As I said, access to voting could be controlled by passwords. Have the congressmen follow the lead of the bank I do business with. They mailed me 2 envelopes on seperate days. One contained my login name, the other my password. Congress people are allocated large funds to send mail to their constituants.
I understand some of the implications of voting via the Internet. What if someone came into my home and forced me to vote a particular way? This really isn't a huge problem when it comes to public opinion polls like I am talking about. I don't see any reason why this couldn't work.
Please, if you have any ideas this wouldn't work, this is the best forum for it. The brightest minds in the computer information field are right here. Why not?
All of your points make perfect sense. Rather than wasting time on email, does anyone know of any politicians that are using web enabled opinion polls to help them understand the thoughts of their constituants?
Each registered voter could be mailed a username and password that would allow them to voice their opinions. It would obviously have to carry a similiar disclaimer as the polls here on/., but having to login could help prevent some of the abuse. It would certainly be more relevent than email where one small group of people could generate thousands of fraudulent email messages in a few minutes. And it would definately be easier to handle for the office staff.
Have hundreds of questions or options up there that are searchable. Only reply to the ones that interest you.
Keep it constantly updated.
Be able to view the current results? I dunno, it might be better not to.
If you MUST do it, allow a comment to be added to each survey question. At least then the messages would be sorted in some sort of logical manner to be reviewed.
I know if one of my congressmen did this that they would be one up in my book when it came time for elections.
Heh, they must have gotten their autoresponder working then, eh? Those new random reply delay and perl keyword sniffer modules are great for simulating human interaction. I don't know how they would stand up against Turing, but it seems to keep the proles happy.
AFAIK, game consoles aren't meant to be rack mountable (ie, not 19", no mounting hardware, etc). Why not just buy a cheap shelf unit? If you did a rack you'd have to buy trays for each unit to sit on, and they are not cheap. Of course you could make them, but that just doesn't make sense.
The only justification I could see for this would be the coolness factor.
The armor was just a machismo thing. Sure, it made them look really cool to the ladies, but it also made it hard to react quickly when being fired upon.
What if you want to listen to something other than music? They have many channels devoted to current news, CNET radio for tech news, talk shows, comedy channels, financial news, PLUS quite a few nice music channels thrown in. (the world music channels look especially interesting to me)
Music is great, but sometimes you need a little variety, especially to keep you company if you spend a lot of time on the road. And if you're on the road a lot you know that a good signal is hard to pick up in the middle of nowhere.
I spend many hours in the car moving between clients. Most of the time there isn't a decent radio station in range. Music is fine, but hours on end will just drive you nuts.
I usually listen to talk radio when it's available and I'm sick of music for a bit. If it's late at night I'll spend all my time switching between AM stations to try and find Art Bell.
For someone like me, this would be a great value. I'm going to do it just as soon as it's available nationwide.
Just think if they ONLY got every long-haul truck driver to sign up, they would be pretty darn successful.
I've been in this business for almost as long as the majority of users here have been alive. I've seen sweeping changes over the years as to how a company treats their tech workers.
When I started up true techs where few and far between in my geographical area. Most of the guys I knew who got into this business where starting a second career, thus older than the lot we have today, and had varying backgrounds like electronics wizards, telecom guys from the military, etc. We where treated with a lot more respect because the companies we worked for knew that they would have problems if we ever left.
The networks we put together weren't just made up of commodity hardware you can buy at the local CompUSA. Most networks where a reflection of the team that designed them. Little inconsistancies and tricks that only they knew about. If the sysop where to be let go, they'd be in for trouble.
Today we have millions of qualified(?) cookie cutter tech guys (and gals) out in the workforce. They've all pretty much had the same exposure to technology as they grew up and went to school. Basically, they're interchangable. I know this is a generalization, but it holds true for 99%.
It's very hard these days to distinguish yourself as a vital part of the corporate machine. Techs can be let go at anytime with the understanding that it will be easy to replace them with someone of equal ability and the skills required to manage an existing system.
You're right, I don't understand the use of "references" in Europe. So how does that work? I borrow money from 3 banks, pay them back properly, and then they give me a good reference should I need to borrow from someone else? Then I use those references to borrow money from bank number 4 and screw them. Then I go to bank number 5 and do the same thing.
Do they really expect you to tell them that although I have excellent references from 3 banks that I have also screwed over 2 others? This makes no sense. I just don't see how this works. Do banks 4 and 5 then contact the banks who initially gave me the references telling them to withdraw them?
Sounds extremely complicated and providing no higher level of personal privacy in return. But like you said, I don't understand how it works in Europe. Please enlighten me.
The difference between what you are describing and a drivers license is that you aren't required to always have your license with you, only when driving.
If I want to take a walk down to the park, I don't have to worry about being stopped by the police for some reason and them hasseling me because I can't prove who I am.
What happens if you don't have it on you? Is there a fine? What other countries have similiar ID cards and how are they used? I know we have a lot of very intelligent people from all over the world here that can provide some insight into a system that is already in place.
Your employer needing it is understood. He has to have your SSN to file forms and payments for you with the IRS. That was part of the original purpose, correct?
Now for the other people. They need some way of differentiating between you and anyone else. They need a Unique Identifier of some sort. How else are they supposed to make a decision on whether or not to extend credit to you? Getting a phone or other utility turned on is a type of credit.
Is it wrong for them to want to be able to go back and look at your history of paying other creditors? Getting a loan is not a right, it is earned by showing that you have fullfilled your obligations in the past and therefore, probably will this time.
If we didn't have some sort of unique identifier assigned to each of us, how would you propose they do this? "Ah, you're a white guy living in a good neighborhood. Here's the $250,000 you needed." If you can't profile people by their past actions, you have to find some other attribute to judge them by.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think this would be such a bad idea. As Ellison said in the article, all we would be giving up is the "illusion" that we can't be tracked.
Why would they even have to be RC if you where using them as decoys? Start them off in the right direction and just let them go. Give them a maximum range so that they would drop out of the sky before they got somewhere that we cared about possibly causing harm to.
Thousands of these could be made for very little money.
I really doubt that they would lose any customers.
Any potential customer who, as you said, "had oogles of free time -and- the requisite skills" probably wouldn't even look at a product like this in the first place. They would already know what could be accomplished with a stock Linux install. These are the guys (like most of us) who would read the advertisement for the product and say, "Gee, I can do all that with Linux for free."
Now on the other hand, if their time where valuable, they might look at this product a little differently. Sure it could be done in house, and we could develop or modify some control software to make it easy to administer for non-tech, but why? In this case, I'm paying for the work they did in setting this up as a package, not for the underlying GPLed code.
Things are very different in the business world than when you are in college or just starting out. My company would gladly pay an extra few hundred bucks or so for a turnkey solution rather than to pay my salary for a couple of days for me to get all this set up by myself.
I have actually had a (semi-tech) client refuse to use FreeBSD based on the devil mascot. I think it's rather foolish, but they said that they didn't want their company to be associated with satanic symbols. Apparently after pitching the idea to use FreeBSD, he went on the 'net and saw the logo.
We used Linux for their application instead and everything is working well. I wonder if he would have been offended by a fish?
I've tried to work this out in my head, but the numbers just don't work out. It seems to defeat the purpose.
Things are swapped out to free available ram either because a process has been sitting around for awhile and doesn't need to occupy the space that could be used for something else, or because the loaded programs occupy more memory than your physical ram can hold.
If you have the memory, and the slots (this is my problem lately... amazing) why not just use it for main ram?
We use it in our development company. We set up a system for each project we are working on. Clients can review our work as we develop it. They can then submit bugs, suggestions, concerns, and feature requests.
It has definately cut down on the time we spend on the phone with them, and the clients like the idea that they can go in and see how and when we are addressing each of their submissions.
In 2 years, will the Mozilla team possibly be remembered as "the guys who wrote bugzilla" instead of "the guys who wrote mozilla"?
Yeah, and I expect to be paid for the content I provide on my page, too!;)
I just don't see how something like this could work for anyone except the absolute top tier of content providors.
How do you decide how much each person gets paid? If BackboneProvidor 1 has more content providors on their net than BackboneProvidor 2, but the end users of BackboneProvidor 2 consume more content, who pays or just forgives the bill this month?
What qualifications would you have to meet to get in on the deal? Number of hits? Google relevence ranking? Bah, the bookkeeping would cost almost as much as the bandwidth, if not more.
If VA where to go under,/. would definately be listed as one of it's assets. It would be sold off to repay VA's creditors.
At that point, VA wouldn't really have the choice to give/. rights back.
Not only that, but do you think they could afford to run this site without corporate support or a subscription system? Bandwidth and boxes aren't cheap. Not only that, they would all have to get real jobs to eat. I know how hard it is to find time to read/. at work without someone looking at you, now try to find time to RUN/. while at your day job.
It will all work out in the end. I actually wish/. did go to a subscription system.
Have you ever used Exchange? Standard pop3 mail is a very small part of it.
And your comment leads me to believe you haven't worked for a large company and your administration experience has only been on systems where you have complete control over everything (ie, you only do it for yourself or at most a very small network).
You can't just say, "Ok guys, let's ditch Exchange so I don't have to use Windows. I don't care that we'll be switching from a full-featured groupware platform to a simple smtp/pop3 email environment, not to mention staff training, custom programming, hardware, and software investments up to this point going downt he tubes. I just REALLY don't like Windows."
If I understand correctly, there was a huge shopping area or something underneath the towers. I'm sure food would not be hard to find in that situation.
I heard reports that there where several subteranian areas that have pockets that are open. This was followed up by saying that there where a lot of snack shops and the such that would have been stocked with food and drinks.
If someone was lucky enough to find themselves in this situation they could survive for quite awhile.
Slashdot Mirror
As I said, access to voting could be controlled by passwords. Have the congressmen follow the lead of the bank I do business with. They mailed me 2 envelopes on seperate days. One contained my login name, the other my password. Congress people are allocated large funds to send mail to their constituants.
I understand some of the implications of voting via the Internet. What if someone came into my home and forced me to vote a particular way? This really isn't a huge problem when it comes to public opinion polls like I am talking about. I don't see any reason why this couldn't work.
Please, if you have any ideas this wouldn't work, this is the best forum for it. The brightest minds in the computer information field are right here. Why not?
All of your points make perfect sense. Rather than wasting time on email, does anyone know of any politicians that are using web enabled opinion polls to help them understand the thoughts of their constituants?
/., but having to login could help prevent some of the abuse. It would certainly be more relevent than email where one small group of people could generate thousands of fraudulent email messages in a few minutes. And it would definately be easier to handle for the office staff.
Each registered voter could be mailed a username and password that would allow them to voice their opinions. It would obviously have to carry a similiar disclaimer as the polls here on
Have hundreds of questions or options up there that are searchable. Only reply to the ones that interest you.
Keep it constantly updated.
Be able to view the current results? I dunno, it might be better not to.
If you MUST do it, allow a comment to be added to each survey question. At least then the messages would be sorted in some sort of logical manner to be reviewed.
I know if one of my congressmen did this that they would be one up in my book when it came time for elections.
Heh, they must have gotten their autoresponder working then, eh? Those new random reply delay and perl keyword sniffer modules are great for simulating human interaction. I don't know how they would stand up against Turing, but it seems to keep the proles happy.
AFAIK, game consoles aren't meant to be rack mountable (ie, not 19", no mounting hardware, etc). Why not just buy a cheap shelf unit? If you did a rack you'd have to buy trays for each unit to sit on, and they are not cheap. Of course you could make them, but that just doesn't make sense.
The only justification I could see for this would be the coolness factor.
All of our servers are 48V DC. You just need to specify the type of power supply when you order a case.
The armor was just a machismo thing. Sure, it made them look really cool to the ladies, but it also made it hard to react quickly when being fired upon.
What if you want to listen to something other than music? They have many channels devoted to current news, CNET radio for tech news, talk shows, comedy channels, financial news, PLUS quite a few nice music channels thrown in. (the world music channels look especially interesting to me)
Music is great, but sometimes you need a little variety, especially to keep you company if you spend a lot of time on the road. And if you're on the road a lot you know that a good signal is hard to pick up in the middle of nowhere.
You obviously only drive around a city.
I spend many hours in the car moving between clients. Most of the time there isn't a decent radio station in range. Music is fine, but hours on end will just drive you nuts.
I usually listen to talk radio when it's available and I'm sick of music for a bit. If it's late at night I'll spend all my time switching between AM stations to try and find Art Bell.
For someone like me, this would be a great value. I'm going to do it just as soon as it's available nationwide.
Just think if they ONLY got every long-haul truck driver to sign up, they would be pretty darn successful.
I've been in this business for almost as long as the majority of users here have been alive. I've seen sweeping changes over the years as to how a company treats their tech workers.
When I started up true techs where few and far between in my geographical area. Most of the guys I knew who got into this business where starting a second career, thus older than the lot we have today, and had varying backgrounds like electronics wizards, telecom guys from the military, etc. We where treated with a lot more respect because the companies we worked for knew that they would have problems if we ever left.
The networks we put together weren't just made up of commodity hardware you can buy at the local CompUSA. Most networks where a reflection of the team that designed them. Little inconsistancies and tricks that only they knew about. If the sysop where to be let go, they'd be in for trouble.
Today we have millions of qualified(?) cookie cutter tech guys (and gals) out in the workforce. They've all pretty much had the same exposure to technology as they grew up and went to school. Basically, they're interchangable. I know this is a generalization, but it holds true for 99%.
It's very hard these days to distinguish yourself as a vital part of the corporate machine. Techs can be let go at anytime with the understanding that it will be easy to replace them with someone of equal ability and the skills required to manage an existing system.
You're right, I don't understand the use of "references" in Europe. So how does that work? I borrow money from 3 banks, pay them back properly, and then they give me a good reference should I need to borrow from someone else? Then I use those references to borrow money from bank number 4 and screw them. Then I go to bank number 5 and do the same thing.
Do they really expect you to tell them that although I have excellent references from 3 banks that I have also screwed over 2 others? This makes no sense. I just don't see how this works. Do banks 4 and 5 then contact the banks who initially gave me the references telling them to withdraw them?
Sounds extremely complicated and providing no higher level of personal privacy in return. But like you said, I don't understand how it works in Europe. Please enlighten me.
The difference between what you are describing and a drivers license is that you aren't required to always have your license with you, only when driving.
If I want to take a walk down to the park, I don't have to worry about being stopped by the police for some reason and them hasseling me because I can't prove who I am.
What happens if you don't have it on you? Is there a fine? What other countries have similiar ID cards and how are they used? I know we have a lot of very intelligent people from all over the world here that can provide some insight into a system that is already in place.
Don't forget the great tax writeoff for his "donation".
Is that really so bad?
Your employer needing it is understood. He has to have your SSN to file forms and payments for you with the IRS. That was part of the original purpose, correct?
Now for the other people. They need some way of differentiating between you and anyone else. They need a Unique Identifier of some sort. How else are they supposed to make a decision on whether or not to extend credit to you? Getting a phone or other utility turned on is a type of credit.
Is it wrong for them to want to be able to go back and look at your history of paying other creditors? Getting a loan is not a right, it is earned by showing that you have fullfilled your obligations in the past and therefore, probably will this time.
If we didn't have some sort of unique identifier assigned to each of us, how would you propose they do this? "Ah, you're a white guy living in a good neighborhood. Here's the $250,000 you needed." If you can't profile people by their past actions, you have to find some other attribute to judge them by.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think this would be such a bad idea. As Ellison said in the article, all we would be giving up is the "illusion" that we can't be tracked.
Why would they even have to be RC if you where using them as decoys? Start them off in the right direction and just let them go. Give them a maximum range so that they would drop out of the sky before they got somewhere that we cared about possibly causing harm to.
Thousands of these could be made for very little money.
Very good virus protection is already available for Linux. Check out AVP.
I really doubt that they would lose any customers.
Any potential customer who, as you said, "had oogles of free time -and- the requisite skills" probably wouldn't even look at a product like this in the first place. They would already know what could be accomplished with a stock Linux install. These are the guys (like most of us) who would read the advertisement for the product and say, "Gee, I can do all that with Linux for free."
Now on the other hand, if their time where valuable, they might look at this product a little differently. Sure it could be done in house, and we could develop or modify some control software to make it easy to administer for non-tech, but why? In this case, I'm paying for the work they did in setting this up as a package, not for the underlying GPLed code.
Things are very different in the business world than when you are in college or just starting out. My company would gladly pay an extra few hundred bucks or so for a turnkey solution rather than to pay my salary for a couple of days for me to get all this set up by myself.
I can just hear all the surgeons begging their bosses to let them telecommute from home now.
I have actually had a (semi-tech) client refuse to use FreeBSD based on the devil mascot. I think it's rather foolish, but they said that they didn't want their company to be associated with satanic symbols. Apparently after pitching the idea to use FreeBSD, he went on the 'net and saw the logo.
We used Linux for their application instead and everything is working well. I wonder if he would have been offended by a fish?
Has anyone else run across anything like this?
I've tried to work this out in my head, but the numbers just don't work out. It seems to defeat the purpose.
Things are swapped out to free available ram either because a process has been sitting around for awhile and doesn't need to occupy the space that could be used for something else, or because the loaded programs occupy more memory than your physical ram can hold.
If you have the memory, and the slots (this is my problem lately... amazing) why not just use it for main ram?
We use it in our development company. We set up a system for each project we are working on. Clients can review our work as we develop it. They can then submit bugs, suggestions, concerns, and feature requests.
It has definately cut down on the time we spend on the phone with them, and the clients like the idea that they can go in and see how and when we are addressing each of their submissions.
In 2 years, will the Mozilla team possibly be remembered as "the guys who wrote bugzilla" instead of "the guys who wrote mozilla"?
Yeah, and I expect to be paid for the content I provide on my page, too! ;)
I just don't see how something like this could work for anyone except the absolute top tier of content providors.
How do you decide how much each person gets paid? If BackboneProvidor 1 has more content providors on their net than BackboneProvidor 2, but the end users of BackboneProvidor 2 consume more content, who pays or just forgives the bill this month?
What qualifications would you have to meet to get in on the deal? Number of hits? Google relevence ranking? Bah, the bookkeeping would cost almost as much as the bandwidth, if not more.
If VA where to go under, /. would definately be listed as one of it's assets. It would be sold off to repay VA's creditors.
/. rights back.
/. at work without someone looking at you, now try to find time to RUN /. while at your day job.
/. did go to a subscription system.
At that point, VA wouldn't really have the choice to give
Not only that, but do you think they could afford to run this site without corporate support or a subscription system? Bandwidth and boxes aren't cheap. Not only that, they would all have to get real jobs to eat. I know how hard it is to find time to read
It will all work out in the end. I actually wish
sendmail Exchange
Have you ever used Exchange? Standard pop3 mail is a very small part of it.
And your comment leads me to believe you haven't worked for a large company and your administration experience has only been on systems where you have complete control over everything (ie, you only do it for yourself or at most a very small network).
You can't just say, "Ok guys, let's ditch Exchange so I don't have to use Windows. I don't care that we'll be switching from a full-featured groupware platform to a simple smtp/pop3 email environment, not to mention staff training, custom programming, hardware, and software investments up to this point going downt he tubes. I just REALLY don't like Windows."
If I understand correctly, there was a huge shopping area or something underneath the towers. I'm sure food would not be hard to find in that situation.
I heard reports that there where several subteranian areas that have pockets that are open. This was followed up by saying that there where a lot of snack shops and the such that would have been stocked with food and drinks.
If someone was lucky enough to find themselves in this situation they could survive for quite awhile.