Stomping on scientific research, technical innovation and in this case open source, all in the name of fighting terrorism is deeply unhealthy.
As well as rather pointless. Given that terrorism attacks can easily be very low tech and use information which has been in the public domain for decades if not centuries.
I'm not in favour of declassifying the usual military secrets,
All too often things can be kept secret because of either a culture of secracy or simply as CYA for some fool. Not because they are a real risk. Except for some fools you probably don't really want involved in the first place...
A paper ballot is easily understandable, easily countable, is reliant only on pencil and paper at the user end
No need for electricity or telecommunications links in order for someone to cast their vote. Power outages are probably easier to arrange than roads being closed...
As someone else has noted, the US only has an election once every 2 years,
It's more that the US likes to "save up" elections so that a whole lot get done all at the same time.
"Lost" ballots, plus ballots that are actually lost by mistake
Give each ballot paper a counterfoil and serial number. Counterfoil has 2 boxes, one is marked when the paper is issued the other is marked if a voter spoils their paper and wants another one.
Voters who mark more than one candidate
Count as "spoiled paper".
Voters who don't mark any candidate. Perhaps someone forgets to mark their choice for Senator even though they intended. An automatic system could confirm that they wish to skip this section.
Maybe they voted for "none of the above". Another thing to remember is one ballot paper per election. i.e. "Senator" would be a different piece of paper. Multiple elections on the same paper make counting recounting and auditing far more complicated.
because everyone in America needs things NOW NOW NOW.
The strange thing is that in many cases it wouldn't matter. It's not as if the US president might be told to leave a few hours after the polls close...
With a paper vote, the system is intrincially very simple - the voter marks a ballot paper according to who they're voting for.
It's also possible to set up a polling station in a shed in the middle of nowhere. Anyway an eletronic voting machine system probably really should come with the generators and telecoms hardware to ensure the whole thing could work in the middle of nowhere. So as to guard against the power going off. Thus you now need a large truck per polling localtion.
The ballot papers can be counted by hand, and anyone who wants to can observe the counting.
Even if you use a machine to count them then the machine you use would be a paper sorter/collater. Which has no "knowlage" as to which candidate is which.
If I can get a touch-screen system that generates auditable, _human readable_ sheets of paper or some other voter-and-auditor readable medium, then I'm very interested in electronic systems -- they're faster, cheaper, and potentially much more accurate.
How are they faster or cheaper when it comes to actually casting the ballot than a form filled in by pen/pencil? When it comes to counting in most parts of the world this is managed in hours by humans. With quite a few US elections it wouldn't really matter if it took a month to get the results anyway.
First, you have to define "digest," and you have to define "burn." If, by digest, you mean that a chunk of bacon is absorbed by the intestines less rapidly than a chunk of rice, you may or may not be correct. It doesn't matter.
Actually it matters quite a bit. Since the process of digestion uses energy and the harder something is to digest then the less of it is likely to end up in the body in the first place.
The point is that when people are hungry; sometimes they really are lacking in something. If you aren't eating a balanced diet you will tend to feel hungry because your body needs something.
N.B. a "balanced diet" does not mean "balanced" meals. Religiously insisting on meals being "balanced" could easily mean that in order to give your body what it needs you are also throwing a lot of stuff it dosn't need at it.
Why the Atkins approach works is first-year biochemistry (in fact, it's one of the first things we learned about in my college biochem class in 1973).
Whereas the idea of "calorie counting" dosn't make any sense from the point of view of bichemistry. The number tends to mean how much energy is generated by burning in pure oxygen. Nothing to do with much of a food is actually taken into the body and how much energy could be derived using the chemical reactions living organisms actually use.
Now, just the other day, a friend of mine told me in rather exasperated terms how he was freaked out that his 4 year old daughter was terrified that mister president bush was going to fly a plane and bomb her day care center. She didnt understand that the little blown up kids on the tv set (Hey nice one TV guys, showing bodies on newsflashes during 9am cartoons.. gee thanx) was part of a complex series of political events staged on the other side of the planet. The 4yo brain just dont get that iraq is not a 5 minute bus ride away, and that the Americans are 'on our side'.
Maybe she dosn't get the idea that someone behind nasty things is on "our side"... Anyway Iraq isn't a 5 minute bus ride away from the US either.
I love how the article says that the Beltway Snipers supposedly practiced with Halo. If they said that or not... I don't know, but either way, even if they DID... how the HELL is a game any good practice for a real sniper rifle. True, you get hand eye coordination, or adjusted vision for it... But you don't line a target up in sights in the game like you would with a REAL gun in your hand. If Halo had a sniper gun attachment which you played with (Like Time Crisis' pistol), then maybe....
You'd probably want at attachment which acts like a real gun, both in terms of weight and moment of inertia. Also something which generates a recoil when "fired". In other words some kind of "gun simulator". Even if you can buy a gun attachment for a games console you simply have a piece of plastic which dosn't behave like the real thing.
US citizens are constanly bombarded with news from the wars and violent conflicts in which the US is involved. The idea is that this sort of news, and in general, this type of government policy, constantly shows that violence and killing are acceptable solutions. Iraq is a great example of this.
Especially with the "embedded reporters". Politicans in both the US and UK moaning about other journalists showing other things. Even firing of journalists who are non-PC.
I do think this is an important point, but it is much easier to blame videogames than government policy.
A violent video game might even be more likely to show the consequences of violence than government sponsored "reporting".
The embedded version is simply a normal version of linux (yes, we do mean redhat, debian, even mandrake...) with very few packages installed.
Not an embedded system is specifically tailored to both the hardware and it's task. Regular distributions are rather too bloated for this kind of thing.
The seller sets the price for his merchandise. The buyer buys it, or he doesn't. "Well, I wouldn't have bought it anyway" doesn't give the buyer the right to just take it for free.
The central issue is that "content" is a different entity from material goods. Pretending that that a music recording is a physical entity made sense when it was tightly tied to a physical media. Over the last few decades this has ceased to be the case. The whole concept of "intellectual property" is based on the assumption that it makes sense to pretend that a piece of "content" is functionally equivalent to a piece of physical property.
With cellular phone networks, it's over-the-air bandwidth that is at a premium.
But that has nothing to do with number portability. Anyway quite a lot of the intrastructure of a cellular network is likely to be connected to cables. Certainly the actual switching hardware and interconnections to other PTOs will be cable.
But transfering land-line numbers to mobile phones is opening a whole new can of worms. If I'm calling what appears to be a local number and it turns out to be mobile, which may not even be in the same country as me, then I'm likely to start getting aggrieved when my phone bill comes through...
In which case you would be charged for a local call. It would be the person you were calling who'd be paying the extra. Exactly the same as if they had placed a regular call divert to their mobile. (though possibly a different cost to them.) So far as the billing system is concerned you made a local call, it would take an extensive rewrite to add the ability to charge by any other metric other than the digits you had actually dialed. You'd need extra fields in the records generated by the switching system for starters.
We (UK) don't however, have the ability to take landline numbers to mobile networks or vice versa as suggested by the article (not permanently anyway - you can redirect calls if you want but you end up paying for incoming calls)....which I'm very glad about because that would be a totally stupid idea. How on earth would you know if you're calling a landline (1p/min or perhaps free) or a mobile (10p/min or much more depending on your tariff). I can't believe they're even suggesting this.
You get charged exactly the same way as now, according to the digits you dial. The mobile companies would probably insist on something like the US system where the mobile owner pays for incomming calls. But I can't see why there should be any issue in the US.
Send letters, rather than emails. Emails are too easy to ignore.
Maybe a postcard would be more likely to get there than a letter, no envelope to contain white powder. Anyway they can just as easily feed letters into a shredder as delete emails.
The whole concept of copyrights (as well as patents) was invented so that people would not keep their works secret. It was invented solely to encourage people to publish their work.
Actually the concept was originally invented to give the state control over the, then new, technology of the printing press. Encouraging publication was a later idea.
Obviously, when the U.S. Constititution was written, nobody expected or imagined that any copyrighted work could be obfuscated or encrypted. The technology didn't exist at the time.
Encryption has probably been around as long as writing. It would certainly have been possible to publish encrypted material a few hundred years ago.
It is clear then, that the exception to free speech carved out by the copyright clause
The copyright clause can only really carve out an exemption if you read the US Constitution backwards. In the same way that the US Congress likes to interpret the commerce clause as overruling the 10th ammendment. The point of an ammendment is that it ammends a pre-existing document. Whilst an ammendment can "carve out" part of a pre-existing clause (or a previous ammendment) the pre-existing clause can't alter the ammendment.
My guess is that this is just a side effect of whatever the standard contract is. When licensing software you don't want to have to negotiate a different licensing agreement with each customer unless you have to.
Thing is that the EULA appears to have originated as an individually negotiated agreement. Where the software supplier was dealing with a much larger and more powerful customer.
Business Environments: Only a student believes corporate users are allowed to install software on business machines.
S/a student/an idiot/ Probably someone who thinks that everything should work like a home machine. Quite a few companies sell addons to prevent end user installation under Windows.
IT manages all installs, which is yet another argument against your dependencies ruse. Even if there is a problem, IT can build the software out on one mule machine and ditribute to desktops automatically with a few simple scripts.
You are less likely to get problems of the form of apps which refuse to run if they don't have privileges to do whatever they like in the first place. You also have the source to fix it. As opposed to Windows apps developed as "power user"/"local admin" which won't run at all as a regular user. Even though they shouldn't actually need privileges to do whatever task they should be doing.
In my experience, if you buy software that any fool can set up by clicking through some wizards, you'll inevitably end up with a bunch of fools running all your expensive computers...
Who may have little clue as to what they are doing and get completly lost when the "wizard" dosn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Stomping on scientific research, technical innovation and in this case open source, all in the name of fighting terrorism is deeply unhealthy.
As well as rather pointless. Given that terrorism attacks can easily be very low tech and use information which has been in the public domain for decades if not centuries.
I'm not in favour of declassifying the usual military secrets,
All too often things can be kept secret because of either a culture of secracy or simply as CYA for some fool. Not because they are a real risk. Except for some fools you probably don't really want involved in the first place...
A paper ballot is easily understandable, easily countable, is reliant only on pencil and paper at the user end
No need for electricity or telecommunications links in order for someone to cast their vote. Power outages are probably easier to arrange than roads being closed...
As someone else has noted, the US only has an election once every 2 years,
It's more that the US likes to "save up" elections so that a whole lot get done all at the same time.
"Lost" ballots, plus ballots that are actually lost by mistake
Give each ballot paper a counterfoil and serial number. Counterfoil has 2 boxes, one is marked when the paper is issued the other is marked if a voter spoils their paper and wants another one.
Voters who mark more than one candidate
Count as "spoiled paper".
Voters who don't mark any candidate. Perhaps someone forgets to mark their choice for Senator even though they intended. An automatic system could confirm that they wish to skip this section.
Maybe they voted for "none of the above". Another thing to remember is one ballot paper per election. i.e. "Senator" would be a different piece of paper. Multiple elections on the same paper make counting recounting and auditing far more complicated.
because everyone in America needs things NOW NOW NOW.
The strange thing is that in many cases it wouldn't matter. It's not as if the US president might be told to leave a few hours after the polls close...
With a paper vote, the system is intrincially very simple - the voter marks a ballot paper according to who they're voting for.
It's also possible to set up a polling station in a shed in the middle of nowhere. Anyway an eletronic voting machine system probably really should come with the generators and telecoms hardware to ensure the whole thing could work in the middle of nowhere. So as to guard against the power going off. Thus you now need a large truck per polling localtion.
The ballot papers can be counted by hand, and anyone who wants to can observe the counting.
Even if you use a machine to count them then the machine you use would be a paper sorter/collater. Which has no "knowlage" as to which candidate is which.
it's actually a lot easier to rig elections when they're done manually than when they're done electronically (as Jeb Bush will happily inform you)
Only if the count isn't properly supervised.
because you can declare big chunks of those paper ballots "unreadable" and exclude them from manual counting
Kind of hard to do if a candidate or journalist says "let me see those papers or spend some time in a police cell".
If I can get a touch-screen system that generates auditable, _human readable_ sheets of paper or some other voter-and-auditor readable medium, then I'm very interested in electronic systems -- they're faster, cheaper, and potentially much more accurate.
How are they faster or cheaper when it comes to actually casting the ballot than a form filled in by pen/pencil?
When it comes to counting in most parts of the world this is managed in hours by humans. With quite a few US elections it wouldn't really matter if it took a month to get the results anyway.
First, you have to define "digest," and you have to define "burn." If, by digest, you mean that a chunk of bacon is absorbed by the intestines less rapidly than a chunk of rice, you may or may not be correct. It doesn't matter.
Actually it matters quite a bit. Since the process of digestion uses energy and the harder something is to digest then the less of it is likely to end up in the body in the first place.
The point is that when people are hungry; sometimes they really are lacking in something. If you aren't eating a balanced diet you will tend to feel hungry because your body needs something.
N.B. a "balanced diet" does not mean "balanced" meals. Religiously insisting on meals being "balanced" could easily mean that in order to give your body what it needs you are also throwing a lot of stuff it dosn't need at it.
Why the Atkins approach works is first-year biochemistry (in fact, it's one of the first things we learned about in my college biochem class in 1973).
Whereas the idea of "calorie counting" dosn't make any sense from the point of view of bichemistry. The number tends to mean how much energy is generated by burning in pure oxygen. Nothing to do with much of a food is actually taken into the body and how much energy could be derived using the chemical reactions living organisms actually use.
Now, just the other day, a friend of mine told me in rather exasperated terms how he was freaked out that his 4 year old daughter was terrified that mister president bush was going to fly a plane and bomb her day care center. She didnt understand that the little blown up kids on the tv set (Hey nice one TV guys, showing bodies on newsflashes during 9am cartoons.. gee thanx) was part of a complex series of political events staged on the other side of the planet. The 4yo brain just dont get that iraq is not a 5 minute bus ride away, and that the Americans are 'on our side'.
Maybe she dosn't get the idea that someone behind nasty things is on "our side"... Anyway Iraq isn't a 5 minute bus ride away from the US either.
I love how the article says that the Beltway Snipers supposedly practiced with Halo. If they said that or not... I don't know, but either way, even if they DID... how the HELL is a game any good practice for a real sniper rifle. True, you get hand eye coordination, or adjusted vision for it... But you don't line a target up in sights in the game like you would with a REAL gun in your hand. If Halo had a sniper gun attachment which you played with (Like Time Crisis' pistol), then maybe....
You'd probably want at attachment which acts like a real gun, both in terms of weight and moment of inertia. Also something which generates a recoil when "fired". In other words some kind of "gun simulator".
Even if you can buy a gun attachment for a games console you simply have a piece of plastic which dosn't behave like the real thing.
US citizens are constanly bombarded with news from the wars and violent conflicts in which the US is involved. The idea is that this sort of news, and in general, this type of government policy, constantly shows that violence and killing are acceptable solutions. Iraq is a great example of this.
Especially with the "embedded reporters". Politicans in both the US and UK moaning about other journalists showing other things. Even firing of journalists who are non-PC.
I do think this is an important point, but it is much easier to blame videogames than government policy.
A violent video game might even be more likely to show the consequences of violence than government sponsored "reporting".
The embedded version is simply a normal version of linux (yes, we do mean redhat, debian, even mandrake ...) with very few packages installed.
Not an embedded system is specifically tailored to both the hardware and it's task. Regular distributions are rather too bloated for this kind of thing.
The seller sets the price for his merchandise. The buyer buys it, or he doesn't. "Well, I wouldn't have bought it anyway" doesn't give the buyer the right to just take it for free.
The central issue is that "content" is a different entity from material goods. Pretending that that a music recording is a physical entity made sense when it was tightly tied to a physical media. Over the last few decades this has ceased to be the case.
The whole concept of "intellectual property" is based on the assumption that it makes sense to pretend that a piece of "content" is functionally equivalent to a piece of physical property.
With cellular phone networks, it's over-the-air bandwidth that is at a premium.
But that has nothing to do with number portability. Anyway quite a lot of the intrastructure of a cellular network is likely to be connected to cables. Certainly the actual switching hardware and interconnections to other PTOs will be cable.
But transfering land-line numbers to mobile phones is opening a whole new can of worms. If I'm calling what appears to be a local number and it turns out to be mobile, which may not even be in the same country as me, then I'm likely to start getting aggrieved when my phone bill comes through...
In which case you would be charged for a local call. It would be the person you were calling who'd be paying the extra. Exactly the same as if they had placed a regular call divert to their mobile. (though possibly a different cost to them.)
So far as the billing system is concerned you made a local call, it would take an extensive rewrite to add the ability to charge by any other metric other than the digits you had actually dialed. You'd need extra fields in the records generated by the switching system for starters.
We (UK) don't however, have the ability to take landline numbers to mobile networks or vice versa as suggested by the article (not permanently anyway - you can redirect calls if you want but you end up paying for incoming calls). ...which I'm very glad about because that would be a totally stupid idea. How on earth would you know if you're calling a landline (1p/min or perhaps free) or a mobile (10p/min or much more depending on your tariff). I can't believe they're even suggesting this.
You get charged exactly the same way as now, according to the digits you dial.
The mobile companies would probably insist on something like the US system where the mobile owner pays for incomming calls. But I can't see why there should be any issue in the US.
The actual problem is that democracy is often the tyranny of the VOCAL MINORITY.
Who are quite likely claiming to represent a "silent majority".
Thats part of the reason that lobbying works...that and the bribes.
It's a lot easier to lobby and bribe when you only have to deal with 2 large political parties too.
Send letters, rather than emails. Emails are too easy to ignore.
Maybe a postcard would be more likely to get there than a letter, no envelope to contain white powder. Anyway they can just as easily feed letters into a shredder as delete emails.
The whole concept of copyrights (as well as patents) was invented so that people would not keep their works secret. It was invented solely to encourage people to publish their work.
Actually the concept was originally invented to give the state control over the, then new, technology of the printing press.
Encouraging publication was a later idea.
Obviously, when the U.S. Constititution was written, nobody expected or imagined that any copyrighted work could be obfuscated or encrypted. The technology didn't exist at the time.
Encryption has probably been around as long as writing. It would certainly have been possible to publish encrypted material a few hundred years ago.
It is clear then, that the exception to free speech carved out by the copyright clause
The copyright clause can only really carve out an exemption if you read the US Constitution backwards. In the same way that the US Congress likes to interpret the commerce clause as overruling the 10th ammendment. The point of an ammendment is that it ammends a pre-existing document. Whilst an ammendment can "carve out" part of a pre-existing clause (or a previous ammendment) the pre-existing clause can't alter the ammendment.
My guess is that this is just a side effect of whatever the standard contract is. When licensing software you don't want to have to negotiate a different licensing agreement with each customer unless you have to.
Thing is that the EULA appears to have originated as an individually negotiated agreement. Where the software supplier was dealing with a much larger and more powerful customer.
you CAN do the change espically in a business environment wher you have the ultimate luxury of having a staff to configure and maintain the systems.
Especially if they are not having to spend time dealing with the results of end users trying to install software on workstations.
Business Environments: Only a student believes corporate users are allowed to install software on business machines.
S/a student/an idiot/
Probably someone who thinks that everything should work like a home machine.
Quite a few companies sell addons to prevent end user installation under Windows.
IT manages all installs, which is yet another argument against your dependencies ruse. Even if there is a problem, IT can build the software out on one mule machine and ditribute to desktops automatically with a few simple scripts.
You are less likely to get problems of the form of apps which refuse to run if they don't have privileges to do whatever they like in the first place. You also have the source to fix it. As opposed to Windows apps developed as "power user"/"local admin" which won't run at all as a regular user. Even though they shouldn't actually need privileges to do whatever task they should be doing.
In my experience, if you buy software that any fool can set up by clicking through some wizards, you'll inevitably end up with a bunch of fools running all your expensive computers...
Who may have little clue as to what they are doing and get completly lost when the "wizard" dosn't work.