What's even stranger is that once one of the voting-machine companies might be controlled by a leftist, the leftist conspiracy theorists have nothing to say about it.
Or could the reason be that no evidence of conspiracy has been found in this case.
Hell, if it takes Chavez to get the US back to pen-and-paper ballots, then all the better. Is there some way we can get Kim Jong-Il to invest in Diebold?
You might do better to ask Iran, they have more spare cash to hand.
What the fuck is the point of calling Bush the Devil? First of all, one of the strongest ideas in the US constitution is the separation of church and state.
Maybe it's a way of drawing attention to the way in which Mr Bush (and plenty of other members of the US Government) appear to have a problem with the separation of church and state. the alternative would be to demand that he be executed for high treason...
All they are ever shown, and all they see, are fallacious reports and charts showing how much money they "have lost" and "will continue to lose" due to copyright infringement. Just like the RIAA and MPAA, they guestimate how many times people download their movies, and multiply that number (which itself is probably twice the actual amount) by the price at which they sell or plan to sell their movies.
Which is rather greater than the actual profit which would result from a retail sale.
This figure is presented to management as their losses. Obviously these figures are bullshit as it is based on two false assumptions. First, that nobody buys a product after downloading it. Second, that every download is an actual lost sale (that is, the downloader would have purchased the product had he/she not downloaded it).
As well as ignoring that some people may not have purchased the product had they not downloaded.
You cannot bill people for services that they did no agree to pay for.
If they have agreed to being provided with the services the best they can do legally is haggle over the price. Worst case senario for the party provided with the services is to end up being prosecuted for fraud.
You cannot bill your doctor for being overbooked, you cannot bill a cable company for missing a service appointment,
These two examples are nothing to do with billing for services they didn't agree to pay for. They are actually breaches of contract by the doctor and cable company respectivly. Also if either had a policy of charging their patients/customers for broken appointments they'd have tough time putting convincing a judge that they shouldn't pay when they broke appointments.
Might want to do a bit of looking at the reasons why the series got cancelled. Given that the network (FOX) aired the show out of order, demanded more "action-oriented" episodes from the producers, and constantly messed with which time slot Firefly was aired at, it's small wonder it never found a solid audience.
Also Firefly isn't the first example of this kind of thing happening. It appears that these people just can't learn.
This will affect the sales of Serenity going forward, but Universal probably doesn't care about that as they've made the majority of the money from it already (or at least they think they have).
Maybe Universe think suing their customers will get them more money.
Of course Universal will attribute any drop in sales to piracy and never figure out it's their own damn fault.
In the same way that they never think producing a poor product could be responsible for a sales drop...
You don't have to assume that all drugs are harmless in order to support their legalization. All that's required is that the harm done by prohibition is greater than the harm done by legalization. I've lived in neighborhoods that saw lots of drug traffic. If I had to choose between the current state of things and legalizing drugs (cocaine, speed, heroin, all of em) I'd choose legalization.
The really daft thing is that you'd expect the US Government to have "learned its lesson" with alcohol.
Much of the (often self-policed) censorship that occurs in the USA is as the result of pressure from corporations and interest groups, not the government.
With similar, even exactly the same, entities trying to pressure government. Anyway historically governments frequently turn a blind eye (even provide covert support) to "angry mobs" when it suits their (the government's) adgenda. Does the (supposed) function of an arm of government being "state security" or "law enforcement" justify a lack of public oversight in a supposedly "democratic country"?
The problem is that education creates pride, and pride often blinds people to the truth. Some of the most profound observations come from children -- the most uneducated of all of us -- because they are not bogged down by the distractions and biases that education brings.
Children also tend not to know what is taboo or politically incorrect. The fable of "The Emperor's New Clothes" explores this idea, written nearly 170 years ago.
One thing to remember with Americans is that compared to the world (not just Europe... there are other continents out there as well), we are very educated. Almost everyone has graduated from high school and a very large percentage of our population has been to or graduated from college.
Actually all that tells you is that Americans tend to spend quite a lot of time in school. Comparing curricula would be a rather more useful metric.
With Cable TV, you have the ability to set your television set to block specific channels - thinks like Skinamax, Spice, etc. These channels aren't automatically blocked. The parent has to sit down with the remote control and program it.
In this case it is the subscriber choosing what they want to block. It's perfectly possible for someone to use this feature to block "child ok/friendly" channels they simply don't want to watch. (Or maybe they are more concerned about their kids seeing Disney than porn...)
Sorry, you're wrong about the Florida election being applicable. The whole "hanging chad" mess doesn't happen when you limit the ballots as the GP suggested: Ink pen, paper, locked metal box.
Can't fill in a block without bleeding over? You just trashed your ballot. Watch it get shredded, then re-do your vote./That's/ how you guarantee both anonymity and clean ballots.
Also use a pencil or a pen where the ink does not soak into the paper and a design of ballot paper which has clear separation between different boxes.
Do you have any recollection of the Florida mess in 2000? The Gore campaign didn't like the results, and demanded recounts in certain districts though to be favorable to their candidate. There was no arguing about most of the poll documents, but because they were literally trying to differentiate between a few hundred votes, it came down to groups of people sitting around a table debating what they imagined a voter's thoughts really were when they left a partial impression next to ONE candidate's name, but then a slightly more dramatic impression next to another, etc.
Florida in 2000 didn't use paper (or even card) ballot paper. Instead they used a hack involving machine readable punched cards. Proper Ballot papers are nativly human readable, they may additionally be possible to tabulate by OMR. Check out a Canadian or British ballot paper and you will see that they have nothing in common with punched cards.
We also have to get rid of our expectations to know the winner of the election on the day of the election or the next. Sane people are willing to wait a few weeks to get all of the counting done I guess.
There are plenty of examples of human counted paper ballot systems which do give a result within 24 hours.
And the advantage of simple and stupid systems where people mark pieces of paper and other people count them is that because these systems are so labor intensive you need to corrupt a much larger group of people to throw an election.
In many real such systems you also have people watching those doing the counting. Which again increases the size of conspiracy you'd need.
I will still support the use of some form of digital voting machine to print these paper ballots with the voter's choice marked, so that the ballots are marked in a consistent fashion and help prevent spoiled ballots (two candidates marked for the same position for example)
If you were to have multiple elections on the same physical ballot paper it's perfectly possible that that a voter might wish to abstain from voting in one or more of these. In this case a some boneheaded software may force someone to change their vote. Even "none of the above" is not the same as abstaining.
Can paper elections be rigged? Of course they can. Can they be rigged as easily, as invisibly, as completely as digital elections? Hell no.
Run the election (N.B. the election is a lot more than just the voting mechanism) the right way and you'd need an implausably large conspiracy to sucessfully rig the vote.
What's mind boggling is that there's even a debate here. Get rid of digital voting machines. Hell, get rid of ANALOG voting machines. Piece of paper, ink pen, padlocked metal box. That's how sane people run elections.
Together with having people as independent as possible from any of the candidates running the election and the count taking place in a way where any interested party can watch.
Conversely, those same laws can be used to deny products in those poorer countries as well. In doesn't make logical sense until you realize that companies don't want this importing to occur back to wealthier countries they are established in (see certain aspects of the pharmaceutical industry, although I think they have a fairer policy than the copyright industry groups).
The pharmaceutical industry can be just a strange. e.g. working hard to protect US Citizens from their Canadian and German products...
This is another side to globalization. As the world as a whole becomes more interconnected thanks to the internet and cheap international shipping, the marketting notion of making products available in different contries at different times is not going to hold up.
It's not holding up very well now. Interestingly it's often the same multinational corporations who are pro "globalization" and "free trade" when it means they can pick and choose the cheapest places of the planet to manufacture who kick up the most fuss (typically in the courts) when their customers (both individuals and retail companies) try and do something similar.
In the future corporations are going to need to stop thinking they can easily dictate the geographical spread of their goods and start thinking of their product launches as a worldwide event. The entertainment industries need to stop setting up distribution deals for invidual regions and make their deals for global availablity.
When it comes to movies and TV/radio the regional distribution model has actually been dead for quite some time. Sometimes TV programmes have even been available "by other means" before their broadcast. Even if this dosn't happen they will be available within a short time of their initial broadcast. People are not going to wait weeks, months (even years) to watch, effectivly any wait longer than 48 hours encourages "piracy". When it comes to speedy global distribution things are in some cases worst than they were a quarter of a century ago, dispite advances in communications technology.
Alcohol, and all drugs, should be treated as the health issue they are, not a criminal issue. Violence on the other hand should be given far more severe penalities for any and all violent offences.
How would you classify operating a motor vehicle under the influence of a drug clinically proven to impair the driver's ability?
Abuse slowly unfolds, it does not spring into existance overnight. Almost everything that is seriously broken in America started off as an innocent (often temporary) stopgap measure to correct some issue of the day but then slowly grew, was hijacked by various interests and warped into an aberration.
It certainly dosn't help matters that the US lacks the most basic of data protection laws.
The specialists who spend months or years designing a system never think of issues that slashdotters think of in 30 seconds. Or so I hear on slashdot.
I think it's almost a sixth sense, kind of like slashdotters' ability to find prior art for any patent in 30 seconds.
It isn't a special attribute of "slashdotters". It's simply that people who are very wrapped up in something can easily miss all sorts of things which are obvious to third parties. Effectivly they build their own "box" to think inside.
The problem is that the composite propellant they regulate isn't an explosive. It just burns hot and fast.
As do quite a lot of things which many people routinely keep in their houses.
Homes have all kinds of items more dangerous to firefighters in them and no permit is needed, including: gasoline in cans, aerosol cans, propane bottles (I have 6 for my grill), insecticides, ammo for guns, etc.
Note that "CFC free" aerosols often contain butane and/or propane, which will burn if the can ruptures, even if the rest of the contents won't. There's also all sorts plastics which emit toxic fumes when burned. It would take a large quantity of rocket fuel to make the average house any more dangerous to firefighters.
Dear god, peoples' laissez-faire attitude towards gasoline is incredible. Working as I do in petroleum retail to pay for school, I see some appalling things. There was one woman who said that she accidentally spills gas on herself all the time. Aside from the hideous level of incompetence that this implies, what about the fire danger, the very real possibility of her washing machine bursting into flames when she throws the clothes into it later? People will stick a gas can in the back of a pickup truck and try to fill it up, ignoring the fact that they are then allowing gas vapors to pool in a metal basin.
If they are this careless fueling their vehicles what must they be like driving them...
Motorcyclists who fill their tank while sitting on the bike.
Which must be harder then doing it the proper way.
It is not even the background check that bothers them, it is some of the insane storage requirements. To legally store more then a small amount, you must submit floor plans of where it is stored, and local authorities MUST have a key to the location,
Without any way for you to verify the security of said plans and keys
and have full rights to inspect the location at any time, as often as they want. So nevermind the local law enforcement or FBI wandering around your house at 2 in the morning, there is nothing you can do...
For all anyone knows they could be terrorists impersonating cops.
Slashdot Mirror
What's even stranger is that once one of the voting-machine companies might be controlled by a leftist, the leftist conspiracy theorists have nothing to say about it.
Or could the reason be that no evidence of conspiracy has been found in this case.
Hell, if it takes Chavez to get the US back to pen-and-paper ballots, then all the better.
Is there some way we can get Kim Jong-Il to invest in Diebold?
You might do better to ask Iran, they have more spare cash to hand.
What the fuck is the point of calling Bush the Devil? First of all, one of the strongest ideas in the US constitution is the separation of church and state.
Maybe it's a way of drawing attention to the way in which Mr Bush (and plenty of other members of the US Government) appear to have a problem with the separation of church and state.
the alternative would be to demand that he be executed for high treason...
All they are ever shown, and all they see, are fallacious reports and charts showing how much money they "have lost" and "will continue to lose" due to copyright infringement. Just like the RIAA and MPAA, they guestimate how many times people download their movies, and multiply that number (which itself is probably twice the actual amount) by the price at which they sell or plan to sell their movies.
Which is rather greater than the actual profit which would result from a retail sale.
This figure is presented to management as their losses. Obviously these figures are bullshit as it is based on two false assumptions. First, that nobody buys a product after downloading it. Second, that every download is an actual lost sale (that is, the downloader would have purchased the product had he/she not downloaded it).
As well as ignoring that some people may not have purchased the product had they not downloaded.
You cannot bill people for services that they did no agree to pay for.
If they have agreed to being provided with the services the best they can do legally is haggle over the price. Worst case senario for the party provided with the services is to end up being prosecuted for fraud.
You cannot bill your doctor for being overbooked, you cannot bill a cable company for missing a service appointment,
These two examples are nothing to do with billing for services they didn't agree to pay for. They are actually breaches of contract by the doctor and cable company respectivly. Also if either had a policy of charging their patients/customers for broken appointments they'd have tough time putting convincing a judge that they shouldn't pay when they broke appointments.
Might want to do a bit of looking at the reasons why the series got cancelled. Given that the network (FOX) aired the show out of order, demanded more "action-oriented" episodes from the producers, and constantly messed with which time slot Firefly was aired at, it's small wonder it never found a solid audience.
Also Firefly isn't the first example of this kind of thing happening. It appears that these people just can't learn.
This will affect the sales of Serenity going forward, but Universal probably doesn't care about that as they've made the majority of the money from it already (or at least they think they have).
Maybe Universe think suing their customers will get them more money.
Of course Universal will attribute any drop in sales to piracy and never figure out it's their own damn fault.
In the same way that they never think producing a poor product could be responsible for a sales drop...
You don't have to assume that all drugs are harmless in order to support their legalization. All that's required is that the harm done by prohibition is greater than the harm done by legalization. I've lived in neighborhoods that saw lots of drug traffic. If I had to choose between the current state of things and legalizing drugs (cocaine, speed, heroin, all of em) I'd choose legalization.
The really daft thing is that you'd expect the US Government to have "learned its lesson" with alcohol.
Much of the (often self-policed) censorship that occurs in the USA is as the result of pressure from corporations and interest groups, not the government.
With similar, even exactly the same, entities trying to pressure government. Anyway historically governments frequently turn a blind eye (even provide covert support) to "angry mobs" when it suits their (the government's) adgenda.
Does the (supposed) function of an arm of government being "state security" or "law enforcement" justify a lack of public oversight in a supposedly "democratic country"?
The problem is that education creates pride, and pride often blinds people to the truth. Some of the most profound observations come from children -- the most uneducated of all of us -- because they are not bogged down by the distractions and biases that education brings.
Children also tend not to know what is taboo or politically incorrect. The fable of "The Emperor's New Clothes" explores this idea, written nearly 170 years ago.
One thing to remember with Americans is that compared to the world (not just Europe... there are other continents out there as well), we are very educated. Almost everyone has graduated from high school and a very large percentage of our population has been to or graduated from college.
Actually all that tells you is that Americans tend to spend quite a lot of time in school. Comparing curricula would be a rather more useful metric.
With Cable TV, you have the ability to set your television set to block specific channels - thinks like Skinamax, Spice, etc. These channels aren't automatically blocked. The parent has to sit down with the remote control and program it.
In this case it is the subscriber choosing what they want to block. It's perfectly possible for someone to use this feature to block "child ok/friendly" channels they simply don't want to watch. (Or maybe they are more concerned about their kids seeing Disney than porn...)
Sorry, you're wrong about the Florida election being applicable. The whole "hanging chad" mess doesn't happen when you limit the ballots as the GP suggested: Ink pen, paper, locked metal box. /That's/ how you guarantee both anonymity and clean ballots.
Can't fill in a block without bleeding over? You just trashed your ballot. Watch it get shredded, then re-do your vote.
Also use a pencil or a pen where the ink does not soak into the paper and a design of ballot paper which has clear separation between different boxes.
Do you have any recollection of the Florida mess in 2000? The Gore campaign didn't like the results, and demanded recounts in certain districts though to be favorable to their candidate. There was no arguing about most of the poll documents, but because they were literally trying to differentiate between a few hundred votes, it came down to groups of people sitting around a table debating what they imagined a voter's thoughts really were when they left a partial impression next to ONE candidate's name, but then a slightly more dramatic impression next to another, etc.
Florida in 2000 didn't use paper (or even card) ballot paper. Instead they used a hack involving machine readable punched cards. Proper Ballot papers are nativly human readable, they may additionally be possible to tabulate by OMR. Check out a Canadian or British ballot paper and you will see that they have nothing in common with punched cards.
We also have to get rid of our expectations to know the winner of the election on the day of the election or the next. Sane people are willing to wait a few weeks to get all of the counting done I guess.
There are plenty of examples of human counted paper ballot systems which do give a result within 24 hours.
And the advantage of simple and stupid systems where people mark pieces of paper and other people count them is that because these systems are so labor intensive you need to corrupt a much larger group of people to throw an election.
In many real such systems you also have people watching those doing the counting. Which again increases the size of conspiracy you'd need.
I will still support the use of some form of digital voting machine to print these paper ballots with the voter's choice marked, so that the ballots are marked in a consistent fashion and help prevent spoiled ballots (two candidates marked for the same position for example)
If you were to have multiple elections on the same physical ballot paper it's perfectly possible that that a voter might wish to abstain from voting in one or more of these. In this case a some boneheaded software may force someone to change their vote. Even "none of the above" is not the same as abstaining.
Can paper elections be rigged? Of course they can. Can they be rigged as easily, as invisibly, as completely as digital elections? Hell no.
Run the election (N.B. the election is a lot more than just the voting mechanism) the right way and you'd need an implausably large conspiracy to sucessfully rig the vote.
What's mind boggling is that there's even a debate here. Get rid of digital voting machines. Hell, get rid of ANALOG voting machines. Piece of paper, ink pen, padlocked metal box. That's how sane people run elections.
Together with having people as independent as possible from any of the candidates running the election and the count taking place in a way where any interested party can watch.
Conversely, those same laws can be used to deny products in those poorer countries as well. In doesn't make logical sense until you realize that companies don't want this importing to occur back to wealthier countries they are established in (see certain aspects of the pharmaceutical industry, although I think they have a fairer policy than the copyright industry groups).
The pharmaceutical industry can be just a strange. e.g. working hard to protect US Citizens from their Canadian and German products...
This is another side to globalization. As the world as a whole becomes more interconnected thanks to the internet and cheap international shipping, the marketting notion of making products available in different contries at different times is not going to hold up.
It's not holding up very well now. Interestingly it's often the same multinational corporations who are pro "globalization" and "free trade" when it means they can pick and choose the cheapest places of the planet to manufacture who kick up the most fuss (typically in the courts) when their customers (both individuals and retail companies) try and do something similar.
In the future corporations are going to need to stop thinking they can easily dictate the geographical spread of their goods and start thinking of their product launches as a worldwide event. The entertainment industries need to stop setting up distribution deals for invidual regions and make their deals for global availablity.
When it comes to movies and TV/radio the regional distribution model has actually been dead for quite some time. Sometimes TV programmes have even been available "by other means" before their broadcast. Even if this dosn't happen they will be available within a short time of their initial broadcast.
People are not going to wait weeks, months (even years) to watch, effectivly any wait longer than 48 hours encourages "piracy". When it comes to speedy global distribution things are in some cases worst than they were a quarter of a century ago, dispite advances in communications technology.
Alcohol, and all drugs, should be treated as the health issue they are, not a criminal issue. Violence on the other hand should be given far more severe penalities for any and all violent offences.
How would you classify operating a motor vehicle under the influence of a drug clinically proven to impair the driver's ability?
Abuse slowly unfolds, it does not spring into existance overnight. Almost everything that is seriously broken in America started off as an innocent (often temporary) stopgap measure to correct some issue of the day but then slowly grew, was hijacked by various interests and warped into an aberration.
It certainly dosn't help matters that the US lacks the most basic of data protection laws.
The specialists who spend months or years designing a system never think of issues that slashdotters think of in 30 seconds. Or so I hear on slashdot.
I think it's almost a sixth sense, kind of like slashdotters' ability to find prior art for any patent in 30 seconds.
It isn't a special attribute of "slashdotters". It's simply that people who are very wrapped up in something can easily miss all sorts of things which are obvious to third parties. Effectivly they build their own "box" to think inside.
The problem is that the composite propellant they regulate isn't an explosive. It just burns hot and fast.
As do quite a lot of things which many people routinely keep in their houses.
Homes have all kinds of items more dangerous to firefighters in them and no permit is needed, including: gasoline in cans, aerosol cans, propane bottles (I have 6 for my grill), insecticides, ammo for guns, etc.
Note that "CFC free" aerosols often contain butane and/or propane, which will burn if the can ruptures, even if the rest of the contents won't. There's also all sorts plastics which emit toxic fumes when burned.
It would take a large quantity of rocket fuel to make the average house any more dangerous to firefighters.
Dear god, peoples' laissez-faire attitude towards gasoline is incredible. Working as I do in petroleum retail to pay for school, I see some appalling things. There was one woman who said that she accidentally spills gas on herself all the time. Aside from the hideous level of incompetence that this implies, what about the fire danger, the very real possibility of her washing machine bursting into flames when she throws the clothes into it later? People will stick a gas can in the back of a pickup truck and try to fill it up, ignoring the fact that they are then allowing gas vapors to pool in a metal basin.
If they are this careless fueling their vehicles what must they be like driving them...
Motorcyclists who fill their tank while sitting on the bike.
Which must be harder then doing it the proper way.
It is not even the background check that bothers them, it is some of the insane storage requirements. To legally store more then a small amount, you must submit floor plans of where it is stored, and local authorities MUST have a key to the location,
Without any way for you to verify the security of said plans and keys
and have full rights to inspect the location at any time, as often as they want. So nevermind the local law enforcement or FBI wandering around your house at 2 in the morning, there is nothing you can do...
For all anyone knows they could be terrorists impersonating cops.