The two advantages of e-Voting that I can see are: votes can be counted more quickly and e-voting systems don't involve humans at the counting stage so in a perfect system errors can't be introduced deliberately or accidently.
Ok, I'll grant those as two advantages. So why not have machine-readable paper ballots? We used them in the Toronto municipal election. Fill in the bubble for your candidate (with a Sharpie), feed into the optical scanner and watch your ballot drop into the big, transparent plexiglass box behind it. You get all of the advantages of the touch screen machines, and all of the auditability and trust of paper.
Well, it's not like they're spending a huge chunk of change to make this happen... All of NASA's most recent Mars orbiters have been fitted with short-range antenna pointing toward the surface. Once the spacecraft have completed their primary missions, they're already out at Mars and in good working order. Might as well use them to squeeze out that extra bandwidth and take advantage of the better transmission windows from orbit.
Actually, if Prada is letting people know about this when they accept the cards, I'd say this is a good technology. Lets them better serve YOU, the customer.
And if you don't like the idea of carrying around RFID tags, you're welcome to not carry the ENTIRELY OPTIONAL card. And the clothes? Well, Club Monaco (a Canadian clothing chain) already puts RFID tags in all of their higher-end merchandise. Clearly labelled "Please remove after purchase," I might add, which is good advice to anyone.
We certainly know a bit about the Martian atmosphere... Both the Spirit and Opportunity rovers used it to aerobrake before deploying their parachutes. Certainly not detailed knowledge, but enough to make something like this (which is self-correcting if it gets too high) workable.
As an IT consultant, I often sell CD-Rs to customers, usually with their own data backed up on it. Here's want I want to do:
1. Buy a pack of 50 CD-Rs for $29.99 + levy. 2. Use the CD-Rs for legitimate purposes. 3. Go into my local music store, grab a stack of 50 music CDs, put $29.99 on the counter and walk out.
I already paid for the content. All I should have to pay the music store for is the cost of the discs.
Will they arrest me for shoplifting? Can I steal something that I have already paid for? What if everyone did this on Dec. 26, the busiest shopping day in Canada?
Oooh... My Machiavellian little mind can't help but suggest:
1. Root a Diebold corporate server. Access their customer's VPNs for ATMs. If they don't patch their cash machines, you can bet their file-sharing is equally vulnerable. 2. Insert a worm into the ATMs. 3. Worm executes simultaneously worldwide. Diebold machines all dump their cash simultaneously. 4. Worm displays a message on the screen: This hack made possible by vulnerability X that MS patched on Y but Diebold didn't bother to apply. Think this is bad? They make VOTING machines too! 5. Sit back and watch as multinational banks sue Diebold into oblivion.
If government is too corrupt to fix the voting machine problem, then perhaps it is better to make it in the interest of someone very rich.
Disclaimer: If you actually do this shit, you've probably committed a "crime" in the legalistic sense... though ethically and morally you're definitely doing OK.
Not a bad idea. I just voted in the Toronto municipal election, and I think they have the right idea with electronic voting.
First they give you a big sheet with all of the candidates listed on it. You use a permanent black SHARPIE marker to connect the arrow next to the candidate you want to vote for. You then place the sheet in a special carboard holder that leaves the top of the ballot visible, but all of the candidates sealed. You hand the thing to a poll worker who turns it upside-down and feeds it into a an optical reader machine. The sheet-fed machine grabs your ballot out of the cardboard privacy shield, pulls it face down through the scanner, records your vote electronically, and dumps the paper ballot into a ballot box.
At the end of the election, all of the machines upload their results, add and declare a winner. If there's any dispute at any polling station, the poll workers open the ballot box and count the PAPER ballots that YOU marked in PERMANENT INK and check against the machine. Paper is always considered correct.
Sure you can fuck around with the ballot box and the counting, but have fun getting away with it when each candidate has a scrutineer watching to make sure the election is fair.
Have a look at the flipside, too! If Meth is now a Chemical Weapon, can I not argue in an American court that the constitution guarantees me the right to bear arms? Would do wonders for the drug trade...
You know, a really cool way to get around this is have the worm only trigger an infection when a Slammer infection attempt is detected. This way, you'll only hit infected machines. Then, coupled with an expiry time, this thing could be relatively benign (well, other than the whole "break into computers and install software without permission" thing).
This is all well-and-good... unless you're the last guy who gets Slammer (or whatever). Then you get DDoS'd by everbody:-)
It's pseudofascist morons like you that are ruining this country, not the kid in his basement.
I have to object to your use of the word pseudofascist. Anyone who honestly believes that the actions of nineteen men justify the removal of rights from anyone based solely on their opinions or their race is a REAL BONE FIDE fascist. No prefix necessary.
SERIOUSLY , the FBI has no place at all getting involved with copyright issues.
In all truth, the FBI is exactly the organization to investigate copyright violations.
Not really. My biggest problem with this is that violating a copyright, at least right now, in the United States, is not a 'crime' per se; it is a civil offense. The copyright holder is responsible for dragging you into court and extracting damages. What this bill proposes is that the FBI now take on that role, at taxpayers expense. Why should the FBI be involved in what is inherently a civil matter?
[...] different renewable energy sources (sun, wind, (nuclear?)) [...]
Nuclear is non-renewable. Fission or fusion, it doesn't matter. Furthermore, fusion presents a second problem in that a key fuel is hydrogen itself... Now if you're using electrolysis to get H out of water at about 10% efficiency, your reactor can't even generate enough power to buy its own fuel. The economics suck.
Sooner or later, we need to find a way to mine hydrogen, in the same way that we get our present fossil fuels. A likely candidate would be the moon, as it's relatively close and traps large amounts of hydrogen in its soil (from the solar wind). As a bonus, one can also extract He3 from said soil... a highly useful fusion-fuel that does not occur naturally on Earth.
As for fission... it's an excellent intermediate technology between here and there. It uses a small amount of non-renewable enriched uranium and produces a small amount of really gross byproducts. It's not a bad trade-off compared to, say, coal... which produces LARGE amounts of fairly-gross stuff when you burn it.
For instance the 20% leakage they've been using is a worldwide amount. The national amount in the US is about 2%.
Which is totally irrelevant. The ozone layer is a global phenomenon, and it affected solely by the global rate. While I agree that the United States will almost certainly have a lower leakage rate than, say, Bangladesh, the question is how much hydrogen is going to get into the upper atmosphere. If that amount is significant, then there is a problem. It's not just whoever's leaking's problem, it's EVERYONE's problem.
If your child is too young to be viewing pornographic material and you provide them with their own unsupervised e-mail address, you should be held liable by state law.
Right. And if a 747 crashes into my house, the airline should sue me for building on THEIR flight path.
Ah.. I see you haven't dealt with university administrators recently. I'll tell you a bit about my experience.
At my university, senior administrators (who make such decisions) exist for the sole purpose of minimising risk to the university. ALL risks are bad, and therefore must be eliminated, from their point of view. Much like middle management in a large corporation being afraid to rock-the-boat, these people live in fear that the university's public image may be damaged by "supporting piracy" or that the RIAA may name _them_ in the suit as well and take A LOT MORE than $12,000 out of university coffers. The actual merits of the RIAA's case would be totally contrary to the point - the least risky scenario is to not interfere in the first place.
Of course, the least risky scenario is also not to cooperate with the RIAA. That might've caused a small backlash in student opinion, which can lead to bad press!
The RIAA has posted their official position on their website. It's REALLY confusing!
These morons can't even decide if this is a "centralised server" or a "Napster-like network." They say it operates on a "local area network" (their quotes, not mine) and yet it's a "particularly flagrant way to illegally distribute millions of copyrighted works over the Internet."
Dear RIAA: GET YOUR LIES STRAIGHT BEFORE FORCING THEM UPON US!
[...] technically the shuttle is not an irreplaceable part of the ISS program.
Unfortunately, this isn't correct. When the shuttle is docked, it fires its thrusters to boost the station to a higher orbit. Because the station orbits so low, air resistance gradually drops the altitude. Without the boosts, the station will re-enter and crash.
Unfortunately, the Soyuz/Progress system can't deliver adequate thrust. You can check out the altitude data.
How long CAN the Expedition Six crew stay on the ISS? Can the Russian space program possibly return the astronauts to earth?
The Soyuz capsule at the station can be used to return the crew. Soyuz were developed in the mid-60s and are probably the safest manned spacecraft in the world. They're also substantially cheaper (per flight) than the shuttle, despite the fact that they're disposable.
A more interesting question is how long can the space station remain in orbit? The station is designed so that a shuttle can dock with it periodically to boost it into a higher orbit. Without these boosts, the station's orbit will decay and it will crash. We're probably talking on the order of a year or two, but keep in mind that the shuttle fleet was grounded for 3 years after Challenger. The Soyuz capsules cannot provide adequate thrust to perform this manoevre.
If the students ran the MSSQL servers, they would have been patched. Perhaps students administer the users and tables, but some admin (bureaucratic, not system) is in charge of the software.
Very true. I happen to live with the Sysadmin for su.ualberta.ca (our Students' Union). Number of attacks from other ualberta servers in my logs? Hundreds. Number from the SU subdomain? Zero.
Huh? I always thought Canada's legal system is based on Common Laws. Now that's pretty much like China's legal system - 'guilty until proven innocent'.
Canada's legal system is based on British Common Law, as is the U.S.'s. However, in Common Law, statues override precedents, and we have a Constitution that defines both the rights of the citizen (see the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a part of the constitution) and the division of power within government.
One of the rights is:
I.11. Any person charged with an offence has the right
(d) to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal
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The two advantages of e-Voting that I can see are: votes can be counted more quickly and e-voting systems don't involve humans at the counting stage so in a perfect system errors can't be introduced deliberately or accidently.
Ok, I'll grant those as two advantages. So why not have machine-readable paper ballots? We used them in the Toronto municipal election. Fill in the bubble for your candidate (with a Sharpie), feed into the optical scanner and watch your ballot drop into the big, transparent plexiglass box behind it. You get all of the advantages of the touch screen machines, and all of the auditability and trust of paper.
This one REALLY seems like a no-brainer.
Well, it's not like they're spending a huge chunk of change to make this happen... All of NASA's most recent Mars orbiters have been fitted with short-range antenna pointing toward the surface. Once the spacecraft have completed their primary missions, they're already out at Mars and in good working order. Might as well use them to squeeze out that extra bandwidth and take advantage of the better transmission windows from orbit.
Smart move on NASA's part.
Actually, if Prada is letting people know about this when they accept the cards, I'd say this is a good technology. Lets them better serve YOU, the customer.
And if you don't like the idea of carrying around RFID tags, you're welcome to not carry the ENTIRELY OPTIONAL card. And the clothes? Well, Club Monaco (a Canadian clothing chain) already puts RFID tags in all of their higher-end merchandise. Clearly labelled "Please remove after purchase," I might add, which is good advice to anyone.
We certainly know a bit about the Martian atmosphere... Both the Spirit and Opportunity rovers used it to aerobrake before deploying their parachutes. Certainly not detailed knowledge, but enough to make something like this (which is self-correcting if it gets too high) workable.
As an IT consultant, I often sell CD-Rs to customers, usually with their own data backed up on it. Here's want I want to do:
1. Buy a pack of 50 CD-Rs for $29.99 + levy.
2. Use the CD-Rs for legitimate purposes.
3. Go into my local music store, grab a stack of 50 music CDs, put $29.99 on the counter and walk out.
I already paid for the content. All I should have to pay the music store for is the cost of the discs.
Will they arrest me for shoplifting? Can I steal something that I have already paid for? What if everyone did this on Dec. 26, the busiest shopping day in Canada?
Oooh... My Machiavellian little mind can't help but suggest:
1. Root a Diebold corporate server. Access their customer's VPNs for ATMs. If they don't patch their cash machines, you can bet their file-sharing is equally vulnerable.
2. Insert a worm into the ATMs.
3. Worm executes simultaneously worldwide. Diebold machines all dump their cash simultaneously.
4. Worm displays a message on the screen: This hack made possible by vulnerability X that MS patched on Y but Diebold didn't bother to apply. Think this is bad? They make VOTING machines too!
5. Sit back and watch as multinational banks sue Diebold into oblivion.
If government is too corrupt to fix the voting machine problem, then perhaps it is better to make it in the interest of someone very rich.
Disclaimer: If you actually do this shit, you've probably committed a "crime" in the legalistic sense... though ethically and morally you're definitely doing OK.
A number of ATMs also run a stripped-down version of OS/2. Thank god. Unfortunately, Microsoft is pushing vendors to move to Windows as IBM is soon to discontinue OS/2 support.
Not a bad idea. I just voted in the Toronto municipal election, and I think they have the right idea with electronic voting.
First they give you a big sheet with all of the candidates listed on it. You use a permanent black SHARPIE marker to connect the arrow next to the candidate you want to vote for. You then place the sheet in a special carboard holder that leaves the top of the ballot visible, but all of the candidates sealed. You hand the thing to a poll worker who turns it upside-down and feeds it into a an optical reader machine. The sheet-fed machine grabs your ballot out of the cardboard privacy shield, pulls it face down through the scanner, records your vote electronically, and dumps the paper ballot into a ballot box.
At the end of the election, all of the machines upload their results, add and declare a winner. If there's any dispute at any polling station, the poll workers open the ballot box and count the PAPER ballots that YOU marked in PERMANENT INK and check against the machine. Paper is always considered correct.
Sure you can fuck around with the ballot box and the counting, but have fun getting away with it when each candidate has a scrutineer watching to make sure the election is fair.
Have a look at the flipside, too! If Meth is now a Chemical Weapon, can I not argue in an American court that the constitution guarantees me the right to bear arms? Would do wonders for the drug trade...
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't copyright infringement a civil, and those non-criminal, matter?
This is all well-and-good... unless you're the last guy who gets Slammer (or whatever). Then you get DDoS'd by everbody
It's pseudofascist morons like you that are ruining this country, not the kid in his basement.
I have to object to your use of the word pseudofascist. Anyone who honestly believes that the actions of nineteen men justify the removal of rights from anyone based solely on their opinions or their race is a REAL BONE FIDE fascist. No prefix necessary.
There aren't really any more whackos out there now (as a percentage of the total population at least) than there have ever been.
No, but there are fewer presidents per capita!
Not really. My biggest problem with this is that violating a copyright, at least right now, in the United States, is not a 'crime' per se; it is a civil offense. The copyright holder is responsible for dragging you into court and extracting damages. What this bill proposes is that the FBI now take on that role, at taxpayers expense. Why should the FBI be involved in what is inherently a civil matter?
[...] different renewable energy sources (sun, wind, (nuclear?)) [...]
Nuclear is non-renewable. Fission or fusion, it doesn't matter. Furthermore, fusion presents a second problem in that a key fuel is hydrogen itself... Now if you're using electrolysis to get H out of water at about 10% efficiency, your reactor can't even generate enough power to buy its own fuel. The economics suck.
Sooner or later, we need to find a way to mine hydrogen, in the same way that we get our present fossil fuels. A likely candidate would be the moon, as it's relatively close and traps large amounts of hydrogen in its soil (from the solar wind). As a bonus, one can also extract He3 from said soil... a highly useful fusion-fuel that does not occur naturally on Earth.
As for fission... it's an excellent intermediate technology between here and there. It uses a small amount of non-renewable enriched uranium and produces a small amount of really gross byproducts. It's not a bad trade-off compared to, say, coal... which produces LARGE amounts of fairly-gross stuff when you burn it.
For instance the 20% leakage they've been using is a worldwide amount. The national amount in the US is about 2%.
Which is totally irrelevant. The ozone layer is a global phenomenon, and it affected solely by the global rate. While I agree that the United States will almost certainly have a lower leakage rate than, say, Bangladesh, the question is how much hydrogen is going to get into the upper atmosphere. If that amount is significant, then there is a problem. It's not just whoever's leaking's problem, it's EVERYONE's problem.
If your child is too young to be viewing pornographic material and you provide them with their own unsupervised e-mail address, you should be held liable by state law.
Right. And if a 747 crashes into my house, the airline should sue me for building on THEIR flight path.
Of course, if it had been me, I'd rather have seen my $12,000 go up in giving the RIAA at least a little fight. So they win in the end... so what?
Declare bankruptcy. Can't get blood from a stone!
Why didn't university help him?
Ah.. I see you haven't dealt with university administrators recently. I'll tell you a bit about my experience.
At my university, senior administrators (who make such decisions) exist for the sole purpose of minimising risk to the university. ALL risks are bad, and therefore must be eliminated, from their point of view. Much like middle management in a large corporation being afraid to rock-the-boat, these people live in fear that the university's public image may be damaged by "supporting piracy" or that the RIAA may name _them_ in the suit as well and take A LOT MORE than $12,000 out of university coffers. The actual merits of the RIAA's case would be totally contrary to the point - the least risky scenario is to not interfere in the first place.
Of course, the least risky scenario is also not to cooperate with the RIAA. That might've caused a small backlash in student opinion, which can lead to bad press!
The RIAA has posted their official position on their website. It's REALLY confusing!
These morons can't even decide if this is a "centralised server" or a "Napster-like network." They say it operates on a "local area network" (their quotes, not mine) and yet it's a "particularly flagrant way to illegally distribute millions of copyrighted works over the Internet."
Dear RIAA: GET YOUR LIES STRAIGHT BEFORE FORCING THEM UPON US!
Anybody else stunned that Slashdot posted an article about MS that didn't involve an explanation as to how they're incompetant?
Surprised, but very pleased. This article is a real testament to timothy's editorial sense of fair play. Good job timothy!
[...] technically the shuttle is not an irreplaceable part of the ISS program.
Unfortunately, this isn't correct. When the shuttle is docked, it fires its thrusters to boost the station to a higher orbit. Because the station orbits so low, air resistance gradually drops the altitude. Without the boosts, the station will re-enter and crash.
Unfortunately, the Soyuz/Progress system can't deliver adequate thrust. You can check out the altitude data.
How long CAN the Expedition Six crew stay on the ISS? Can the Russian space program possibly return the astronauts to earth?
The Soyuz capsule at the station can be used to return the crew. Soyuz were developed in the mid-60s and are probably the safest manned spacecraft in the world. They're also substantially cheaper (per flight) than the shuttle, despite the fact that they're disposable.
A more interesting question is how long can the space station remain in orbit? The station is designed so that a shuttle can dock with it periodically to boost it into a higher orbit. Without these boosts, the station's orbit will decay and it will crash. We're probably talking on the order of a year or two, but keep in mind that the shuttle fleet was grounded for 3 years after Challenger. The Soyuz capsules cannot provide adequate thrust to perform this manoevre.
If the students ran the MSSQL servers, they would have been patched. Perhaps students administer the users and tables, but some admin (bureaucratic, not system) is in charge of the software.
Very true. I happen to live with the Sysadmin for su.ualberta.ca (our Students' Union). Number of attacks from other ualberta servers in my logs? Hundreds. Number from the SU subdomain? Zero.
Huh? I always thought Canada's legal system is based on Common Laws. Now that's pretty much like China's legal system - 'guilty until proven innocent'.
Canada's legal system is based on British Common Law, as is the U.S.'s. However, in Common Law, statues override precedents, and we have a Constitution that defines both the rights of the citizen (see the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a part of the constitution) and the division of power within government.
One of the rights is: