Also maintainance of a vehicle is necissarry for the proper operation of a vehicle, and there is an established business to do just this. By keeping these codes secret, they are monopolizing the repair market for their vehicles which hurts the consumer.
On the other hand a video game system doesn't need repair. If something goes wrong with it, there is propably nothing you can do - just get a new one. So the console makers aren't monopolizing the repair market because it doesn't exist.
So there is a difference, which is not to say that any application of the DCMA is good. But really, I wish that congress would stop passing peice-meal legislation and actually spend some crafting the law rather than passing garbage and then adding all sort of bandaids and cludges to fix it for special cases that aren't really special.
Here is some info about biodiesel quantities I posting in another biodiesel thread. Biodiesel using conventional crops is not a feasible replacement for gasoline. As posted on slashdot before, there have been some preliminary studies using algae that look promising, but until we get some functional plants operating, I will be suspicious of their numbers. Nothing against them, it's just that they are researchers not business men, and usually don't have the experience necesarry to predict real world numbers.
I really hope that biodiesel does pan out. I really don't see fuel cells getting anywhere, nor do I see battery technology getting good enough anytime in the future. If we don't get a good fuel before the price of oil jacks up, then the only viable form of transportation is going to be electric rail, which is fine for dense areas, but is bad news for the US.
Source and documentation is not what keeps software alive. It is the working knowledge and contributions of the developers that keeps a project alive. You can release all the code you want, but until that code exists in someone else's head it is dead and stagnant.
That is one of the main difference between Linux and the Hurd (the other being iterative programming vs design everything first, code latter). Linus actively facilitated contributions from others and as a result he ended up with a community of developers and a kernal far better than he could have done by himself, while Hurd limped along.
I'll make a note to go looking for one where something other than "just Windows" was being kept in mind.
Hauppauge makes some good PCI cards, most of which work in linux (although the linux drivers are neither written nor supported by Hauppauge). Also have heard that the ATI all-in-wonders work in linux as well. On the software side you should look at MythTV or FreeVo. Have fun!
Oh and if by "other than windows" you meant mac, there are no PCI solutions that I know of, but a couple of USB units, including one by Hauppauge.
I would have no problem with renting music (aka paying for ad-free radio), if the price was right.
The problem I have with Napster is that they are not up-front with you about the fact that you are only renting music, not buying it, and they are charging you the same price as if you were buying it, which is absolutely asinine.
It is as though their business model depends on tricking people into thinking that they are buying music, as noone that I have talked to was even aware that they would not be buying music, and none of them decided to use the service after I informed told them that fact.
So the better question is why rent music in crappy DRM'd form when you can buy it in a more open format for the same price?
Come on guys, do you have no understanding of due process? All they did was accuse him of being guilty. They didn't detain him without charges, and they didn't detain him for longer than is allowed. They had a warrent to search his house. There is nothing about innocent until proven guilty that says you can't accuse someone of a crime - it is punishment for the crime that has to wait for proof.
Lastly they never even charged him with stealing a device. They charged him with interfering with the devices, and if that would have gone to court he would have most definately been found guilty because he documented the whole process. However, the government promised to let those charges go if he promised to return or pay for the one that they thought he stole. It was his choice to agree to that plea bargain, or face charges in court, and he made it out of his own free will.
There is an argument to be made as to whether the government should be allowed to have these devices on public land, and whether interfering with these devices should be federal offense of this magnitude, but to say that due process was violated is just plain ignorant.
Given the crazy estimates from enviro fear mongering of how much we would need to reduce greenhouse gas consumption to make a real impact, the 10000sq.mile area is not enough. What would it replace? all... petroleum transportation fuels... which account for only 16% of greenhouse gasses produces in America.
Yep, and most of the rest could easily be solved if we switched to nuclear power, but those same fear mongerers are primarily the ones that are opposed to it. So they can just blame global warming on themselves.
Besides, greenhouse gasses are not the only problem when talking about oil. Independence from the middle east and rising costs as the supply can no longer keep up with rising demand are top on my list. And those are not an issue for coal - IIRC the estimate US's coal supply is an order of magnitude larger than the worlds supply of oil.
Getting off of oil is a much more immediate concern than getting off of coal. And while we getting off of coal is only a political issue, we currently have no viable alternative for oil. So this is exactly what we need!
Clearly such research is good. But beware the big numbers. First, they require large government intervention(otherwise, we needn't worry and the market will take care of things), which means that you shouldn't trust their figures to be that realistic.
True, lab numbers are always to be taken with a grain of salt. I eagerly await real plants creating real biodiesel to see what the yields and cost comes out to, but this is more promising than anything else that has happend in the past.
Second, they are talking about a change in a large sector of the oil economy. This would have to be slow by design.
Why? There is very little infrastructure to change. Gas stations switch one pump to biodiesel, diesel owners take their vehicle to the mechnanic to have the seals changed, and thats it. There are already operating economical biodiesel pumps around the country. Biodiesel is easy to switch over to. Quantity that has been the hold back, and this might solve that problem.
Again, this is good, but more needs to be done. Anyone want to fund a Grand Challenge/X-Prize for the best price/performance renewable fuel?
Nah, as I mentioned, there is already a biodiesel market. Businesses who need to comply with new diesel emision regulations are saving money by using B20. The market will take care of the practical aspects of finding the cheapest solution. What is needed is more fundimental research like this.
Does it? China has a lot of people, but how many people in the dirt poor mainland will be buying all this technology? It is the size of the market that matters, not the size of the country.
Okay I checked the numbers and it appears that only 15% of chinese fall into what we would consider middle class, but this is still 110 million people. In the US 60% of the population is concidered middle class which comes out to about 170 million. So it appears that China is significantly large enough to dictate thier own standards.
Thats the first thought I had too, but cache misses and other things can eat away at linearity. AMD has been pretty good at assigning model numbers that accurately reflect the real world performance of the chip compared to intel, so something like that must be going on.
Getting the materials are not the main operating cost. Creating extreme pressure and temperature is the expensive part. EFDA is the group that is putting this together. The best yeilds that they have gotten with their current tokamak reactor (JET) are about 60%, and this is for very short time periods. They are confident that ITER will be able to opperate for long periods of time and will break even on energy use. They hope to produce up to 10x as much energy as is input. Determining the appropriate amount of scepticism is left as an exercise for the reader:)
This is why we outsource to India. Less government regulation, fewer worker protection laws, fewer environmental regulations...
While you could make a case for this in some industries, like textiles, it isn't the major factor in most cases of outsourcing. The main reason that companies outsource is because people are willing to work for less elsewhere, and this is overwelmingly because the standard of living is lower in their country.
As someone else pointed out India does have unions and wage laws, and if they think they need more they are a democracy and can pass more, just like the US did. So no this is not a problem at all.
If anyone finds a site that has these in stock could you please post a link? I have been wanting to get one (or something like it) for about a year and the times that I have tried searching over this period I have not been able to find anything. I'm starting to suspect that the manufacturer went out of business.
You misunderstand the purpose of SPF. It is not much of a solution in and of itself. It only garentees that email came from the domain it claims. The solitary benifits of this are small like you claim. However, once you have a garenteed method of tracking email back to a domain, you suddenly create the possibility for all sorts of measures.
Suppose spammers did set up SPF. If they follow the spam laws it is trivial to filter all their mail at the server. If they aren't, it is trivial to prove that they are breaking the law, and approach things that way. It is also now safe to blacklist them because you have proof that the incriminating spam came from them and wasn't forged. No more joe-jobs.
SPF lays the groundwork to make it useless to spam from dedicated servers, which is half of the total solution. The other half is dealing with hijacked machines. In my opinion the only solution here is to is get ISP's to start taking responcibility for firewalling hijacked machines from the network. When you sign up for a connection you either get their "home" line which they run a firewall on, and comes with mail etc. Or you get a "business" line that is static IP and is not allowed to use thier mail servers, so you are completely free and completely responsible for what you do with that IP.
In light of it's recent success, Monsanto plans on suing the Sun, rain and Canadian soil for growing canola plants without proper patent licencing. A spokesman was quoted as saying "The forces of nature must be brought to respect our intelectual property."
I mean, L Ron Fucking Hubbard, how can you ban the replication of a self-replicating device! I'm sorry but that is just plain asinine. Not all ventures in this world are profitable and if I have to wait a few more years for Government funded research to develop this these things, then it won't bother me a bit.
Customer: "When my computer boots up, all I get is a black screen that says, 'boot2/'." Tech Support: "What operating system are you using?" Customer: "I'm using Windows 98 and NT 4.0." Tech Support: "Ok, I'm the Mac tech. The Windows tech is gone, but I can try to help you." Customer: "Ok, what should I do? I've reformatted the hard drive and have fresh installs of both operating systems." Tech Support: "Sir, have you put any cheese or mustard in your a drive?" Customer: "What? Did you just ask me if I put cheese or mustard in my floppy drive?" Tech Support: "Yeah, we've had that happen a lot lately." Customer: (staring blankly at roommate, who was laughing uncontrollably on the floor) "I think I'll wait for the PC tech to get back. Thanks for the help." (click)
The fact that it costs my company money hasn't stopped people from spamming the hell out of me. Why should it stop people from telemarketing to our cell phones?
1) Telemarketing cell phones is definately illegal while the spam laws are worthless. 2) Telemarketers can be easily traced and caught while spammers cannot.
I have gotten two telemarketing calls on my cell phone (both of which were quasi-legitimate purchase "follow-up" calls) and both times when I told them I was on a cell phone they immediately appologized, voluntarily put me on their DNC list and hung up. That is what accountability gets you, and it doesn't exist for email.
Yes. Concidering that we already have one spyware law on the books, and others in concideration, I think it is very important as an industry to continue to discuss these issues and attempt come to some sort of concensus about what we think is reasonable behavior. Google has taken the initiative to provide what it conciders a reasonable set of guidelines so others can comment and build on it.
Or we could let the politicians figure things out on thier own.
No you are wrong. The firewire code is just plain broken, and it's inclusion has been causing problems even for people that don't have firewire. For this reason the Fedora team had (rightly) decided to remove the firewire code until it is working.
That is fine - Fedora simply does not have firewire support yet. But it would have been nice if this information was more visable. There were several issues (like this and the nVidia drivers) that I'm sure many users would have liked to know about before downloading the entire distro. But I couldn't find release notes for Fedora Core 2 anywhere on their site. The only reason I new about the issues was because someone posted about it on slashdot. So I decided to wait to try Fedora until this was resolved.
PS: I'm sure it was unintentional, but your comment was very rude. He has just spent a bunch of time trying to firewire to work and then you, who know nothing about the problem, brushed it off as if it was trivial.
On a realated note the economist recently had an interesting article about cricket and recent controversy over one of the more important rules - the bowler (pitcher) is not allowed to straighten his arm when delivering the ball. Some are claiming that new bowlers are breaking this rule and other question whether the rule itself might actually contradict physics. Being an American who didn't know much about cricket I found the article to be thouroughly amusing. That game could never exist here in the states.
You misunderstand the purpose of these "reciepts". They stay at the ballot box, and are availiable for recounts and audits. The voter does not take them home, and thus cannot prove how he voted. Futhermore, they do not identify who the voter is. They may have an ID that corresponds to the vote in the electronic database, but this is also not linked to the voter. A piece of paper printed by a machine and checked by the voter is just as good as on filled in by hand.
You are right that taking hardcopies home would be a stupid idea, but I have honestly not heard a single person suggest that. Unfortunately, someone started calling them reciepts, and it caught on and now everyone is all confused because they think these hardcopies are used the same way as a normal reciept. Damn it, I knew this was going to happen the first time I saw that word in a major article.
Yes, but it also means it could be passing, oh, I don't know... information about a planned organized revolt against an opressive government or inside company information from a whistleblower about e.g. pollution of ground water. Welcome to the double-edged sword of truly free speech.
And this oppressive government would let people use free net. Yeah right. I'm sorry but I have yet to hear a single real problem that FreeNet actually solves. Anywhere that does not allow free speech would consider encryption of any kind, including FreeNet, a crime. Anywhere that FreeNet is allowed, there are already other avenues for either private or anonymous speech, and so the only communication which needs to be both private and anonymous, is that which is deemed nearly unanimously to be bad (like child pornography).
I agree with the idea in principle but in reality, FreeNet has no real uses except for garbage like child pornograpy.
On the other hand, the decades of precise mesurements by people like Ptolemy provided the data needed to spark an idea in the mind of Copernicus. Science seems to work that way. You have a wonderful complete theory, then a long period of gathering empirical data which conflicts the theory. During this time many cludges are suggested, but real understanding does not come because there isn't enough data yet. Then you reach a point where all the pieces of the puzzle are finally available and 3 people independently discover the new complete theory.
I don't think it is a Coperinicus that the world is lacking right now, but rather understanding of the concept in general. This can only be gained by the tedious emperical work which is being done by very smart people who will likely never have the good fortune of ending up in history books simply because they were around at the wrong time.
There is something so darkly comic about using the idea of "unfair advantages" (in the economic sense) as an argument against human rights abuses. Or actually the argument wasn't against human rights abuses, just that they shouldn't be allowed when they grant an "unfair advantage". We really are just productions units, I suppose.
Hehe, I didn't notice that. They way I was looking at it, the only reason that people exploit others is because they benifit from it. If you don't allow them to benifit from exploitation then they will have no motivation to exploit. Although I guess not all human rights violations fit in the catagory of exploitation, and so those would have to be dealt with seperately.
You can lick a fossil, see a fossil, touch a fossil, hear a fossil if you drop it, and taste a fossil. They all look, smell, feel, sound, and taste like...... rocks. But it takes faith to believe they appeared millions of years ago by random chance.
Hehe.
I can see, hear and touch the posts that follower_of_christ has made since joining slashdot on the 15th of April. But it takes faith to believe that he will continue to have non-negative karma when posting comments like this on slashdot.
I'm not saying I won't or that I think it's a bad idea, just that I don't get the imperative that's implied by the web site in question and your post, since I've been giving everything I recieved as I recieved it.
That is the crux of the issue. For most people the amount of data that the client uploaded while in the process of downloading is much less than the amount they downloaded. This is because most broadband connections (and modem for that matter) have a bigger download bandwidth than upload. In this case you haven't given everything that you have recieved, because your upload rate couldn't keep up with the download.
If you are fortunate enough to have a balanced connection, and your client shows that you have uploaded as at least much as you have downloaded by the time your download is complete, then you have done your fair share (although you can always be extra nice and keep it open even longer to help others out:).
Slashdot Mirror
Also maintainance of a vehicle is necissarry for the proper operation of a vehicle, and there is an established business to do just this. By keeping these codes secret, they are monopolizing the repair market for their vehicles which hurts the consumer.
On the other hand a video game system doesn't need repair. If something goes wrong with it, there is propably nothing you can do - just get a new one. So the console makers aren't monopolizing the repair market because it doesn't exist.
So there is a difference, which is not to say that any application of the DCMA is good. But really, I wish that congress would stop passing peice-meal legislation and actually spend some crafting the law rather than passing garbage and then adding all sort of bandaids and cludges to fix it for special cases that aren't really special.
Here is some info about biodiesel quantities I posting in another biodiesel thread. Biodiesel using conventional crops is not a feasible replacement for gasoline. As posted on slashdot before, there have been some preliminary studies using algae that look promising, but until we get some functional plants operating, I will be suspicious of their numbers. Nothing against them, it's just that they are researchers not business men, and usually don't have the experience necesarry to predict real world numbers.
I really hope that biodiesel does pan out. I really don't see fuel cells getting anywhere, nor do I see battery technology getting good enough anytime in the future. If we don't get a good fuel before the price of oil jacks up, then the only viable form of transportation is going to be electric rail, which is fine for dense areas, but is bad news for the US.
Source and documentation is not what keeps software alive. It is the working knowledge and contributions of the developers that keeps a project alive. You can release all the code you want, but until that code exists in someone else's head it is dead and stagnant.
That is one of the main difference between Linux and the Hurd (the other being iterative programming vs design everything first, code latter). Linus actively facilitated contributions from others and as a result he ended up with a community of developers and a kernal far better than he could have done by himself, while Hurd limped along.
I'll make a note to go looking for one where something other than "just Windows" was being kept in mind.
Hauppauge makes some good PCI cards, most of which work in linux (although the linux drivers are neither written nor supported by Hauppauge). Also have heard that the ATI all-in-wonders work in linux as well. On the software side you should look at MythTV or FreeVo. Have fun!
Oh and if by "other than windows" you meant mac, there are no PCI solutions that I know of, but a couple of USB units, including one by Hauppauge.
I would have no problem with renting music (aka paying for ad-free radio), if the price was right.
The problem I have with Napster is that they are not up-front with you about the fact that you are only renting music, not buying it, and they are charging you the same price as if you were buying it, which is absolutely asinine.
It is as though their business model depends on tricking people into thinking that they are buying music, as noone that I have talked to was even aware that they would not be buying music, and none of them decided to use the service after I informed told them that fact.
So the better question is why rent music in crappy DRM'd form when you can buy it in a more open format for the same price?
Come on guys, do you have no understanding of due process? All they did was accuse him of being guilty. They didn't detain him without charges, and they didn't detain him for longer than is allowed. They had a warrent to search his house. There is nothing about innocent until proven guilty that says you can't accuse someone of a crime - it is punishment for the crime that has to wait for proof.
Lastly they never even charged him with stealing a device. They charged him with interfering with the devices, and if that would have gone to court he would have most definately been found guilty because he documented the whole process. However, the government promised to let those charges go if he promised to return or pay for the one that they thought he stole. It was his choice to agree to that plea bargain, or face charges in court, and he made it out of his own free will.
There is an argument to be made as to whether the government should be allowed to have these devices on public land, and whether interfering with these devices should be federal offense of this magnitude, but to say that due process was violated is just plain ignorant.
Given the crazy estimates from enviro fear mongering of how much we would need to reduce greenhouse gas consumption to make a real impact, the 10000sq.mile area is not enough. What would it replace? all... petroleum transportation fuels ... which account for only 16% of greenhouse gasses produces in America.
Yep, and most of the rest could easily be solved if we switched to nuclear power, but those same fear mongerers are primarily the ones that are opposed to it. So they can just blame global warming on themselves.
Besides, greenhouse gasses are not the only problem when talking about oil. Independence from the middle east and rising costs as the supply can no longer keep up with rising demand are top on my list. And those are not an issue for coal - IIRC the estimate US's coal supply is an order of magnitude larger than the worlds supply of oil.
Getting off of oil is a much more immediate concern than getting off of coal. And while we getting off of coal is only a political issue, we currently have no viable alternative for oil. So this is exactly what we need!
Clearly such research is good. But beware the big numbers. First, they require large government intervention(otherwise, we needn't worry and the market will take care of things), which means that you shouldn't trust their figures to be that realistic.
True, lab numbers are always to be taken with a grain of salt. I eagerly await real plants creating real biodiesel to see what the yields and cost comes out to, but this is more promising than anything else that has happend in the past.
Second, they are talking about a change in a large sector of the oil economy. This would have to be slow by design.
Why? There is very little infrastructure to change. Gas stations switch one pump to biodiesel, diesel owners take their vehicle to the mechnanic to have the seals changed, and thats it. There are already operating economical biodiesel pumps around the country. Biodiesel is easy to switch over to. Quantity that has been the hold back, and this might solve that problem.
Again, this is good, but more needs to be done. Anyone want to fund a Grand Challenge/X-Prize for the best price/performance renewable fuel?
Nah, as I mentioned, there is already a biodiesel market. Businesses who need to comply with new diesel emision regulations are saving money by using B20. The market will take care of the practical aspects of finding the cheapest solution. What is needed is more fundimental research like this.
Does it? China has a lot of people, but how many people in the dirt poor mainland will be buying all this technology? It is the size of the market that matters, not the size of the country.
Okay I checked the numbers and it appears that only 15% of chinese fall into what we would consider middle class, but this is still 110 million people. In the US 60% of the population is concidered middle class which comes out to about 170 million. So it appears that China is significantly large enough to dictate thier own standards.
Thats the first thought I had too, but cache misses and other things can eat away at linearity. AMD has been pretty good at assigning model numbers that accurately reflect the real world performance of the chip compared to intel, so something like that must be going on.
Getting the materials are not the main operating cost. Creating extreme pressure and temperature is the expensive part. EFDA is the group that is putting this together. The best yeilds that they have gotten with their current tokamak reactor (JET) are about 60%, and this is for very short time periods. They are confident that ITER will be able to opperate for long periods of time and will break even on energy use. They hope to produce up to 10x as much energy as is input. Determining the appropriate amount of scepticism is left as an exercise for the reader :)
This is why we outsource to India. Less government regulation, fewer worker protection laws, fewer environmental regulations...
While you could make a case for this in some industries, like textiles, it isn't the major factor in most cases of outsourcing. The main reason that companies outsource is because people are willing to work for less elsewhere, and this is overwelmingly because the standard of living is lower in their country.
As someone else pointed out India does have unions and wage laws, and if they think they need more they are a democracy and can pass more, just like the US did. So no this is not a problem at all.
If anyone finds a site that has these in stock could you please post a link? I have been wanting to get one (or something like it) for about a year and the times that I have tried searching over this period I have not been able to find anything. I'm starting to suspect that the manufacturer went out of business.
You misunderstand the purpose of SPF. It is not much of a solution in and of itself. It only garentees that email came from the domain it claims. The solitary benifits of this are small like you claim. However, once you have a garenteed method of tracking email back to a domain, you suddenly create the possibility for all sorts of measures.
Suppose spammers did set up SPF. If they follow the spam laws it is trivial to filter all their mail at the server. If they aren't, it is trivial to prove that they are breaking the law, and approach things that way. It is also now safe to blacklist them because you have proof that the incriminating spam came from them and wasn't forged. No more joe-jobs.
SPF lays the groundwork to make it useless to spam from dedicated servers, which is half of the total solution. The other half is dealing with hijacked machines. In my opinion the only solution here is to is get ISP's to start taking responcibility for firewalling hijacked machines from the network. When you sign up for a connection you either get their "home" line which they run a firewall on, and comes with mail etc. Or you get a "business" line that is static IP and is not allowed to use thier mail servers, so you are completely free and completely responsible for what you do with that IP.
In light of it's recent success, Monsanto plans on suing the Sun, rain and Canadian soil for growing canola plants without proper patent licencing. A spokesman was quoted as saying "The forces of nature must be brought to respect our intelectual property."
I mean, L Ron Fucking Hubbard, how can you ban the replication of a self-replicating device! I'm sorry but that is just plain asinine. Not all ventures in this world are profitable and if I have to wait a few more years for Government funded research to develop this these things, then it won't bother me a bit.
This one was hilarious. That tech is a genius.
Customer: "When my computer boots up, all I get is a black screen that says, 'boot2/'."
Tech Support: "What operating system are you using?"
Customer: "I'm using Windows 98 and NT 4.0."
Tech Support: "Ok, I'm the Mac tech. The Windows tech is gone, but I can try to help you."
Customer: "Ok, what should I do? I've reformatted the hard drive and have fresh installs of both operating systems."
Tech Support: "Sir, have you put any cheese or mustard in your a drive?"
Customer: "What? Did you just ask me if I put cheese or mustard in my floppy drive?"
Tech Support: "Yeah, we've had that happen a lot lately."
Customer: (staring blankly at roommate, who was laughing uncontrollably on the floor) "I think I'll wait for the PC tech to get back. Thanks for the help." (click)
The fact that it costs my company money hasn't stopped people from spamming the hell out of me. Why should it stop people from telemarketing to our cell phones?
1) Telemarketing cell phones is definately illegal while the spam laws are worthless.
2) Telemarketers can be easily traced and caught while spammers cannot.
I have gotten two telemarketing calls on my cell phone (both of which were quasi-legitimate purchase "follow-up" calls) and both times when I told them I was on a cell phone they immediately appologized, voluntarily put me on their DNC list and hung up. That is what accountability gets you, and it doesn't exist for email.
Yes. Concidering that we already have one spyware law on the books, and others in concideration, I think it is very important as an industry to continue to discuss these issues and attempt come to some sort of concensus about what we think is reasonable behavior. Google has taken the initiative to provide what it conciders a reasonable set of guidelines so others can comment and build on it.
Or we could let the politicians figure things out on thier own.
No you are wrong. The firewire code is just plain broken, and it's inclusion has been causing problems even for people that don't have firewire. For this reason the Fedora team had (rightly) decided to remove the firewire code until it is working.
That is fine - Fedora simply does not have firewire support yet. But it would have been nice if this information was more visable. There were several issues (like this and the nVidia drivers) that I'm sure many users would have liked to know about before downloading the entire distro. But I couldn't find release notes for Fedora Core 2 anywhere on their site. The only reason I new about the issues was because someone posted about it on slashdot. So I decided to wait to try Fedora until this was resolved.
PS: I'm sure it was unintentional, but your comment was very rude. He has just spent a bunch of time trying to firewire to work and then you, who know nothing about the problem, brushed it off as if it was trivial.
On a realated note the economist recently had an interesting article about cricket and recent controversy over one of the more important rules - the bowler (pitcher) is not allowed to straighten his arm when delivering the ball. Some are claiming that new bowlers are breaking this rule and other question whether the rule itself might actually contradict physics. Being an American who didn't know much about cricket I found the article to be thouroughly amusing. That game could never exist here in the states.
You misunderstand the purpose of these "reciepts". They stay at the ballot box, and are availiable for recounts and audits. The voter does not take them home, and thus cannot prove how he voted. Futhermore, they do not identify who the voter is. They may have an ID that corresponds to the vote in the electronic database, but this is also not linked to the voter. A piece of paper printed by a machine and checked by the voter is just as good as on filled in by hand.
You are right that taking hardcopies home would be a stupid idea, but I have honestly not heard a single person suggest that. Unfortunately, someone started calling them reciepts, and it caught on and now everyone is all confused because they think these hardcopies are used the same way as a normal reciept. Damn it, I knew this was going to happen the first time I saw that word in a major article.
Yes, but it also means it could be passing, oh, I don't know... information about a planned organized revolt against an opressive government or inside company information from a whistleblower about e.g. pollution of ground water. Welcome to the double-edged sword of truly free speech.
And this oppressive government would let people use free net. Yeah right. I'm sorry but I have yet to hear a single real problem that FreeNet actually solves. Anywhere that does not allow free speech would consider encryption of any kind, including FreeNet, a crime. Anywhere that FreeNet is allowed, there are already other avenues for either private or anonymous speech, and so the only communication which needs to be both private and anonymous, is that which is deemed nearly unanimously to be bad (like child pornography).
I agree with the idea in principle but in reality, FreeNet has no real uses except for garbage like child pornograpy.
On the other hand, the decades of precise mesurements by people like Ptolemy provided the data needed to spark an idea in the mind of Copernicus. Science seems to work that way. You have a wonderful complete theory, then a long period of gathering empirical data which conflicts the theory. During this time many cludges are suggested, but real understanding does not come because there isn't enough data yet. Then you reach a point where all the pieces of the puzzle are finally available and 3 people independently discover the new complete theory.
I don't think it is a Coperinicus that the world is lacking right now, but rather understanding of the concept in general. This can only be gained by the tedious emperical work which is being done by very smart people who will likely never have the good fortune of ending up in history books simply because they were around at the wrong time.
There is something so darkly comic about using the idea of "unfair advantages" (in the economic sense) as an argument against human rights abuses. Or actually the argument wasn't against human rights abuses, just that they shouldn't be allowed when they grant an "unfair advantage". We really are just productions units, I suppose.
Hehe, I didn't notice that. They way I was looking at it, the only reason that people exploit others is because they benifit from it. If you don't allow them to benifit from exploitation then they will have no motivation to exploit. Although I guess not all human rights violations fit in the catagory of exploitation, and so those would have to be dealt with seperately.
You can lick a fossil, see a fossil, touch a fossil, hear a fossil if you drop it, and taste a fossil.
They all look, smell, feel, sound, and taste like...... rocks. But it takes faith to believe they appeared millions of years ago by random chance.
Hehe.
I can see, hear and touch the posts that follower_of_christ has made since joining slashdot on the 15th of April. But it takes faith to believe that he will continue to have non-negative karma when posting comments like this on slashdot.
I'm not saying I won't or that I think it's a bad idea, just that I don't get the imperative that's implied by the web site in question and your post, since I've been giving everything I recieved as I recieved it.
:).
That is the crux of the issue. For most people the amount of data that the client uploaded while in the process of downloading is much less than the amount they downloaded. This is because most broadband connections (and modem for that matter) have a bigger download bandwidth than upload. In this case you haven't given everything that you have recieved, because your upload rate couldn't keep up with the download.
If you are fortunate enough to have a balanced connection, and your client shows that you have uploaded as at least much as you have downloaded by the time your download is complete, then you have done your fair share (although you can always be extra nice and keep it open even longer to help others out