so how is this any different than when people went ballistic over google's streetview cars logging wifi?
Not that I'm saying there should be anything wrong with it in the first place, but why are the freaks that tried to go after google for doing this going to leave this guy alone? Looks like about the same thing to me.
I don't think bicycle riding is a very good analogy to this problem. How about cooking, which is a procedural step-by-step operation? Little hints the recipe can give you like "preheat oven to 350 degrees" can be a tremendous time-saver later. If you didn't know to do that, you'd get your dish ready and then look at the oven (off) and click it on and sit back and wait 20 minutes before placing it in the oven. A dish that was supposed to be 60 minutes start to serve is now going to take 80 minutes due to a lack of process optimization.
Compilers have the same problem of not knowing what the expectations are down the road, and aren't good at timing things. Good expereinced cooks can manage a 4 course meal and time it so all the dishes are done at the right time and don't dirty as many dishes. Inexperienced cooks are much like compilers, they can get the job done but their timing and efficiency usually have much room for improvement.
What if the system has a 'bug' which makes any vote for the opposition a 'shadow' vote, and any vote for the guy currently in power a 'real' vote? If the verification of both votes looks the same, then you can't tell which is counted as real.
The vote tallying and verifying software needs to be open source of course. If that is being tampered with, there is nothing anyone can do to insure a fair vote.
It's like saying "but what if someone bribes ALL the election officials?" Well, then you're screwed. No amount of procedure or auditing can save you.
As long as the tallying and verifying code is known good, any attempt to manipulate the data will be detectable. And even if the code IS flawed or abusable, once that's fixed, the data can be run through it again and be verified and return correct results after the fact, insuring both accurate AND complete results. (that's one of the subtle problems right now, wads of votes can just disappear and be extremely difficult to detect) If data was altered or deleted by bad code, the corruption will be detectable after the code is fixed.
And how do you know you aren't looking at a shadow vote when you go to verify your vote? What benefit is there to verifying your vote if you can't trust the answer?
If you opted to make a shadow vote, the receipt will display the shadow vote. If you did not create a shadow vote, it will show your actual vote. The web page will not tell you if it's the shadow vote or not. For this to work, the only two that know it's a shadow vote are the voter (who made the choice in the privacy of the voting booth) and a voting auditor in the event of an audit. (who doesn't know whose vote it is unless you complain)
When placing your vote you have the option to either have a vote you can verify later, OR have a variable vote you can show to someone later. Only the voter will know which path they chose, and that's what makes it useless to try to buy/force votes. I realize this may be slightly confusing so I will provide the scenarios and why they all work:
1) Average Joe goes to the booth and places his vote, doesn't get a receipt. Nothing changes from current. He's just placing his trust in the system to work.
2) paranoid Greg goes to booth and votes, and gets a receipt. That evening he takes his receipt and logs into the provided url and enters the password he made up when he voted, and can verify that the system has correctly recorded all his votes. If he loses the receipt, it's useless without the password. If someone forces him to show them the verification page and they don't like it, he can tell them it was a shadow vote he made up for someone else.
3) Husband tells bullied wife Dawn you better vote republican or you're getting a beating. Wife goes in and votes dem, but gets a shadow vote for straight ticket republican. Husband demands receipt and password and checks it and it's all republican. He's probably not too bright not to realize it's fake, but he has no way to tell otherwise and never will.
4) same scenario as (3) but with employer or anyone trying to buy Dawn's vote. they could pay her to vote one way, but they have no credible way to verify Dawn's vote later because she may have voted her way and given them her shadow vote receipt.
5) Tim votes and gets a receipt, but when he checks it online some of the votes are different than how he remembers voting. Greg submits a complaint, which, if a significant number of people complain about, will be investigated for tampering. (this isn't a PERFECT solution, but is a huge improvement over the current system where no one can tell if their vote may have been counted incorrectly)
6) Mary votes and gets a receipt. But when she tries to check it online, it's not found. Mary submits a complaint the same way Tim did, and if any significant number of ballots are reported missing, an investigation can be started, similar to Tim's complaint. Since the receipts are serialized and the precincts related to the receipt, votes being lost or discarded will be easy for the auditors to spot patterns for.
7) Pat was worried his boss might demand to see his vote so he decided to get a shadow vote. Later he found that his boss wasn't going to try to pull that. He'd like to verify the system correctly registered his vote, but he is out of luck. Pat gave up the ability to verify it by choosing to get a shadow receipt.
Take note:
A) your vote remains anonymous unless you submit a complaint because you think there was a problem. You will have to be willing to reveal your vote to submit a complaint, that is a necessary and I think sensible tradeoff. Complaints will be handled privately one-on-one with an auditor and a voter, to prevent someone from trying to use the complaint process to verify how you voted.
B) only the voter and the system know if the receipt displays a real or shadow vote. No one can prove which way you voted even with the receipt, except the auditors, which is necessary to verify a vote.
C) the voter has to make the decision when voting whethe
You're right but the bigger threat isn't from a political player. The biggest threat is retaliation from your employer, your customers, your neighbors and maybe even your family. Imagine if your father-in-law found out you voted one way instead of another and didn't want you in the family because of it.
The solution to this is very simple really. When inside the booth, have it offer an option to enter a password and get a printed URL receipt, that you can take to a web browser later to enter your password and verify your vote was recorded the way you cast it. AND, offer the option to make a shadow vote that will show up online instead of your actual vote when checked online. If someone is pressuring you to vote a certain way, you can create the shadow vote however they are pressuring you to vote, and you can then show them how you "voted" online. You will lose the ability to verify your vote, but in your case being able to "show" how you voted to someone else is what you need.
This allows you to vote in a way you can confirm if you want to, or deny if you need to. (but not both) The receipt ID is randomly generated and is not tied to you personally, but the voting system keeps track of the actual vote and shadow vote tied to the receipt. If you did not create a shadow vote, and you check it online and it has changed, you can submit a complaint. Until you do that they don't know who the vote belonged to, but they will have record of the actual vote and whether a shadow vote was created. This allows your vote to stay anonymous unless you think it was tampered with. So they could investigate if there was suspicion that the vote was changed if you filed a complaint. This appears to meet all the requirements people are looking for, unless I'm missing something here. I invite people to criticize this idea, I'm looking to test/improve it.
A judge's ability to basically say "I demand you do (anything)" and have the authority to lock you up without due process until you comply is in itself a violation of due process.
I don't see why we still have that. A judge's job isn't to create law.
Any large group of people will have at least a few members that are VERY "uncivilized". And within that small portion is where the death penalty occasionally needs to be applied.
The death penalty is for those that have demonstrated a complete, destructive, and unwavering lack of respect for the rights of others, and who are an unsalvageable and severe danger to their community. If you think YOUR community is completely devoid of uncivilized people, you are delusional.
There are three camps for the support of death penalty. It's used as a deterrent, a punishment, and a protection for the community. It doesn't make a completely effective deterrent because some hardened sadistic people are ok to just rape and pillage until they finally get caught. Punishment doesn't provide anything more than emotional help for those injured. Removing them permanently from the community for its own protection, that has demonstrable, practical value.
I like how they did it with Australia, dump them off on an isolated island where they're no longer a danger to their community, they can fend for themselves among the rest of the cutthroats. Don't need to kill them, let them kill each other since they all seem to agree that's the OK thing to do. Let their own values be the executor of their fate.
You're already leasing it. It's called licensing. The only difference is that you had a one-time payment before, and now they want you to pay continuously.
They say they're going to add new features, but I don't see how they can add $100 worth of new features every year. Heck, office 2004 still gets my jobs done. I don't see what features they could possibly have added over the last 8 years that would be worth $800.
The whole pricing thing for apps like this I think is going to do a bubble burst shortly anyway. Who's going to pay $100/yr to lease an app that a cloud app will do for you for $15/yr? I've used Google Docs recently, and while it's not a perfect replacement yet, it's sure a lot cheaper!
Several things I'd like to address there. First I'd agree that hitting an incoming ICBM wouldn't be any kind of a safe bet. We had enough trouble hitting SCUDs with patriots not too long ago.
But second, ANY hit to an ICBM at several miles out is good enough. First off we can assume (if it hits) it will disable or detonate any explosives, either conventional or nuclear. That does indeed leave a large chunk of mass headed to the target. At any significant distance, if we assume say 3-5 miles up, even aiming at something as large as a battleship is going to require terminal guidance to hit. Wind direction changes dramatically as you pass through vertical layers, plenty enough to throw off your aim, and it's likely running evasive maneuvers. If the control mechanisms or surfaces are disabled, it's very unlikely to hit the target. Further, unless all that's coming down is a very hard sabot with a guidance tail, the aerodynamics of what's left of the ICBM after the missile has hit it should be compromised, and it's likely to start to tumble, making the odds of a hit even less likely. At those speeds, if it wasn't a sabot, it'd probably disintegrate due to atmospheric friction.
The concept of a "soft hit" from a missile isn't a new concept. When R2T2 hits an incoming harpoon for example, you'll usually get a nice fireball, but then you still have a substantial chunk of metal and what's left of the engine headed you way, not something you want to stick around outdoors to watch impact the ship. It won't blow a massive hole in the side of the superstructure like it wanted to, but it could still easily take out an AA gun or two, a missile rack, kill a few on deck, start a fire, or hit a jet that's fueling. It's still dangerous, but much less so than it was before the counterstrike.
I suppose at this point you have to start looking at what happens with a near hit. It's interesting to look at photos and video from WW2 when they were dropping 2k# bombs trying to hit battleships and cruisers that were swerving frantically. A direct hit wasn't required with them - hitting close enough with that big of a charge could buckle in bulkheads pretty easily. But if you're playing the "mass effect" game, you almost completely lose that option. Darts will drop into the water and will make a bit of a splash, but close to 100% of their energy will be dissipated into the water below as the water slows it down. Best thing you're going to get with a DIRECT hit is to punch a (small) hole straight through and out the bottom. With compartmentalization of ships what it is, that may not even be enough to make it retire from the battle, depending on what you manage to hit. You'll get a much better result with penetrating explosives or large nearby water concussions.
The carriers themselves aren't TOO big of a deal. they can launch some missiles but really their big thing is they're a mobile airstrip and can launch devastating aircraft right off your coast or your fleet. The real teeth aren't on the deck but what they can put in the air. As the article mentions, battleships used to be the symbolic supership but were found to be vulnerable to airstrikes.
Sort of like a wasp nest. The nest itself is nothing to be worried about, it's the insects milling around looking for an excuse to sting you that you have to be thinking about.
From what I've seen recently, there's sabor rattling going on about these "carrier killer" cruise missiles. Basically it's a flying torpedo. Probably pretty bad news for a carrier, though we really haven't seen much from them to tell just how effective they are. Carriers have those CWIS that draw lines of metal in the sky when a missile is inbound, hopefully they're effective against threats coming in from outside screen ship range. That's really the biggest unknown right now. Miss the carrier and there's gonna be a whole world of hurt on the wing headed for wherever that missile came from. A bit like trying to throw a rock at a hornet nest.... better take it out on the first toss or better start running.
It'll be interesting to see how modern aircraft fair against modern battleships. Ancient canvas-winged swordfish crippled the most powerful battleship ever to float (Bismarch), I wonder what a nice modern jet will be capable of?
I wish they had showed some practical application. Moving an air hockey paddle two feet to the right isn't extremely practical. Show me it loading a dozen donuts into a donut box or something.
Sensors. Yes it has force sensors but anything else? He was having to carefully position the paddles for pickup. He talked about previous robots being "blind". But is this robot really not blind? Blind people have a sense of touch, why isn't this robot "blind"? Show me it can adapt a little using sight or ultrasound or something.
Slow. Wow. Ten seconds to move the paddle. Traditional industrial robots would do ten paddles in ten seconds. Sure they're not safe to be around running at those speeds, but this is completely at the other wrong end of the speed scale. Nobody's going to use a robot that moves like a retarded sloth. I do hope the speed can be cranked up?
I would like to have seen a very brief runthrough of the training process. Telling me ten times that it's "easy" without showing me it even once leaves me suspicious of your definition of "easy". (and of "simple")
Someone setting their hand under an object being set down really isn't a practical example of collision behavior on the manufacturing floor. Stick your head out in front of the arm's path and show me how it reacts. Does it knock you off your feet, or maybe shove you slowly to the side? Does it stop immediately and drop that fragile widget a foot down onto the bench? This demo wasn't nearly as informative as I was hoping it would be.
But I do like the "move the arms" training method. I'd put a little time into pondering how to train manufacturing robots in the past, and I was always wondering why they didn't use that approach, at least to rough out the behavior, and use an interface to tweak the positioning and timing etc. But afaik all the programming on other industrial robots to date has been purely through the console. Even if you don't eliminate the programmers or computer techs, at least being able to get a good floor worker to flesh out the robot's basic movements will save a lot of time. And if you involve them more, they can help in optimizing the behavior too I think.
I think that's why I'd say considering clocking out for that is a bad idea. But then again there are certain behavioral expectations at any job, whether it's coming to work looking presentable to not dumping food all over the carpet. Obviously using the restroom is on that list, and isn't something that should even factor into the timeclock one way or the other. But it's expected behavior while on the job, and could be neglected or abused just the same. Wasting time reading an ebook in the restroom is a productivity hit just the same as leaving your lunch trash all over the break room. Those are usually handled as "management issues", not with pay reward/penalty reactions.
Unless you work purely on commission, they are paying you for your time. How you spend it is a metric they're entitled to.
Some businesses will say "I don't care if you leave early, if you have your work done and didn't get sloppy because you were in a hurry, then go home.". Those places may be paying hourly, but they're effectively still working on commission.
But the majority of jobs out there are paying for your time there as a warm body doing the work they need done, and want you to be as productive as possible every day. You like to keep an eye on what they're paying you, and naturally they want to keep an eye on what they're getting for their money. "We'll quit tracking your bathroom breaks if we start just telling you *about* how much we're paying you." How would you like some of that?
And in many cases they're not merely justified in doing it, they NEED to be doing it. I've seen my share of coworkers that walk in the door and clock in, and always head directly to the bathroom for the next 15-20 minutes. And somehow also manage to be in the bathroom for the last 20-25 minutes of most work days. Funny, they all seem to bring their smartphones with them. And the other 4-6 long bathroom breaks they seem to need throughout the day. And on the rare occasion I'm int here at the same time all I hear is yakyakyak on the phone. Employees abuse it, company starts to buckle down. Big surprise there. One guy bought a kindle recently and it somehow has had a profound effect on the amount of bathroom time he needs, imagine that. Basically you have a few bad apples ruining the barrel. Stop blaming the barrel.
And if you've ever been short-staffed on the sales floor and have to deal with one of the clerks being missing during rushes all the time, it starts getting on your nerves too. "Three more just came in, have you seen Brian?" "Take one guess where he is." "Great. Go tell him to hurry up!" Go pound on the door, "hurry up we have a rush here" and somehow they can always emerge within 30 seconds. Amazing bodily control they have, don't you think?
I have a much bigger beef with smoke breaks though. We've had our share of abusers here. They like to go out back for "a quick cig" that turns into a 15-20 minute long break as they yak on their cell phone, repeat every 45-60 minutes. At best, a 15 minute break every hour, you do the math. Though after a number of times of the manager stepping out back looking for Joe and seeing him with no lit cigarette and on the phone and sparks tend to start flying. Managers don't have quite that level of monitoring for bathroom breaks, and that's what encourages their abuse.
If I were the manager here, employees would be clocking out for cigarette breaks, and that would end the problem right quick. But I don't think that would necessarily be a good solution for toilet breaks. The majority of people need 1-3 toilet breaks a day. (I'm personally at 0-2 a day, my manager actually averages 4-8) Cigarette smokers like a hit once an hour or more, so there's much more reason for insisting on clocking out for them, it's arguably more controllable and is usually longer. At the very least, phones/ipads/etc would be forbidden on *paid* breaks, cigarette AND toilet. And before you flinch.... MY time, MY rules.
Anyway, that's my 2c worth. And I'm a salaried employee but I'm the only one that really does the specific things I do there.
This not a simple case of security through obscurity, though.
I see this from a different point of view. There are two distinct things I'd consider here, the link itself (separate from the content it takes you to), and the act of directing you to content owned by someone else.
Most of us have had exposure to people trying to get links taken down. What has to be considered here is what they're trying to claim for protection. The actual provider of the content is not the link. It's what's at the other end of the link, which in these cases is the person claiming to be wronged. I don't see them having any right to claim infringement of content because they alone are the ones providing it. I don't see any difference between this and say for example, my posting a note on a telephone pole saying "go to SuperScreen Theatre and watch Xmen 7". I'm not infringing on their ownership of anything xmen, I'm merely informing people that you're offering it. There's no fundamental difference in what I have done if XMen 7 is a regular paid show or a free-of-charge sneak preview that SuperScreen actually only informed a small group of people about. The difference there being one showing was public or charge normal, and the other was a "free if you know about it" kind of thing. But there was no difference in my posting of the notice. The only change was on the provider's end, and why should that change the legality of what *I* did?
So at least how I'm seeing it, the providing of the link itself should be legal, and that's what most people here will also be assuming.
But then we have to address the url itself. If it contains a secret parameter such as a unique ID, login, etc, is it legal to give that way? And I mean in any form, not just an easily clickable hyperlink. You can't call it a trade secret because you're sending it out to at least a subset of the public. It's a fact so you can't copyright it. An unauthorized person using it could be charged with unauthorized access (using credentials that were "stolen") but the person providing the link isn't the user so that doesn't apply to them. (and then you get into the IMHO completely BS concept of "contributing to infringement" etc) I don't see any angle to view this as illegal.
I think this is just some frustration on the part of the providers. They had a system in place that was assisting with their revenue, was convenient for them and their customers, and was mostly under their control. A bit like mailing out coupons to some of your good customers. But then they decided to change how their offer was being sent out, say for example by emailing their customers links to the coupon to download and print out. But now someone has posted the url to that coupon so it'd available to a lot of others. So others are going there and downloading and printing the coupon too, which is not what the provider intended or wants to have happen. So they're looking for a way to call what the poster is doing is "illegal" - not because it IS illegal, but merely because they want it stopped. The provider has no real ground to stand on, other than "I don't like it, I didn't intend for that to happen." They made a change to make things more convenient for themselves and their customers, and in doing so they gave up a bit of control over who they were giving things away to. They switched from using a secured private distribution method to using an insecure public distribution method. They continue to claim "privacy" but they themselves made it public. It's no different than my opening the curtains at my house and then getting upset when people look in my window. What I want doesn't have any bearing on what you see, I'm the one that made it available and it's my fault that you were able to see it. I have no right to demand you look the other way.
it was neither a matter of bad intent or bad idea. The intent and the design were good, but they weren't made to work forever without being updated. Nothing like this had ever been put together that had managed to last very long. Maybe they just didn't really think it was too important to make the constitution something that would easily keep itself up to date with the times.
If they would have made the constitution easier to ammend, maybe we'd see a more modern document.
Now that the state and federal government have managed to wiggle mostly out of the ropes of the constitution, it's become a very difficult prospect to get them tightened up again the way they were intended to be. The constitution used to be considered a guideline and a framework for law, but now it's more of a nuisance and inconvenience to be worked around as a matter of daily business. It doesn't stop them from doing whatever they want to, it just forces them to plan HOW they do it a little more carefully.
A laptop (of any sort really) would have been a better choice, at least for the higher grades. I could see an ipad or other tablet being useful in K-2 for example, but beyond that where keyboarding, app flexibility, and document exchange become important, a tablet (any tablet) isn't the best tool for the job, unless you intend to have a very specific restricted usage, such as portable textbooks / reference.
I loaned one out to my cousin and never saw it again. I remember writing games for that thing too... checkers, reversi, hex, nym, etc. fun little basic programming environment with pixel-level graphics. (not too speedy though) So atm I just use my old TI-35 for basic stuff.
Whether or not they're steno'ing the data only affects what you KNOW is in the file. They're still allowed to PLACE anything in the file, and they're neither required to tell you what data, nor even be obvious about it being in there in the first place.
Their TOS describes how and what info is SENT to them by the client. This is information on your own computer. They don't have to tell you all the places they store your information. Think copy protection. There's a good deal of sneaky things they're doing on your computer to make sure you're running a legit license. They don't have to tell you about any of that. If you take a file that their client makes, and upload it somewhere, it may contain identifying information in it. This just happens to be a screenshot / image, that you wouldn't normally expect metadata to be in.
It's not too different than say, your digital camera embedding metadata. And it does. A lot. Usually common things like date/time, fstop, exposure, etc, but also can include model of camera, CAMERA SERIAL NUMBER, gps location, firmware version, total number of shots taken, etc etc.
So you can take off the tinfoil hat. It's too late. They're already in your head.
Trading is too fast when it ceases to mean anything. The rate at which these decisions are being made indicates that it is not going through a human mind. The stock market is about people being able to buy and sell securities that allows businesses to raise additional capital. It was originally a very social thing so much so that it could reflect the mood of the populace's strength and development.
I see it as more of a high-end gambling. You're trying to make money, with money, hoping to outguess someone else. It's really not all that different than going to vegas and playing the poker table. If you can find a few suckers, and avoid being one yourself, you can make money.
All these people are doing is trying to speed up the process and make it easier to do. Some opportunities may only exist for a few seconds. Someone decides to sell when they shouldn't and causes price to dip momentarily. If you have automated systems in place you can take advantage of it better.
The problem of course is the computers can get really twitchy and cause shockwaves of trading to occur. My favorite thing to watch is how people scream about how all this money "just disappeared". Idiots. The money was never there to begin with. There was just an opportunity for money and now there isn't. Big difference. Money doesn't disappear, liquidity disappears. But that can cause problems for companies that are running closer to the edge. When there's a "crash", the money is just taken back out of the system. 100% of it CAME from the investors (the public) and for awhile some of it was in the hands of companies, selling stock is like getting a loan from the public. A crash just means people try to take their money back. They won't get it all back, the company has some of it and the public has some of it. No money disappears, you just don't see as much anymore.
It's all an illusion created by liquidity. It's like a group of three friends passing a $1 bill around. All three of them see $1 and get the impression that it looks like $3 since all three of them see $1. Until someone pockets the bill and the other two don't see it anymore, and start freaking out wondering where the other $2 went. A loss in liquidity makes people think (their) money has vanished, and someone must be to blame, and tends to cause a panic.
Same effect with stock. If you buy a stock from a company for $1, where's the money? They have $1 cash and you have $1 in stock. Does that mean that $2 exists in this closed system? NO. There was $1 and there still is only $1. If you turn around and sell your stock back to the company, you have $1 cash and the company, well their own stock isn't worth anything to them unless they can sell it so they really have nothing. So now we went magically from $2 to $1 as a dollar disappeared? NO.
Slashdot Mirror
that certainly would appear to be common sense for photography...
so how is this any different than when people went ballistic over google's streetview cars logging wifi?
Not that I'm saying there should be anything wrong with it in the first place, but why are the freaks that tried to go after google for doing this going to leave this guy alone? Looks like about the same thing to me.
Certainly! "If you forget to check your grammar carefully before making a flaming post, you're going to have a bad time."
role, noun: a part or character played by an actor or actress
roll, idiom, "on a roll": enjoying continuing good luck or success
I don't think bicycle riding is a very good analogy to this problem. How about cooking, which is a procedural step-by-step operation? Little hints the recipe can give you like "preheat oven to 350 degrees" can be a tremendous time-saver later. If you didn't know to do that, you'd get your dish ready and then look at the oven (off) and click it on and sit back and wait 20 minutes before placing it in the oven. A dish that was supposed to be 60 minutes start to serve is now going to take 80 minutes due to a lack of process optimization.
Compilers have the same problem of not knowing what the expectations are down the road, and aren't good at timing things. Good expereinced cooks can manage a 4 course meal and time it so all the dishes are done at the right time and don't dirty as many dishes. Inexperienced cooks are much like compilers, they can get the job done but their timing and efficiency usually have much room for improvement.
True. Tho there's already a lot of that going on with the current system. Hanging chads, dead people voting in droves, misplaced ballot boxes, etc.
There's just no way to do 100% privacy with 100% confidence.
The vote tallying and verifying software needs to be open source of course. If that is being tampered with, there is nothing anyone can do to insure a fair vote.
It's like saying "but what if someone bribes ALL the election officials?" Well, then you're screwed. No amount of procedure or auditing can save you.
As long as the tallying and verifying code is known good, any attempt to manipulate the data will be detectable. And even if the code IS flawed or abusable, once that's fixed, the data can be run through it again and be verified and return correct results after the fact, insuring both accurate AND complete results. (that's one of the subtle problems right now, wads of votes can just disappear and be extremely difficult to detect) If data was altered or deleted by bad code, the corruption will be detectable after the code is fixed.
If you opted to make a shadow vote, the receipt will display the shadow vote. If you did not create a shadow vote, it will show your actual vote. The web page will not tell you if it's the shadow vote or not. For this to work, the only two that know it's a shadow vote are the voter (who made the choice in the privacy of the voting booth) and a voting auditor in the event of an audit. (who doesn't know whose vote it is unless you complain)
When placing your vote you have the option to either have a vote you can verify later, OR have a variable vote you can show to someone later. Only the voter will know which path they chose, and that's what makes it useless to try to buy/force votes. I realize this may be slightly confusing so I will provide the scenarios and why they all work:
1) Average Joe goes to the booth and places his vote, doesn't get a receipt. Nothing changes from current. He's just placing his trust in the system to work.
2) paranoid Greg goes to booth and votes, and gets a receipt. That evening he takes his receipt and logs into the provided url and enters the password he made up when he voted, and can verify that the system has correctly recorded all his votes. If he loses the receipt, it's useless without the password. If someone forces him to show them the verification page and they don't like it, he can tell them it was a shadow vote he made up for someone else.
3) Husband tells bullied wife Dawn you better vote republican or you're getting a beating. Wife goes in and votes dem, but gets a shadow vote for straight ticket republican. Husband demands receipt and password and checks it and it's all republican. He's probably not too bright not to realize it's fake, but he has no way to tell otherwise and never will.
4) same scenario as (3) but with employer or anyone trying to buy Dawn's vote. they could pay her to vote one way, but they have no credible way to verify Dawn's vote later because she may have voted her way and given them her shadow vote receipt.
5) Tim votes and gets a receipt, but when he checks it online some of the votes are different than how he remembers voting. Greg submits a complaint, which, if a significant number of people complain about, will be investigated for tampering. (this isn't a PERFECT solution, but is a huge improvement over the current system where no one can tell if their vote may have been counted incorrectly)
6) Mary votes and gets a receipt. But when she tries to check it online, it's not found. Mary submits a complaint the same way Tim did, and if any significant number of ballots are reported missing, an investigation can be started, similar to Tim's complaint. Since the receipts are serialized and the precincts related to the receipt, votes being lost or discarded will be easy for the auditors to spot patterns for.
7) Pat was worried his boss might demand to see his vote so he decided to get a shadow vote. Later he found that his boss wasn't going to try to pull that. He'd like to verify the system correctly registered his vote, but he is out of luck. Pat gave up the ability to verify it by choosing to get a shadow receipt.
Take note:
A) your vote remains anonymous unless you submit a complaint because you think there was a problem. You will have to be willing to reveal your vote to submit a complaint, that is a necessary and I think sensible tradeoff. Complaints will be handled privately one-on-one with an auditor and a voter, to prevent someone from trying to use the complaint process to verify how you voted.
B) only the voter and the system know if the receipt displays a real or shadow vote. No one can prove which way you voted even with the receipt, except the auditors, which is necessary to verify a vote.
C) the voter has to make the decision when voting whethe
(without being able to sell them or be pressured)
The solution to this is very simple really. When inside the booth, have it offer an option to enter a password and get a printed URL receipt, that you can take to a web browser later to enter your password and verify your vote was recorded the way you cast it. AND, offer the option to make a shadow vote that will show up online instead of your actual vote when checked online. If someone is pressuring you to vote a certain way, you can create the shadow vote however they are pressuring you to vote, and you can then show them how you "voted" online. You will lose the ability to verify your vote, but in your case being able to "show" how you voted to someone else is what you need.
This allows you to vote in a way you can confirm if you want to, or deny if you need to. (but not both) The receipt ID is randomly generated and is not tied to you personally, but the voting system keeps track of the actual vote and shadow vote tied to the receipt. If you did not create a shadow vote, and you check it online and it has changed, you can submit a complaint. Until you do that they don't know who the vote belonged to, but they will have record of the actual vote and whether a shadow vote was created. This allows your vote to stay anonymous unless you think it was tampered with. So they could investigate if there was suspicion that the vote was changed if you filed a complaint. This appears to meet all the requirements people are looking for, unless I'm missing something here. I invite people to criticize this idea, I'm looking to test/improve it.
A judge's ability to basically say "I demand you do (anything)" and have the authority to lock you up without due process until you comply is in itself a violation of due process.
I don't see why we still have that. A judge's job isn't to create law.
Any large group of people will have at least a few members that are VERY "uncivilized". And within that small portion is where the death penalty occasionally needs to be applied.
The death penalty is for those that have demonstrated a complete, destructive, and unwavering lack of respect for the rights of others, and who are an unsalvageable and severe danger to their community. If you think YOUR community is completely devoid of uncivilized people, you are delusional.
There are three camps for the support of death penalty. It's used as a deterrent, a punishment, and a protection for the community. It doesn't make a completely effective deterrent because some hardened sadistic people are ok to just rape and pillage until they finally get caught. Punishment doesn't provide anything more than emotional help for those injured. Removing them permanently from the community for its own protection, that has demonstrable, practical value.
I like how they did it with Australia, dump them off on an isolated island where they're no longer a danger to their community, they can fend for themselves among the rest of the cutthroats. Don't need to kill them, let them kill each other since they all seem to agree that's the OK thing to do. Let their own values be the executor of their fate.
Someone needs to arrange a scavenger hunt list for this image. I'll get you started:
find two x-wings
find three whales
find one submarine
find three comets
You're already leasing it. It's called licensing. The only difference is that you had a one-time payment before, and now they want you to pay continuously.
They say they're going to add new features, but I don't see how they can add $100 worth of new features every year. Heck, office 2004 still gets my jobs done. I don't see what features they could possibly have added over the last 8 years that would be worth $800.
The whole pricing thing for apps like this I think is going to do a bubble burst shortly anyway. Who's going to pay $100/yr to lease an app that a cloud app will do for you for $15/yr? I've used Google Docs recently, and while it's not a perfect replacement yet, it's sure a lot cheaper!
Several things I'd like to address there. First I'd agree that hitting an incoming ICBM wouldn't be any kind of a safe bet. We had enough trouble hitting SCUDs with patriots not too long ago.
But second, ANY hit to an ICBM at several miles out is good enough. First off we can assume (if it hits) it will disable or detonate any explosives, either conventional or nuclear. That does indeed leave a large chunk of mass headed to the target. At any significant distance, if we assume say 3-5 miles up, even aiming at something as large as a battleship is going to require terminal guidance to hit. Wind direction changes dramatically as you pass through vertical layers, plenty enough to throw off your aim, and it's likely running evasive maneuvers. If the control mechanisms or surfaces are disabled, it's very unlikely to hit the target. Further, unless all that's coming down is a very hard sabot with a guidance tail, the aerodynamics of what's left of the ICBM after the missile has hit it should be compromised, and it's likely to start to tumble, making the odds of a hit even less likely. At those speeds, if it wasn't a sabot, it'd probably disintegrate due to atmospheric friction.
The concept of a "soft hit" from a missile isn't a new concept. When R2T2 hits an incoming harpoon for example, you'll usually get a nice fireball, but then you still have a substantial chunk of metal and what's left of the engine headed you way, not something you want to stick around outdoors to watch impact the ship. It won't blow a massive hole in the side of the superstructure like it wanted to, but it could still easily take out an AA gun or two, a missile rack, kill a few on deck, start a fire, or hit a jet that's fueling. It's still dangerous, but much less so than it was before the counterstrike.
I suppose at this point you have to start looking at what happens with a near hit. It's interesting to look at photos and video from WW2 when they were dropping 2k# bombs trying to hit battleships and cruisers that were swerving frantically. A direct hit wasn't required with them - hitting close enough with that big of a charge could buckle in bulkheads pretty easily. But if you're playing the "mass effect" game, you almost completely lose that option. Darts will drop into the water and will make a bit of a splash, but close to 100% of their energy will be dissipated into the water below as the water slows it down. Best thing you're going to get with a DIRECT hit is to punch a (small) hole straight through and out the bottom. With compartmentalization of ships what it is, that may not even be enough to make it retire from the battle, depending on what you manage to hit. You'll get a much better result with penetrating explosives or large nearby water concussions.
The carriers themselves aren't TOO big of a deal. they can launch some missiles but really their big thing is they're a mobile airstrip and can launch devastating aircraft right off your coast or your fleet. The real teeth aren't on the deck but what they can put in the air. As the article mentions, battleships used to be the symbolic supership but were found to be vulnerable to airstrikes.
Sort of like a wasp nest. The nest itself is nothing to be worried about, it's the insects milling around looking for an excuse to sting you that you have to be thinking about.
From what I've seen recently, there's sabor rattling going on about these "carrier killer" cruise missiles. Basically it's a flying torpedo. Probably pretty bad news for a carrier, though we really haven't seen much from them to tell just how effective they are. Carriers have those CWIS that draw lines of metal in the sky when a missile is inbound, hopefully they're effective against threats coming in from outside screen ship range. That's really the biggest unknown right now. Miss the carrier and there's gonna be a whole world of hurt on the wing headed for wherever that missile came from. A bit like trying to throw a rock at a hornet nest.... better take it out on the first toss or better start running.
It'll be interesting to see how modern aircraft fair against modern battleships. Ancient canvas-winged swordfish crippled the most powerful battleship ever to float (Bismarch), I wonder what a nice modern jet will be capable of?
I wish they had showed some practical application. Moving an air hockey paddle two feet to the right isn't extremely practical. Show me it loading a dozen donuts into a donut box or something.
Sensors. Yes it has force sensors but anything else? He was having to carefully position the paddles for pickup. He talked about previous robots being "blind". But is this robot really not blind? Blind people have a sense of touch, why isn't this robot "blind"? Show me it can adapt a little using sight or ultrasound or something.
Slow. Wow. Ten seconds to move the paddle. Traditional industrial robots would do ten paddles in ten seconds. Sure they're not safe to be around running at those speeds, but this is completely at the other wrong end of the speed scale. Nobody's going to use a robot that moves like a retarded sloth. I do hope the speed can be cranked up?
I would like to have seen a very brief runthrough of the training process. Telling me ten times that it's "easy" without showing me it even once leaves me suspicious of your definition of "easy". (and of "simple")
Someone setting their hand under an object being set down really isn't a practical example of collision behavior on the manufacturing floor. Stick your head out in front of the arm's path and show me how it reacts. Does it knock you off your feet, or maybe shove you slowly to the side? Does it stop immediately and drop that fragile widget a foot down onto the bench? This demo wasn't nearly as informative as I was hoping it would be.
But I do like the "move the arms" training method. I'd put a little time into pondering how to train manufacturing robots in the past, and I was always wondering why they didn't use that approach, at least to rough out the behavior, and use an interface to tweak the positioning and timing etc. But afaik all the programming on other industrial robots to date has been purely through the console. Even if you don't eliminate the programmers or computer techs, at least being able to get a good floor worker to flesh out the robot's basic movements will save a lot of time. And if you involve them more, they can help in optimizing the behavior too I think.
I think that's why I'd say considering clocking out for that is a bad idea. But then again there are certain behavioral expectations at any job, whether it's coming to work looking presentable to not dumping food all over the carpet. Obviously using the restroom is on that list, and isn't something that should even factor into the timeclock one way or the other. But it's expected behavior while on the job, and could be neglected or abused just the same. Wasting time reading an ebook in the restroom is a productivity hit just the same as leaving your lunch trash all over the break room. Those are usually handled as "management issues", not with pay reward/penalty reactions.
Unless you work purely on commission, they are paying you for your time. How you spend it is a metric they're entitled to.
Some businesses will say "I don't care if you leave early, if you have your work done and didn't get sloppy because you were in a hurry, then go home.". Those places may be paying hourly, but they're effectively still working on commission.
But the majority of jobs out there are paying for your time there as a warm body doing the work they need done, and want you to be as productive as possible every day. You like to keep an eye on what they're paying you, and naturally they want to keep an eye on what they're getting for their money. "We'll quit tracking your bathroom breaks if we start just telling you *about* how much we're paying you." How would you like some of that?
And in many cases they're not merely justified in doing it, they NEED to be doing it. I've seen my share of coworkers that walk in the door and clock in, and always head directly to the bathroom for the next 15-20 minutes. And somehow also manage to be in the bathroom for the last 20-25 minutes of most work days. Funny, they all seem to bring their smartphones with them. And the other 4-6 long bathroom breaks they seem to need throughout the day. And on the rare occasion I'm int here at the same time all I hear is yakyakyak on the phone. Employees abuse it, company starts to buckle down. Big surprise there. One guy bought a kindle recently and it somehow has had a profound effect on the amount of bathroom time he needs, imagine that. Basically you have a few bad apples ruining the barrel. Stop blaming the barrel.
And if you've ever been short-staffed on the sales floor and have to deal with one of the clerks being missing during rushes all the time, it starts getting on your nerves too. "Three more just came in, have you seen Brian?" "Take one guess where he is." "Great. Go tell him to hurry up!" Go pound on the door, "hurry up we have a rush here" and somehow they can always emerge within 30 seconds. Amazing bodily control they have, don't you think?
I have a much bigger beef with smoke breaks though. We've had our share of abusers here. They like to go out back for "a quick cig" that turns into a 15-20 minute long break as they yak on their cell phone, repeat every 45-60 minutes. At best, a 15 minute break every hour, you do the math. Though after a number of times of the manager stepping out back looking for Joe and seeing him with no lit cigarette and on the phone and sparks tend to start flying. Managers don't have quite that level of monitoring for bathroom breaks, and that's what encourages their abuse.
If I were the manager here, employees would be clocking out for cigarette breaks, and that would end the problem right quick. But I don't think that would necessarily be a good solution for toilet breaks. The majority of people need 1-3 toilet breaks a day. (I'm personally at 0-2 a day, my manager actually averages 4-8) Cigarette smokers like a hit once an hour or more, so there's much more reason for insisting on clocking out for them, it's arguably more controllable and is usually longer. At the very least, phones/ipads/etc would be forbidden on *paid* breaks, cigarette AND toilet. And before you flinch.... MY time, MY rules.
Anyway, that's my 2c worth. And I'm a salaried employee but I'm the only one that really does the specific things I do there.
I see this from a different point of view. There are two distinct things I'd consider here, the link itself (separate from the content it takes you to), and the act of directing you to content owned by someone else.
Most of us have had exposure to people trying to get links taken down. What has to be considered here is what they're trying to claim for protection. The actual provider of the content is not the link. It's what's at the other end of the link, which in these cases is the person claiming to be wronged. I don't see them having any right to claim infringement of content because they alone are the ones providing it. I don't see any difference between this and say for example, my posting a note on a telephone pole saying "go to SuperScreen Theatre and watch Xmen 7". I'm not infringing on their ownership of anything xmen, I'm merely informing people that you're offering it. There's no fundamental difference in what I have done if XMen 7 is a regular paid show or a free-of-charge sneak preview that SuperScreen actually only informed a small group of people about. The difference there being one showing was public or charge normal, and the other was a "free if you know about it" kind of thing. But there was no difference in my posting of the notice. The only change was on the provider's end, and why should that change the legality of what *I* did?
So at least how I'm seeing it, the providing of the link itself should be legal, and that's what most people here will also be assuming.
But then we have to address the url itself. If it contains a secret parameter such as a unique ID, login, etc, is it legal to give that way? And I mean in any form, not just an easily clickable hyperlink. You can't call it a trade secret because you're sending it out to at least a subset of the public. It's a fact so you can't copyright it. An unauthorized person using it could be charged with unauthorized access (using credentials that were "stolen") but the person providing the link isn't the user so that doesn't apply to them. (and then you get into the IMHO completely BS concept of "contributing to infringement" etc) I don't see any angle to view this as illegal.
I think this is just some frustration on the part of the providers. They had a system in place that was assisting with their revenue, was convenient for them and their customers, and was mostly under their control. A bit like mailing out coupons to some of your good customers. But then they decided to change how their offer was being sent out, say for example by emailing their customers links to the coupon to download and print out. But now someone has posted the url to that coupon so it'd available to a lot of others. So others are going there and downloading and printing the coupon too, which is not what the provider intended or wants to have happen. So they're looking for a way to call what the poster is doing is "illegal" - not because it IS illegal, but merely because they want it stopped. The provider has no real ground to stand on, other than "I don't like it, I didn't intend for that to happen." They made a change to make things more convenient for themselves and their customers, and in doing so they gave up a bit of control over who they were giving things away to. They switched from using a secured private distribution method to using an insecure public distribution method. They continue to claim "privacy" but they themselves made it public. It's no different than my opening the curtains at my house and then getting upset when people look in my window. What I want doesn't have any bearing on what you see, I'm the one that made it available and it's my fault that you were able to see it. I have no right to demand you look the other way.
it was neither a matter of bad intent or bad idea. The intent and the design were good, but they weren't made to work forever without being updated. Nothing like this had ever been put together that had managed to last very long. Maybe they just didn't really think it was too important to make the constitution something that would easily keep itself up to date with the times.
If they would have made the constitution easier to ammend, maybe we'd see a more modern document.
Now that the state and federal government have managed to wiggle mostly out of the ropes of the constitution, it's become a very difficult prospect to get them tightened up again the way they were intended to be. The constitution used to be considered a guideline and a framework for law, but now it's more of a nuisance and inconvenience to be worked around as a matter of daily business. It doesn't stop them from doing whatever they want to, it just forces them to plan HOW they do it a little more carefully.
A laptop (of any sort really) would have been a better choice, at least for the higher grades. I could see an ipad or other tablet being useful in K-2 for example, but beyond that where keyboarding, app flexibility, and document exchange become important, a tablet (any tablet) isn't the best tool for the job, unless you intend to have a very specific restricted usage, such as portable textbooks / reference.
I loaned one out to my cousin and never saw it again. I remember writing games for that thing too... checkers, reversi, hex, nym, etc. fun little basic programming environment with pixel-level graphics. (not too speedy though) So atm I just use my old TI-35 for basic stuff.
Whether or not they're steno'ing the data only affects what you KNOW is in the file. They're still allowed to PLACE anything in the file, and they're neither required to tell you what data, nor even be obvious about it being in there in the first place.
Their TOS describes how and what info is SENT to them by the client. This is information on your own computer. They don't have to tell you all the places they store your information. Think copy protection. There's a good deal of sneaky things they're doing on your computer to make sure you're running a legit license. They don't have to tell you about any of that. If you take a file that their client makes, and upload it somewhere, it may contain identifying information in it. This just happens to be a screenshot / image, that you wouldn't normally expect metadata to be in.
It's not too different than say, your digital camera embedding metadata. And it does. A lot. Usually common things like date/time, fstop, exposure, etc, but also can include model of camera, CAMERA SERIAL NUMBER, gps location, firmware version, total number of shots taken, etc etc.
So you can take off the tinfoil hat. It's too late. They're already in your head.
I see it as more of a high-end gambling. You're trying to make money, with money, hoping to outguess someone else. It's really not all that different than going to vegas and playing the poker table. If you can find a few suckers, and avoid being one yourself, you can make money.
All these people are doing is trying to speed up the process and make it easier to do. Some opportunities may only exist for a few seconds. Someone decides to sell when they shouldn't and causes price to dip momentarily. If you have automated systems in place you can take advantage of it better.
The problem of course is the computers can get really twitchy and cause shockwaves of trading to occur. My favorite thing to watch is how people scream about how all this money "just disappeared". Idiots. The money was never there to begin with. There was just an opportunity for money and now there isn't. Big difference. Money doesn't disappear, liquidity disappears. But that can cause problems for companies that are running closer to the edge. When there's a "crash", the money is just taken back out of the system. 100% of it CAME from the investors (the public) and for awhile some of it was in the hands of companies, selling stock is like getting a loan from the public. A crash just means people try to take their money back. They won't get it all back, the company has some of it and the public has some of it. No money disappears, you just don't see as much anymore.
It's all an illusion created by liquidity. It's like a group of three friends passing a $1 bill around. All three of them see $1 and get the impression that it looks like $3 since all three of them see $1. Until someone pockets the bill and the other two don't see it anymore, and start freaking out wondering where the other $2 went. A loss in liquidity makes people think (their) money has vanished, and someone must be to blame, and tends to cause a panic.
Same effect with stock. If you buy a stock from a company for $1, where's the money? They have $1 cash and you have $1 in stock. Does that mean that $2 exists in this closed system? NO. There was $1 and there still is only $1. If you turn around and sell your stock back to the company, you have $1 cash and the company, well their own stock isn't worth anything to them unless they can sell it so they really have nothing. So now we went magically from $2 to $1 as a dollar disappeared? NO.
the students will positively hate that.