If you want to change the system, vote for anyone except a Democrat or Republican. Any time another party looks like it might be competitive it will scare both parties into better behavior.
If you genuinely don't care which of the two major party candidates wins the election, then I wholeheartedly agree - even if you don't like any of the minor party candidates, vote for one of them anyway. They can't win, so voting for them isn't in any way "dangerous", but the bigger their numbers, the more the two major parties will listen to them.
In this presidential election, I do care which candidate wins, so I voted for the candidate I want to win. However, in some local elections I voted for third party candidates, because I don't care.
By being given the opportunity to vote, we're invited to participate in our electoral process.
If you decline to vote, then you really have no recourse to complain about the results of that process, do you? You had your chance to be heard and decided you had other things to do.
As others have pointed out, your logic is flawed. If you dislike all the candidates who are running, then a vote for one of them is not expressing your real opinion. Why should voting for a candidate you don't like be a prerequisite to making your voice heard?
Personally, I don't really understand people who take that position; I usually find the two major party candidates to be different enough that there is a clear "lesser of two evils" that I want to win. The idea that some people really don't care which candidate wins the election, not because they're apathetic about politics but because they strongly believe that both major party candidates AND all the third-party candidates would be equally bad for the country, confuses me. But, there are quite a few of these people out there who hold this view, and their refusal to vote is justified.
In other countries, protesting a flawed election system by not voting is pretty common. Usually that's because the people know the vote counting is rigged in favor of the incumbent, but if the opposing candidate were the incumbent's best friend, that would probably be a good reason to abstain. Imagine an election between Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, for example, or if Hillary Clinton switched parties and ran as a Republican against Barack Obama in 2012.
I think there's room for an electronic and a paper record that mirror each other, and use the paper record as the official one in case of discrepancy. There are too many benefits to having an electronic copy of the record immediately to ignore the possibility of using electronic entry and tallying, with a physical "backup".
I disagree about the benefits, but if you really need a real-time count, use a second machine with an optical scanner, which voter-verified paper ballots are fed into. This machine counts the votes and stores the paper ballots; there only needs to be one per polling place even though there may be a dozen of the user input/ballot printing machines. Each polling place should also have a supply of blank ballots on hand, which voters can fill out with a #2 pencil just like standardized tests in school; these would be used in case the user input/ballot printing machines break, or there aren't enough of them for the number of voters, or a voter simply prefers not to use the machines. If the counting machine fails, you simply bypass the scanner (I envision removing the scanning/counting module which would break tamper-evident tape, so election officials know the electronic count is invalid) and drop ballots into a slot in the locked ballot box.
The entire browser market has a strong 'you snooze, you lose' component to it. Microsoft did employ dirty tricks to get IE popular fast, but if Netscape hadn't fallen asleep at the switch, Microsoft still wouldn't have succeeded in dominating the market.
And Microsoft's dominance isn't a permanent thing - they built up enough marketshare that they could afford to fall asleep at the switch for several years, but when Firefox started making inroads, Microsoft woke up. Their first move was to add a couple of security features to IE6SP2, then they built IE7 which was a genuine attempt to make a less terrible browser. They're fully awake now, and (shockingly) they're playing by the rules this time around - behaving as though they're competing on a level playing field, even going out of their way to cooperate with other browser vendors. They know they've fallen way behind, and it will take them a long time to catch up, but they're definitely not asleep anymore.
The simplest solution is to use an electronic machine for people to select their choices but at the end, provide a sheet with all their votes recorded which they deposit in a box. The machine votes are recorded but you have a paper trail in case electronic votes are "lost".
One slight modification of your idea: the electronic machine people use to select their choices, which prints their selections on a sheet of paper, does not count the votes. The sheet of paper is the actual ballot, and it gets counted by an optical scan machine AFTER the voter has looked at it and dropped it into a box. The optical scanner could be inside the box where ballots are stored in each polling place, or the box full of ballots could be taken to election headquarters and fed into a scanner there; either way, the paper ballot is what gets counted (and recounted if necessary).
There's no reason to not use electronic voting machines that are properly designed and verified.
Sorry, but if you're referring to the type of electronic voting machines that do not use a paper ballot as the official record, then you're wrong. Even if the machine uses open-source software, even if it is tested and verified to work. Computers can break, and they break a lot. It's my job to fix them, so I see them break more often than most people do, and I don't want to rely on them for something as important as voting.
However, I'm a huge fan of optical scan machines. They're proven, they're reliable, and there's no reason not to use a machine to scan paper ballots. Also, there's no reason not to use a computer with a well-designed UI to prepare and print paper ballots, which can be verified by the voter before being cast. But whatever technology is used, I think we need physical human-readable ballots. There's just no good reason not to.
It's difficult to design complicated software in Perl.
Hogwash. You just have to self-impose some rules, since Perl doesn't impose them for you.
Plus Perl is basically dead since they decided to start that idiotic Perl 6 project that will never be finished (and even if it is I'm sure it will suck).
Go ahead and ignore Perl 6 for now; I am. Perl 5 is still being actively developed; they're not making major announcements like "OMG we've invented namespaces!" because Perl 5 is already a perfectly adequate language. Perl isn't a hot new buzzword, but that doesn't mean it's dead.
Given that / support has only been present in recent Windows versions, I have to say
[citation sorely needed]
Agreed. I think there might be some places where Windows 95 will accept / as a path separator, but I'm not aware that it was ever allowed before that, and although Windows 95 may seem like ancient history in the modern age of Vista, it's a looooong way from MS-DOS 1.0.
When are you going to use the escape character outside of a string? I agree that it's dumb, and it's going to make for ugly looking code, but saying that it shouldn't be used because it's an escape character seems like an empty criticism. It's like saying that Elisabeth Taylor's personal life is messed up because she doesn't pay enough attention to her hair.
It's true that backslashes aren't used outside of a string... but variables ARE used INSIDE of a string. So, if you have a variable called $foo\name, you're going to be seeing strings like "Hello, my name is $foo\name\n".
Terrorists can use TXT messages too... and guess what... TXT messages are more secure than Twitter.
Not necessarily. It's easy to identify the recipient of an SMS text message - it's whatever phone number the message was sent to, obviously. Of course, associating the phone number to a person may not be possible (e.g. if they paid cash for a pre-paid phone), but at least you know their phone number, which you can correlate with call records (under subpoena, of course).
On the other hand, since Twitter is a broadcast-style service that anyone can subscribe to, there could be hundreds of people subscribed to a particular feed, and no way to tell which one of them can understand the hidden message (using pre-arranged code words, etc.).
Suicide bombers don't much care about being identified after the fact. Most terrorists, especially domestic terrorists, want to live to see the results of their actions without getting caught.
It must be quite obvious by now that this is NOT about protecting the US from 'dangerous terrorists'(TM). It's all about justifying the security and intelligence forces' jobs.
You're an idiot.
The GP is right, it is totally appropriate for the government and the military to be aware of the existence of services like Twitter and how they can be used. In the unlikely event that Twitter is somehow used in the execution of the next terrorist attack, I want the reaction from the government to be something like this:
"The terrorists used the micro-blogging service Twitter to communicate with each other and coordinate the attack. We have previously evaluated Twitter, and do not believe the service itself to be a threat; unfortunately, any communications medium can be abused by those with criminal intent."
I do NOT want the reaction to be something like this:
"The terrorists used something called Twitter to carry out their attack. Until we can learn more about this new threat to freedom, we have ordered Twitter to be shut down. The FBI has just completed an operation to seize all computers and other equipment used in Twitter's operation, and several members of Twitter's staff are being held for questioning."
I hate distros that do that by default. I'm not going to confirm every single file I want to delete, so when I delete a directory, instead of just using rm -r, I'm just going to use rm -rf instead. Now, not only have I completely negated any benefit of using rm -i, but I've also lost the confirmation for files I might want to be warned about (I don't encounter this often, but I think it warns you about deleting files you don't have write access to, but can still delete because you have write access to the parent directory and the sticky bit is off).
Hell YES. This is what I've been wishing Warcraft/Starcraft could do. Shared vision and the ability to send resources to other members of your team is one small step in the right direction, but I don't want multiple armies who happen to be allied with each other, I want multiple players controlling one army.
I would add that there's no need to label one player a Minister of War, another as Minister of Commerce, etc. If you give all players full control over everything, they'll figure out how to cooperate based on their own personal strengths and preferences. (On the other hand, it may be useful to optimize the UI for specific roles; I'm not really opposed to the idea, just saying it's not a requirement.)
Nobody's talking about perma-beta here. Firefox 3.0 was released four months ago. Version 3.1 has been in alpha testing since late July, is in beta testing now, and will be released in a couple of months.
IE 7 was released in October 2006.
IE 8 beta 1 was released in March, beta 2 was released in August, and Microsoft is currently working on beta 3. (I'm pretty sure they mentioned something about beta 3 in last week's developer chat, but I can't verify that, because for some reason they haven't posted the transcript yet.)
If you don't care about beta versions, maybe Slashdot isn't the web site for you.
This destroys Microsoft's claim that their intimate knowledge of the OS that runs IE will increase performance.
This proves that Microsoft's intimate knowledge of their OS actually inhibits performance of IE and therefore all other Microsoft products.
Microsoft is a victim of their own feature-rich corporate culture. They are a victim of their customers non-uniform demands.
Microsoft is a victim of their own monopoly position. They seized dominance of the web browser market away from Netscape with IE 4, achieved monopoly status with IE 5, and with the release of IE 6 in 2001, they stopped development and did nothing but minor bugfixes for the next three years. It wasn't until 2004 that they released XPSP2 with a handful of new features, such as the information bar, popup blocker, add-on manager, and some new security features.
When you control over 90% of the market, you have no incentive to innovate. From 2001 to 2004, Microsoft simply didn't bother doing anything with IE, because they didn't have to. However, other browsers such as Firefox started becoming popular, and when IE's market share dipped below 90%, Microsoft realized if they wanted people to keep using IE at all, they would have to start competing again.
Microsoft still has a large market share, but obviously their competitors have the technical superiority, and in order to catch up, Microsoft will have to play by everybody else's rules. This means adding features that users want, listening to web developers, supporting industry standards, and cooperating with their competing browser vendors to ensure interoperability. SP2 was the very beginning of this effort, and IE7 was a serious attempt to make a browser that doesn't suck as much as IE6. Microsoft is back in the game, and they're playing by the rules, but after sitting on their thumbs for three years (and not doing a whole lot for the four years before that), it's going to take them a long time to catch up.
The issue is similar to the ones that have always plagued Java; you have to load massive libraries to do miniscule tasks and that causes noticeable overhead, when they were sadly intended to save time! Firefox is simply more minimal, and it is through their actively sought after security footprint that they deliver better performance by default.
Firefox loads what you need to surf and also lets you modify the experience -- you are in control.
It sounds to me like you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Add with that experience, superior plugins like NoScript, and you also save bandwidth because Flash files don't load by default and scripts don't tie up resources unless you approve them to do so. NoScript was designed for security, but with the added benefit that you get faster performance with it.
Add-ons like NoScript aren't part of Firefox. Support for them is, but IE added that support years ago (and IE add-ons like this are available).
Even when you look at Google Chrome, which is also a valid attempt at increasing performance (they flaunt security as a pillar of their design, but their cheerleading is unwarranted),
Again, you don't know what you're talking about; they haven't reached a 1.0 release yet, so of course it's buggy, but their design philosophy isn't just cheerleading.
the fact that you can't control scripts that are allowed to run, limits the user and make the user bound to the control of the webmaster, who typically controlled by a business or corporation that is only in it for the money and will infringe on rights of users without any form of conscience or compassion.
Maybe you should start visiting better web sites. I have absolutely no interest in blocking JavaScript or Flash, because I avoid sites that abuse them, just as I avoid sites that abuse HTML and CSS to do obnoxious things.
You are correct, or it may not cook correctly at all at the lower temperature even with more time. For example, if you want to boil rice in Guatemala City, you have to sautee it first.
Damn Slashdot's broken Unicode support. There should be an accent in there.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to change the system, vote for anyone except a Democrat or Republican. Any time another party looks like it might be competitive it will scare both parties into better behavior.
If you genuinely don't care which of the two major party candidates wins the election, then I wholeheartedly agree - even if you don't like any of the minor party candidates, vote for one of them anyway. They can't win, so voting for them isn't in any way "dangerous", but the bigger their numbers, the more the two major parties will listen to them.
In this presidential election, I do care which candidate wins, so I voted for the candidate I want to win. However, in some local elections I voted for third party candidates, because I don't care.
By being given the opportunity to vote, we're invited to participate in our electoral process.
If you decline to vote, then you really have no recourse to complain about the results of that process, do you? You had your chance to be heard and decided you had other things to do.
As others have pointed out, your logic is flawed. If you dislike all the candidates who are running, then a vote for one of them is not expressing your real opinion. Why should voting for a candidate you don't like be a prerequisite to making your voice heard?
Personally, I don't really understand people who take that position; I usually find the two major party candidates to be different enough that there is a clear "lesser of two evils" that I want to win. The idea that some people really don't care which candidate wins the election, not because they're apathetic about politics but because they strongly believe that both major party candidates AND all the third-party candidates would be equally bad for the country, confuses me. But, there are quite a few of these people out there who hold this view, and their refusal to vote is justified.
In other countries, protesting a flawed election system by not voting is pretty common. Usually that's because the people know the vote counting is rigged in favor of the incumbent, but if the opposing candidate were the incumbent's best friend, that would probably be a good reason to abstain. Imagine an election between Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, for example, or if Hillary Clinton switched parties and ran as a Republican against Barack Obama in 2012.
I think there's room for an electronic and a paper record that mirror each other, and use the paper record as the official one in case of discrepancy. There are too many benefits to having an electronic copy of the record immediately to ignore the possibility of using electronic entry and tallying, with a physical "backup".
I disagree about the benefits, but if you really need a real-time count, use a second machine with an optical scanner, which voter-verified paper ballots are fed into. This machine counts the votes and stores the paper ballots; there only needs to be one per polling place even though there may be a dozen of the user input/ballot printing machines. Each polling place should also have a supply of blank ballots on hand, which voters can fill out with a #2 pencil just like standardized tests in school; these would be used in case the user input/ballot printing machines break, or there aren't enough of them for the number of voters, or a voter simply prefers not to use the machines. If the counting machine fails, you simply bypass the scanner (I envision removing the scanning/counting module which would break tamper-evident tape, so election officials know the electronic count is invalid) and drop ballots into a slot in the locked ballot box.
The entire browser market has a strong 'you snooze, you lose' component to it. Microsoft did employ dirty tricks to get IE popular fast, but if Netscape hadn't fallen asleep at the switch, Microsoft still wouldn't have succeeded in dominating the market.
And Microsoft's dominance isn't a permanent thing - they built up enough marketshare that they could afford to fall asleep at the switch for several years, but when Firefox started making inroads, Microsoft woke up. Their first move was to add a couple of security features to IE6SP2, then they built IE7 which was a genuine attempt to make a less terrible browser. They're fully awake now, and (shockingly) they're playing by the rules this time around - behaving as though they're competing on a level playing field, even going out of their way to cooperate with other browser vendors. They know they've fallen way behind, and it will take them a long time to catch up, but they're definitely not asleep anymore.
The simplest solution is to use an electronic machine for people to select their choices but at the end, provide a sheet with all their votes recorded which they deposit in a box. The machine votes are recorded but you have a paper trail in case electronic votes are "lost".
One slight modification of your idea: the electronic machine people use to select their choices, which prints their selections on a sheet of paper, does not count the votes. The sheet of paper is the actual ballot, and it gets counted by an optical scan machine AFTER the voter has looked at it and dropped it into a box. The optical scanner could be inside the box where ballots are stored in each polling place, or the box full of ballots could be taken to election headquarters and fed into a scanner there; either way, the paper ballot is what gets counted (and recounted if necessary).
People who can't program their VCRs (how long before people stare at me when I mention "VCR"?)
New analogy: people who can't set the correct aspect ratio on their widescreen TV.
There's no reason to not use electronic voting machines that are properly designed and verified.
Sorry, but if you're referring to the type of electronic voting machines that do not use a paper ballot as the official record, then you're wrong. Even if the machine uses open-source software, even if it is tested and verified to work. Computers can break, and they break a lot. It's my job to fix them, so I see them break more often than most people do, and I don't want to rely on them for something as important as voting.
However, I'm a huge fan of optical scan machines. They're proven, they're reliable, and there's no reason not to use a machine to scan paper ballots. Also, there's no reason not to use a computer with a well-designed UI to prepare and print paper ballots, which can be verified by the voter before being cast. But whatever technology is used, I think we need physical human-readable ballots. There's just no good reason not to.
I'm in Texas and apparently 23% of Texans believe Obama is a Muslim.
On the other hand, that means 77% of Texans believe he isn't. That should count for something!
Toothing.
Ah, now you have raised an interesting point.
Will the people who made PHP a good programming language please fork it and take it away from the clueless morons who have taken over?
As a Perl programmer, I have to laugh at your suggestion that somebody ever made PHP a good programming language. Read this and this.
Download a minor update to your IDE, and you should be fine.
It's difficult to design complicated software in Perl.
Hogwash. You just have to self-impose some rules, since Perl doesn't impose them for you.
Plus Perl is basically dead since they decided to start that idiotic Perl 6 project that will never be finished (and even if it is I'm sure it will suck).
Go ahead and ignore Perl 6 for now; I am. Perl 5 is still being actively developed; they're not making major announcements like "OMG we've invented namespaces!" because Perl 5 is already a perfectly adequate language. Perl isn't a hot new buzzword, but that doesn't mean it's dead.
...they could do ":.:" and make both C# and Perl programmers happy in one swoop!
I can't speak for C# programmers, but I can assure you that Perl programmers would ridicule them far more for using ":.:" than for using "\".
Given that / support has only been present in recent Windows versions, I have to say
[citation sorely needed]
Agreed. I think there might be some places where Windows 95 will accept / as a path separator, but I'm not aware that it was ever allowed before that, and although Windows 95 may seem like ancient history in the modern age of Vista, it's a looooong way from MS-DOS 1.0.
When are you going to use the escape character outside of a string? I agree that it's dumb, and it's going to make for ugly looking code, but saying that it shouldn't be used because it's an escape character seems like an empty criticism. It's like saying that Elisabeth Taylor's personal life is messed up because she doesn't pay enough attention to her hair.
It's true that backslashes aren't used outside of a string... but variables ARE used INSIDE of a string. So, if you have a variable called $foo\name, you're going to be seeing strings like "Hello, my name is $foo\name\n".
Terrorists can use TXT messages too... and guess what... TXT messages are more secure than Twitter.
Not necessarily. It's easy to identify the recipient of an SMS text message - it's whatever phone number the message was sent to, obviously. Of course, associating the phone number to a person may not be possible (e.g. if they paid cash for a pre-paid phone), but at least you know their phone number, which you can correlate with call records (under subpoena, of course).
On the other hand, since Twitter is a broadcast-style service that anyone can subscribe to, there could be hundreds of people subscribed to a particular feed, and no way to tell which one of them can understand the hidden message (using pre-arranged code words, etc.).
Suicide bombers don't much care about being identified after the fact. Most terrorists, especially domestic terrorists, want to live to see the results of their actions without getting caught.
Al Qaeda has sold out.
It must be quite obvious by now that this is NOT about protecting the US from 'dangerous terrorists'(TM). It's all about justifying the security and intelligence forces' jobs.
You're an idiot.
The GP is right, it is totally appropriate for the government and the military to be aware of the existence of services like Twitter and how they can be used. In the unlikely event that Twitter is somehow used in the execution of the next terrorist attack, I want the reaction from the government to be something like this:
"The terrorists used the micro-blogging service Twitter to communicate with each other and coordinate the attack. We have previously evaluated Twitter, and do not believe the service itself to be a threat; unfortunately, any communications medium can be abused by those with criminal intent."
I do NOT want the reaction to be something like this:
"The terrorists used something called Twitter to carry out their attack. Until we can learn more about this new threat to freedom, we have ordered Twitter to be shut down. The FBI has just completed an operation to seize all computers and other equipment used in Twitter's operation, and several members of Twitter's staff are being held for questioning."
I hate distros that do that by default. I'm not going to confirm every single file I want to delete, so when I delete a directory, instead of just using rm -r, I'm just going to use rm -rf instead. Now, not only have I completely negated any benefit of using rm -i, but I've also lost the confirmation for files I might want to be warned about (I don't encounter this often, but I think it warns you about deleting files you don't have write access to, but can still delete because you have write access to the parent directory and the sticky bit is off).
Hell YES. This is what I've been wishing Warcraft/Starcraft could do. Shared vision and the ability to send resources to other members of your team is one small step in the right direction, but I don't want multiple armies who happen to be allied with each other, I want multiple players controlling one army.
I would add that there's no need to label one player a Minister of War, another as Minister of Commerce, etc. If you give all players full control over everything, they'll figure out how to cooperate based on their own personal strengths and preferences. (On the other hand, it may be useful to optimize the UI for specific roles; I'm not really opposed to the idea, just saying it's not a requirement.)
If they made a 13" MacBook Pro, that might be OK.
Nobody's talking about perma-beta here. Firefox 3.0 was released four months ago. Version 3.1 has been in alpha testing since late July, is in beta testing now, and will be released in a couple of months.
IE 7 was released in October 2006.
IE 8 beta 1 was released in March, beta 2 was released in August, and Microsoft is currently working on beta 3. (I'm pretty sure they mentioned something about beta 3 in last week's developer chat, but I can't verify that, because for some reason they haven't posted the transcript yet.)
If you don't care about beta versions, maybe Slashdot isn't the web site for you.
This destroys Microsoft's claim that their intimate knowledge of the OS that runs IE will increase performance.
This proves that Microsoft's intimate knowledge of their OS actually inhibits performance of IE and therefore all other Microsoft products.
Microsoft is a victim of their own feature-rich corporate culture. They are a victim of their customers non-uniform demands.
Microsoft is a victim of their own monopoly position. They seized dominance of the web browser market away from Netscape with IE 4, achieved monopoly status with IE 5, and with the release of IE 6 in 2001, they stopped development and did nothing but minor bugfixes for the next three years. It wasn't until 2004 that they released XPSP2 with a handful of new features, such as the information bar, popup blocker, add-on manager, and some new security features.
When you control over 90% of the market, you have no incentive to innovate. From 2001 to 2004, Microsoft simply didn't bother doing anything with IE, because they didn't have to. However, other browsers such as Firefox started becoming popular, and when IE's market share dipped below 90%, Microsoft realized if they wanted people to keep using IE at all, they would have to start competing again.
Microsoft still has a large market share, but obviously their competitors have the technical superiority, and in order to catch up, Microsoft will have to play by everybody else's rules. This means adding features that users want, listening to web developers, supporting industry standards, and cooperating with their competing browser vendors to ensure interoperability. SP2 was the very beginning of this effort, and IE7 was a serious attempt to make a browser that doesn't suck as much as IE6. Microsoft is back in the game, and they're playing by the rules, but after sitting on their thumbs for three years (and not doing a whole lot for the four years before that), it's going to take them a long time to catch up.
The issue is similar to the ones that have always plagued Java; you have to load massive libraries to do miniscule tasks and that causes noticeable overhead, when they were sadly intended to save time! Firefox is simply more minimal, and it is through their actively sought after security footprint that they deliver better performance by default.
Firefox loads what you need to surf and also lets you modify the experience -- you are in control.
It sounds to me like you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Add with that experience, superior plugins like NoScript, and you also save bandwidth because Flash files don't load by default and scripts don't tie up resources unless you approve them to do so. NoScript was designed for security, but with the added benefit that you get faster performance with it.
Add-ons like NoScript aren't part of Firefox. Support for them is, but IE added that support years ago (and IE add-ons like this are available).
Even when you look at Google Chrome, which is also a valid attempt at increasing performance (they flaunt security as a pillar of their design, but their cheerleading is unwarranted),
Again, you don't know what you're talking about; they haven't reached a 1.0 release yet, so of course it's buggy, but their design philosophy isn't just cheerleading.
the fact that you can't control scripts that are allowed to run, limits the user and make the user bound to the control of the webmaster, who typically controlled by a business or corporation that is only in it for the money and will infringe on rights of users without any form of conscience or compassion.
Maybe you should start visiting better web sites. I have absolutely no interest in blocking JavaScript or Flash, because I avoid sites that abuse them, just as I avoid sites that abuse HTML and CSS to do obnoxious things.
You are correct, or it may not cook correctly at all at the lower temperature even with more time. For example, if you want to boil rice in Guatemala City, you have to sautee it first.
Damn Slashdot's broken Unicode support. There should be an accent in there.