should read: -Voting machine does nothing becuase its only as smart as its programmers.
Sure, it's easy to blame the user. How many times have YOU, a geek, used a brand-new computer program and gotten it to do EXACTLY what you wanted, first time out? Surely not 100%.
Now ask yourself what Grandma's success rate will be? And remember there are no do-overs, since you only get one shot at voting.
This whole thing is a complete fiasco. We should go back to marking a piece of paper with a pen, putting the piece of paper in a box, and counting them up. It's harder (more time consuming, more physical evidence to hide) to destroy an entire box of ballots than it is to type format c:/y
At the time that our solar system is greatly developed and colonized, you will find that the Luna (our moon) has become a major transport hub, and that the Earth is a very lush residential garden planet.
Isn't the earth already a very lush residential garden planet???
I mean, what exactly about space exploration is going to make the earth better than it is now? Only a tiny tiny percentage of the population will be able to afford to leave Earth. I tend to think Earth will slowly become yuckier and yuckier, to the point that we've soiled our nest so completely that we have to find a new home.
Then again, people like me haven't forgotten about France and those F-111s bombing Tripoli and overflight rights...
I remember that too.
I also remember learning after the fact that it was Syria that bombed the nightclub in Germany, not Libya. So France may have had a point.
being called imperialists for wanting to fix a problem that cost us 2500 or so of our fellow citizens in one day
It's the way we're trying (have always tried, as we did with Libya) to fix the problem. Most recently, convincing Congress (but not the world) that we needed to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, on the false assertion that they were going to give us another 9/11, only this time with nuclear weapons that could be set up and launched at the east coast in 45 minutes. Then establishing a puppet regime in Iraq. How this strikes you as anything other than "Imperial" I would love to know.
Remember how Iraq presented an imminent danger to U.S. interests in the region? Remember how easy the invasion was? It doesn't add up.
By the way, 2500 citizens is a drop in the proverbial bucket. We lose orders of magnitude more to drunk driving, secondhand smoke, fatty foods, you name it. The very simple solution to 9/11-type attacks already exists, as demonstrated on 9/11 by the passengers of UAL Flight 93.
Only when you can look past the gang colors of the American Flag will other human beings interact with you based on anything other than fear. We're all human, and killing X number of people because they killed Y number of people will just lead to more dead people, over and over again. Current U.S. foreign policy with regards to 9/11 amounts to a drive-by on an opposing gang members house, with plenty of stray bullets to go around, and sometimes we hit the wrong address.
I wouldn't say that Dell specialized in it, but their machines are pretty damn quiet.
If you really want silence, check out this article: http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-118-6.h tm And if you don't want to build that yourself, have your local mom and pop computer shop order that stuff and put it together for you.
there's plenty of info on the web if you want to roll your own. Zalman for instance specializes in making low noise components like heat sinks for CPUs, north bridge, etc.
This came up at work. What happens if: You send out a contract as a Word doc email attachment. Customer changes the language of the contract, signs it, prints it, then mails it back. We could easily sign that without noticing the difference.
We decided to send out digitally signed PDFs instead.
There was a great article on BuzzFlash about just this. Bush's cowboy image is popular with an entire swath of America (the red states I think) who are fed up with "liberals", political correctness, welfare, and so on.
In other words, there are plenty of "bruised egos" in the hinterlands of America. Males whose traditional place at the head of the family has been eroded, as their jobs earn them less, and their wives have to go off to work. They aren't as powerful as they once were, and they resent it. Their daily dose of Rush and their local news have convinced them that trial lawyers, Hollywood, and Hillary Clinton are the reason for their malaise. It's not true, but it sure plays in Peoria.
There are more similarities than I would like there to be between the Third Reich and Bush. The Nazi seizure of power was legal, as is PATRIOT. That blank check that Congress signed for the "War on Terror" isn't looking too good either.
A little thingamabob that plays MP3s and you put your compactflash or smartmedia or what have you card into it. Esp. now that I can get a 1GB cf.
Just gimme a little mp3 player and a aaa battery. That's all I want. It doesn't need built in storage.
I'll pay seventy, tops. And that really seems like too much.
How many chips do you need? Something to access the memory. Something to decode a MP3. A little amplifier. A little power supply, and a small lcd readout and a few buttons, one of which must be shuffle.
I can't get all that for fifty bucks? I would think Sony would be churning these bad boys out day and night.
Here it's practically a stoning offense to say the following:
Without a state income tax, the state coffers will slowly but surely run dry.
Everybody knows we need a state income tax. No elected official can ever say that we do, or they will surely be voted out. The result is, things will have to get a LOT worse before they get better.
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 1
You have to spell it "nigga" if you don't want to get in trouble. Interestingly I'm reading a chronicle of life in the 'hood called "Do or Die" (isbn 0-06-092291-5) which was published in 1991, before the phonetic spelling nigga came along. It's really odd to read all these gangsters saying nigger instead of the now accepted alternate spelling.
The really weak extension of this is online, where people type "ghey" because they want to use the word "gay" meaning lame, sucky, etc. but they don't want to offend any gay people. People who do that are gay.
No no no. Nudity does not harm children. No credible psychologist or behavioral expert or what have you believes this. Babies suck on titties for christ's sake, and it's completely natural. To a certain extent, though, wearing clothes is pretty much required to fit in with society, kinda like potty training.
The reason that nudity is kept off of TV is because in our culture, we use sex to sell. If nudity were less taboo, and the things that naked people did became less taboo, these ads would lose their punch.
The other thing that sells is fear; fear actually creates consumer want -- as in, we're all going to die so I'll go ahead and get into unsurmountable debt if it means I get to enjoy life while I can.
Breast cancer is the wet dream of Madison Avenue; it's got both sex and fear all rolled up into one (well, two) little packages. Look how many breast cancer specials there are during sweeps (when the networks compete for highest viewer count.)
Seriously, watch the news. The stories are there to make you afraid or to tittilate (sp?). The prodcuts advertised during the news provide the means for security and companionship. It's basic psychology, discovered around a hundred years ago and perfected during/after WWII, when all those propaganda big brains went to work for advertising agencies.
Shaving and deodorant ads are my personal favorite. I'm a big fan on crotch shots too; they turn up in the strangest places, like that one super bowl ad from 2000 that had a 14-year old girl walking over the camera wearing khaki shorts. The ad was for a financial services company.
I don't think it's because NASA missions are boring that they're not funded. It's because everything that isn't military has a hard time getting funding in America.
Your SMTP server gets a piece of mail. It notes the IP address and the mail-from header.
Your SMTP server does a lookup. Does the mail-from domain correspond to the IP address that said HELO? This gives you a hunch whether or not a message is fake.
Next, your SMTP server tries to open a connection to the IP that said HELO and tries to send a message to the address in mail-from. If it gets "no such recipient" then assume the message is spam.
It would use more bandwidth, opening all those sessions to see if recipients actually exists, but once you've done it once the resuslts can be put in a lookup table. Whitelists and blacklists would be created. Bandwidth cost would be high at first, but as more IPs are logged, and mail-from rcpt-to pairs are sorted, the cost would decrease.
All Tort Reform is going to do is make it a meaningless gesture for little guys to sue big guys. When the maximum penalty for wrongdoing sits at $250,000, large companies will knowingly and with malice aforethought do wrong, because they can afford the penalty.
Tort reform isn't even a double-edged sword. The corporate side retains its edge; the common man gets a dulled-down second-rate imstrument. Tort reform will remove the one redress which keeps corporate goons from knowingly providing shoddy services.
One year is not enough. Look back at the last ten
on
The Year In Tech Law
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's going to be even more disturbing when we all wake up and find that none of us have "root" access on our computers anymore. All our packets on the Internet are going to be authenticated and cryptographically "secured" (i.e. "secured" from US), and the content publishers and distributors will hold all the keys.
I don't know diddly about crypto... but what you've described is exactly why Hollywood wanted CSS.
If Xing had protected their key better, we might still be trying to crack DVDs. (I'm not really sure how strong CSS is.) But take note of the approach -- a combination of leveraged industrial power, tech, and legislation. I think we'll be seeing this hybrid approach more and more. Try to lock 'em out, and if(when) the hackers find a way in, make sure the path they took was an illegal one, and a federal case to boot.
To wit: "Content providers" believe that when you skip commercials in TiVo, you're "stealing" from the networks. New TiVo's don't have this feature. (Or maybe it's ReplayTV, I'm a bit ignorant since I barely watch TV.) When you decipher Adobe's eBook, you go to jail for a few months -- the Sklyarov case being the equivalent of the Feds dipping their toes in the hot tub. Linking is looking less and less like protected speech. Jon Johansen gets retried for DeCSS. Microsoft rams Product Activation down our throat, and Windows XP loves to phone home.
While everyone's caught up looking at the trees, here's what's happening in the forest: We're inching ever towards limiting the common man's access to "intellectual property" (whatever that is). In doing so we're walking away from the past five hundred years of intellectual freedom brought about by Johannes Gutenberg and Martin Luther.
This is a huge, gigantic assault on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, on which (to some extent) our country was founded and our Constitution based. Yet my impression is that most comptuer geeks only see the tip of the iceberg --e.g. "I can't legally play my DVDs on Linux" or "ROT13! WTF J00 AD0B3 LAM3RZ!" The strongest fight is coming from librarians. I think librarians are the only ones to realize that, were libraries to be invented today, they would promptly be sued out of existence by the RIAA for illegal filesharing.
Though I think the librarians missed the obvious solutions when faced with CIPA and COPA: Deny Internet access to minors, and let adults surf unfettered. Let's see how Mommy and Daddy respond to that.
Hey, maybe somebody knows, is there any MP3 players that can read compactflash?
The only one I've seen is the Frontier Labs Nex products, which is crippled with a horrible name and it's kinda chunky looking, and it seems too big. Ideally what I'd want is a tiny-sized MP3 player that can hold the same compactflash memory card I use in my digital camera. Though I could live with it being slightly larger to accomodate a MicroDrive, I really don't consider this a necessity. You can get 1GB compactflash these days, and the no-moving-parts solution really seems the way to go.
I guess I don't see what's so great about MicroDrive. If it had 100x the capacity of CompactFlash, that would be one thing. But it has maybe 4x the capacity. As both those numbers are bound to go up, 4x doesn't seem compelling to add moving parts to the system. Plus it uses 3x more power and takes up 2x the room. I'm not seeing the value of Microdrive here. Though, if I already had one for my camera, I would think it's great.
the statistics do support the assertion that the most dangerous time for a male (not sure if theres a race dependency) is his 18th year. And if he makes it to 30, he will most likely make it to 60.
Two days? Come to your senses man, we're almost two months late!
(Dec 18 = Oct 22)
Re:Larry Wall's first mention of Perl on Usenet
on
Perl is Sweet Sixteen
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· Score: 1
the really interesting thing about that quote is that he was basically evangelizing free software (free software as in Larry Wall "gets it") 16 years ago. it's like the yin to moore's law's yang.
Slashdot Mirror
should read:
/y
-Voting machine does nothing becuase its only as smart as its programmers.
Sure, it's easy to blame the user. How many times have YOU, a geek, used a brand-new computer program and gotten it to do EXACTLY what you wanted, first time out? Surely not 100%.
Now ask yourself what Grandma's success rate will be? And remember there are no do-overs, since you only get one shot at voting.
This whole thing is a complete fiasco. We should go back to marking a piece of paper with a pen, putting the piece of paper in a box, and counting them up. It's harder (more time consuming, more physical evidence to hide) to destroy an entire box of ballots than it is to type format c:
At the time that our solar system is greatly developed and colonized, you will find that the Luna (our moon) has become a major transport hub, and that the Earth is a very lush residential garden planet.
Isn't the earth already a very lush residential garden planet???
I mean, what exactly about space exploration is going to make the earth better than it is now? Only a tiny tiny percentage of the population will be able to afford to leave Earth. I tend to think Earth will slowly become yuckier and yuckier, to the point that we've soiled our nest so completely that we have to find a new home.
It's pretty common in the porno biz for actors to sign these sorts of exclusive studio contracts. For example, to be in 12 Vivid films in 2 years.
Then again, people like me haven't forgotten about France and those F-111s bombing Tripoli and overflight rights...
I remember that too.
I also remember learning after the fact that it was Syria that bombed the nightclub in Germany, not Libya. So France may have had a point.
being called imperialists for wanting to fix a problem that cost us 2500 or so of our fellow citizens in one day
It's the way we're trying (have always tried, as we did with Libya) to fix the problem. Most recently, convincing Congress (but not the world) that we needed to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, on the false assertion that they were going to give us another 9/11, only this time with nuclear weapons that could be set up and launched at the east coast in 45 minutes. Then establishing a puppet regime in Iraq. How this strikes you as anything other than "Imperial" I would love to know.
Remember how Iraq presented an imminent danger to U.S. interests in the region? Remember how easy the invasion was? It doesn't add up.
By the way, 2500 citizens is a drop in the proverbial bucket. We lose orders of magnitude more to drunk driving, secondhand smoke, fatty foods, you name it. The very simple solution to 9/11-type attacks already exists, as demonstrated on 9/11 by the passengers of UAL Flight 93.
Only when you can look past the gang colors of the American Flag will other human beings interact with you based on anything other than fear. We're all human, and killing X number of people because they killed Y number of people will just lead to more dead people, over and over again. Current U.S. foreign policy with regards to 9/11 amounts to a drive-by on an opposing gang members house, with plenty of stray bullets to go around, and sometimes we hit the wrong address.
Isn't that off the "Tunnel Under Troubled Water" album?
I wouldn't say that Dell specialized in it, but their machines are pretty damn quiet.
h tm
If you really want silence, check out this article: http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-118-6.
And if you don't want to build that yourself, have your local mom and pop computer shop order that stuff and put it together for you.
there's plenty of info on the web if you want to roll your own. Zalman for instance specializes in making low noise components like heat sinks for CPUs, north bridge, etc.
This came up at work. What happens if: You send out a contract as a Word doc email attachment. Customer changes the language of the contract, signs it, prints it, then mails it back. We could easily sign that without noticing the difference.
We decided to send out digitally signed PDFs instead.
There was a great article on BuzzFlash about just this. Bush's cowboy image is popular with an entire swath of America (the red states I think) who are fed up with "liberals", political correctness, welfare, and so on.
In other words, there are plenty of "bruised egos" in the hinterlands of America. Males whose traditional place at the head of the family has been eroded, as their jobs earn them less, and their wives have to go off to work. They aren't as powerful as they once were, and they resent it. Their daily dose of Rush and their local news have convinced them that trial lawyers, Hollywood, and Hillary Clinton are the reason for their malaise. It's not true, but it sure plays in Peoria.
There are more similarities than I would like there to be between the Third Reich and Bush. The Nazi seizure of power was legal, as is PATRIOT. That blank check that Congress signed for the "War on Terror" isn't looking too good either.
Buzzflash article here
Forget a hundred bucks. Sell me this for 50:
A little thingamabob that plays MP3s and you put your compactflash or smartmedia or what have you card into it. Esp. now that I can get a 1GB cf.
Just gimme a little mp3 player and a aaa battery. That's all I want. It doesn't need built in storage.
I'll pay seventy, tops. And that really seems like too much.
How many chips do you need? Something to access the memory. Something to decode a MP3. A little amplifier. A little power supply, and a small lcd readout and a few buttons, one of which must be shuffle.
I can't get all that for fifty bucks? I would think Sony would be churning these bad boys out day and night.
And why do they let transsexual, uh, women who used to be men, compete in women's events?
Here it's practically a stoning offense to say the following:
Without a state income tax, the state coffers will slowly but surely run dry.
Everybody knows we need a state income tax. No elected official can ever say that we do, or they will surely be voted out. The result is, things will have to get a LOT worse before they get better.
You have to spell it "nigga" if you don't want to get in trouble. Interestingly I'm reading a chronicle of life in the 'hood called "Do or Die" (isbn 0-06-092291-5) which was published in 1991, before the phonetic spelling nigga came along. It's really odd to read all these gangsters saying nigger instead of the now accepted alternate spelling.
The really weak extension of this is online, where people type "ghey" because they want to use the word "gay" meaning lame, sucky, etc. but they don't want to offend any gay people. People who do that are gay.
seem to believe that nudity harms children.
No no no. Nudity does not harm children. No credible psychologist or behavioral expert or what have you believes this. Babies suck on titties for christ's sake, and it's completely natural. To a certain extent, though, wearing clothes is pretty much required to fit in with society, kinda like potty training.
The reason that nudity is kept off of TV is because in our culture, we use sex to sell. If nudity were less taboo, and the things that naked people did became less taboo, these ads would lose their punch.
The other thing that sells is fear; fear actually creates consumer want -- as in, we're all going to die so I'll go ahead and get into unsurmountable debt if it means I get to enjoy life while I can.
Breast cancer is the wet dream of Madison Avenue; it's got both sex and fear all rolled up into one (well, two) little packages. Look how many breast cancer specials there are during sweeps (when the networks compete for highest viewer count.)
Seriously, watch the news. The stories are there to make you afraid or to tittilate (sp?). The prodcuts advertised during the news provide the means for security and companionship. It's basic psychology, discovered around a hundred years ago and perfected during/after WWII, when all those propaganda big brains went to work for advertising agencies.
Shaving and deodorant ads are my personal favorite. I'm a big fan on crotch shots too; they turn up in the strangest places, like that one super bowl ad from 2000 that had a 14-year old girl walking over the camera wearing khaki shorts. The ad was for a financial services company.
I don't think it's because NASA missions are boring that they're not funded. It's because everything that isn't military has a hard time getting funding in America.
No, but if you know anyone who is pushing mushrooms, please send them my way. Those things aren't easy to find.
Here's what I'd like to see:
Your SMTP server gets a piece of mail. It notes the IP address and the mail-from header.
Your SMTP server does a lookup. Does the mail-from domain correspond to the IP address that said HELO? This gives you a hunch whether or not a message is fake.
Next, your SMTP server tries to open a connection to the IP that said HELO and tries to send a message to the address in mail-from. If it gets "no such recipient" then assume the message is spam.
It would use more bandwidth, opening all those sessions to see if recipients actually exists, but once you've done it once the resuslts can be put in a lookup table. Whitelists and blacklists would be created. Bandwidth cost would be high at first, but as more IPs are logged, and mail-from rcpt-to pairs are sorted, the cost would decrease.
Could such an approach work?
likewise, if you put the word SPAM in your real email address, you don't get much spam
And Tort Reform will fix this how?
All Tort Reform is going to do is make it a meaningless gesture for little guys to sue big guys. When the maximum penalty for wrongdoing sits at $250,000, large companies will knowingly and with malice aforethought do wrong, because they can afford the penalty.
Tort reform isn't even a double-edged sword. The corporate side retains its edge; the common man gets a dulled-down second-rate imstrument. Tort reform will remove the one redress which keeps corporate goons from knowingly providing shoddy services.
It's going to be even more disturbing when we all wake up and find that none of us have "root" access on our computers anymore. All our packets on the Internet are going to be authenticated and cryptographically "secured" (i.e. "secured" from US), and the content publishers and distributors will hold all the keys.
I don't know diddly about crypto... but what you've described is exactly why Hollywood wanted CSS.
If Xing had protected their key better, we might still be trying to crack DVDs. (I'm not really sure how strong CSS is.) But take note of the approach -- a combination of leveraged industrial power, tech, and legislation. I think we'll be seeing this hybrid approach more and more. Try to lock 'em out, and if(when) the hackers find a way in, make sure the path they took was an illegal one, and a federal case to boot.
To wit: "Content providers" believe that when you skip commercials in TiVo, you're "stealing" from the networks. New TiVo's don't have this feature. (Or maybe it's ReplayTV, I'm a bit ignorant since I barely watch TV.) When you decipher Adobe's eBook, you go to jail for a few months -- the Sklyarov case being the equivalent of the Feds dipping their toes in the hot tub. Linking is looking less and less like protected speech. Jon Johansen gets retried for DeCSS. Microsoft rams Product Activation down our throat, and Windows XP loves to phone home.
While everyone's caught up looking at the trees, here's what's happening in the forest: We're inching ever towards limiting the common man's access to "intellectual property" (whatever that is). In doing so we're walking away from the past five hundred years of intellectual freedom brought about by Johannes Gutenberg and Martin Luther.
This is a huge, gigantic assault on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, on which (to some extent) our country was founded and our Constitution based. Yet my impression is that most comptuer geeks only see the tip of the iceberg --e.g. "I can't legally play my DVDs on Linux" or "ROT13! WTF J00 AD0B3 LAM3RZ!" The strongest fight is coming from librarians. I think librarians are the only ones to realize that, were libraries to be invented today, they would promptly be sued out of existence by the RIAA for illegal filesharing.
Though I think the librarians missed the obvious solutions when faced with CIPA and COPA: Deny Internet access to minors, and let adults surf unfettered. Let's see how Mommy and Daddy respond to that.
Hey, maybe somebody knows, is there any MP3 players that can read compactflash?
The only one I've seen is the Frontier Labs Nex products, which is crippled with a horrible name and it's kinda chunky looking, and it seems too big. Ideally what I'd want is a tiny-sized MP3 player that can hold the same compactflash memory card I use in my digital camera. Though I could live with it being slightly larger to accomodate a MicroDrive, I really don't consider this a necessity. You can get 1GB compactflash these days, and the no-moving-parts solution really seems the way to go.
I guess I don't see what's so great about MicroDrive. If it had 100x the capacity of CompactFlash, that would be one thing. But it has maybe 4x the capacity. As both those numbers are bound to go up, 4x doesn't seem compelling to add moving parts to the system. Plus it uses 3x more power and takes up 2x the room. I'm not seeing the value of Microdrive here. Though, if I already had one for my camera, I would think it's great.
the statistics do support the assertion that the most dangerous time for a male (not sure if theres a race dependency) is his 18th year. And if he makes it to 30, he will most likely make it to 60.
Judging by your sig, I assume that you're an asshole.
Happy Holidays!
PS this is supposed to be funny.
Perl turned 16 2 days ago, on Dec. 18th.
Happy belated birthday, anyway.
Two days? Come to your senses man, we're almost two months late!
(Dec 18 = Oct 22)
the really interesting thing about that quote is that he was basically evangelizing free software (free software as in Larry Wall "gets it") 16 years ago. it's like the yin to moore's law's yang.
Fuck Bill Clinton and his middle-of the road Moderate Republican tendencies.
What we need is a real progressive. Think of how many jobs will be created in the US if we switch to the metric system!!!