I'm not a cryptographer, but my hunch is that it's impossible to construct a system in which you can verify that your vote was counted correctly but can't prove that to a third person...?
Ah, yes, of course--protecting your vote from your neighbour isn't so hard, since your neighbour doesn't generally know your SSN. But the much more important job of protecting your vote from the government is handled, um, shall we just say "poorly", by my proposal. Yes, the addition (as you suggest, we still need something close to uniqueness) of a password ought to solve it, assuming people remember theirs. Of course, one could still at least verify a guessed password, since there are about 2^28 people in the USA and 128 bits in md5...
Speaking of patents, is it too late to patent democracy? Oh wait--seems there isn't much money in it. Never mind.
When you go to vote, you take a one-way hash (md5sum or something) of your SSN or SSN+lastname+phone or some other unique identifier, and enter that along with your vote.
An official website lists each person's hashed ID and non-hashed vote. I can always check that my vote was registered correctly (and maybe repeat (before some deadline) until it is what I wanted it to be).
I can download everyone's vote and count them myself.
If there is a discrepancy, the responsible election officials will be flayed alive, and their heads impaled on stakes placed around the town walls for such occasions.
What's the risk here? If voter profiling reveals that someone is probably not computer-literate then they can "safely" change that person's vote, as it's unlikely that that person will confirm? Still more countable than we have now. Of course, maybe computer-illiterate people don't, on average, have the education or news access to vote responsibly and shouldn't be allowed to vote anyway?
Open Source software is a creative product that, when it leaves the nest, is likely to continue to develop and improve, and come back to the creator greater than when it left.
Passive entertainment is different: why would I spend a bunch of time and money creating some product for a bunch of parasitic consumers? Yes, in theory many versions of the CC license allow modification, but in practice I think that this is much less likely than with software, largely because while code fills a specific need and there are some measurably good and bad ways of doing it, art is far more a personal act of the creator, not very niche-driven, and there are an infinite number of ways to do it right.
I realise that YouTube has had fragments of professional shows forever, but what I saw as the greatness of YouTube was the fact that it encouraged user content. More and more we are moving away from a creative society, turning into one in which, while creators are celebrated if they are popular enough, it is expected that most people are mere parasites. I'm not sure what effect adding major TV productions to YouTube will have, but I have a hard time imagining that it will not put a damper on the "You" in YouTube.
OTOH it might have the opposite effect. Time will tell.
How can being in neutral get you into trouble? Is being unable to accelerate out of the way of someone actually a cause of significant numbers of injury-causing accidents? If so, that sounds tantamount to the claim that you need 800 horsepower for "safety reasons"--a Geo Metro, or even something turbocharged with some turbo lag, isn't that different from a car in neutral, and yet such cars drive many billions of miles safely every year.
What is the relative danger of needing the extra half second required to shift into gear vs. the danger of the extra toxins, carcinogens, greenhouse gases, etc., that you spew into the air by not coasting?
The problem is that in a capitalist society, the press writes about what people want to read about. They say that 0.3% of current mainstream news coverage (by time) is science. That's abysmal. Abolishing the free press and mandating good science coverage paves the way for all manner of stupidity, but can anyone think of a way to "encourage" the free press to do lots of good science reporting?
Also, banning religion and football couldn't really hurt.
Could someone please explain to me what "integration" means in terms of email? I picture a package that reads my email for me, figures out what meetings, talks, and parties I'm invited to, figures out which ones I want to attend based on my current schedule and priorities, adds them to my calendar, downloads and prints the papers I need for the meetings, and orders me the ingredients for whatever recipe would work well for the potlucks.
Any interpretation of "integration" I can think of sounds like a violation of any reasonable security policy.
Unless you mean "integration" in the way QT / GTK people mean, which means "the buttons have the same texture maps that they do on my word processor"...
Seriously, could someone give me an example?
And for the record, my university, that of Colorado at Boulder, provides some ad-hoc turd for webmail, and at least 95% of the students I know use gmail/yahoo/hotmail instead.
Yup, if you can find somewhere with reliable high-speed access. When I go on holiday I often come back with 2G of photos (that's with a 6MP camera and medium compression; many poor suckers will be shooting more pixels and less compression). I don't know about where you're going, but Mexico is not exactly known for network bandwidth or reliability.
Which means, I guess, that you should move to a country where you're not subject to unreasonable search and seizure. Or fulfill your duty to overthrow corrupt "government"...
If you know the exact costs, good for you. But you haven't cited any sources for your numbers, and my experience with Apple suggests that whatever they sell is, shall we say, somewhat more above cost than your numbers suggest. Steve Jobs is, after all, rather wealthy, and it's not all inherited.
This is hardly news. It's been obvious for many years. But it's interesting to see someone famous talking about it.
It's still not quite right--there are selective pressures. For example, in 1000 years the genes associated with the ability to use contraceptives will have been purged from the population. For example, all of humanity might have an innate terror of taking a pill every day. And then they'll release the new horror movie, "Condoms On Planes"!
I love the phrases "Congress banned..." and "Congress did not prohibit...". Congress would be quite interested to hear that. Congress is made of people, after all, and they almost never have the tiniest clue as to how their laws will be interpreted by trained nit-pickers. The idea that they did any of this intentionally is farcical. A more realistic phrase would be something like "Due to a bizarre, completely unanticipated technicality in over-analysed legalese, we are not allowed to..."
This reminds me of literary analysis. People will get PhDs writing about what some 300-year-old poem really meant, but they never think to ask the poet (ouija boards have come a long way...). Only in this case people are actually affected by this literarary masturbation.
This argument has been used by Harley assholes for a long time, and it's simply not valid. It may be that louder vehicles give more clues as to their whereabouts--but if that is the case, we should be duct-taping our horns down, or building in beepers and sirens to continuously wail (or wail at variable pitch depending on speed (and direction??)).
Don't get me wrong--I think driving should be made as unpleasant as possible in order to encourage people to use more responsible forms of transportation--but the unpleasantness should be limited to the driver, not to the world at large. Inflicting your noise on your neighbours is sociopathic.
So which do you think is worse: economic meltdown, or, say, global warming?
You have a very simplistic view of the economic meltdown and seem to be trying to place it all on the shoulders of Democrats (scapegoating sure is easier than actual understanding, ain't it?), but honestly, if the USA reverts to an agrarian society supporting a third of its current population, that's better than, say, having no heavy-metal-free surface water anywhere in the country (completely unrelated to global warming; just mixing it up a bit). And while Democrats haven't exactly been fighting the good fight on all counts (Clinton weakened the EPA as much as anyone), the latest Republican regime has been working very hard and very consistently to hasten every possible mode of environmental catastrophe.
An ecosystem can survive without much of a human economy. The converse is slightly more problematic. Get your priorities straight.
Politicians and other marketing people have been trying to create associations between "happy words" and their products for aeons. "Patriot Act" invokes some fucked-up association between "Patriot" and "good" (why? As someone else here is fond of pointing out, 'patriot' is almost a synonym for 'racist'). At least this suggests that "Open Source" is now a "happy word"!
Isn't that why trademarks were invented? It would not be unreasonable to trademark "Open Source" and then have a legal team (of volunteers, obviously) going around making trouble for Microsoft etc. Payment in prestige, as usual. However, I believe that Bruce Perens already tried this on behalf of the OSI, and for some reason or other it didn't work out.
Remember William Della Croce Jr? You'd better never forget that valuable lesson.
The fact that it's so close to an election is due to massive incompetence by the government in not doing comprehensive studies sooner. It's not as if there hasn't been plenty of evidence that such a study needed to be done since 2000 or so. I'm frankly a bit surprised that Bush hasn't publicised this and declared a national emergency in order to address it, suspending the elections for a couple of years.
If this study provides evidence that the election could easily be a sham, what exactly is the point of having the election?
Damn. That's a lot faster than my machine (Lenovo t61) wakes up after suspend-to-ram. 'Course, I don't need to tell matlab to suspend and save and exit, etc...
Ah, not a carrot. That's somewhat helpful... so I could sue people who own SUVs? Nice. Or Japan could sue China (and vice versa)--but in what court? It still seems that there must be a single world government for the management of global resources. And they'd need a military, or at least contracts with member countries' militaries, because a court decision without the ability to hurt people is pretty meaningless. If the USA ever invades another country for polluting, I will be very impressed:)
Perhaps you can explain how this would work? In the case of elephants I can see it, but in the case of, say, the atmosphere, I can't. Someone would have to stand to profit by providing clean air. So someone would presumably have to be able to charge money for a service that clean air provides, and that dirty air doesn't. This seems, um, wrong? What am I missing?
*laugh* Yup, given that we're going up in smoke, the "fly on the wall" perspective is mighty useful. But since we're many many years from having the capability to colonise space (especially in the amount of 7 billion), counting on that seems, um, premature. Besides, people are self-aware, intelligent, and capable of great things. We feel pain, too, as do many other animals. Yes, probably even Republicans feel pain, although possibly only in the vicinity of their right ass cheek... but why not work to let us reach our full potential, rather than shooting ourselves and everyone else in the foot? C'mon, it'll be fun!
The survival of the species is worth nothing. The survival of individuals is what matters. Our species is worth nothing for its own sake--it doesn't contribute anything positive to any ecosystem. But each person, taken separately, is worth something. Hell, this is sometimes even true of undergrads!
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This was moderated "Funny"? What's funny is that you are so trapped in a society run by cars that you can't even see the truth in what I say. Faugh!
ps. Gasoline makes you fat. Get on yer bike.
I'm not a cryptographer, but my hunch is that it's impossible to construct a system in which you can verify that your vote was counted correctly but can't prove that to a third person...?
Ah, yes, of course--protecting your vote from your neighbour isn't so hard, since your neighbour doesn't generally know your SSN. But the much more important job of protecting your vote from the government is handled, um, shall we just say "poorly", by my proposal. Yes, the addition (as you suggest, we still need something close to uniqueness) of a password ought to solve it, assuming people remember theirs. Of course, one could still at least verify a guessed password, since there are about 2^28 people in the USA and 128 bits in md5...
Speaking of patents, is it too late to patent democracy? Oh wait--seems there isn't much money in it. Never mind.
What if we did this:
When you go to vote, you take a one-way hash (md5sum or something) of your SSN or SSN+lastname+phone or some other unique identifier, and enter that along with your vote.
An official website lists each person's hashed ID and non-hashed vote. I can always check that my vote was registered correctly (and maybe repeat (before some deadline) until it is what I wanted it to be).
I can download everyone's vote and count them myself.
If there is a discrepancy, the responsible election officials will be flayed alive, and their heads impaled on stakes placed around the town walls for such occasions.
What's the risk here? If voter profiling reveals that someone is probably not computer-literate then they can "safely" change that person's vote, as it's unlikely that that person will confirm? Still more countable than we have now. Of course, maybe computer-illiterate people don't, on average, have the education or news access to vote responsibly and shouldn't be allowed to vote anyway?
What am I not considering?
No surprises there.
Open Source software is a creative product that, when it leaves the nest, is likely to continue to develop and improve, and come back to the creator greater than when it left.
Passive entertainment is different: why would I spend a bunch of time and money creating some product for a bunch of parasitic consumers? Yes, in theory many versions of the CC license allow modification, but in practice I think that this is much less likely than with software, largely because while code fills a specific need and there are some measurably good and bad ways of doing it, art is far more a personal act of the creator, not very niche-driven, and there are an infinite number of ways to do it right.
We've all been criminals for a long, long time. It's just that nobody has bothered to prosecute us yet.
Sure they did. Our British government tried its best to prosecute us. We shot at them. That used to be feasible.
I think that our only hope now is to fission into "Jesusland" and "The United States of Canada" (aka the 13th province).
I realise that YouTube has had fragments of professional shows forever, but what I saw as the greatness of YouTube was the fact that it encouraged user content. More and more we are moving away from a creative society, turning into one in which, while creators are celebrated if they are popular enough, it is expected that most people are mere parasites. I'm not sure what effect adding major TV productions to YouTube will have, but I have a hard time imagining that it will not put a damper on the "You" in YouTube.
OTOH it might have the opposite effect. Time will tell.
I see this study as further evidence that people should not be allowed to drive.
How can being in neutral get you into trouble? Is being unable to accelerate out of the way of someone actually a cause of significant numbers of injury-causing accidents? If so, that sounds tantamount to the claim that you need 800 horsepower for "safety reasons"--a Geo Metro, or even something turbocharged with some turbo lag, isn't that different from a car in neutral, and yet such cars drive many billions of miles safely every year.
What is the relative danger of needing the extra half second required to shift into gear vs. the danger of the extra toxins, carcinogens, greenhouse gases, etc., that you spew into the air by not coasting?
Don't take this as support for Palin, I personally don't think she's fit to run a day care, never mind a country.
There's a difference? Wait--maybe I've been living in the USA for too long now... oops...
Wanna bikkit!
The problem is that in a capitalist society, the press writes about what people want to read about. They say that 0.3% of current mainstream news coverage (by time) is science. That's abysmal. Abolishing the free press and mandating good science coverage paves the way for all manner of stupidity, but can anyone think of a way to "encourage" the free press to do lots of good science reporting?
Also, banning religion and football couldn't really hurt.
Could someone please explain to me what "integration" means in terms of email? I picture a package that reads my email for me, figures out what meetings, talks, and parties I'm invited to, figures out which ones I want to attend based on my current schedule and priorities, adds them to my calendar, downloads and prints the papers I need for the meetings, and orders me the ingredients for whatever recipe would work well for the potlucks.
Any interpretation of "integration" I can think of sounds like a violation of any reasonable security policy.
Unless you mean "integration" in the way QT / GTK people mean, which means "the buttons have the same texture maps that they do on my word processor"...
Seriously, could someone give me an example?
And for the record, my university, that of Colorado at Boulder, provides some ad-hoc turd for webmail, and at least 95% of the students I know use gmail/yahoo/hotmail instead.
Yup, if you can find somewhere with reliable high-speed access. When I go on holiday I often come back with 2G of photos (that's with a 6MP camera and medium compression; many poor suckers will be shooting more pixels and less compression). I don't know about where you're going, but Mexico is not exactly known for network bandwidth or reliability.
Which means, I guess, that you should move to a country where you're not subject to unreasonable search and seizure. Or fulfill your duty to overthrow corrupt "government"...
If you know the exact costs, good for you. But you haven't cited any sources for your numbers, and my experience with Apple suggests that whatever they sell is, shall we say, somewhat more above cost than your numbers suggest. Steve Jobs is, after all, rather wealthy, and it's not all inherited.
This is hardly news. It's been obvious for many years. But it's interesting to see someone famous talking about it.
It's still not quite right--there are selective pressures. For example, in 1000 years the genes associated with the ability to use contraceptives will have been purged from the population. For example, all of humanity might have an innate terror of taking a pill every day. And then they'll release the new horror movie, "Condoms On Planes"!
I love the phrases "Congress banned..." and "Congress did not prohibit...". Congress would be quite interested to hear that. Congress is made of people, after all, and they almost never have the tiniest clue as to how their laws will be interpreted by trained nit-pickers. The idea that they did any of this intentionally is farcical. A more realistic phrase would be something like "Due to a bizarre, completely unanticipated technicality in over-analysed legalese, we are not allowed to ..."
This reminds me of literary analysis. People will get PhDs writing about what some 300-year-old poem really meant, but they never think to ask the poet (ouija boards have come a long way...). Only in this case people are actually affected by this literarary masturbation.
This argument has been used by Harley assholes for a long time, and it's simply not valid. It may be that louder vehicles give more clues as to their whereabouts--but if that is the case, we should be duct-taping our horns down, or building in beepers and sirens to continuously wail (or wail at variable pitch depending on speed (and direction??)).
Don't get me wrong--I think driving should be made as unpleasant as possible in order to encourage people to use more responsible forms of transportation--but the unpleasantness should be limited to the driver, not to the world at large. Inflicting your noise on your neighbours is sociopathic.
So which do you think is worse: economic meltdown, or, say, global warming?
You have a very simplistic view of the economic meltdown and seem to be trying to place it all on the shoulders of Democrats (scapegoating sure is easier than actual understanding, ain't it?), but honestly, if the USA reverts to an agrarian society supporting a third of its current population, that's better than, say, having no heavy-metal-free surface water anywhere in the country (completely unrelated to global warming; just mixing it up a bit). And while Democrats haven't exactly been fighting the good fight on all counts (Clinton weakened the EPA as much as anyone), the latest Republican regime has been working very hard and very consistently to hasten every possible mode of environmental catastrophe.
An ecosystem can survive without much of a human economy. The converse is slightly more problematic. Get your priorities straight.
Politicians and other marketing people have been trying to create associations between "happy words" and their products for aeons. "Patriot Act" invokes some fucked-up association between "Patriot" and "good" (why? As someone else here is fond of pointing out, 'patriot' is almost a synonym for 'racist'). At least this suggests that "Open Source" is now a "happy word"!
Isn't that why trademarks were invented? It would not be unreasonable to trademark "Open Source" and then have a legal team (of volunteers, obviously) going around making trouble for Microsoft etc. Payment in prestige, as usual. However, I believe that Bruce Perens already tried this on behalf of the OSI, and for some reason or other it didn't work out.
Remember William Della Croce Jr? You'd better never forget that valuable lesson.
The fact that it's so close to an election is due to massive incompetence by the government in not doing comprehensive studies sooner. It's not as if there hasn't been plenty of evidence that such a study needed to be done since 2000 or so. I'm frankly a bit surprised that Bush hasn't publicised this and declared a national emergency in order to address it, suspending the elections for a couple of years.
If this study provides evidence that the election could easily be a sham, what exactly is the point of having the election?
Damn. That's a lot faster than my machine (Lenovo t61) wakes up after suspend-to-ram. 'Course, I don't need to tell matlab to suspend and save and exit, etc...
Ah, not a carrot. That's somewhat helpful... so I could sue people who own SUVs? Nice. Or Japan could sue China (and vice versa)--but in what court? It still seems that there must be a single world government for the management of global resources. And they'd need a military, or at least contracts with member countries' militaries, because a court decision without the ability to hurt people is pretty meaningless. If the USA ever invades another country for polluting, I will be very impressed :)
Perhaps you can explain how this would work? In the case of elephants I can see it, but in the case of, say, the atmosphere, I can't. Someone would have to stand to profit by providing clean air. So someone would presumably have to be able to charge money for a service that clean air provides, and that dirty air doesn't. This seems, um, wrong? What am I missing?
I believe money is made from cotton hereabouts...
*laugh* Yup, given that we're going up in smoke, the "fly on the wall" perspective is mighty useful. But since we're many many years from having the capability to colonise space (especially in the amount of 7 billion), counting on that seems, um, premature. Besides, people are self-aware, intelligent, and capable of great things. We feel pain, too, as do many other animals. Yes, probably even Republicans feel pain, although possibly only in the vicinity of their right ass cheek... but why not work to let us reach our full potential, rather than shooting ourselves and everyone else in the foot? C'mon, it'll be fun!
The survival of the species is worth nothing. The survival of individuals is what matters. Our species is worth nothing for its own sake--it doesn't contribute anything positive to any ecosystem. But each person, taken separately, is worth something. Hell, this is sometimes even true of undergrads!