Yeah, I considered that, but you needn't just consider Linux. Multimedia is a tricky business to support cross-platform. In the absence of the right codecs, even older Windows installs will be gimpy. Flash? Uh-uh. What if I don't want to download the plugin? Do I have to watch 30 seconds of blank screen before I can advance?
Bottom line: What works for TV just isn't right for the Internet. At least not as long as I am paying for the service.
A federal appeals court in December rejected the RIAA's use of the controversial subpoenas, but that decision prompted several in Congress to call for amending the DMCA to restore the RIAA's power to go after downloaders.
Anybody have documentation of who these Congressfolk were?
How about the fact that the Federal system deliberately passes the buck to the states, who in turn pass it to the counties, to run the elections? The law is deliberately vague (and Florida is the norm, not the exception, as far as I can tell) because of the way election processes are delegated to the localities. One might cynically conclude that they want this kind of chaos because it suits them.
As for the problem with the last election, there were a lot more than just the interpretation of Florida's intent law.
The law doesn't say that they have to. It says that the intent of the voter must be honored by the whole process, which begins at the voting booth and ends with certification. I certainly don't mean to advocate careless solutions that are worse than the problems, but I do support a law that says the intent of the voter must be honored when it can be determined.
If votes are lost in a way that biases the election, then remedies are necessary, up to and including new elections. I suppose some would argue that a statistical assumption that an equal number of votes would be lost for all sides is adequate, but I'd note that similar logic wasn't good enough for the Republicans when the 2000 census loomed.
OTOH, it does give me some comfort to imagine that the election of GWB could have been the result of statistical anomalies in the polling process rather than the will of the American voters (If you disagree with my politics, just substitute Bill Clinton for GWB and enjoy the joke).
You are correct in pointing out that divining the intent from the ballot is a knotty problem, but when the system fails upstream (e.g. through defective equipment) something must be done to remedy the problem. Recount, revote, whatever is appropriate to the situation, but just saying "oops! machine broke, your vote doesn't count" is not acceptable. It is not always a case of voters not following instructions.
I realize that in the current case, it looks like careless of apathetic voters, and those votes are just lost. The point of my post, though, was to answer the person who asked about the "intent" policy, and I don't see how you can say that a law mandating that the voting and counting system must honor the will of the voters is a bad law. A law which said we should always trust the output of a computer, now that would be a bad law...
In the case of Florida, it's a matter of law that the intent of the voter is to be honored.
Voting machines help with this.
In general I agree with you, assuming you refer to computerized voting machines and not mechanical ones. In this case, I think a mountain is being made of a mole hill just because everyone's so obsessed with Florida's elections since 2000.
The lack of an audit trail and, in the absence of a better term, peer review are severe problems with our current digital systems, though. Their vulnerability to a man-in-the-middle attack is very disturbing, and I am considering voting absentee by registered mail because of them.
I'm sorry, but since when was any vote-counting system designed to interpret what a voter's intent was, beyond correctly-cast votes?
Vote-counting systems (in the big sense of end-to-end counting and certification, not just talking about balloting hardware) in Florida must honor the intent of the voter as a matter of law.
The law is designed to address the array of things that can go wrong with the voting process and equipment, and ensure that the intent of the voter is paramount to any vagueries introduced by the equipment or counting procedures. How anyone could think this is a bad thing (unless they were in the process of exploiting such vagueries) is beyond me...
Can someone please explain to me when this became a land where we had to determine what a voter intended and not what he actualy voted for (or in this case didn't vote for).
In the case of Florida, it's a matter of law that the intent of the voter is to be honored. The intent stipulation arises out of an acknoledgement that all recording systems are subject to innacuracies, and that the noblest thing to do is to honor the will of the voter, rather than the output of the machine.
This is obviously an extreme example, but it should be illustrative:
Imagine a ballot-punching machine where a peg for one of the candidates breaks an hour before the polls close. Noone notices this and the voters go on pressing the button for that candidate until closing time, assuming they voted for him or her.
In the end, the vote count is wrong, underrepresenting that candidate's support. In this case, the intent of the voters was not registered even though they acted in good faith and without making any mistakes.
It is this type of scenario that the intent law is intended to remedy. The will of the voters is paramount to the output of a machine that can be tampered with, broken, or buggy.
Think how many people could install and config a router and an AP, versus the number of people that can plug in one of the self-contained wireless routers?
Now think of how many of them can secure those routers, and imagine yourself with access to all your neighbors' movie collections!
I have no desire to take on the matter of religion vs science, because I generally consider it a non-issue drummed up by zealots on both sides when they're tired of doing anything useful. Nonetheless, I have to take issue with your statement because it indicates a pretty deep misunderstanding of the nature of both faith and science.
Black holes (or gravastars or whatever) were first postulated as a consequence of a cosomological theory and their existence was later verified by detection of phenomena in the Universe exhibiting their predicted characteristics. Let me know when you detect the X-rays emanating from God's event horizon.
For the record, I don't question the existence of God. I just don't think that faith, science, or argument are served by muddying the waters with specious claims.
i did'nt understand a word you just said, something about never forgetting?, what is the point in this article, something about the sco case against linux, some piece of evidence we've forgotten???
Reading this post immediately following this one almost split my ribs...
You may be looking forward to a sustained period of unhappiness, then.
I'm not a search specialist, but it seems to me that the nature of regex searching and the indexed searching used by a system like Google are not going to be easy to meld. Regexes are fine for a small corpus of text, but would be computationally impossible for volumes the size of the Web. I always assumed that was the reason for the lack of the (very obvious) regexp searching in popular search engines.
Imagine: you just sent out your resume for your dream job, you're qualified, your application is filled out perfectly, and the news comes on that a guy with the same first and last name as yours just shot the president...
Kind of like when the actor Mark David Chapman showed up to audition for the part of John Lennon in the TV movie of his life? Yoko Ono went ballistic, so the (apocryphal?) story goes...
I've noticed that the FML name thing is done for criminals in general, and I'd always wondered about it. Your theory makes about as much sense as any I could conceive of...
I appreciate you not calling me a "smarmy little bitch", but there is apparently some major confusion here. I didn't ask you anything. I picked up on a discussion between you and someone else. It started like this:
twoflower said:
more troublingly, studios make special "Blockbuster" editions of a film for home video -- the tape or DVD you rent at Blockbuster of a given film might be missing material that shows up in the theatrical version or in a home video version seen elsewhere, with no indication on the packaging that this is the case.
marcop said:
Never heard of that. Could you give some URLs that supports this and gives some details as to the type of changes that are done.
And then you provided the links. I read the first one, initially having no reason to suspect your credibility, but it did not address the question at hand. Sorry if I was a little snippy in pointing this out. I just wanted to know if there was an answer to the question before I investigated the other sources. For all I know, your reply was intended to be attached to a different post (it happens here all the time because of the interaction between the hierarchical views and the moderation system).
At any rate, I apologize for any offense. Believe me, had I intended to be a jerk, I would have put much more effort into it.:-)
I didn't read further than your first link because, unless my reading comprehension is dropping, it just said that BB refused to market or stock NC-17 flicks. It said nothing about BB carrying unlabled versions. Does the other "proof" you provide answer the question any better?
For the record, I know that (at least my) BB will not carry movies with ratings beyond R, and they will often carry an R-rated version of a movie that is available with NC-17 release, but in that case the rating alone is sufficient "labelling" to indicate the difference. The original post stated that BB was renting altered copies without any notation that they were altered.
Come to think of it, the R-rated versions at my BB actually explicitly say "R-rated version", clearly implying that there is another version.
Now, run every single possible emulator available for each OS
The chair of my physics dept once said that he'd seen, on a visit to a local Air Force Base, a CPU emulator that could be configured to simulate any CPU on the market. He then said they had four of these monster emulators at the AFB.
I asked him why they didn't just buy one and have it emulate the other three.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I considered that, but you needn't just consider Linux. Multimedia is a tricky business to support cross-platform. In the absence of the right codecs, even older Windows installs will be gimpy. Flash? Uh-uh. What if I don't want to download the plugin? Do I have to watch 30 seconds of blank screen before I can advance?
Bottom line: What works for TV just isn't right for the Internet. At least not as long as I am paying for the service.
In a word, yes. When the Net comes to me for free, like TV, I will accept intrusive advertising. Not before...
And Java is write-once, run-anywhere...
I don't even know where to begin to describe what is wrong with this obvious bit of market-droid nonsense!
Anybody have documentation of who these Congressfolk were?
If ever a post cried out for a goatse troll linked behind the words, "here's the proof", this would be it!
Sorry, but I just can't bring myself to actually do it...
How about the fact that the Federal system deliberately passes the buck to the states, who in turn pass it to the counties, to run the elections? The law is deliberately vague (and Florida is the norm, not the exception, as far as I can tell) because of the way election processes are delegated to the localities. One might cynically conclude that they want this kind of chaos because it suits them.
As for the problem with the last election, there were a lot more than just the interpretation of Florida's intent law.
The law doesn't say that they have to. It says that the intent of the voter must be honored by the whole process, which begins at the voting booth and ends with certification. I certainly don't mean to advocate careless solutions that are worse than the problems, but I do support a law that says the intent of the voter must be honored when it can be determined.
If votes are lost in a way that biases the election, then remedies are necessary, up to and including new elections. I suppose some would argue that a statistical assumption that an equal number of votes would be lost for all sides is adequate, but I'd note that similar logic wasn't good enough for the Republicans when the 2000 census loomed.
OTOH, it does give me some comfort to imagine that the election of GWB could have been the result of statistical anomalies in the polling process rather than the will of the American voters (If you disagree with my politics, just substitute Bill Clinton for GWB and enjoy the joke).
You are correct in pointing out that divining the intent from the ballot is a knotty problem, but when the system fails upstream (e.g. through defective equipment) something must be done to remedy the problem. Recount, revote, whatever is appropriate to the situation, but just saying "oops! machine broke, your vote doesn't count" is not acceptable. It is not always a case of voters not following instructions.
I realize that in the current case, it looks like careless of apathetic voters, and those votes are just lost. The point of my post, though, was to answer the person who asked about the "intent" policy, and I don't see how you can say that a law mandating that the voting and counting system must honor the will of the voters is a bad law. A law which said we should always trust the output of a computer, now that would be a bad law...
In general I agree with you, assuming you refer to computerized voting machines and not mechanical ones. In this case, I think a mountain is being made of a mole hill just because everyone's so obsessed with Florida's elections since 2000.
The lack of an audit trail and, in the absence of a better term, peer review are severe problems with our current digital systems, though. Their vulnerability to a man-in-the-middle attack is very disturbing, and I am considering voting absentee by registered mail because of them.
Vote-counting systems (in the big sense of end-to-end counting and certification, not just talking about balloting hardware) in Florida must honor the intent of the voter as a matter of law.
The law is designed to address the array of things that can go wrong with the voting process and equipment, and ensure that the intent of the voter is paramount to any vagueries introduced by the equipment or counting procedures. How anyone could think this is a bad thing (unless they were in the process of exploiting such vagueries) is beyond me...
In the case of Florida, it's a matter of law that the intent of the voter is to be honored. The intent stipulation arises out of an acknoledgement that all recording systems are subject to innacuracies, and that the noblest thing to do is to honor the will of the voter, rather than the output of the machine.
This is obviously an extreme example, but it should be illustrative:
Imagine a ballot-punching machine where a peg for one of the candidates breaks an hour before the polls close. Noone notices this and the voters go on pressing the button for that candidate until closing time, assuming they voted for him or her.
In the end, the vote count is wrong, underrepresenting that candidate's support. In this case, the intent of the voters was not registered even though they acted in good faith and without making any mistakes.
It is this type of scenario that the intent law is intended to remedy. The will of the voters is paramount to the output of a machine that can be tampered with, broken, or buggy.
-122
Now think of how many of them can secure those routers, and imagine yourself with access to all your neighbors' movie collections!
Did that letter explain what the "upgrade" was? i.e. did it explicitly state that your bandwidth went up?
I have, and the conclusion I'd draw from it is that in the future, everything will be really boring and take far too long to resolve...
How about the sections of Snow Crash told from the point of view of the robotic guard dog.
My gratitude for your complimentary utterances is unbounded.
I have no desire to take on the matter of religion vs science, because I generally consider it a non-issue drummed up by zealots on both sides when they're tired of doing anything useful. Nonetheless, I have to take issue with your statement because it indicates a pretty deep misunderstanding of the nature of both faith and science.
Black holes (or gravastars or whatever) were first postulated as a consequence of a cosomological theory and their existence was later verified by detection of phenomena in the Universe exhibiting their predicted characteristics. Let me know when you detect the X-rays emanating from God's event horizon.
For the record, I don't question the existence of God. I just don't think that faith, science, or argument are served by muddying the waters with specious claims.
Reading this post immediately following this one almost split my ribs...
You may be looking forward to a sustained period of unhappiness, then.
I'm not a search specialist, but it seems to me that the nature of regex searching and the indexed searching used by a system like Google are not going to be easy to meld. Regexes are fine for a small corpus of text, but would be computationally impossible for volumes the size of the Web. I always assumed that was the reason for the lack of the (very obvious) regexp searching in popular search engines.
Or, perhaps I've just been trolled...
Kind of like when the actor Mark David Chapman showed up to audition for the part of John Lennon in the TV movie of his life? Yoko Ono went ballistic, so the (apocryphal?) story goes...
I've noticed that the FML name thing is done for criminals in general, and I'd always wondered about it. Your theory makes about as much sense as any I could conceive of...
twoflower said:
marcop said:
And then you provided the links. I read the first one, initially having no reason to suspect your credibility, but it did not address the question at hand. Sorry if I was a little snippy in pointing this out. I just wanted to know if there was an answer to the question before I investigated the other sources. For all I know, your reply was intended to be attached to a different post (it happens here all the time because of the interaction between the hierarchical views and the moderation system).
At any rate, I apologize for any offense. Believe me, had I intended to be a jerk, I would have put much more effort into it.
I didn't read further than your first link because, unless my reading comprehension is dropping, it just said that BB refused to market or stock NC-17 flicks. It said nothing about BB carrying unlabled versions. Does the other "proof" you provide answer the question any better?
For the record, I know that (at least my) BB will not carry movies with ratings beyond R, and they will often carry an R-rated version of a movie that is available with NC-17 release, but in that case the rating alone is sufficient "labelling" to indicate the difference. The original post stated that BB was renting altered copies without any notation that they were altered.
Come to think of it, the R-rated versions at my BB actually explicitly say "R-rated version", clearly implying that there is another version.
I am impressed. You certainly know your Mothrology!
The chair of my physics dept once said that he'd seen, on a visit to a local Air Force Base, a CPU emulator that could be configured to simulate any CPU on the market. He then said they had four of these monster emulators at the AFB.
I asked him why they didn't just buy one and have it emulate the other three.