You don't have to host it. All you have to do is make it available. It could be printed out on napkins or hand written on post-it-notes if you want, as long as it's available.
You're correct that you don't have to host it yourself (if all you're doing is redistributing someone else's code - you obviously have to make your own changes available somehow). You're incorrect that it can just be printed on napkins. The GPL stipulates that you offer "the complete corresponding machine-readable source code... on a medium customarily used for software interchange" and although I'm sure a lot of very important code has been written on cocktail napkins, that doesn't satisfy this criteria of the GPL.
However, this article is talking about something much more inane. Why do people expect that codecs downloaded from arbitrary untrusted sources would be any less free of viruses, adware, etc... than any other random executables obtained off the net?
Because as soon as they do, fresh porn is waiting for them! Or so they've been told.
Apple's EULA says Mac OS X can only be used on an "Apple-labeled computer." But what does that really mean, legally? I've heard some people suggest that if you stick your own label that says "Apple" on a PC, then it should count as being "Apple-labeled," but I'm assuming the real meaning is "a computer that has been labeled by Apple."
So, what if you buy an old Blue & White G3 tower, remove the motherboard, and install a P4 or Core 2 motherboard (along with CPU and RAM)? Can this machine still be considered "Apple-labeled"? Surely you can upgrade the hard drive or RAM without voiding the EULA; which other components are OK to replace before the result can no longer be legally considered "Apple-labeled"?
Of course I'm talking about using a legally purchased retail copy of Mac OS X.
Out of curiosity, how come, when someone pleads guilty to copyright violation and gets sentenced with 5 months everybody complains that he didn't commit a "real crime" where anyone was harmed, yet finds it perfectly ok that a spammer gets fined such an exorbitant amount?
Simple: the spammer is directly costing millions of people real time and money, and raking in huge piles of cash as a result. Many of us are responsible for maintaining mail servers and have to deal with complaints from end users about spam that the filtering software we've worked so hard to configure failed to block. Also, we're not sure about this case, but the fine might be less than the amount he made, so the spammer would still come out ahead.
The copyright infringer may be depriving a record label (and to a lesser extent the artist) of potential revenue that it's possible they might have gotten otherwise, maybe. Nobody is profiting financially (although some people are listening to music they wouldn't have otherwise gotten to listen to without paying for it).
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it (X) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, asshole! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(X) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers (X) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) Extreme profitability of spam (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, asshole! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it (X) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, asshole! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
At this point, this wouldn't significantly impact the spam I receive. I'm pretty sure the spam will keep coming, even if the sites (which are often hosted by zombie PCs, for precisely this reason) are long gone. You have to remember, the people actually sending the spam aren't the people trying to advertise their product; by the time a spammer starts spewing out his crap, he's already collected his money from the client.
"You want access to our commanding market share of users? Then you'll damn well have to buy our product and become one of them. No cross-platform development for you."
Am I the only one who thinks this sounds perfectly reasonable? You can't test your web site in Safari without buying a Mac either.
It may be the first browser in Windows land but Browsers have been running in protected mode on Linux for years.
He doesn't just mean "not running as root", he really means a sandbox that prevents the browser from doing things that the user running the browser still has access to.
I don't have any experience with IE for Solaris, but IE for Mac was once the best, most standards-compliant browser available for Mac OS. Three things have happened since then: first, Mac OS X came out, and IE doesn't run nearly as well on Mac OS X. Depending on the complexity and cleanness of your code, the transition from OS9 to OSX isn't as smooth as Apple wanted people to believe; I'm sure Microsoft could have fixed the problem by rewriting major pieces of the browser, but that would have taken quite a bit of effort/time/money. Second, other browsers became available (Safari, Firefox, Opera) that have surpassed the quality of Internet Explorer. Third, Apple now sets Safari as the default browser on new Macs, giving Safari the same kind of competitive advantage over any other browser on the Mac as IE has on Windows (with the exception that you can actually get rid of Safari just by dragging it to the Trash).
Safari is better than IE was, and Safari is preinstalled by default. If Microsoft put the effort/time/money into cleaning up IE/Mac, it's not likely that they could make it so much better than Safari that a large number of people would want to switch.
but it didn't work in the IE version I tried (6, I think) while the validator page showed me I was 100% compliant with the specs.
1) This article isn't about IE6, it's about IE7. Microsoft has been working on fixing exactly the kind of problem you ran into, and that's what we're talking about.
2) Just because the validator says your syntax is correct, does NOT mean your CSS code as written should actually do what you meant. It only means it should do SOMETHING.
Well, if you code CSS to standards, it will look pretty decent in Firefox, Konquerer or Safari. But to make it work in IE6 you'll have to add another stylesheet with strange modifications.
It's not as simple as "coding CSS to standards", because (as Mr. Hachamovitch mentioned) there are multiple different CSS specifications and no browser fully supports CSS 2.1. And sure, IE6 is notoriously buggy, but this article isn't about IE6, is it?
You are aware, aren't you, that the ACID2 test fails miserably in Firefox 2.0?
...is how each time Gillette introduces a new razor, they advertise it as being completely new technology, a revolutionary leap forward rather than an incremental or evolutionary improvement. When they came out with the Sensor Excel, that was fine. When they came out with the Mach 3, that was pretty ridiculous. Since then, though, it's just been moronic.
I'm not suggesting that 5 blades isn't better, and yes, I currently use a Fusion. But to market it as a new idea is just retarded.
This may be a stupid question but did you ever think about buying another one, getting it set into a ring and then see what it would get make ebay?
Moderators are on crack, this is not a troll.
I think people need to look at how to market these things. Stop buying into DeBeers' marketing spin - stop thinking of artificially-created diamonds as cheap knock-offs of the real thing. Artificially-created diamonds are better than the real thing, not because they're technically flawless, but because they don't support human-rights abuses in Africa. Anyone who's socially conscious ought to be able to see this as a positive thing. A quick Google search turned up this list; for this purpose ignore the first three items.
Somebody needs to start marketing artificially-created diamonds as being the socially-conscious alternative to the existing cartels. Anyone who already supports fighting HIV in Africa (for example), or opposes funding child/slave labor, should prefer them.
So, when you advertise it on eBay in that way, no, you're not being fraudulent at all.
Ok, your design seems reasonable, but essentially what you describe is using the electronic device as a printer.
The key is that the printed ballot is both human-readable and machine-readable at the same time, and free from problems like partially-filled bubbles (make an X with a red pen instead of completely filling it in with a black pen), hanging chads, etc. You could use punchcards instead of printing with this same concept, as long as the machines were reliable.
I don't think that is what most people mean when they talk about electronic voting.
No, which is why we have all these problems. But when people talk about electronic voting, they are talking about getting all the advantages I listed, and the solution I've explained (I won't call it my idea, since it isn't) still has all of those same advantages over traditional voting methods.
The only additional advantage that paperless electronic voting has is that it's simpler than what I've described - you can't have problems with printers and ink and scanning and fiddling with paper, if there is no paper trail. But by skipping that step, you're introducing an unacceptable dependence on technology, requiring essentially blind trust that the machines are working as advertised because you can't really tell for sure.
Electronic vote counting can't be verified the same way as other electronic systems, because one of the requirements is that vote verification can't be connected to the voter. This is different from ATMs, for example, where the user can verify their own bank account balance after the transaction.
I tell you, I'm not much of a programmer, but I am convinced that, given a year, I could design and program an effective voting software with: 1) A paper trail sufficient to be used for a manual recount. 2) Reasonable measures to ensure 1 voter 1 vote. 3) A barcode crypto scheme to tie #1 and #2 together so that every database record can, if required, be verified against every paper record. 4) A completely open and peer-reviewed code base.
Advantages of electronic voting over paper voting:
1) Faster to get the results. 2) More accessible to people with physical disabilities or who speak another language 3) Easier to review your choices and correct a mistake before casting your ballot 4) Can prevent some invalid selections, e.g. voting both "yes" and "no" for the same item 5) No problem with hanging/pregnant chads, or partly-filled bubbles
Disadvantages
1) Independant observers cannot observe that votes are being counted correctly.
There's a way to fix this.
2) Voters cannot easily understand or see how the system works.
Only because the people who designed the system are idiots.
3) Voters are likely to distrust a system they cannot see functioning.
As well they should. So here's the solution:
You have two kinds of machines.
The first machine, you have several of, in little booths for privacy. These machines have touchscreens or whatever user interface is easiest for voters to interact with. Voters can choose their preferred language to use. A color photo of each candidate is displayed next to their name. Candidates can be listed in a random order for each voter, to prevent problems where people just pick the first/last/middle name on the list (most places already randomize the sorting, but it may not be randomized differently for each voter). Write-in votes can be entered using a keyboard. Explanatory information about ballot measures/propositions is available at the touch of a button. Voters make their selections, and when they're done, a summary of their vote is presented for review. At any point, the voter can go back and change their selection if they've made a mistake or changed their mind.
Finally, the voter confirms their choices, and the machine prints out on paper one human-readable and machine-readable ballot. It's a Scantron-type form, with those little bubbles you're supposed to fill in, but they're already filled in. This ballot contains no personally identifying information, no serial number, nothing that could be used to track it back to the voter. The voter can review this ballot, to make sure the bubbles are filled in correctly. If not, the ballot gets shredded, and the voter starts over. Nothing has been counted at this point.
The next step is, these printed ballots are fed into a counting machine, which stores all the paper ballots. The machine can give election officials an immediate count at the end of the night. If there's any question as to the accuracy of the count, the ballots can be counted by hand, just as they are now. Ballots from random machines can also be counted by hand to verify the accuracy of the electronic count.
There are a few details to be determined that I haven't mentioned here, but that's the gist of it. It's not rocket science, but companies like Diebold and ES&S aren't interested in putting in the effort to design such a system (even if one assumes they don't intend to use their paperless systems to rig elections with no way to do a recount, they're still cheap and lazy and generally incompetent). So until someone else steps up to the plate, we will not see electronic voting machines that solve all of these problems, and Quebec is absolutely right to ban the broken ones.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to host it. All you have to do is make it available. It could be printed out on napkins or hand written on post-it-notes if you want, as long as it's available.
You're correct that you don't have to host it yourself (if all you're doing is redistributing someone else's code - you obviously have to make your own changes available somehow). You're incorrect that it can just be printed on napkins. The GPL stipulates that you offer "the complete corresponding machine-readable source code... on a medium customarily used for software interchange" and although I'm sure a lot of very important code has been written on cocktail napkins, that doesn't satisfy this criteria of the GPL.
Because that topic has been, to put it nicely, discussed thoroughly on Slashdot already.
However, this article is talking about something much more inane. Why do people expect that codecs downloaded from arbitrary untrusted sources would be any less free of viruses, adware, etc... than any other random executables obtained off the net?
Because as soon as they do, fresh porn is waiting for them! Or so they've been told.
What do you feel are the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Opera?
What do you feel are the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Safari?
What do you feel are the greatest strengths of IE7? (I won't ask about weaknesses...)
Whoops!
Go for it. I doubt Apple's market share will move one bit from people buying old G3 towers and filling it with PC components.
That wasn't my question.
So here's what I'm wondering.
Apple's EULA says Mac OS X can only be used on an "Apple-labeled computer." But what does that really mean, legally? I've heard some people suggest that if you stick your own label that says "Apple" on a PC, then it should count as being "Apple-labeled," but I'm assuming the real meaning is "a computer that has been labeled by Apple."
So, what if you buy an old Blue & White G3 tower, remove the motherboard, and install a P4 or Core 2 motherboard (along with CPU and RAM)? Can this machine still be considered "Apple-labeled"? Surely you can upgrade the hard drive or RAM without voiding the EULA; which other components are OK to replace before the result can no longer be legally considered "Apple-labeled"?
Of course I'm talking about using a legally purchased retail copy of Mac OS X.
Out of curiosity, how come, when someone pleads guilty to copyright violation and gets sentenced with 5 months everybody complains that he didn't commit a "real crime" where anyone was harmed, yet finds it perfectly ok that a spammer gets fined such an exorbitant amount?
Simple: the spammer is directly costing millions of people real time and money, and raking in huge piles of cash as a result. Many of us are responsible for maintaining mail servers and have to deal with complaints from end users about spam that the filtering software we've worked so hard to configure failed to block. Also, we're not sure about this case, but the fine might be less than the amount he made, so the spammer would still come out ahead.
The copyright infringer may be depriving a record label (and to a lesser extent the artist) of potential revenue that it's possible they might have gotten otherwise, maybe. Nobody is profiting financially (although some people are listening to music they wouldn't have otherwise gotten to listen to without paying for it).
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, asshole! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(X) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(X) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, asshole! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
At this point, this wouldn't significantly impact the spam I receive. I'm pretty sure the spam will keep coming, even if the sites (which are often hosted by zombie PCs, for precisely this reason) are long gone. You have to remember, the people actually sending the spam aren't the people trying to advertise their product; by the time a spammer starts spewing out his crap, he's already collected his money from the client.
In fact, the spammer co
"You want access to our commanding market share of users? Then you'll damn well have to buy our product and become one of them. No cross-platform development for you."
Am I the only one who thinks this sounds perfectly reasonable? You can't test your web site in Safari without buying a Mac either.
Is Windows' reputation for lack of safety, really subjective or disputed?
Not by those of us who are aware that other safer options exist, which is a pretty small minority.
It may be the first browser in Windows land but Browsers have been running in protected mode on Linux for years.
He doesn't just mean "not running as root", he really means a sandbox that prevents the browser from doing things that the user running the browser still has access to.
Why did they make sense then and not now?
I don't have any experience with IE for Solaris, but IE for Mac was once the best, most standards-compliant browser available for Mac OS. Three things have happened since then: first, Mac OS X came out, and IE doesn't run nearly as well on Mac OS X. Depending on the complexity and cleanness of your code, the transition from OS9 to OSX isn't as smooth as Apple wanted people to believe; I'm sure Microsoft could have fixed the problem by rewriting major pieces of the browser, but that would have taken quite a bit of effort/time/money. Second, other browsers became available (Safari, Firefox, Opera) that have surpassed the quality of Internet Explorer. Third, Apple now sets Safari as the default browser on new Macs, giving Safari the same kind of competitive advantage over any other browser on the Mac as IE has on Windows (with the exception that you can actually get rid of Safari just by dragging it to the Trash).
Safari is better than IE was, and Safari is preinstalled by default. If Microsoft put the effort/time/money into cleaning up IE/Mac, it's not likely that they could make it so much better than Safari that a large number of people would want to switch.
but it didn't work in the IE version I tried (6, I think) while the validator page showed me I was 100% compliant with the specs.
1) This article isn't about IE6, it's about IE7. Microsoft has been working on fixing exactly the kind of problem you ran into, and that's what we're talking about.
2) Just because the validator says your syntax is correct, does NOT mean your CSS code as written should actually do what you meant. It only means it should do SOMETHING.
Well, if you code CSS to standards, it will look pretty decent in Firefox, Konquerer or Safari. But to make it work in IE6 you'll have to add another stylesheet with strange modifications.
It's not as simple as "coding CSS to standards", because (as Mr. Hachamovitch mentioned) there are multiple different CSS specifications and no browser fully supports CSS 2.1. And sure, IE6 is notoriously buggy, but this article isn't about IE6, is it?
You are aware, aren't you, that the ACID2 test fails miserably in Firefox 2.0?
...is how each time Gillette introduces a new razor, they advertise it as being completely new technology, a revolutionary leap forward rather than an incremental or evolutionary improvement. When they came out with the Sensor Excel, that was fine. When they came out with the Mach 3, that was pretty ridiculous. Since then, though, it's just been moronic.
I'm not suggesting that 5 blades isn't better, and yes, I currently use a Fusion. But to market it as a new idea is just retarded.
This may be a stupid question but did you ever think about buying another one, getting it set into a ring and then see what it would get make ebay?
Moderators are on crack, this is not a troll.
I think people need to look at how to market these things. Stop buying into DeBeers' marketing spin - stop thinking of artificially-created diamonds as cheap knock-offs of the real thing. Artificially-created diamonds are better than the real thing, not because they're technically flawless, but because they don't support human-rights abuses in Africa. Anyone who's socially conscious ought to be able to see this as a positive thing. A quick Google search turned up this list; for this purpose ignore the first three items.
Somebody needs to start marketing artificially-created diamonds as being the socially-conscious alternative to the existing cartels. Anyone who already supports fighting HIV in Africa (for example), or opposes funding child/slave labor, should prefer them.
So, when you advertise it on eBay in that way, no, you're not being fraudulent at all.
Ok, your design seems reasonable, but essentially what you describe is using the electronic device as a printer.
The key is that the printed ballot is both human-readable and machine-readable at the same time, and free from problems like partially-filled bubbles (make an X with a red pen instead of completely filling it in with a black pen), hanging chads, etc. You could use punchcards instead of printing with this same concept, as long as the machines were reliable.
I don't think that is what most people mean when they talk about electronic voting.
No, which is why we have all these problems. But when people talk about electronic voting, they are talking about getting all the advantages I listed, and the solution I've explained (I won't call it my idea, since it isn't) still has all of those same advantages over traditional voting methods.
The only additional advantage that paperless electronic voting has is that it's simpler than what I've described - you can't have problems with printers and ink and scanning and fiddling with paper, if there is no paper trail. But by skipping that step, you're introducing an unacceptable dependence on technology, requiring essentially blind trust that the machines are working as advertised because you can't really tell for sure.
Electronic vote counting can't be verified the same way as other electronic systems, because one of the requirements is that vote verification can't be connected to the voter. This is different from ATMs, for example, where the user can verify their own bank account balance after the transaction.
I tell you, I'm not much of a programmer, but I am convinced that, given a year, I could design and program an effective voting software with: 1) A paper trail sufficient to be used for a manual recount. 2) Reasonable measures to ensure 1 voter 1 vote. 3) A barcode crypto scheme to tie #1 and #2 together so that every database record can, if required, be verified against every paper record. 4) A completely open and peer-reviewed code base.
You don't have to, it's already been done.
Advantages of electronic voting over paper voting:
1) Faster to get the results.
2) More accessible to people with physical disabilities or who speak another language
3) Easier to review your choices and correct a mistake before casting your ballot
4) Can prevent some invalid selections, e.g. voting both "yes" and "no" for the same item
5) No problem with hanging/pregnant chads, or partly-filled bubbles
Disadvantages
1) Independant observers cannot observe that votes are being counted correctly.
There's a way to fix this.
2) Voters cannot easily understand or see how the system works.
Only because the people who designed the system are idiots.
3) Voters are likely to distrust a system they cannot see functioning.
As well they should. So here's the solution:
You have two kinds of machines.
The first machine, you have several of, in little booths for privacy. These machines have touchscreens or whatever user interface is easiest for voters to interact with. Voters can choose their preferred language to use. A color photo of each candidate is displayed next to their name. Candidates can be listed in a random order for each voter, to prevent problems where people just pick the first/last/middle name on the list (most places already randomize the sorting, but it may not be randomized differently for each voter). Write-in votes can be entered using a keyboard. Explanatory information about ballot measures/propositions is available at the touch of a button. Voters make their selections, and when they're done, a summary of their vote is presented for review. At any point, the voter can go back and change their selection if they've made a mistake or changed their mind.
Finally, the voter confirms their choices, and the machine prints out on paper one human-readable and machine-readable ballot. It's a Scantron-type form, with those little bubbles you're supposed to fill in, but they're already filled in. This ballot contains no personally identifying information, no serial number, nothing that could be used to track it back to the voter. The voter can review this ballot, to make sure the bubbles are filled in correctly. If not, the ballot gets shredded, and the voter starts over. Nothing has been counted at this point.
The next step is, these printed ballots are fed into a counting machine, which stores all the paper ballots. The machine can give election officials an immediate count at the end of the night. If there's any question as to the accuracy of the count, the ballots can be counted by hand, just as they are now. Ballots from random machines can also be counted by hand to verify the accuracy of the electronic count.
There are a few details to be determined that I haven't mentioned here, but that's the gist of it. It's not rocket science, but companies like Diebold and ES&S aren't interested in putting in the effort to design such a system (even if one assumes they don't intend to use their paperless systems to rig elections with no way to do a recount, they're still cheap and lazy and generally incompetent). So until someone else steps up to the plate, we will not see electronic voting machines that solve all of these problems, and Quebec is absolutely right to ban the broken ones.
It's already illegal to "mod" the speakers by soldering a connection directly to the speaker output.
Do you have a reference to back this up, or are you just spreading FUD?
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
And I thought they were the evil GIF patent trolls?