I beg to differ, aluminum is the number one killer of trees, it even beats out fire.
for humans, it has been linked to Alzheimer's, although it is not known if that is a cause or an effect of the disease.
but it is the third most common element on earth (silicon and oxygen beat it out), and is fairly common in space as well.
the down side is they're doing this is aluminum which doesn't make the existing use of superconductivity any cheaper.
existing superconductivity is used in superconducting magnets, you could never make a maglev train without superconductive magnets. MRIs and particle accelerators also rely heavily on superconductive magnets.
making a cheaper MRI machine would be a real boon to modern medicine. Eventually this research might make it into other materials though and allow cheaper MRI equipment to be made.
in the future they just call it 'al' because they're too lazy to type in aluminium or aluminum on their cell phones. it's sad but true. people talk entirely in acronyms, I've been guilty of it myself, more so when i was on irc. FWIW firefox uses aluminum as it's official spelling, although wiki goes the other way.
As far as i can tell, every operating system in existence has required security patches.
I know one of the BSD variants was claiming something like a 7 or 8 year streak of not being remote exploitable or some such... but by default you could only install as a console mode, and had only a very small number of files to configure the OS because it was completely stripped down. and even that OS has a page full of updates for security vulnerabilities for people not running the 'current' version.
the problem with windows is more that Microsoft at the time, was trying to bury ever single operating system competitor through ruthless marketing practices, and exclusivity agreements. They wouldn't go to anything remotely close to a unix security model, because competitors had already started down that road, and Microsoft didn't want to buy patents, or technology that others were trying to sell... or what not, Microsoft really screwed up the evolution of personal computing, in the way anyone would expect a company that was in no way familiar with operating systems (but rather with 'basic' programming languages) would mess things up, trying to make everything brain dead simple, and worthless like basic was.
If I had access to a time machine the first thing I'd do is go back to a week before IBM visited the author of CP/M and get him a lawyer who would advise the signing of a nondisclosure agreement with IBM.
At the very least, even if IBM screwed the pooch, and their PCs still tanked compared to competitors products, it would have left the OS development market in the hands of the maker of CP/M not Microsoft.
Although it's hard to say where the CP/M founder would have taken operating systems as PCs developed, i can't help but believe he would have done a better job than Microsoft. my reason for saying this? simple, look where apple too the PC in 1984, they were an 'old' as in garage kit company, and while they were unable to compete with Microsoft windows
apple nearly died and even now, they're selling way more ipods than they sell apple computers, but interestingly enough they're the only computer company that does almost as well in the 1st quarter as they do in the 4th quarter. that suggest they aren't meeting demand in the 4th quarter with their current production quotas...
Also, since he died in 1994, if he had been a billionaire his company would have gone on to whomever he had in his will... although one might wonder if his heart disease would have gone unnoticed, had he been a billionaire.
anyways, the time line I'm living in is perhaps the one with the worst most stunted and bass ackwards PC development ever. I can't imagine a single other company stringing people along for 10 years while waiting for their 'new' OS while crushing every other competitor no matter what they were offering.
On the downside, a timeline where sane computer OS designers were doing the OS design, rather than a marketing company... we would have no 'dave barry in cyberspace' book to read. truly a classic, and exemplary of where using the same 'hobbyist' style OS for 10 years on subsequently faster systems made people annoyed, and frustrated when trying to 'get these confounded machines to work'
"Current measurements suggest the Andromeda Galaxy is approaching us at 100 to 140 kilometers per second. The Milky Way may collide with it in 3 to 4 billion years, depending on the importance of unknown lateral components to the galaxies' relative motion. If they collide, it is thought that the Sun and the other stars in the Milky Way will probably not collide with the stars of the Andromeda Galaxy, but that the two galaxies will merge to form a single elliptical galaxy over the course of about a billion years.[36]"
"It's not understood what is causing the black holes to become newly active, because in most cases there is no evidence of collisions or mergers."
Clearly it's the dark matter that nobody has figured out where it is or where it's going that's colliding with all these black holes making them quasars.
In theory a super large gravity well that's tightly compressed shouldn't change into a quasar with no reason. After-all with no impact, that would require matter escaping the singularity...
But FWIW i doubt it would affect life on earth, after all the luminosity of a quasar at it's brightest would appear as a second sun to objects within 33 light years away. we're about 26,000 light years away, so the radiation levels by the time they reach us would be 1/787th the intensity of our sun. in other words just a little more background radiation. and that's at the brightest know quasar. if a large galaxy were about to collide with ours i think it would be visible, and a known event, if dark matter were on a collision course, it would have to be a large galaxy sized formation of dark matter to affect earth residents. I think that dark matter on that scale would be detectable long before it collides, as it should block out stars and galaxies..
Cable modems drive me crazy. I had an original cable modem, from when cable modems first came out, and because it didn't have adequate thermal protection, i wound up breaking it open, and putting heat sinks on all the hot chips (there were 2) it wasn't as fast as it originally was because of thermal damage to the chips, but that sucker would stay up and running for years at a time...
but now, you get a POS cable modem that can't even change it's own ip address without a power cycle WTH is wrong with cable companies? Do they really want to loose customers to DSL or fiber to the home? my sister's DSL company even shipped a DSL router complete with a wireless access point (with encryption enabled by default) she never ever has to power cycle the DSL...
Let me just point out, you can use an apple PC without running quicktime OR safari.
And Since it's based off FreeBSD, there are really easy ways to harden the OS against exploits, like with any unix or unix-a-like OS variant. (like chflag aka chattr on linux)
and if you REALLY want to harden an apple system there is Darwin.
I mean, at least someone with some common sense can add a nice layer of security for apple without adding anything more than a replacement for safari and removing quicktime.
I know the safari vulnerability is pretty serious, but is it not as equally serious as the ActiveX Control Dialog Box Security Bypass Vulnerability, that is still unpatched on XP? I mean think of the dancing bunnies problem of internet security, a dancing bunnies site could easily use the activex bypass to install malware, on millions of XP machines.
Well kinda, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0173840/ was my favorite movie of 2001, it got horrible reviews, people said it was trash, it did so bad at the box office that every other final fantasy movie has been the 'straight to dvd' variety...
But IT GOT ME A REAL DATE! With a pretty girl, no less!!!! she was probably only an 8 on a scale of 10, but I'm only a 7.5 according to hot or not... plus I'm overweight (but for guys that doesn't matter as much)
the movie could have been bad enough to make my eyes bleed and it would have been my favorite movie.
all my other movie dates, were with long time internet friends when i drove to Texas.
they don't compare to actually succeeding on asking a girl out on a date.
um the problem i mentioned the disc usage wasn't directly tied to exchange, it was tied to a 'feature' of windows, where it was endlessly consuming more and more gigs of space, at a rate of 10 GB a day. just wanted to be clear here, this was due to a 'feature' of windows not exchange server.
It just happened to be happening on a mission critical exchange server..
D) And lastly, realize that this opens up an avenue for propaganda by MS and the *AA to try to squash innovation by spreading FUD with how "pirated" things always has viruses and can lead to identity theft and being stalked!!!One!11!!
How does software piracy promote innovation? better p2p clients? I'm trying to stretch my mind here, about how piracy in any way benefits anyone except the hacker who made sure you have a version of windows you'll never update, and thus will be totally exposed to hackers who know what they're doing...
And you know what, I've seen pirate version of windows slipstreamed with rootkits, it's easy google 'slipstreaming' once... i remember before the days of slipstreaming when they came in a zip file, with their own special installer to install windows 98 over windows 95, only the windows 98 had the browser completely hijacked, and god knows what kind of software they had preloaded...
Do you Really trust software pirates to have no financial reason to be providing their cracks or downloads??
A really clean piracy operation will provide clean copies of software, but only if they have really easy remote vulnerabilities. LOADS of video games fall in this category, thanks to anti-piracy software, and the cracks to remove that anti-piracy functionality... often times the software will have to auto update the anti-piracy features to keep up with company updates of the game... are you really going to trust pirate software that requires an auto updater?!?!
"In my opinion, a print on demand, image, scan, and destroy solution is the only practical solution"
I hope by that you mean 'destroy' only AFTER the election is made official by the state. the whole point of a paper trail is that it can be recounted.
your suggestion that the image should be encrypted baffles me... who can read a 3-d barcode Besides a computer? they come standard issue on almost every state drivers license... yeah regular barcodes can be read, by the exceptional individual, but we don't need to encrypt 3-d barcodes, because even though it has my address information in it so cops don't have to type it in, i couldn't honestly tell you anyones address by glancing at a 3-d barcode.
that site doesn't specifically state that they'll use open source software. "that would be publicly owned or open source."
Basically they're saying they're selling the source code, along with licensing the machines. Part of this is due to dibold and others trying to make it illegal to use open source software so they can't predate on dibold's contracts to license voting machines to voting precincts.
Remember dibold and other companies are 'insiders' in politics, and competing open source projects are not. I know there have been (aborted) attempts at making open source voting reality, but they were mostly abandoned when they realized the amount of cash it would take to even get a seat at the table to show election officials what open source software could do for them.
the last time i dealt with a census worker they came to the front door, and asked to verify some data... i was living with my sister at the time (i think it was the 2000 census) and i didn't recall the ages of her kids, but they were okay about it, said i didn't have to know.
considering the amount of data they have to collect, hiring enough temp workers to go door to door in every city in America... it's no wonder it costs $50 per person.
they may have licensed the machines, rather than bought them, but they still were able to analyze the data output by them in a real election, compared to voter registration (voter registration is not handled by their machines, they only tally votes)
this is how they know that they have a serious bug, the numbers didn't mesh by a large enough number to be more than statistical chance.
"If the state government maintains strict controls on slot machines and has access to the source code of slot machines....why the hell doesn't it have a better grasp on voting machines?!"
Just to be fair, people have died because they worked for a slot machine company (one that sold to bars, etc, in Nevada, where they have the same or similar laws) and were going to whistle blow (testify in court, witness protection and all that) on them about the fact that the company had forced them to work on two versions of source code. One version that the state got, and a special version they charged the bar $$$ for, that would make the machine skip it's top payout 50% of the time.
The company that sold these machines, and they hired a gunman to shoot the man dead, while he was in witness protection!
"Whistle-blower laws exist because companies don't exactly line up to hire such paragons of virtue and honesty."
Ahh, so THAT was the question i kept screwing up when i tried to get a job at best buy. Who the hell knew that if you saw someone steal 20 dollars from the company they wanted you to say you'd do nothing.
the simplest solution with receipts, is to fold them in half, and drop them in a separate box, that the voting poll place provides, so they can compare receipts to the big master rolls.
the end user, if they see a print out other than what they chose, can take it straight to the voting officials, tear off a special the code at the bottom, and they can hand them a paper ballot, and they type the code in on their workstation, invalidating that entry in the electronic tally.
In Wisconsin, they ask you 'paper or electronic' when you ask for a ballot. Knowing what I know, I always say 'paper.'
Eventually there will be a time when they stop asking, just like grocery stores stopped asking 'paper or plastic' and just give you cheap plastic bags that drop your groceries to the ground before you get to the car.
The fact that voting machine companies have refused to use an open model for handling votes shows that they are just in it for the money, they could give a damn if the election is skewed by bugs in their machines. all they want is that big multi million dollar budget for essentially a 200 dollar computer in a special case and with a $20,000 dollar touch screen.
you apparently didn't get the point. Uwe Boil is an American citizen, and all his movies are produced in America.
Not Germany.
Germans wishing to save money on their taxes, are supporting American movie production, thanks to Uwe Boll, the changes made, were to 'reduce fraud.'
But boll's American Production Company, and his German Title Holding company. although not supporting the German film industry are not committing fraud either.
Let me explain, Boll's title company gets 75 million dollars in donations, for example, the title company 'acquires the rights' to the movie for 40 million, then pays 5 million for boll's American production company to make the film.
This is all legal and above board, when the film is done, the Title company pays theaters 30 million dollars to show boll's films, with an agreement that they pay standard percentage of gate fees to the title company. the film rakes in for the title company 5 million dollars (and theaters soon drop the film) the tile company pays taxes on the 5 million, but in essence, this is a way to turn 75 million German dollars into a 5 million dollar film, all above board and within the law.
It's sad really, really really sad. A bad producer found the perfect loophole to support his films that nobody wants to see.
welcome to spamtrap@donotreply.com (just kidding, but donotreply.com gets a lot of interesting e-mail, I just wondered what they'd do if they started getting 'spamtrap' addressed mail)
well, making special spamtrap e-mail addresses and putting them in the clear on usenet, message boards, or even on social networking sites owned by google, and making sure the content is boring drivel no one would e-mail that person about. well, i mean how could you decide how to make boring drivel that would still put their address out on sites? 'first post' messages?
wouldn't someone notice that google got 'first post' every time on 123 consecutive front page articles? wouldn't they? though and e-mail them a congratulation and get spam busted?
i mean i know i can post boring irrelevant information, but i can't guarantee that if an e-mail is tied to that identity that someone won't e-mail me....
so spam traps are harder to implement than one would think, unless they're in 'hidden' code. EG: you go to a website, the e-mail is in the html, but never shows on the page... and if you do that, then they might make a scanner that nullifies those addresses... once the realize what's happening.
Most of the spam mail is identical, and goes to multiple accounts. if you have millions of users, then you can save space by making messages with identical md5 sums all take only one slot of disk storage space.
then you run into the problem that not all e-mails produce unique md5 sums (something only an e-mail provider with millions and billions of test cases would ever notice...) and well the occasional bit of mail gets lost because it produced an identical md5 some by chance as a spam message.
I remember reading a post about one poor hapless admin, who had come across an exchange server that was eating 10 GB of HD space a day, couldn't figure out what was causing the massive use of disk space, his company was in the middle of their most critical time of year, and he had 3 days left before the server crashed again and he'd be out of a job if he lost 12 of so days (since the last backup of that servers files) of e-mail.. it was an old post, and the people who had ideas were ideas the admin had already tried.
I'm fairly sure that the shit hit the fan and he took the blame, and i can't imagine a single reason why anything other than poorly designed malware, or a really rare hard to reproduce bug could be eating 10 GB of disc space a day...
If it had been recent i would have suggested he find a tool to let him add an external raid array for the OS to keep eating the 10GB a day until he had the problem locked down... but, it was too late for my advice...
Slashdot Mirror
"with cheap and nontoxic aluminum"
I beg to differ, aluminum is the number one killer of trees, it even beats out fire.
for humans, it has been linked to Alzheimer's, although it is not known if that is a cause or an effect of the disease.
but it is the third most common element on earth (silicon and oxygen beat it out), and is fairly common in space as well.
the down side is they're doing this is aluminum which doesn't make the existing use of superconductivity any cheaper.
existing superconductivity is used in superconducting magnets, you could never make a maglev train without superconductive magnets.
MRIs and particle accelerators also rely heavily on superconductive magnets.
making a cheaper MRI machine would be a real boon to modern medicine. Eventually this research might make it into other materials though and allow cheaper MRI equipment to be made.
in the future they just call it 'al' because they're too lazy to type in aluminium or aluminum on their cell phones. it's sad but true. people talk entirely in acronyms, I've been guilty of it myself, more so when i was on irc. FWIW firefox uses aluminum as it's official spelling, although wiki goes the other way.
As far as i can tell, every operating system in existence has required security patches.
I know one of the BSD variants was claiming something like a 7 or 8 year streak of not being remote exploitable or some such... but by default you could only install as a console mode, and had only a very small number of files to configure the OS because it was completely stripped down. and even that OS has a page full of updates for security vulnerabilities for people not running the 'current' version.
the problem with windows is more that Microsoft at the time, was trying to bury ever single operating system competitor through ruthless marketing practices, and exclusivity agreements. They wouldn't go to anything remotely close to a unix security model, because competitors had already started down that road, and Microsoft didn't want to buy patents, or technology that others were trying to sell... or what not, Microsoft really screwed up the evolution of personal computing, in the way anyone would expect a company that was in no way familiar with operating systems (but rather with 'basic' programming languages) would mess things up, trying to make everything brain dead simple, and worthless like basic was.
If I had access to a time machine the first thing I'd do is go back to a week before IBM visited the author of CP/M and get him a lawyer who would advise the signing of a nondisclosure agreement with IBM.
At the very least, even if IBM screwed the pooch, and their PCs still tanked compared to competitors products, it would have left the OS development market in the hands of the maker of CP/M not Microsoft.
Although it's hard to say where the CP/M founder would have taken operating systems as PCs developed, i can't help but believe he would have done a better job than Microsoft. my reason for saying this? simple, look where apple too the PC in 1984, they were an 'old' as in garage kit company, and while they were unable to compete with Microsoft windows
apple nearly died and even now, they're selling way more ipods than they sell apple computers, but interestingly enough they're the only computer company that does almost as well in the 1st quarter as they do in the 4th quarter. that suggest they aren't meeting demand in the 4th quarter with their current production quotas...
Also, since he died in 1994, if he had been a billionaire his company would have gone on to whomever he had in his will... although one might wonder if his heart disease would have gone unnoticed, had he been a billionaire.
anyways, the time line I'm living in is perhaps the one with the worst most stunted and bass ackwards PC development ever. I can't imagine a single other company stringing people along for 10 years while waiting for their 'new' OS while crushing every other competitor no matter what they were offering.
On the downside, a timeline where sane computer OS designers were doing the OS design, rather than a marketing company... we would have no 'dave barry in cyberspace' book to read. truly a classic, and exemplary of where using the same 'hobbyist' style OS for 10 years on subsequently faster systems made people annoyed, and frustrated when trying to 'get these confounded machines to work'
Should have wiki'd
"Current measurements suggest the Andromeda Galaxy is approaching us at 100 to 140 kilometers per second. The Milky Way may collide with it in 3 to 4 billion years, depending on the importance of unknown lateral components to the galaxies' relative motion. If they collide, it is thought that the Sun and the other stars in the Milky Way will probably not collide with the stars of the Andromeda Galaxy, but that the two galaxies will merge to form a single elliptical galaxy over the course of about a billion years.[36]"
"It's not understood what is causing the black holes to become newly active, because in most cases there is no evidence of collisions or mergers."
Clearly it's the dark matter that nobody has figured out where it is or where it's going that's colliding with all these black holes making them quasars.
In theory a super large gravity well that's tightly compressed shouldn't change into a quasar with no reason. After-all with no impact, that would require matter escaping the singularity...
But FWIW i doubt it would affect life on earth, after all the luminosity of a quasar at it's brightest would appear as a second sun to objects within 33 light years away. we're about 26,000 light years away, so the radiation levels by the time they reach us would be 1/787th the intensity of our sun. in other words just a little more background radiation. and that's at the brightest know quasar. if a large galaxy were about to collide with ours i think it would be visible, and a known event, if dark matter were on a collision course, it would have to be a large galaxy sized formation of dark matter to affect earth residents. I think that dark matter on that scale would be detectable long before it collides, as it should block out stars and galaxies..
Cable modems drive me crazy. I had an original cable modem, from when cable modems first came out, and because it didn't have adequate thermal protection, i wound up breaking it open, and putting heat sinks on all the hot chips (there were 2) it wasn't as fast as it originally was because of thermal damage to the chips, but that sucker would stay up and running for years at a time...
but now, you get a POS cable modem that can't even change it's own ip address without a power cycle WTH is wrong with cable companies? Do they really want to loose customers to DSL or fiber to the home? my sister's DSL company even shipped a DSL router complete with a wireless access point (with encryption enabled by default) she never ever has to power cycle the DSL...
Let me just point out, you can use an apple PC without running quicktime OR safari.
And Since it's based off FreeBSD, there are really easy ways to harden the OS against exploits, like with any unix or unix-a-like OS variant. (like chflag aka chattr on linux)
and if you REALLY want to harden an apple system there is Darwin.
I mean, at least someone with some common sense can add a nice layer of security for apple without adding anything more than a replacement for safari and removing quicktime.
For windows security you need to run vista, or have a hardware firewall to protect your XP machine... Is it just me or is an OS with 58 'unpatched' vulnerabilities not somehow worse?
http://www.frsirt.com/english/Unpatched-Microsoft-Vulnerabilities.php
I know the safari vulnerability is pretty serious, but is it not as equally serious as the ActiveX Control Dialog Box Security Bypass Vulnerability, that is still unpatched on XP? I mean think of the dancing bunnies problem of internet security, a dancing bunnies site could easily use the activex bypass to install malware, on millions of XP machines.
Well kinda, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0173840/ was my favorite movie of 2001, it got horrible reviews, people said it was trash, it did so bad at the box office that every other final fantasy movie has been the 'straight to dvd' variety...
But IT GOT ME A REAL DATE! With a pretty girl, no less!!!! she was probably only an 8 on a scale of 10, but I'm only a 7.5 according to hot or not... plus I'm overweight (but for guys that doesn't matter as much)
the movie could have been bad enough to make my eyes bleed and it would have been my favorite movie.
all my other movie dates, were with long time internet friends when i drove to Texas.
they don't compare to actually succeeding on asking a girl out on a date.
the problem is all his films follow the SAME FORMULA... 'more chase scenes please' is the basic formula of his scripts.
the video game could be about unlocking doors with special colored keys after solving logical puzzles, AND HE'D REQUIRE 20 chases scenes.
seriously, he doesn't need to make more films, how can you MSTK formula pictures? do too many and you'd be a tired setup.
76889 to 425
i think the 425 are people that live and work because of boll.
um the problem i mentioned the disc usage wasn't directly tied to exchange, it was tied to a 'feature' of windows, where it was endlessly consuming more and more gigs of space, at a rate of 10 GB a day. just wanted to be clear here, this was due to a 'feature' of windows not exchange server.
It just happened to be happening on a mission critical exchange server..
D) And lastly, realize that this opens up an avenue for propaganda by MS and the *AA to try to squash innovation by spreading FUD with how "pirated" things always has viruses and can lead to identity theft and being stalked!!!One!11!!
How does software piracy promote innovation? better p2p clients? I'm trying to stretch my mind here, about how piracy in any way benefits anyone except the hacker who made sure you have a version of windows you'll never update, and thus will be totally exposed to hackers who know what they're doing...
And you know what, I've seen pirate version of windows slipstreamed with rootkits, it's easy google 'slipstreaming' once... i remember before the days of slipstreaming when they came in a zip file, with their own special installer to install windows 98 over windows 95, only the windows 98 had the browser completely hijacked, and god knows what kind of software they had preloaded...
Do you Really trust software pirates to have no financial reason to be providing their cracks or downloads??
A really clean piracy operation will provide clean copies of software, but only if they have really easy remote vulnerabilities. LOADS of video games fall in this category, thanks to anti-piracy software, and the cracks to remove that anti-piracy functionality... often times the software will have to auto update the anti-piracy features to keep up with company updates of the game... are you really going to trust pirate software that requires an auto updater?!?!
And what do you do when the print out doesn't match what the screen shows due to a bug in the system?
hrm?
"In my opinion, a print on demand, image, scan, and destroy solution is the only practical solution"
I hope by that you mean 'destroy' only AFTER the election is made official by the state. the whole point of a paper trail is that it can be recounted.
your suggestion that the image should be encrypted baffles me... who can read a 3-d barcode Besides a computer? they come standard issue on almost every state drivers license... yeah regular barcodes can be read, by the exceptional individual, but we don't need to encrypt 3-d barcodes, because even though it has my address information in it so cops don't have to type it in, i couldn't honestly tell you anyones address by glancing at a 3-d barcode.
that site doesn't specifically state that they'll use open source software. "that would be publicly owned or open source."
Basically they're saying they're selling the source code, along with licensing the machines. Part of this is due to dibold and others trying to make it illegal to use open source software so they can't predate on dibold's contracts to license voting machines to voting precincts.
Remember dibold and other companies are 'insiders' in politics, and competing open source projects are not. I know there have been (aborted) attempts at making open source voting reality, but they were mostly abandoned when they realized the amount of cash it would take to even get a seat at the table to show election officials what open source software could do for them.
the last time i dealt with a census worker they came to the front door, and asked to verify some data... i was living with my sister at the time (i think it was the 2000 census) and i didn't recall the ages of her kids, but they were okay about it, said i didn't have to know.
considering the amount of data they have to collect, hiring enough temp workers to go door to door in every city in America... it's no wonder it costs $50 per person.
they may have licensed the machines, rather than bought them, but they still were able to analyze the data output by them in a real election, compared to voter registration (voter registration is not handled by their machines, they only tally votes)
this is how they know that they have a serious bug, the numbers didn't mesh by a large enough number to be more than statistical chance.
"If the state government maintains strict controls on slot machines and has access to the source code of slot machines....why the hell doesn't it have a better grasp on voting machines?!"
Just to be fair, people have died because they worked for a slot machine company (one that sold to bars, etc, in Nevada, where they have the same or similar laws) and were going to whistle blow (testify in court, witness protection and all that) on them about the fact that the company had forced them to work on two versions of source code. One version that the state got, and a special version they charged the bar $$$ for, that would make the machine skip it's top payout 50% of the time.
The company that sold these machines, and they hired a gunman to shoot the man dead, while he was in witness protection!
"Whistle-blower laws exist because companies don't exactly line up to hire such paragons of virtue and honesty."
Ahh, so THAT was the question i kept screwing up when i tried to get a job at best buy. Who the hell knew that if you saw someone steal 20 dollars from the company they wanted you to say you'd do nothing.
the simplest solution with receipts, is to fold them in half, and drop them in a separate box, that the voting poll place provides, so they can compare receipts to the big master rolls.
the end user, if they see a print out other than what they chose, can take it straight to the voting officials, tear off a special the code at the bottom, and they can hand them a paper ballot, and they type the code in on their workstation, invalidating that entry in the electronic tally.
In Wisconsin, they ask you 'paper or electronic' when you ask for a ballot. Knowing what I know, I always say 'paper.'
Eventually there will be a time when they stop asking, just like grocery stores stopped asking 'paper or plastic' and just give you cheap plastic bags that drop your groceries to the ground before you get to the car.
The fact that voting machine companies have refused to use an open model for handling votes shows that they are just in it for the money, they could give a damn if the election is skewed by bugs in their machines. all they want is that big multi million dollar budget for essentially a 200 dollar computer in a special case and with a $20,000 dollar touch screen.
you apparently didn't get the point. Uwe Boil is an American citizen, and all his movies are produced in America.
Not Germany.
Germans wishing to save money on their taxes, are supporting American movie production, thanks to Uwe Boll, the changes made, were to 'reduce fraud.'
But boll's American Production Company, and his German Title Holding company. although not supporting the German film industry are not committing fraud either.
Let me explain, Boll's title company gets 75 million dollars in donations, for example, the title company 'acquires the rights' to the movie for 40 million, then pays 5 million for boll's American production company to make the film.
This is all legal and above board, when the film is done, the Title company pays theaters 30 million dollars to show boll's films, with an agreement that they pay standard percentage of gate fees to the title company. the film rakes in for the title company 5 million dollars (and theaters soon drop the film) the tile company pays taxes on the 5 million, but in essence, this is a way to turn 75 million German dollars into a 5 million dollar film, all above board and within the law.
It's sad really, really really sad. A bad producer found the perfect loophole to support his films that nobody wants to see.
welcome to spamtrap@donotreply.com (just kidding, but donotreply.com gets a lot of interesting e-mail, I just wondered what they'd do if they started getting 'spamtrap' addressed mail)
well, making special spamtrap e-mail addresses and putting them in the clear on usenet, message boards, or even on social networking sites owned by google, and making sure the content is boring drivel no one would e-mail that person about. well, i mean how could you decide how to make boring drivel that would still put their address out on sites? 'first post' messages?
wouldn't someone notice that google got 'first post' every time on 123 consecutive front page articles? wouldn't they? though and e-mail them a congratulation and get spam busted?
i mean i know i can post boring irrelevant information, but i can't guarantee that if an e-mail is tied to that identity that someone won't e-mail me....
so spam traps are harder to implement than one would think, unless they're in 'hidden' code. EG: you go to a website, the e-mail is in the html, but never shows on the page... and if you do that, then they might make a scanner that nullifies those addresses... once the realize what's happening.
Most of the spam mail is identical, and goes to multiple accounts. if you have millions of users, then you can save space by making messages with identical md5 sums all take only one slot of disk storage space.
then you run into the problem that not all e-mails produce unique md5 sums (something only an e-mail provider with millions and billions of test cases would ever notice...) and well the occasional bit of mail gets lost because it produced an identical md5 some by chance as a spam message.
I remember reading a post about one poor hapless admin, who had come across an exchange server that was eating 10 GB of HD space a day, couldn't figure out what was causing the massive use of disk space, his company was in the middle of their most critical time of year, and he had 3 days left before the server crashed again and he'd be out of a job if he lost 12 of so days (since the last backup of that servers files) of e-mail.. it was an old post, and the people who had ideas were ideas the admin had already tried.
I'm fairly sure that the shit hit the fan and he took the blame, and i can't imagine a single reason why anything other than poorly designed malware, or a really rare hard to reproduce bug could be eating 10 GB of disc space a day...
If it had been recent i would have suggested he find a tool to let him add an external raid array for the OS to keep eating the 10GB a day until he had the problem locked down... but, it was too late for my advice...