittorrent as long as you discriminate based on bandwidth use and not based on the protocol or the host that the user is trying to connect to. The idea is that you don't want to kill innovative technology companies in the crib by blocking/throttling a particular service delivered over the internet. It's analogous to the free flow of cash in a capitalist society, except that it applies to bits. Network neutrality does not mean that the ISP has to provide the same level of service to all their customers. It is just a reinstatement of the principle of best-effort delivery that made the internet such a blockbuster success when compared to all the competing non-best-effort-delivery networks that died off in the 1990's.
The best analogy would probably be a Starbucks store which sold Bolivian and Java coffee, but whenever you ordered a Bolivian coffee they spit in the cup because the Java roaster had paid them to do that. Network neutrality just says that if they feel like spitting in the cups they must spit in both Bolivian and Java cups or must spit in your cup based on some other criteria such as the color of your clothing, the brand of deoderant you use, how often you buy coffee there, etc.
Basically anyone who says 200 k is slow is an asshole or living in a fantasy world. If you aren't downloading othe people's movies or video games 200 k is ok.
Hmm, I think 20 Mbps is slow, so I must be a super-duper asshole. Doing a day to day operation like 'svn up' would be incredibly slow on 0.2 Mbps, I can't image how long it would take to download security patches. I would think anybody connecting directly to the internet at that speed is probably a hazard to the internet as botnet node. If you are a botnet member doesn't that make you the asshole sending out all those stock scams and penis enlargement e-mails?
The problem is that you would be getting paid retail value for the power you are selling to the company. Looking from their point of view, you should actually have two meters, one to meter the power you buy from them at retail price, and another to meter the power you sell to them, at whatever price they buy power.
In New York the utility has the option of installing two meters, and only paying you a fraction of the retail value as a refund. For wind might be fair, but for solar you should actually be getting much more than retail from the utility since you are producing the most power when wholesale power is the costliest.
Otherwise, if everyone started generating their own power part of the time, the power company would go bankrupt.
I guess power deregulation hasn't made it to your state yet. Here in New York the traditional power utility doesn't generate much power, they get paid on a cost plus healthy profit basis. Their "costs" include the financing of borrowed money they paid directly to their shareholders. They can't fail to profit unless everyone disconnects from the grid. My local utility also hasn't maintained the power lines in close to 50 years and yet are defended by the local politicians whenever we have days long power outages and the citizens get upset.
In a sane world the local governments would build their own electrical delivery networks and kick the old local utility out of any right of way granted by the local government in the past, unless the utility is willing to pay a fair market value to for them. Then allow any power generating company connected to the network to sell electricity to any rate payer , like any flower shop in the city can sell to any customer and use the public roads to deliver the flowers. Power aggregators could buy the electricity from these small PV setups and sell it to their customers.
As a MythTV developer I'm as anti-broadcast flag as one could be, but I don't think I could support this bill.
While the broadcast flag was a travesty amoung quite a few travesties surrounding the ATSC standard the FCC needs to be able to impose standards on the industry. Without mandated standards the cable industry would fragment with each manufacturer of devices coming up with their own standards like Motorola and Scientific Atlanta and all the different access control device manufacturers did in the 1990's. At the moment the FCC is pushing OpenCable(TM). It is in fact anything but open, but it is marginally better for the consumer than the current state of things in the USA because it allows you to buy a box from Motorola, SA, or TiVo you are not locked into whichever one your cable company chooses for their entire system.
But under a different administration the FCC might push for something like Europe's DVB CAM standards which are a better trade-off between allowing broadcasters to encrypt copyrighted material+ and allowing consumers to watch the material as they please once they've paid for it. In Europe they allow broadcasters to encrypt the material but once the consumer decrypts it with the key they buy from the broadcaster the copyrighted material is now a normal video they can transfer to their laptop or iPod to watch there. With "Open" Cable the materials are locked in your OpenCable receiver and can only be transfered to other DRMed devices if the broadcaster specifically allows it.
This bill looks like it would bar the FCC from doing the only good thing it does do, promulgate technical standards. It would basically religate the FCC to enforcing government mandated censorship and to enforcing technical standards directly dictated by congress, i.e. laws written by companies that write the largest checks to legislators and their families. If get the FCC out of the business regulation business, it would be much more wise to have it give up it's monopoly regulation powers and hand those over to the FTC. The FTC could apply the same standards to telecommunications as it does to other industries and could be more effective without getting into nitti-gritty regulation of specific fees, etc. It could simply bar a cable company that used anti-competitive tactics from selling any content over their pipes, or prevent a content company from owning any cable in the ground.
If you want to pass a simple law that makes any future broadcast flag moot, pass a law that removes copyright protection* from any work where the a paying customer can not easily remove DRM from media without paying an additional fee. You would quickly see content producers begin to police the broadcasters to prevent them from implementing any unworkable and expensive "content protection" schemes. The broadcasters would instead do something smarter like embedding your subscriber ID in the file when it exits the CAM so that any bit-perfect or even decent looking copy could be traced back to the subscriber who originally lost control of it.
+As a guy with a liberterian bent I have no problem with allowing DRM without restriction when dealing with non-government protected creative works in a competitive landscape.
*Copyright protection is a very non-liberterian form of restriction on property that prevents you from improving your property once it begins to look like something someone else did in the last 150 years or so. We accept this restriction on our liberty because the term of the restriction is short and it presumably encourages the distibution of new ideas into the public domain. When DRM prevents the entry of a work into the public domain this alone makes copy rights on works "protected" in this manner troublesome. Combine that with the current term of copyright, which has actually lengthened in these last two hundred years instead of shortening as the means of distribution became cheaper, and extending any copyright protection to a DRMed work in this day and age is downright immoral.
The Constitution says "for limited time." That means that some sort of copyright expiration means is necessary in DRM, so that after the copyright expiration the medium becomes free and unencumbered - public domain. AFAIK there is NO expiration mechanism whatsoever in current DRM, therefore it violates the letter and spirit of the Constitution.
There is a very simple solution for this. We simply need to make it legal to break DRM schemes, and we need to pass a second law that says that copyrighted or patented works may not be transmitted or stored in an encrypted form once published. Then a publisher must choose whether to accept copyright protection for their work or use a DRM scheme of some sort to protect their work. If they choose to use a DRM scheme then they can force additional restrictions on the user of the work but can not sue anyone else that distibutes the work, if they choose copyright then they a legal monopoly to distrubute the work so retain the ability to sue anyone that distributes a copy of the copyrighted work.
I would also like to shorten copyright to something on the order of an initial 5 years; with an optional extension for an additional 5 years for $100,000 adjusted for inflation/deflation, but only if the author is still alive and wants to extend the copyright. It should also be illegal to force an author to extend their copyright under any contract; that should prevent the copyright holder from some of the abuse they are known to subject authors too. But I see this as a completely seperate issue from the DRM problem. Solving the copyright length issue will require negotiating international treaties, eliminating copyright protection from DRM works could be done in an hour by a vote of congress and a signature from the President.
Back in high school I attended a talk by Admiral Hopper where she passed around a wire about 30 centimeters long and explained to us "this is how far light, or any electromagnetic signal, can travel in one nanosecond." That illustration has always stayed with me, it helps to explain a lot of the limitations inherent in hardware now that CPU speeds have become so fast.
:)
Through a vacum!
When traveling through a media like copper or silicon you can only reach about 2/3 of that speed.
Although I guess the point is the same. Light travels much more slowly than you might assume after watching all those hyperbolic PBS specials on Einstein.
Evidence ? Because none of the links I discovered (including court documents) - nor my memory from when it was actually happening - support your assertion.
/* /*/* /*/*/*"
Do you have a DOS 6.2 around the matching Windows 3.xx? Start with "grep Stac
DOS 6.22 won't work.. it was "cleansed". The patent suit allowed Stac to prevent MS-DOS from being distributed to the public until the problem was addressed.
I believe the string in win.exe was an error message; it was all over the internet at the time, but I just tried google and can't find it now. The web just starting back when this story was current so I'm not so surprised by this. Maybe you can find more info in a Nexis search...
You might also want to read Andrew Schulman's article in Dr Dobbs, May 1994...
BTW I'm not sure why you are still interested in this case, Microsoft has committed much worse offences against our nation's economic health than the Stacker incident. It's also going to be difficult to research since people like me have forgotten the details. But if you want to research this it's best to just get your hands on the executables. You can then break up the stacker binaries into snippets and search for those snippets in the Microsoft binaries, you can also run a decompiler and repeat, which may find more matches. You can also interview the expert witnesses in the case, they probably have notes on the facts that didn't show up in the lawsuit and can now talk about it.
According to the information I can locate, it was a patent infringement case. I haven't seen anything reliable that talks about copying source code (which would be copyright infringement).
They were caught because of the copyright infringement, you could see the Stacker strings in the win.exe with a simple text search. But they blamed this on a rogue programmer and the law is unfortunately much stronger for the plaintif in a patent case than a copyright case. The rogue programmer theory is believable to me at least, they had poached some talent from Stacker for staggering $$$ and they were presumably under a lot of pressure to deliver, and Microsoft was late on it's release deadline. I could see this slipping past their code review process, whatever it was at the time. They've only been caught infringing on copyright a handful of times and AFAIK in all cases except for the Stacker incident they had either hired outside contractors to write the code, or they had bought another company and a programmer they didn't hire themselves was the culprit, or code they had licensed for a limited time was still in the codebase after the license expired. In a company as large as and as prominent a target as Microsoft they seem to have relatively few slipups wrt copyright infringement.
Patents are another matter, there isn't a human being over the age of five that hasn't violated a number of patents. Ghandi was right, all patents should go the way of the patent on table salt.
Stac were killed by plummeting storage prices. Why would any sane person want to use risky compression (especially the whole-volume-in-a-file approach that Stacker and Stacker-like used) when they could just buy a bigger drive.
For the same reason that 95% of my 1.5 Terrabytes of data is compressed maybe? Disks are cheaper than ever, but they are still slow. Processors are relatively fast and can decompress the data quickly.
Even the NTFS file compression in Windows (which is implemented far more intelligently and less kludgily) is rarely used. Why would you bother, when hard disks are so cheap ?
See above. I don't use Microsoft Windows, but my impression is that this is something you have to enable for each directory you want to compress. A smart implementation would figure out which files would benefit on the speed of access metric from compression and would compress those files as a low priority background process. Most of my data is in a data specific compressed format, those files would not benefit from compression, but raw pictures from my cameras would, as would wav files from my audio captures.. To address the multiplied data loss from a single (or multiple) block failure all you need to do is add some FEC w/reordering, this would make the compressed files more reliable than the uncompressed ones.
[...] outright theft (see Stac), [...]
Since when is a patent violation "theft" ?
Besides, I thought we'd all agreed that software patents were bad, mmkay ?
It was the clear copyright infingement that riled most people.
Microsoft copy-n-pasted the code!
Also, it was a depressing to see how badly our legal system handled the infraction, Stac was killed causing everyone there to lose their jobs and breaking up a good development team. The only relief was a few hundred million dollars for the investors in the company, much of which went to their lawyers. Stac probably would have become a multi-billion dollar company and today we might all have faster disk access through a clever mix of compression and better filesystems.
Of course copyright infringement isn't theft either. Stac might have survived if the management had thought more about keeping the operation going than worrying about the Microsoft lawsuit. They could have handed over the lawsuit handling to a few trusted people and gotten a good cash infusion down the road to help launch a future product. Instead news reports at the time indicated that they freaked out and then missplaced their business thinking caps.
This is why absentee ballots are always counted after regular votes are counted.
This is not the case in Ohio. The absentees were counted first. In order to prevent people voting again at the polls, the pollbook indicates that the person should vote with a provisional ballot if they ordered an absentee.
Ohio elections are run by idiots of the highest idiocy.
PS If they are not idiots, they are intentionally opposed to a democratic form of government. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here, which they may not deserve considering the dirty tricks they've used to prevent eligable voters from voting.
PS2 The landslide for Democrats in Ohio yesterday could mean electoral reform in Ohio, but only if Ohio's citizens insist on it. Democrats in New York City "reformed" away second and third parties so that they now hold almost every seat in the city legislature. If Ohio's citizens don't insist on really fixing the electoral system there the Democratic Party will just subvert the pro-Republican bias in the electoral system to be a pro-Democratic bias and won't actually fix serious systems problems like this absentee voting system designed to facilitate vote buying and voter intimidation.
Vote By Mail as practiced in Oregon is open to vote buying and voter intimidation.
I personally think the federal government should step in and remove all the canditates voted in (and overturn all the laws passed) since Vote By Mail was initiated in Oregon, under it's powers to ensure a democratic form of government in each state of the union.
Unlike absentee ballots Vote By Mail ballots are not invalidated by a vote on election day but are in leu of a real vote and so it does not have the same protection against vote buying as absentee ballots in other states do (where you can always sell your absentee and then override that ballot with a vote on election day.)
Everyone I talked to today noticed there were no exit pollsters this time. Last election most everyone complained about noticing a huge number of exit poll people outside the polling place asking everyone who they voted for...
Nothing this year.... were they banned?
They were not banned, exit polsters are essential to keep elections honest, but by necessity they strike randomly. You were just lucky/unlucky last time, 99% of precincts in any given election don't have exit pollsters, it was just your time last time. When they do strike they try very hard to get every X'th person exiting the polling place for the entire day so that they don't bias the sample by time of day. They may also even track how cooperative you are so they can balance the sample (cooperative people count less since they are more likely to cooperate so you get more responses).
As someone who basically agrees with you, something has been bothering me. How is this different from absentee ballots? Sure, you have to sign the back of the envelope, but can't he be with you watching to make sure you vote the "right" way?
Absentee ballots are problematic for this reason, but you can always go to your polling place on election day and vote a completely different ballot. This breaks down if a poll worker or election official is crooked or incompetent and lets anyone other than the people who see you go into the polling place know that you voted at your polling place (and hence overriding the potentially suspect absentee ballot).
Note: If you have ever voted absentee you probably got a set of envelopes and the outermost one had just your name on it, and the innermost one contained no identifying information. The outer envelope allows the vote counters to discard your absenteee ballot if your absentee ballot is invalidated, either because you voted at your polling place or for some other reason, the inner envelope without identifying information allows for an anonymous absentee ballot because it is placed in a ballot box with other ballots and mixed before counting. This is why absentee ballots are always counted after regular votes are counted.
Hypothetical situation: let's say it came to light that the 2000 presidential election (I don't think there were any electronic machines used in that one, but if there were, let's pretend that wasn't the case) was indeed rigged. Enough paper ballots were replaced to give Bush a slim lead (oh, 50K or whatever makes sense). Now what did that involve?
Not so hypothetical, how do you think Gore got those -50K votes in one Florida district?
Electronic tabulator...
Of course, he was a total idiot to conceed the election before reviewing the numbers, negative voting totals are always suspect... This was corrected because it was so obviously wrong, and because there was a paper record to correct it with. The Florida legislature has decided that in future cases like this the paper record must be ignored.
Face it, it's not foolproof. "Security through difficulty" is just as bad as "security through obscurity".
Paper ballots are not just "security through difficulty", though if you think about it this is how banks protect gold and cash. They are also have security through auditability. This means you can detect a set of suspect election ballots:
ballot box goes out of public view before/during counting = possible ballots tampering
two marks, one for each of the two canditates = possibly spoiled after voting
the X's have the same handwriting on many ballots = possible multiple voting
Even if you can't determine the true intent of the voters in this case you can at least hold a new election in most cases, or in the case of a presidential election the state legislature can decide what electors to send to the electoral college.
With electronic voting machines which print a voter verified ballot, your only recourse to prevent ballot tampering is to watch that LEXAN(tm) ballot box like a hawk until the votes have been manually counted.
If the districts converting to electronic voting machines swore upon pain of death to protect that ballot box and count the votes printed out from the machines in full public view in the place of voting they might be almost as secure as paper ballots, except for being more suseptiple to local vote manipulation (which isn't a huge concern.) But this is not what these districts are doing, they are just going by what the computer tells them, and either not printing real auditable votes, or putting them in a locked box which goes out of public view before it is counted. In the last election plastic twist ties, the same brand and model as sold as the local hardware store, were used as the "seals" in my district. This is simply unacceptable.
Thankfully, I won't need their permission to give up my America citizenship. Actually, screw that. This is _our_ country, not theirs.
Actually... If you are in another country and want to renounce your US citizenship you need to visit the US Embassy and do it in person. This gives the bastards a chance to arrest you and ship you off to whatever secret prison or concentration camp they desire. If you don't renounce your citizenship and make any money in your country of refuge you still need to pay US taxes.
The revolution is happening _now_ folks.
Umm no, and it will get a lot worse before it gets any better. Think 1940's with nukes.
-- Daniel
And you are an idiot. The copyright laws certainly cover copying, that's why they are called COPYright laws. The act of downloading and running the program is COPYING.
You are an ignoramous. The copyright laws certainly cover copying, that's why they explicitly tell you that running a program or copying in other ways required for running it are not infringement.
This language dates from the 1980's because some software companies worried that if they copyrighted their software they would need a signed contract for every sale. They need not have worried because running the program was already covered under fair-use, which is another large portion of US law you should familiarize yourself with.
In they 1990's Congress added provisions to the code allowing you to transfer your music onto CD's and tapes. (And added a tax on music handling hardware and media which goes directly to the major labels.)
It's not just the sheer number of FP calculations that can be the problem. Once you get away from the first (or perhaps even second) level of rays, you end up losing coherence between neighbouring rays which causes memory page/cache thrashing. This is not a nice thing on a GPU.
Yep and you only get 100 million rays per second on a P4@3Ghz when you do four at a time (and the scene is relatively simple, this would be better stated as 200 million intersections). As soon as you lose coherence you drop to as little as 25 million rays per second. And the 100 number is probably using a binary subdivision of space, something like a kd-tree, for a GPU you would want grids as an acceleration structure, this means you need to do a lot more intersections.
But grids is it actually where it gets interesting, it means losing ray packet coherence is not such a big deal. You just do more intersections on a single ray, instead of intersecting one triangle with multiple rays...
Note: I didn't read the article, but I wrote a fast SIMD raytracer a few years ago.
lol - are you kidding me? This post gets modded "Informative", yet my reply (with the actual facts) gets modded "Overrated"? Not sure if someone defaced the Wikipedia article everybody got this misinformation from, but CRTs televisions cannot display 1080p (1920x1080), period. Go look it up somewhere else.
Hey kid, I threw away a monitor capable of twice that resolution last year. And I bought that monitor used for less than $250 (and have had similar monitors for years, Sony made the CRT, and various companies sold the monitors). I replaced it with a couple crappy 1920x1200 LCDs because I needed more room on my desk, not because there was any problem with the resolution. The LCDs are a pain because they are so blurry in comparison, and the color rendition is horrible (esp for the shaddows in movies). But for space they can't be beat.
Not that I recommend Plasma's over LCDs in most applications. In general the color rendition is better with Plasma's, but they consume too much power and suffer from burn-in. Plus dollar-per-pixel LCDs are cheaper. If you really care about picture quality you go with a 3 chip DLP projector in a darkened room, if you need it to work in a sunny room you go with a Plasma, otherwise you go with an LCD.
Back to reality, of course I know that what Bush and "his whitehouse" does will reflect heavily on the Republican party. But that doesn't mean that it should.
Yes is should.
If they support that criminal and have the gall to run, they have no moral compass.
The Congress has failed to impeach "the president" and try him for his crimes. Since the "Republicans" are in charge of both houses, any congress critter who has not left the party has implicitly endorsed this inaction and should be fired. Any "Democrat" who has supported the "Republicans", aka Hillary, should be fired. It is as simple as that. If any "Republican" doesn't want to be held responsible for the actions of their leaders should quit the party, and "Democrat" who wants to backpedal on their support for these criminals in power is shit out of luck.
BTW1 I sent in my change of party form last year to leave the Repulicrat party and the change won't be effective until next year. It has not endeared me to the Party that they prevent me from leaving.
BTW2 Yes I'm pissed.