Er, there's a bit of a difference between easyJet and Ryanair.
I know plenty of other people, besides myself, who are perfectly happy to fly with easyJet but would rather not make the trip than have to fly with Ryanair.
Anyway, Europe is not like the USA - there are other public transport options than just flying. You can't be "stranded" in Bratislava. The train system works fine, to anywhere in Europe, buses ditto, and if you want something different (albeit rather noisy) there's the Danube Hydrofoil.
I "hate Linux", to the extent that I use it as little and as infrequently as possible. I certainly don't like it enough to want to spend time, that I could otherwise spend on real life, telling people why I don't like it!
(1) The extra base station costs money, and someone has to pay for it, after all I want to get paid for the work I've done on it don't I!
(2) The satellite bandwidth costs money.
(3) The extra infrastructure on the ground costs money.
And, last time I heard, the ground in most places is lower than 3,000m so if you use your phone on the ground what happens is that you'll be just as liable to prosecution as you are today.
Look mate, when there's a phone switched on in my plane I can hear it over the VHF radio - how do I know it's not also affecting the NAV radio (adjacent band) and making the VOR needle point the wrong way? - you can't hear that.
If you reduce the audience for your product then it's not surprising if your distribution costs go down!
Obviously yer average slashweenie has heard of BitTorrent, and even I would probably mange to be able to find it and install it and make it work if I really wanted to... but I wouldn't bother with all that hassle just to watch a telly programme, so that's one fewer viewer.
And how many people's grandmas:
(1) can cope perfectly well with watching a telly programme on a web page in the normal way
(2) wouldn't have the remotest clue what you were on about if you started wittering about BitTorrent?
If you don't like the terms, or the seller, or something, the answer is extraordinarily simple - don't buy it. This won't kill you. You can live without music.
We have laws saying you can't steal stuff. What do people think is special about music that you should be able to steal music in contravention of this general principle? (If you don't believe in the general principle please let me know where you live and I'll come round and help myself to all your stuff.)
I've always found traffic reports on local radio to work well. It goes like this:
(1) Local radio says "there's a jam at such-and-such".
(2) I adjust my route in order to go directly through such-and-such.
(3) I get a clear run because by the time I get there the original problem has cleared, and everybody else has avoided the place having heard about it on the radio.
Including, please, banning such toys from any and all airspace that anyone with a proper pilot's licence might want to fly in. I've had one near miss with a toy already and that's enough thanks.
(OK, it was just a child's balloon, and I didn't hit it. But I really don't want to come across untrained idiots who can take my aircraft out of the sky if I hit them.)
Being a couple on my desk, and a few in a remote rack, so that when I get to the office tomorrow morning the results of the carefully prepared Sunday midnight run will be available for me to debug. It takes several hours to prepare this experiment, and there wasn't time to run it on Friday night before I went home, and I didn't want to risk the logs cycling far enough to destroy the evidence. (Yes I can fiddle with the log settings, but the more things I fiddle with the further my experient is from what happens in the field and the less likely I am to catch some real behaviour.)
But usually I switch things off, I'm not one of these willy-waving "my OS stays up longer than yours" plonkers.
"Since most people would rather die than write or study software source code, it is actually counterproductive to promote software 'because you can modify it yourself and be part of its community'. Now, if the open source "movement" had realised that years ago...
This is the reality of life today in a police state.
Like France, for example, where I and my family wasted half a day of our holiday in a police station because I didn't take my passport with me when we went to the beach. (We never did make it to the beach, it was too far to drive there and back in just the afternoon.)
The other symptom of a police state, BTW, besides "show me your papers" is easily recognisable - the police carry guns.
... from Win2k to XP, a couple of weeks ago, because the child wanted to run something that didn't work on Win2k. (We have no Win9x or NT boxes left at home now, they've all been upgraded to at least Win2k.)
In the end, that'll be why people upgrade to Vista - difficulty in obtaining applications that still work on XP.
There's no particular reason to suppose that just applying proper statistical theory will produce the right answer. Because elections aren't like that.
For example, the next door ward to mine typically had a 19% turnout. For years and years and years.
We knew that if we could get the turnout up to 29%, by persuading just one person in ten to come out and vote for us instead of sitting at home, we'd take the seat. But we never had enough bodies on the street to actually fight that ward.
Until the year we did. Result: increase in turnout that the statistics couldn't have predicted, and we won. There was absolutely no way we were going to warn the returning officer that we were going to launch a surprise attack on that ward so he might want to print more ballot papers than usual! - whilst we absolutely trust the returning officer not to leak our intentions to the opposition there is just no way you're going to risk any opportunity of a leak of that sort of thing.
It would be very interesting to read the threat analysis for this scheme, which doesn't have decades of world-wide experience behind it like print-in-advance ballots do, with all the associated gubbins such as secure printers and individually numbered ballots which are audited and counted and signed for every time they change hands.
(Even with proper ballots there's an interesting question: if there are 1,000 voters and there has never been a turnout of more than 300 in this area, how many ballots do you print, bearing in mind that you'll almost certainly lose your job if you print just one too few, but on the other hand people will be upset with you if you end up wasting two thirds of your print cost?)
... to make telecoms systems work properly. Most protocol suites are sufficiently poorly specified that a certain amount of folklore, which you can only gain from years in the industry, is necessary as well as a careful reading of the specs.
I really do hate to think what would happen to the world's telephone system if vital pieces of infrastructure have code in them that is randomly hacked around by amateurs, well-meaning or otherwise. "Look, this must work, look, it says so here in the spec, my code follows the standards, it's all the other guys who are wrong, they should fix theirs"... yeah, right.
(Example: as soon as you do something to base station code which looks perfectly allowed according to the GSM specs but is out of the ordinary, ie is not something that current live systems routinely do, you start coming across "bugs" in phones... and I mean mass market rock-solid stable phones like bog standard Nokias... where the "bug" is its failure to implement some detail of the standard that has never been needed in a live network. Great fun to play with, to be sure, if you've got your own private base station and a bunch of test SIMs, but you don't want people doing this sort of playing in important parts of the live system.)
What would the impact be of a carbomb going off in one of the vehicles transporting the ballots? If a district were known to be heavily in favor of a certain candidate, wouldn't the destruction of those ballots negate their votes?
Depends.
Round here, in a local election there are three ballot boxes for my ward, and they are probably transported to the count in two cars. The loss of any one of those boxes would clearly invalidate the election. Whether the election would have be run again in the entire ward, or just in the area(s) for the lost box(es) I don't know, but I think "the entire ward" would be a good guess.
For a parliamentary election, there are around forty ballot boxes for this constituency. If one box were lost, and that box held, say, 1,500 ballots, and the count of the remaining boxes gave someone a majority of, say, 4,000, then the result would be clear without that box. Otherwise I expect that again the entire election would be re-run.
(A car transporting me to a polling station, of which I was in charge, in Kosovo broke down. I finished the journey sitting in the back of the van that our armed guard was driving. A novel experience for a Brit - most of us can go through life never seeing a real live gun, and having one a few way away from you is a bit weird.)
Publicity for false election day
Dunno about the American South, but round here that's something I'm pretty sure would go through the courts, with a re-run of the election a possible outcome.
Company pressure
There's no way you can have an "informant watching the polls" in a propery run election. Everybody in the polling station needs to have a good excuse... and being the candidate's officially appointed observer is a good excuse, so each candidate can have someone watching inside each polling station for any bad goings-on. Your putative "informant" might be able to gain entry to the polling station but wouldn't be able to watch people marking their ballots, as there would be too many other people watching them in turn.
Now, this sort of buying / forcing votes is possible with postal votes - your crooked employer could lean on his employees to request postal votes and then hand over the ballot papers. There isn't an answer to this, which is why we (my party) really don't like postal votes very much, other than for the traditional good reasons (housebound etc).
(This sort of employer pressure was thought to be widespread in the Ukraine election that was re-run because of the various complaints. I went to the Boxing Day re-run (a novel way to spend Christmas away from my family) and we were told that the employers hadn't applied any pressure the second time round, basically everybody involved had decided to stop trying to cheat and to hold a clean election.)
if we can't actually verify that each vote is registered
Do you mean voters who don't make it onto the electoral register? Yes, that's part of the wider system rather than polling day security. There's two theories about natural safeguards here:
(a) candidates will make efforts to get everybody onto the register (b) actually it probably doesn't matter that much, as someone who can't be bothered to get onto the register is quite likely also somebody who can't be bothered to vote, so who cares.
And there are plenty more ways of gaming elections you haven't thought up yet... and the system has thought them up, and has safeguards in place...
Whilst I have no faith in electronic systems, I do know about pencil-and-paper elections, having taken part in several in the UK and been on UN election monitoring missions in Kosovo and Ukraine.
It is perfectly possible to make pencil-and-paper elections secure against the malpractices you suggest, as well as many others that you haven't thought of but the election designers certainly have!
Even if the entire system were corrupt, in terms of every single person involved in running the election being involved in a conspiracy, there's no way they could hide what they're doing from observers.
Now, in civilised parts of the world people don't always make use of all their observation opportunities. For example, in the UK the candidate can watch the ballot box being sealed, make a note of the number on the seal, and check that the same seal is still on the box when it is opened later at the counting hall. But we don't bother - we trust the officials, and we've been working for something like 17 hours with another 4 or 5 to go so we take the opportunity to have something to eat whilst the ballot boxes are being shifted around. But, if there were any suspicion that the election officials tampered with the boxes in their cars, we could do this check.
Oh, and as we all said goodbye to each other when leaving Kosovo the first time we were all calling out "bye, see you in Florida!", including the Americans.
Slashdot Mirror
... I'd keep well out of its way.
I'd probably stay on the ground, actually, unless someone experienced in flying in that sort of weather was able to convince me that it was OK.
If someone were to ask me to work overtime, I'd say "what's the deal?".
If I didn't like it I'd say "no thanks".
End of story. What's the problem?
Er, there's a bit of a difference between easyJet and Ryanair.
I know plenty of other people, besides myself, who are perfectly happy to fly with easyJet but would rather not make the trip than have to fly with Ryanair.
Anyway, Europe is not like the USA - there are other public transport options than just flying. You can't be "stranded" in Bratislava. The train system works fine, to anywhere in Europe, buses ditto, and if you want something different (albeit rather noisy) there's the Danube Hydrofoil.
I "hate Linux", to the extent that I use it as little and as infrequently as possible. I certainly don't like it enough to want to spend time, that I could otherwise spend on real life, telling people why I don't like it!
... in traditionally democratic parts of the world like Kosovo and Ukraine ... ... training has been provided. Doesn't the USA run to that then?
... what makes a me use a programming language is that someone is paying me to use it.
Beyond that I don't care much. (Well, there are limits, I refuse to do Perl, or Unix shell scripting.)
... that women are useless at communicating non-verbally with men, as they persist in using signals that are in fact only understood by women.
(Just like women dress up and put on makeup to impress each other, not to communicate with men.)
Hey girls, if you want to tell a man something you need to use a language he can understand, not some incomprehensible private girlie language!
(1) The extra base station costs money, and someone has to pay for it, after all I want to get paid for the work I've done on it don't I!
(2) The satellite bandwidth costs money.
(3) The extra infrastructure on the ground costs money.
And, last time I heard, the ground in most places is lower than 3,000m so if you use your phone on the ground what happens is that you'll be just as liable to prosecution as you are today.
Look mate, when there's a phone switched on in my plane I can hear it over the VHF radio - how do I know it's not also affecting the NAV radio (adjacent band) and making the VOR needle point the wrong way? - you can't hear that.
If you reduce the audience for your product then it's not surprising if your distribution costs go down!
... but I wouldn't bother with all that hassle just to watch a telly programme, so that's one fewer viewer.
Obviously yer average slashweenie has heard of BitTorrent, and even I would probably mange to be able to find it and install it and make it work if I really wanted to
And how many people's grandmas:
(1) can cope perfectly well with watching a telly programme on a web page in the normal way
(2) wouldn't have the remotest clue what you were on about if you started wittering about BitTorrent?
I'd pay lots more than that to return to checking in thirty minutes before flight rather than the current three hours.
So how come it rates the front page?
Music is non-essential entertainment.
The providers of it offer it for sale.
You can buy it if you like.
If you don't like the terms, or the seller, or something, the answer is extraordinarily simple - don't buy it. This won't kill you. You can live without music.
We have laws saying you can't steal stuff. What do people think is special about music that you should be able to steal music in contravention of this general principle? (If you don't believe in the general principle please let me know where you live and I'll come round and help myself to all your stuff.)
I've always found traffic reports on local radio to work well. It goes like this:
(1) Local radio says "there's a jam at such-and-such".
(2) I adjust my route in order to go directly through such-and-such.
(3) I get a clear run because by the time I get there the original problem has cleared, and everybody else has avoided the place having heard about it on the radio.
Including, please, banning such toys from any and all airspace that anyone with a proper pilot's licence might want to fly in. I've had one near miss with a toy already and that's enough thanks.
(OK, it was just a child's balloon, and I didn't hit it. But I really don't want to come across untrained idiots who can take my aircraft out of the sky if I hit them.)
There's a knee-jerk rant in response to this sort of thing that it is "pricing the poor off the roads".
This is utter nonsense, of course, as the poor aren't on the roads in the first place, as they can't afford cars.
Schemes like this actually make life better for the poor by enabling the buses to run faster.
Being a couple on my desk, and a few in a remote rack, so that when I get to the office tomorrow morning the results of the carefully prepared Sunday midnight run will be available for me to debug. It takes several hours to prepare this experiment, and there wasn't time to run it on Friday night before I went home, and I didn't want to risk the logs cycling far enough to destroy the evidence. (Yes I can fiddle with the log settings, but the more things I fiddle with the further my experient is from what happens in the field and the less likely I am to catch some real behaviour.)
But usually I switch things off, I'm not one of these willy-waving "my OS stays up longer than yours" plonkers.
There is little to no point in uninformed speculation.
The facts that we know so far are those in the interim AAIB report.
The AAIB will publish their full report in due course, at which point we can expect to know what happened.
That's it, basically.
Oh No It Isn't.
This is the reality of life today in a police state.
Like France, for example, where I and my family wasted half a day of our holiday in a police station because I didn't take my passport with me when we went to the beach. (We never did make it to the beach, it was too far to drive there and back in just the afternoon.)
The other symptom of a police state, BTW, besides "show me your papers" is easily recognisable - the police carry guns.
... from Win2k to XP, a couple of weeks ago, because the child wanted to run something that didn't work on Win2k. (We have no Win9x or NT boxes left at home now, they've all been upgraded to at least Win2k.)
In the end, that'll be why people upgrade to Vista - difficulty in obtaining applications that still work on XP.
There's no particular reason to suppose that just applying proper statistical theory will produce the right answer. Because elections aren't like that.
For example, the next door ward to mine typically had a 19% turnout. For years and years and years.
We knew that if we could get the turnout up to 29%, by persuading just one person in ten to come out and vote for us instead of sitting at home, we'd take the seat. But we never had enough bodies on the street to actually fight that ward.
Until the year we did. Result: increase in turnout that the statistics couldn't have predicted, and we won. There was absolutely no way we were going to warn the returning officer that we were going to launch a surprise attack on that ward so he might want to print more ballot papers than usual! - whilst we absolutely trust the returning officer not to leak our intentions to the opposition there is just no way you're going to risk any opportunity of a leak of that sort of thing.
It would be very interesting to read the threat analysis for this scheme, which doesn't have decades of world-wide experience behind it like print-in-advance ballots do, with all the associated gubbins such as secure printers and individually numbered ballots which are audited and counted and signed for every time they change hands.
(Even with proper ballots there's an interesting question: if there are 1,000 voters and there has never been a turnout of more than 300 in this area, how many ballots do you print, bearing in mind that you'll almost certainly lose your job if you print just one too few, but on the other hand people will be upset with you if you end up wasting two thirds of your print cost?)
... to make telecoms systems work properly. Most protocol suites are sufficiently poorly specified that a certain amount of folklore, which you can only gain from years in the industry, is necessary as well as a careful reading of the specs.
... yeah, right.
... and I mean mass market rock-solid stable phones like bog standard Nokias ... where the "bug" is its failure to implement some detail of the standard that has never been needed in a live network. Great fun to play with, to be sure, if you've got your own private base station and a bunch of test SIMs, but you don't want people doing this sort of playing in important parts of the live system.)
I really do hate to think what would happen to the world's telephone system if vital pieces of infrastructure have code in them that is randomly hacked around by amateurs, well-meaning or otherwise. "Look, this must work, look, it says so here in the spec, my code follows the standards, it's all the other guys who are wrong, they should fix theirs"
(Example: as soon as you do something to base station code which looks perfectly allowed according to the GSM specs but is out of the ordinary, ie is not something that current live systems routinely do, you start coming across "bugs" in phones
Loss of car
... and being the candidate's officially appointed observer is a good excuse, so each candidate can have someone watching inside each polling station for any bad goings-on. Your putative "informant" might be able to gain entry to the polling station but wouldn't be able to watch people marking their ballots, as there would be too many other people watching them in turn.
... and the system has thought them up, and has safeguards in place ...
What would the impact be of a carbomb going off in one of the vehicles transporting the ballots? If a district were known to be heavily in favor of a certain candidate, wouldn't the destruction of those ballots negate their votes?
Depends.
Round here, in a local election there are three ballot boxes for my ward, and they are probably transported to the count in two cars. The loss of any one of those boxes would clearly invalidate the election. Whether the election would have be run again in the entire ward, or just in the area(s) for the lost box(es) I don't know, but I think "the entire ward" would be a good guess.
For a parliamentary election, there are around forty ballot boxes for this constituency. If one box were lost, and that box held, say, 1,500 ballots, and the count of the remaining boxes gave someone a majority of, say, 4,000, then the result would be clear without that box. Otherwise I expect that again the entire election would be re-run.
(A car transporting me to a polling station, of which I was in charge, in Kosovo broke down. I finished the journey sitting in the back of the van that our armed guard was driving. A novel experience for a Brit - most of us can go through life never seeing a real live gun, and having one a few way away from you is a bit weird.)
Publicity for false election day
Dunno about the American South, but round here that's something I'm pretty sure would go through the courts, with a re-run of the election a possible outcome.
Company pressure
There's no way you can have an "informant watching the polls" in a propery run election. Everybody in the polling station needs to have a good excuse
Now, this sort of buying / forcing votes is possible with postal votes - your crooked employer could lean on his employees to request postal votes and then hand over the ballot papers. There isn't an answer to this, which is why we (my party) really don't like postal votes very much, other than for the traditional good reasons (housebound etc).
(This sort of employer pressure was thought to be widespread in the Ukraine election that was re-run because of the various complaints. I went to the Boxing Day re-run (a novel way to spend Christmas away from my family) and we were told that the employers hadn't applied any pressure the second time round, basically everybody involved had decided to stop trying to cheat and to hold a clean election.)
if we can't actually verify that each vote is registered
Do you mean voters who don't make it onto the electoral register? Yes, that's part of the wider system rather than polling day security. There's two theories about natural safeguards here:
(a) candidates will make efforts to get everybody onto the register
(b) actually it probably doesn't matter that much, as someone who can't be bothered to get onto the register is quite likely also somebody who can't be bothered to vote, so who cares.
And there are plenty more ways of gaming elections you haven't thought up yet
Whilst I have no faith in electronic systems, I do know about pencil-and-paper elections, having taken part in several in the UK and been on UN election monitoring missions in Kosovo and Ukraine.
It is perfectly possible to make pencil-and-paper elections secure against the malpractices you suggest, as well as many others that you haven't thought of but the election designers certainly have!
Even if the entire system were corrupt, in terms of every single person involved in running the election being involved in a conspiracy, there's no way they could hide what they're doing from observers.
Now, in civilised parts of the world people don't always make use of all their observation opportunities. For example, in the UK the candidate can watch the ballot box being sealed, make a note of the number on the seal, and check that the same seal is still on the box when it is opened later at the counting hall. But we don't bother - we trust the officials, and we've been working for something like 17 hours with another 4 or 5 to go so we take the opportunity to have something to eat whilst the ballot boxes are being shifted around. But, if there were any suspicion that the election officials tampered with the boxes in their cars, we could do this check.
Oh, and as we all said goodbye to each other when leaving Kosovo the first time we were all calling out "bye, see you in Florida!", including the Americans.