Someone holding a gun to your head as you vote is unlikely in the USA -- no one man can stop such incidents from being investigated, so anyone using such tactics would soon be impeached or indicted. In some other countries, it happens every election -- the Army's out there guarding the polls, and somehow the candidate endorsed by the Army always wins... And the Nazis in Germany and Fascists in Italy used intimidation by street thugs as a campaign tactic -- but I think it was of candidates and newspaper editors, not of individual voters. I hope Americans wouldn't stand for that either.
But there is a considerable history in this country of vote-buying. In the 19th century, it was quite common in the big cities for campaign workers to hand out ballots already filled in, along with a beer -- and a promise of cash after you went and turned in that form. Or maybe your boss would hand you a ballot already filled in... So reforms required that ballots come only from the supposedly neutral pollworkers, and be filled out at the polls, in secret. You could pay someone to vote for you, but you could not tell whether or not he had -- and you might get most of the people taking your money and voting against you because you were a worse crook than them...
So internet voting and absentee ballots both leave the door open for vote-buying, or for your boss to tell you how to vote if you want to keep your job. They also make the "vote early and often" type of fraud safer than if the crooks have to stand in line at each polling place. The difference is that absentee ballots are hard to get (except in Oregon). You've got to prove you really exist, that you have a reason you can't come to the polls, and in many states go through a bunch of mickey-mouse. People who can handle that are not going to be easy to buy or intimidate. But internet voting is (supposed to be) easy.
But it does not take hindsight to see that companies with no revenue and no coherent plan for collecting money from anywhere aren't a great investment...
kill 100% of it, and the insects as well Not likely. The dinosaur killer asteroid or comet was much bigger than the ones they are talking about steering with nukes, and plenty of species survived that. I'm sure humans would turn out to be more adaptable than alligators and insectivores.
In their simulation, the expected error was a few hundred miles. In other words, aim at England, hit France or Ireland. Mostly this is because you can't adjust the power of the steering nuke blasts -- it's like putting with hand-grenades. Get a better propulsion system and you should be able to get pinpoint accuracy -- but it might take a few practice shots to figure out how much atmospheric entry will deflect an asteroid of a given size and shape. NASA's first manned flights came down up to a hundred miles off target, and those capsules were far more steerable than a rock.
Think of it not as an apartment, but as a commercial building, which you have paid to remodel to fit your business... This is a slightly better analogy, because quite often the data you have accumulated in proprietary formats (.doc,.xls,...) is more valuable than the software you use to access it. But to make the analogy really complete -- you had all your furniture custom built to fit this one building, now they take it away from you, and they have the building design patented so you can't hire someone else to build one just like it.
Unfortunately, the UCC has been updated to take into account what the software companies want. It's called UCITA, and it takes real nerve for the authors of that to call other people "pirates". Fortunately, it's been rejected in most states where it came to a vote, but keep an eye on your legislature.
Unless THEY [M$] are the ones to go under.... While it is unlikely, it would be an interesting happenstance.
I can easily think of one scenario. The courts finally wake up and realize that software is a product, that it is sold to consumers like other products, and therefore that those clauses in the EULA's saying that they are not responsible for whether it works or not violate the UCC. Then everyone sues M$ for all the time and work lost in system crashes, and all the hours spent on hold to tech support and then re-installing Windoze because tech support doesn't know anything either ("incidental and consequential damages", and they can't be limited in the warranty on consumer products). Poof, M$ is the most bankrupt company in history. (Bill Gates' mansion is presumably not company property, unfortunately...)
I would recommend more than that: have the contract provide that a reliable third party hold copies of the source code (if you don't normally get it) and the technology to renew the keys. Then if the leasor goes under, you not only own the software, you have someplace you can go to get it. I'd say that any company that rents mission-critical software without clauses like this in the lease is living dangerously.
I have only one question. Why just rental software? I know of some DOS and Win 3.1 programs that are still useful but don't run on Win 98 or NT, and presumably won't run on anything MS will be supporting in a few years. You should be able to get the source code on software you bought when the vendor ceases to support it.
I don't believe it would be a good thing to pile on yet another law to deal with these situations. The best solution would be for the corporate bosses to extract their craniums from their rectums and realize that they need to insist on something like this in the contract before they buy or rent _any_ software, and tell M$ that they'll just have to use open source until they can get such contracts. But meanwhile, several changes to the copyright laws are in order: (1)A much shorter term for books, movies, and music, and a very much shorter term for software. (2)If you stop publishing it, you lose the copyright. (If you are worried about rights to derivative works, you can keep it in publication forever by just posting it on the web.) (3) To copyright software, you must put the complete source code on CD and file it at the Library of Congress. Once it becomes public domain, the source is available to the public.
[thin client] computing restricted to just the corporate setting.
Think of 5,000 employees coming in at 8:30 am, turning on the computer, and starting to download MS Word across the network. Two hours later, the boss starts to wonder why everyone is _still_ sitting around drinking coffee. "We're waiting for the computers to boot up." Or if by "thin client" you mean the software runs on the servers and they send screen-shots across the network several times a second, then you've invented a way to keep GHz ethernet overloaded all day.
True, it would be possible to write a good word processor that wouldn't hammer a 100MHz LAN. I used to write term papers in LeScript, on a TRS-80 Model I with 48K of RAM. I wouldn't want to go quite all the way back to that (monospaced font, and little choice of which font), but you could get the essential parts of a good word processor in less than 1/2 Meg, then download the extras later, only for the few people that use them. Don't expect to see that soon, because you could not get from MS Word or any other bloated product to there -- you would have to make a fresh start.
A more reasonable approach might be to use a "medium client." The desktops download the application once, then cache it on their local hard drives. Once a day, they check whether the cache is still current. It doesn't save on harware cost at all, but in theory the tech support guys never have to come back after installing the computer. But you either have to make all desktops identical, or make the programs handle all variations in hardware transparently. And I think then you are back to bloatware -- and unreliable bloatware, too.
It's been a long time since German 101, but here goes... "Der" implies the noun it is attached to is male. "Das" is neuter. "Der Wienerschnitzel" might seem rather crude to a German...
"Wiener" (pronounced "vee-ner") is the proper (German) word for "Viennese", and I'm pretty sure this is indeed what is meant. "ei" is pronounced rather like the English long "i", and I think you'd have noticed if your father pronounced it like "vhiner." And finally, I don't know if it's "sh" or "sch", but the latter is common in German.
And finally, German isn't just one language, but a collection of related languages. I've seen tourist guidebooks that were printed in three languages, and two of them were German. So a north German might disagree about a few details. I learned German from a Hungarian-American of Austrian descent -- so I hope he at least knew the dialect of Wiens (Vienna).
If you get into an accident, are injured or killed in a manner that wearing a seatbelt or motorcycle helmet would've prevented those injuries, and no third party is involved/negligent, you forfeit your right to sue.
And when your insurance runs out, the hospital doesn't arrange for the taxpayers to pick up the bill (medicaid or whatever), it just carries you out to the dumpster. Or maybe the ambulance crew should have checked whether your insurance covers injuries due to your own stupidity before they even picked you up. Sounds OK to me, but then I'm a hard-hearted libertarian nut-case. 8-)
Just in case it gets slashdotted, here is the critical section:
Legal protection of anti-copying devices and exceptions
This has been amongst the most political and controversial topics of the whole debate. The problem has been how to ensure that an exception e.g. an act of reproduction or copying for illustration for teaching can be made use of where a copyrightholder also has in place an anti-copying device e.g. a digital tracker designed to prevent piracy. Failure to address this would have meant that the exceptions could have been meaningless in some cases. Here too there has been a balanced compromise.
Firstly, rightholders have complete control over the manufacture, distribution etc. of devices designed to circumvent anti-copying devices. A more flexible solution in this regard would have carried a greater risk of abuse and piracy.
Secondly, the Directive provides that rightholders either voluntarily or by way of agreements with other parties have to provide those who would benefit from a particular exception e.g. schools, libraries in the case of teaching, with the means to do so. It will be up to Member States to ensure that such means exist.
However, as far as private copying is concerned, the quality and quantity of private copying and the growth of electronic commerce all mean that there should be greater protection for rightholders in digital recording media (whereby unlimited numbers of perfect copies may be made rapidly). In certain limited cases, where rightholders have made the means available, private copying may be carried out.
the section that's highlighted in the article here actually says that the copyright holder must make available some means of making legitimate copies [for 'fair use'] Someone mod that up, please -- this is a major point that sydb missed in his own links.
So the EU wants to make breaking someone else's encryption illegal, but require the vendors of encrypted material to supply the decryption for fair use. The devil is in the details (which certainly aren't in that article, and I don't think the Europoliticians who wrote it have any idea of the technical thicket they are heading into). Will the "means" be bundled with the product or otherwise readily available to everyone (e.g., cut-and-paste enabled for one page at a time), or will you have to fill out a ton of forms to prove you really are a teacher, satirist, reviewer, or whatever and have a need to clip out a particular section, and then wait six months until the corp gets around to processing your request. You all know which choice WeSaySo, Inc., would prefer... But will the legislators and courts require that they provide real access for fair use -- even if the technology means that any access is really total access?
They did have "reusable paper" in the dark ages. Most writing was done on parchment, which is a sort of leather. It was expensive enough that a good many warlords would have the lettering soaked and scraped off of books so as to re-use the parchment for their army payroll and tax records. Sometimes, monks of a later generation would try to recover the original text from the incomplete erasures...
In 10,000 years or so when people look back the 2001, they will know plenty. But only the important stuff. Depends on whether what they consider important is what the spin doctors persuaded the news media to publish, or what _really_ happened. If you want to know what really happened, you have to find records left by ordinary people.
On the other hand, I can think of several letters I wrote over the years that could possibly serve to keep my employer out of a product liability suit -- ones that said "We'll build it to your design if you insist, but it might be more reliable if it was changed..."
Of course, they'll be uncataloged and locked away in a gov't warehouse along with the Ark of the Covenant, the real investigation into the Kennedy assassination, and the records of which soldiers were deliberately exposed to atom bomb tests. 8-)
High quality paper only lasts 500 - 1000 years under the best storage conditions. (Cheap paper contains residual acid which destroys the paper in a few decades even under ideal conditions.) What we have of Roman and Greek literature, or of the Bible, is copies of copies, and sometimes not too accurate. Some messages engraved on stone have lasted over 5000 years -- but it's expensive and low capacity, and much has been destroyed by weathering, religious fanatics, and other vandals. Engrave it on gold and bury it and it will last forever -- unless it's dug up by barbarians that just melt it down...
The stamped CD's will probably outlast paper records, but are only good for large-volume publications, not for the actual records that most interest historians. CD-R/RW and similar dye-based disks, properly stored, are probably going to outlive the technology to read them, but they are less stable than good paper.
Generally, Asimov's robots weren't intelligent enough to get hung up on stuff like that. But he did a few stories with robots that had broken through to a sort of meta-level where they looked at the good of humanity as a whole...
There's a big difference between "create" and "invent." If I design a circuit board, and some originality is involved (not usually 8-), then I invented something. Meanwhile, on one line on the factory floor, about a dozen people and $2M in machines creates 800 circuit boards an hour...
Gore does have a habit of overstatement -- I guess he's trying to prove he really is a politician rather than a Mr. Rogers impersonator. 8-) But it's well attested that he really was the first Congressman to understand that the Arpanet could be more than a chat line for goverment scientists. And unless you are a knee-jerk conservative, I doubt that you can look up the whole story and then claim that Gore's overstatements are worse than every other politicians.
There were some really good reasons to vote against Gore, but the hoopla about "inventing the internet" certainly wasn't one.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone holding a gun to your head as you vote is unlikely in the USA -- no one man can stop such incidents from being investigated, so anyone using such tactics would soon be impeached or indicted. In some other countries, it happens every election -- the Army's out there guarding the polls, and somehow the candidate endorsed by the Army always wins... And the Nazis in Germany and Fascists in Italy used intimidation by street thugs as a campaign tactic -- but I think it was of candidates and newspaper editors, not of individual voters. I hope Americans wouldn't stand for that either.
But there is a considerable history in this country of vote-buying. In the 19th century, it was quite common in the big cities for campaign workers to hand out ballots already filled in, along with a beer -- and a promise of cash after you went and turned in that form. Or maybe your boss would hand you a ballot already filled in... So reforms required that ballots come only from the supposedly neutral pollworkers, and be filled out at the polls, in secret. You could pay someone to vote for you, but you could not tell whether or not he had -- and you might get most of the people taking your money and voting against you because you were a worse crook than them...
So internet voting and absentee ballots both leave the door open for vote-buying, or for your boss to tell you how to vote if you want to keep your job. They also make the "vote early and often" type of fraud safer than if the crooks have to stand in line at each polling place. The difference is that absentee ballots are hard to get (except in Oregon). You've got to prove you really exist, that you have a reason you can't come to the polls, and in many states go through a bunch of mickey-mouse. People who can handle that are not going to be easy to buy or intimidate. But internet voting is (supposed to be) easy.
But it does not take hindsight to see that companies with no revenue and no coherent plan for collecting money from anywhere aren't a great investment...
kill 100% of it, and the insects as well Not likely. The dinosaur killer asteroid or comet was much bigger than the ones they are talking about steering with nukes, and plenty of species survived that. I'm sure humans would turn out to be more adaptable than alligators and insectivores.
In their simulation, the expected error was a few hundred miles. In other words, aim at England, hit France or Ireland. Mostly this is because you can't adjust the power of the steering nuke blasts -- it's like putting with hand-grenades. Get a better propulsion system and you should be able to get pinpoint accuracy -- but it might take a few practice shots to figure out how much atmospheric entry will deflect an asteroid of a given size and shape. NASA's first manned flights came down up to a hundred miles off target, and those capsules were far more steerable than a rock.
Think of it not as an apartment, but as a commercial building, which you have paid to remodel to fit your business... This is a slightly better analogy, because quite often the data you have accumulated in proprietary formats (.doc, .xls,...) is more valuable than the software you use to access it. But to make the analogy really complete -- you had all your furniture custom built to fit this one building, now they take it away from you, and they have the building design patented so you can't hire someone else to build one just like it.
Unfortunately, the UCC has been updated to take into account what the software companies want. It's called UCITA, and it takes real nerve for the authors of that to call other people "pirates". Fortunately, it's been rejected in most states where it came to a vote, but keep an eye on your legislature.
Are you sure you can physically get your hands on the code if the supplier's offices are padlocked?
Unless THEY [M$] are the ones to go under.... While it is unlikely, it would be an interesting happenstance.
I can easily think of one scenario. The courts finally wake up and realize that software is a product, that it is sold to consumers like other products, and therefore that those clauses in the EULA's saying that they are not responsible for whether it works or not violate the UCC. Then everyone sues M$ for all the time and work lost in system crashes, and all the hours spent on hold to tech support and then re-installing Windoze because tech support doesn't know anything either ("incidental and consequential damages", and they can't be limited in the warranty on consumer products). Poof, M$ is the most bankrupt company in history. (Bill Gates' mansion is presumably not company property, unfortunately...)
I would recommend more than that: have the contract provide that a reliable third party hold copies of the source code (if you don't normally get it) and the technology to renew the keys. Then if the leasor goes under, you not only own the software, you have someplace you can go to get it. I'd say that any company that rents mission-critical software without clauses like this in the lease is living dangerously.
I have only one question. Why just rental software? I know of some DOS and Win 3.1 programs that are still useful but don't run on Win 98 or NT, and presumably won't run on anything MS will be supporting in a few years. You should be able to get the source code on software you bought when the vendor ceases to support it.
I don't believe it would be a good thing to pile on yet another law to deal with these situations. The best solution would be for the corporate bosses to extract their craniums from their rectums and realize that they need to insist on something like this in the contract before they buy or rent _any_ software, and tell M$ that they'll just have to use open source until they can get such contracts. But meanwhile, several changes to the copyright laws are in order: (1)A much shorter term for books, movies, and music, and a very much shorter term for software. (2)If you stop publishing it, you lose the copyright. (If you are worried about rights to derivative works, you can keep it in publication forever by just posting it on the web.) (3) To copyright software, you must put the complete source code on CD and file it at the Library of Congress. Once it becomes public domain, the source is available to the public.
[thin client] computing restricted to just the corporate setting.
Think of 5,000 employees coming in at 8:30 am, turning on the computer, and starting to download MS Word across the network. Two hours later, the boss starts to wonder why everyone is _still_ sitting around drinking coffee. "We're waiting for the computers to boot up." Or if by "thin client" you mean the software runs on the servers and they send screen-shots across the network several times a second, then you've invented a way to keep GHz ethernet overloaded all day.
True, it would be possible to write a good word processor that wouldn't hammer a 100MHz LAN. I used to write term papers in LeScript, on a TRS-80 Model I with 48K of RAM. I wouldn't want to go quite all the way back to that (monospaced font, and little choice of which font), but you could get the essential parts of a good word processor in less than 1/2 Meg, then download the extras later, only for the few people that use them. Don't expect to see that soon, because you could not get from MS Word or any other bloated product to there -- you would have to make a fresh start.
A more reasonable approach might be to use a "medium client." The desktops download the application once, then cache it on their local hard drives. Once a day, they check whether the cache is still current. It doesn't save on harware cost at all, but in theory the tech support guys never have to come back after installing the computer. But you either have to make all desktops identical, or make the programs handle all variations in hardware transparently. And I think then you are back to bloatware -- and unreliable bloatware, too.
It's been a long time since German 101, but here goes... "Der" implies the noun it is attached to is male. "Das" is neuter. "Der Wienerschnitzel" might seem rather crude to a German...
"Wiener" (pronounced "vee-ner") is the proper (German) word for "Viennese", and I'm pretty sure this is indeed what is meant. "ei" is pronounced rather like the English long "i", and I think you'd have noticed if your father pronounced it like "vhiner." And finally, I don't know if it's "sh" or "sch", but the latter is common in German.
And finally, German isn't just one language, but a collection of related languages. I've seen tourist guidebooks that were printed in three languages, and two of them were German. So a north German might disagree about a few details. I learned German from a Hungarian-American of Austrian descent -- so I hope he at least knew the dialect of Wiens (Vienna).
If you get into an accident, are injured or killed in a manner that wearing a seatbelt or motorcycle helmet would've prevented those injuries, and no third party is involved/negligent, you forfeit your right to sue.
And when your insurance runs out, the hospital doesn't arrange for the taxpayers to pick up the bill (medicaid or whatever), it just carries you out to the dumpster. Or maybe the ambulance crew should have checked whether your insurance covers injuries due to your own stupidity before they even picked you up. Sounds OK to me, but then I'm a hard-hearted libertarian nut-case. 8-)
Just in case it gets slashdotted, here is the critical section:
Legal protection of anti-copying devices and exceptions
This has been amongst the most political and controversial topics of the whole debate. The problem has been how to ensure that an exception e.g. an act of reproduction or copying for illustration for teaching can be made use of where a copyrightholder also has in place an anti-copying device e.g. a digital tracker designed to prevent piracy. Failure to address this would have meant that the exceptions could have been meaningless in some cases. Here too there has been a balanced compromise.
Firstly, rightholders have complete control over the manufacture, distribution etc. of devices designed to circumvent anti-copying devices. A more flexible solution in this regard would have carried a greater risk of abuse and piracy.
Secondly, the Directive provides that rightholders either voluntarily or by way of agreements with other parties have to provide those who would benefit from a particular exception e.g. schools, libraries in the case of teaching, with the means to do so. It will be up to Member States to ensure that such means exist. However, as far as private copying is concerned, the quality and quantity of private copying and the growth of electronic commerce all mean that there should be greater protection for rightholders in digital recording media (whereby unlimited numbers of perfect copies may be made rapidly). In certain limited cases, where rightholders have made the means available, private copying may be carried out.
the section that's highlighted in the article here actually says that the copyright holder must make available some means of making legitimate copies [for 'fair use'] Someone mod that up, please -- this is a major point that sydb missed in his own links.
So the EU wants to make breaking someone else's encryption illegal, but require the vendors of encrypted material to supply the decryption for fair use. The devil is in the details (which certainly aren't in that article, and I don't think the Europoliticians who wrote it have any idea of the technical thicket they are heading into). Will the "means" be bundled with the product or otherwise readily available to everyone (e.g., cut-and-paste enabled for one page at a time), or will you have to fill out a ton of forms to prove you really are a teacher, satirist, reviewer, or whatever and have a need to clip out a particular section, and then wait six months until the corp gets around to processing your request. You all know which choice WeSaySo, Inc., would prefer... But will the legislators and courts require that they provide real access for fair use -- even if the technology means that any access is really total access?
"Management technology": at last, a bigger oxymoron than "military intelligence"
And the old F-105 (I think) fighter was unaffectionately nicknamed the "Thud", and F-4 pilots claimed that was the sound it made hitting the ground...
They did have "reusable paper" in the dark ages. Most writing was done on parchment, which is a sort of leather. It was expensive enough that a good many warlords would have the lettering soaked and scraped off of books so as to re-use the parchment for their army payroll and tax records. Sometimes, monks of a later generation would try to recover the original text from the incomplete erasures...
In 10,000 years or so when people look back the 2001, they will know plenty. But only the important stuff. Depends on whether what they consider important is what the spin doctors persuaded the news media to publish, or what _really_ happened. If you want to know what really happened, you have to find records left by ordinary people.
On the other hand, I can think of several letters I wrote over the years that could possibly serve to keep my employer out of a product liability suit -- ones that said "We'll build it to your design if you insist, but it might be more reliable if it was changed..."
Of course, they'll be uncataloged and locked away in a gov't warehouse along with the Ark of the Covenant, the real investigation into the Kennedy assassination, and the records of which soldiers were deliberately exposed to atom bomb tests. 8-)
High quality paper only lasts 500 - 1000 years under the best storage conditions. (Cheap paper contains residual acid which destroys the paper in a few decades even under ideal conditions.) What we have of Roman and Greek literature, or of the Bible, is copies of copies, and sometimes not too accurate. Some messages engraved on stone have lasted over 5000 years -- but it's expensive and low capacity, and much has been destroyed by weathering, religious fanatics, and other vandals. Engrave it on gold and bury it and it will last forever -- unless it's dug up by barbarians that just melt it down...
The stamped CD's will probably outlast paper records, but are only good for large-volume publications, not for the actual records that most interest historians. CD-R/RW and similar dye-based disks, properly stored, are probably going to outlive the technology to read them, but they are less stable than good paper.
Generally, Asimov's robots weren't intelligent enough to get hung up on stuff like that. But he did a few stories with robots that had broken through to a sort of meta-level where they looked at the good of humanity as a whole...
And have the Chinese said that they're sorry about the incident?
There's no way that 4 engined prop plane _could_ run into a jet fighter.
There's a big difference between "create" and "invent." If I design a circuit board, and some originality is involved (not usually 8-), then I invented something. Meanwhile, on one line on the factory floor, about a dozen people and $2M in machines creates 800 circuit boards an hour...
Gore does have a habit of overstatement -- I guess he's trying to prove he really is a politician rather than a Mr. Rogers impersonator. 8-) But it's well attested that he really was the first Congressman to understand that the Arpanet could be more than a chat line for goverment scientists. And unless you are a knee-jerk conservative, I doubt that you can look up the whole story and then claim that Gore's overstatements are worse than every other politicians.
There were some really good reasons to vote against Gore, but the hoopla about "inventing the internet" certainly wasn't one.