Good catch, that's the sort of thinking I was hoping to hear from.
OK then one more tweak. The receipt you print in the booth can either be your real or your dummy vote. You pick just before you leave. So if you are being coerced, you can pick the dummy receipt but if you want to watch over your vote you pick the real receipt to take home.
So in this case you don't get an A/B choice when you get home and punch in the URL. It immediately shows a vote, either the dummy or the real, whichever you elected to get the receipt for.
Are we bulletproof yet? That doesn't look like it adds any real complexity to what I'm trying to keep to a bare minimum.
or rather, that's how consultants make their money. Get hired, come in and install a convoluted system that only they understand and can run/support, and then are your support-until-death-do-we-part.
I've actually put some thought into this and I think I have an idea that could work. It could provide accountability, although not necessarily in a provable form, but at least to let the individual voter know if their vote was lost or changed.
When you vote, you can enter TWO votes. The first is your actual real it-counts vote. The second is a made up vote. It's totally optional, but lets you enter a second vote different than your first. One is vote A and one is vote B, and you pick which (A or B) is counted. When you leave the booth you get a receipt with a url and a long hashed ID number for your vote(s). If you chose not to enter a second vote, the second vote is randomly selected based on statistical averages of recent votes.
You can go home and get online and go to the govt website and enter your hash id. It will ask you if you want to see A or B. You pick one, and it shows your votes. You CANNOT look at your other vote. (it only lets you look at one vote per ID, you can go back later and see A again, but never look at B once you've looked at A or vice-versa) Important: it will NOT tell you if the vote you are looking at is the vote that counts or is the dummy.
This allows you to go into the system later and see that your vote was not lost or changed. It can't tell if the counter/dummy was toggled but if the dummy is statistical average of recent votes in that booth then the ability to do any heavy fraud by dummy swapping is minimized. If you are more concerned about swapping than being coerced, then you can just make both of your votes the same so a swap won't matter.
But it also prevents selling of your vote, or coercion. Lets say your boss says you WILL be voting for Kodos this year. OK go into the booth and put in your real vote, and then your alternate vote for Kodos. The only thing that puts any teeth in someone being able to sell their vote or coerce a vote is being able to prove who you voted for. So if you are forced to show your vote later, do the lookup in front of them but for the dummy vote. To prevent the possibility of them simply asking to see BOTH your votes to make sure they were both for who they wanted, you can only look at the A or the B ever. This makes it impossible to prove to an individual that you voted a certain way.
If there's a major cry of fraud, it's possible for the system to be queried and compared later to look for patterns.
I'd like to hear everyone's devil's advocate on this idea. Rip it up! (or improve it?)
The only downside is its a tad convoluted. But I maintain that people that can't deal with even slightly complicated voting processes have no business casting a totally uneducated vote.
capacitors can be used in parallel or series. parallel for more current, series for more voltage. higher voltage can be beneficial because it requires smaller cables and has less loss, but it requires more expensive materials to contain (insulate) the high voltage.
Note: 4,0000 amps at 480 volts is what is required to move a electric subway car. e
(we'll assume you mean 4,000 amps, not 40,000)
watts=amps x volts so that's 1920kW (1.9mW)
HP=kW/.746 so that's about 2500HP. I hope it doesn't take anywhere near that kind of engine to move a bus unless you're trying to drive it at 250mph or something.
A bus can get by on what, 500HP? 1/5 of that? less? I don't have any idea what HP engine a bus typically has. And if it's going to be running new tech we can assume it's going to be made of light materials and composites to maximize efficiency so it's no greyhound.
Capacitors are also a lot lighter than lead acid batteries by volume so that helps with efficiency.
One thing to keep in mind is that capacitors are designed to pretty much discharge all at once in a blinding flash whereas the internal resistance of a battery will limit the current to something that might take at least minutes to discharge, if not longer
Although batteries have a larger internal resistance, that's not the dominating effect. Lead acid batteries use a chemical change to replenish the charge on the plates, an effect that occurs over time. (faster discharge batteries usually suffer from heat issues due to the chemical reaction required being sped up and thus releasing more heat) They are "constant voltage" supplies. As the voltage is sipped off the plates, the chemicals in the battery replenish the voltage and return the plates to their previous voltage. This process continues until the chemical potential is exhausted, at which point plate voltage rapidly drops.
Caps on the other hand store massive amounts of charge, and have little means of replenishing it once taken. Because of this when some power is tapped from the cap, it's not replenished, and the voltage drops every time.
Because of this, caps' storage potential is a factor of how high of a voltage you can pack into them, combined with how much charge. You make the cap retain a greater charge by increasing its size, it's about 1:1 gain. By using better insulators, you can increase the voltage without increasing the size, so most high energy caps are high voltage so they can be small. This is not a requirement however.
Lets not forget it's current that kills, not voltage. All the voltage does is make an easier path for the current to take to get you. There's more than enough current in a single car battery to punch your ticket. It's just that 12 volts is not enough under most circumstances to get the current running at any quantity through your body. (overcome skin resistance)
Most caps can store charge for months or even years. They can store both high current and high voltage, but cannot deliver a sustained current. In that respect they're a bit like a high pressure air tank, where the gas doesn't change state to a liquid in the tank. (like CO2 does, those are called "constant air" tanks, and are more akin to lead acid batteries because they maintain their pressure until almost exhausted) Like an air tank can retain pressure for months without significant loss as long as there's no leak, so can capacitors.
I work on HV equipment and am all too aware of how capacitors (and things that behave like them... picture tubes in particular) can retain several hundred volts (life threatening) of power for months. Always have to discharge them before working on them, even if they HAVE been unplugged for a month.
Buses I've been on aren't known for their air conditioning anyway. When the bus is idling in a jam it's just sitting there and consuming almost zero of its power reserves.
Last I checked, capacitors have a very long lifespan, many many years compared to what, 5-10 for lead acid and lithium ion. They don't get memory, their performance doesn't degrade over time. And unlike lead acid, they don't mind the vibrations and jolts of being in a vehicle. I'm not aware of any severe temp restrictions on them either - I know for certain that hotter areas of the country have to have different kinds of batteries because of how heat kills batteries. (moreso than cold)
So that makes them cheaper to run since you don't have to change out batteries for many thousands of dollars every 5-7 years like you do on the hybrid cars.
There's also one thing that I believe is being seriously overlooked.
“It turns electrical power into thrust so that we can use solar energy” to power a spaceship, he said.
I'd like to slightly adjust that to
“It turns electrical power plus a small amount of matter into thrust so that we can use solar energy” to power a spaceship
The key is to use the electricity to accelerate the matter to a very high velocity so that very little physical "fuel' can be used to achieve a large amount of thrust. Mass is still required to be thrown overboard in one direction to achieve thrust in the opposite direction. It's just that the faster you throw it away, the more thrust you get.
So, no, it does not use electricity as the sole fuel. It just does a very good job of making the best use of a limited consumable resource in the engine/ship.
Now if it were possible to skim the mass out of space as you travel, that could replenish your stock. Sort of like ships of the Star Trek lore grab deuterium from stars instead of carrying all they need. But then even if you can find something in space to use for mass, everytime you pick some up you're having to accelerate it to your speed when you catch it, thus slowing you down a bit, so the gain would not be as much as you might originally expect, and would become more of a problem as your speed increased.
Well said. I think geeks place more value in how they feel about themselves, rather than how others feel about them. Ask a random hundred what's more important to them, "how you feel about yourself" or "how others view you", see what answers you get. You could probably pick out most of the geeks real quick with just that.
This is why you should read the release notes before you install software.
And the 109 page EULA. Don't forget to read all of that too. Pay particular attention to the 215+ word long sentences with words so long they wrap the window and stump your dictionary.
considering how things interact with DNA, and how subtle changes in one place can cause unimaginably large changes in other unexpected places ("butterfly effect" of sorts) I believe very little of "junk" DNA is actually "junk", by the conceptual definition. Running over a pebble on the highway may seem irrelevant until you 're not allowed to move the steering wheel. Then see what a different outcome you get ten miles down the road when someone removes the pebble.
If I do a rebuild, I'll either reinstall XP or bite the bullet and put Mint on it. I don't see a compelling need for 7, so it's a choice between what works today and trying something new. If I'm going to try something new, Linux is a lot cheaper.;)
I think that's going to be the issue though... XP is getting behind the times and nobody likes vista, so what does a person do when it's time to buy new hardware? not a lot of choice. Lots of people aren't comfortable with linux, so I think it's just going to be a lose-lose situation for a lot of people. "well, I don't really like windows7, but I sure don't like Vista, and XP isn't cutting it anymore..." So they're just going to bite the bullet and get Win7 regardless of whether they like it or not, because they don't believe there's a better choice. The lesser of evils kind of thing.
I expect a lot of businesses are going to go down this road in the next two years.
Specifically for games that have multiplayer and solo. Solo gaming usually has this where you can set your difficulty level. This allows you to play through it once or twice until it becomes easy, and THEN crank it up a notch. This allows you to play the entire game through at a set pace, so that even the "final boss" is easy until you turn it up. Games that auto-adjust NEVER have an easy boss because by the time you get there the game has already adjusted itself to your skill level.
For multiplayer, all I've seen in the past are ways to set the overall arena difficulty, not to set the players separately. It's no fun as a new player playing against a seasoned vetran - no matter where you set the difficulty it's not a fun game for either player. Either they just smack you around the entire game, or it becomes a matter of who happens (sometimes by chance alone) to get the drop because everything is instakill. No fun for anyone.
There needs to be a separate setting for each player, or even a single slider that shifts between the two players, for a "balance of power". So it could start at 50/50, and if player 1 is just more experienced, maybe set it to 40/60 or 30/70 etc.
I think part of the frustration in games that auto adjust is that sometimes the game plays in unexpected or infuriating ways. If the game decides that you need to be nerfed, suddenly that combo that always was just enough now doesn't work quite as well anymore. Seen plenty of people scream at a game because a move they did that had always worked for them in the past, didn't work or didn't work as well. Makes you feel robbed. Now if you deliberately have set the level up, it's understandable, you did it to yourself.
I think the point is to benchmark the performance of the gpu. If your fav-game-of-the-month looks fabulous on your friend's hopped up system with xyz graphics card, you expect to get the same graphics performance if you buy the same card, despite having a lower class processor. If the game is already taxing your friend's CPU to play smoothly, imagine the reduced gameplay AND graphics you'll get when you try it on your system, since it's trying to offload GPU work to your already burdened CPU?
There's simply no excuse for changing your behavior when you detect a benchmark app is running. Fraud, fraud, fraud. That's no better than the driver software screwing with the benchmark app as it runs or modifying its output before it's displayed, bugging it into displaying completely made-up numbers of their choosing.
That does reek of tinfoil hats, but you shouldn't have to have a serious concern to adopt a backup strategy - timecapsule or otherwise.
That being said, we have yet to see a single person raise this complaint where I work. When one comes in it'll get my full attention and we'll find out why it's happening.
Speculating somewhat wildly since I don't have a specimen to examine, it probably has to do with the deletion of the temp data from the guest session. Seeing users manage to disconnect their home folder from their account has been seen before, and causes everything to appear to "go away", but it's all just in another folder. Major inconvenience to fix (or bring it to us) but nothing is lost. So I'm interested to know if this is a problem of data hiding or truly being erased. Though since it's related to the guest account I'm suspecting data loss as previously described.
Getting back to time capsule though, I don't like it myself (rsync me baby) but our customers have been very happy with it and it's saved their bacon on dozens of failed hard drives we've had to (warranty) replace. Even if only used for a backup, a $170 1TB HD sure beats a $2,500 bill from drivesavers or total recall etc. I'm amazed other companies (dell etc) don't bundle some sort of backup software. They're all using the same HDs as apple so it's not like anyone is more or less proof against HD failure.
Tiananmen Square was a protest, not an attempt at negotiations.
but ya, china has no patience for protests for much the same reason. If you never give an inch on a tactic the 'opposition' tries, they will eventually quit trying it because then it's only being a waste of time, energy, and resources.
They're worse than domain name squatters though, because you can't even enter into negotiation with them.
The way I look at any "hostage situation" is that negotiation is what gives them their power. If you refuse to negotiate with them, and they know that negotiation isn't an option, it severely limits what they can do or what benefits they can reap from their actions. Look at china, they have a simple rule, they do not negotiate with criminals under any circumstances. You don't see anywhere near the hostage-ish problems over there because any criminal knows they have little to gain.
Its the same way with domain squatting. The reason they do it is so they can extort or gouge you for a fortune to get the name because they can negotiate with you. If it wasn't possible for them to contact you or you to contact them to negotiate, domain squatting wouldn't be 1/100th the problem it is now. The LAST thing in the world the ITMS needs is some way for a squatter to be contacted by someone that wants the name.
The solution here is as the article mentions, the same thing that was done to domain tasting recently, for Apple to make it impractical by limiting how long someone can squat without using the name.
Slashdot Mirror
Good catch, that's the sort of thinking I was hoping to hear from.
OK then one more tweak. The receipt you print in the booth can either be your real or your dummy vote. You pick just before you leave. So if you are being coerced, you can pick the dummy receipt but if you want to watch over your vote you pick the real receipt to take home.
So in this case you don't get an A/B choice when you get home and punch in the URL. It immediately shows a vote, either the dummy or the real, whichever you elected to get the receipt for.
Are we bulletproof yet? That doesn't look like it adds any real complexity to what I'm trying to keep to a bare minimum.
or rather, that's how consultants make their money. Get hired, come in and install a convoluted system that only they understand and can run/support, and then are your support-until-death-do-we-part.
I've actually put some thought into this and I think I have an idea that could work. It could provide accountability, although not necessarily in a provable form, but at least to let the individual voter know if their vote was lost or changed.
When you vote, you can enter TWO votes. The first is your actual real it-counts vote. The second is a made up vote. It's totally optional, but lets you enter a second vote different than your first. One is vote A and one is vote B, and you pick which (A or B) is counted. When you leave the booth you get a receipt with a url and a long hashed ID number for your vote(s). If you chose not to enter a second vote, the second vote is randomly selected based on statistical averages of recent votes.
You can go home and get online and go to the govt website and enter your hash id. It will ask you if you want to see A or B. You pick one, and it shows your votes. You CANNOT look at your other vote. (it only lets you look at one vote per ID, you can go back later and see A again, but never look at B once you've looked at A or vice-versa) Important: it will NOT tell you if the vote you are looking at is the vote that counts or is the dummy.
This allows you to go into the system later and see that your vote was not lost or changed. It can't tell if the counter/dummy was toggled but if the dummy is statistical average of recent votes in that booth then the ability to do any heavy fraud by dummy swapping is minimized. If you are more concerned about swapping than being coerced, then you can just make both of your votes the same so a swap won't matter.
But it also prevents selling of your vote, or coercion. Lets say your boss says you WILL be voting for Kodos this year. OK go into the booth and put in your real vote, and then your alternate vote for Kodos. The only thing that puts any teeth in someone being able to sell their vote or coerce a vote is being able to prove who you voted for. So if you are forced to show your vote later, do the lookup in front of them but for the dummy vote. To prevent the possibility of them simply asking to see BOTH your votes to make sure they were both for who they wanted, you can only look at the A or the B ever. This makes it impossible to prove to an individual that you voted a certain way.
If there's a major cry of fraud, it's possible for the system to be queried and compared later to look for patterns.
I'd like to hear everyone's devil's advocate on this idea. Rip it up! (or improve it?)
The only downside is its a tad convoluted. But I maintain that people that can't deal with even slightly complicated voting processes have no business casting a totally uneducated vote.
Interesting to note, the new iMac's DisplayPort is also an input.
Where did you read THAT ?
capacitors can be used in parallel or series. parallel for more current, series for more voltage. higher voltage can be beneficial because it requires smaller cables and has less loss, but it requires more expensive materials to contain (insulate) the high voltage.
Note: 4,0000 amps at 480 volts is what is required to move a electric subway car. e
(we'll assume you mean 4,000 amps, not 40,000)
watts=amps x volts so that's 1920kW (1.9mW)
HP=kW/.746 so that's about 2500HP. I hope it doesn't take anywhere near that kind of engine to move a bus unless you're trying to drive it at 250mph or something.
A bus can get by on what, 500HP? 1/5 of that? less? I don't have any idea what HP engine a bus typically has. And if it's going to be running new tech we can assume it's going to be made of light materials and composites to maximize efficiency so it's no greyhound.
Capacitors are also a lot lighter than lead acid batteries by volume so that helps with efficiency.
One thing to keep in mind is that capacitors are designed to pretty much discharge all at once in a blinding flash whereas the internal resistance of a battery will limit the current to something that might take at least minutes to discharge, if not longer
Although batteries have a larger internal resistance, that's not the dominating effect. Lead acid batteries use a chemical change to replenish the charge on the plates, an effect that occurs over time. (faster discharge batteries usually suffer from heat issues due to the chemical reaction required being sped up and thus releasing more heat) They are "constant voltage" supplies. As the voltage is sipped off the plates, the chemicals in the battery replenish the voltage and return the plates to their previous voltage. This process continues until the chemical potential is exhausted, at which point plate voltage rapidly drops.
Caps on the other hand store massive amounts of charge, and have little means of replenishing it once taken. Because of this when some power is tapped from the cap, it's not replenished, and the voltage drops every time.
Because of this, caps' storage potential is a factor of how high of a voltage you can pack into them, combined with how much charge. You make the cap retain a greater charge by increasing its size, it's about 1:1 gain. By using better insulators, you can increase the voltage without increasing the size, so most high energy caps are high voltage so they can be small. This is not a requirement however.
Lets not forget it's current that kills, not voltage. All the voltage does is make an easier path for the current to take to get you. There's more than enough current in a single car battery to punch your ticket. It's just that 12 volts is not enough under most circumstances to get the current running at any quantity through your body. (overcome skin resistance)
remember, fat floats.
Most caps can store charge for months or even years. They can store both high current and high voltage, but cannot deliver a sustained current. In that respect they're a bit like a high pressure air tank, where the gas doesn't change state to a liquid in the tank. (like CO2 does, those are called "constant air" tanks, and are more akin to lead acid batteries because they maintain their pressure until almost exhausted) Like an air tank can retain pressure for months without significant loss as long as there's no leak, so can capacitors.
I work on HV equipment and am all too aware of how capacitors (and things that behave like them... picture tubes in particular) can retain several hundred volts (life threatening) of power for months. Always have to discharge them before working on them, even if they HAVE been unplugged for a month.
Buses I've been on aren't known for their air conditioning anyway. When the bus is idling in a jam it's just sitting there and consuming almost zero of its power reserves.
Last I checked, capacitors have a very long lifespan, many many years compared to what, 5-10 for lead acid and lithium ion. They don't get memory, their performance doesn't degrade over time. And unlike lead acid, they don't mind the vibrations and jolts of being in a vehicle. I'm not aware of any severe temp restrictions on them either - I know for certain that hotter areas of the country have to have different kinds of batteries because of how heat kills batteries. (moreso than cold)
So that makes them cheaper to run since you don't have to change out batteries for many thousands of dollars every 5-7 years like you do on the hybrid cars.
and it's faaaaast
It searches by content as well as by filename too for those that didn't know. Incredibly useful.
There's also one thing that I believe is being seriously overlooked.
“It turns electrical power into thrust so that we can use solar energy” to power a spaceship, he said.
I'd like to slightly adjust that to
“It turns electrical power plus a small amount of matter into thrust so that we can use solar energy” to power a spaceship
The key is to use the electricity to accelerate the matter to a very high velocity so that very little physical "fuel' can be used to achieve a large amount of thrust. Mass is still required to be thrown overboard in one direction to achieve thrust in the opposite direction. It's just that the faster you throw it away, the more thrust you get.
So, no, it does not use electricity as the sole fuel. It just does a very good job of making the best use of a limited consumable resource in the engine/ship.
Now if it were possible to skim the mass out of space as you travel, that could replenish your stock. Sort of like ships of the Star Trek lore grab deuterium from stars instead of carrying all they need. But then even if you can find something in space to use for mass, everytime you pick some up you're having to accelerate it to your speed when you catch it, thus slowing you down a bit, so the gain would not be as much as you might originally expect, and would become more of a problem as your speed increased.
Well said. I think geeks place more value in how they feel about themselves, rather than how others feel about them. Ask a random hundred what's more important to them, "how you feel about yourself" or "how others view you", see what answers you get. You could probably pick out most of the geeks real quick with just that.
This is why you should read the release notes before you install software.
And the 109 page EULA. Don't forget to read all of that too. Pay particular attention to the 215+ word long sentences with words so long they wrap the window and stump your dictionary.
Read everything
considering how things interact with DNA, and how subtle changes in one place can cause unimaginably large changes in other unexpected places ("butterfly effect" of sorts) I believe very little of "junk" DNA is actually "junk", by the conceptual definition. Running over a pebble on the highway may seem irrelevant until you 're not allowed to move the steering wheel. Then see what a different outcome you get ten miles down the road when someone removes the pebble.
I have no idea what you're talking aboot.
If I do a rebuild, I'll either reinstall XP or bite the bullet and put Mint on it. I don't see a compelling need for 7, so it's a choice between what works today and trying something new. If I'm going to try something new, Linux is a lot cheaper. ;)
I think that's going to be the issue though... XP is getting behind the times and nobody likes vista, so what does a person do when it's time to buy new hardware? not a lot of choice. Lots of people aren't comfortable with linux, so I think it's just going to be a lose-lose situation for a lot of people. "well, I don't really like windows7, but I sure don't like Vista, and XP isn't cutting it anymore..." So they're just going to bite the bullet and get Win7 regardless of whether they like it or not, because they don't believe there's a better choice. The lesser of evils kind of thing.
I expect a lot of businesses are going to go down this road in the next two years.
- iphone
- window button position
- dashboard
- expose
- dock
- cinema display
wonder what platform they're going to market to first eh?
I was going to ask about spidermites here. Are such mites technically still considered spiders? Are all mites arachnids?
I'd like to see it configurable
ABSOLUTELY
Specifically for games that have multiplayer and solo. Solo gaming usually has this where you can set your difficulty level. This allows you to play through it once or twice until it becomes easy, and THEN crank it up a notch. This allows you to play the entire game through at a set pace, so that even the "final boss" is easy until you turn it up. Games that auto-adjust NEVER have an easy boss because by the time you get there the game has already adjusted itself to your skill level.
For multiplayer, all I've seen in the past are ways to set the overall arena difficulty, not to set the players separately. It's no fun as a new player playing against a seasoned vetran - no matter where you set the difficulty it's not a fun game for either player. Either they just smack you around the entire game, or it becomes a matter of who happens (sometimes by chance alone) to get the drop because everything is instakill. No fun for anyone.
There needs to be a separate setting for each player, or even a single slider that shifts between the two players, for a "balance of power". So it could start at 50/50, and if player 1 is just more experienced, maybe set it to 40/60 or 30/70 etc.
I think part of the frustration in games that auto adjust is that sometimes the game plays in unexpected or infuriating ways. If the game decides that you need to be nerfed, suddenly that combo that always was just enough now doesn't work quite as well anymore. Seen plenty of people scream at a game because a move they did that had always worked for them in the past, didn't work or didn't work as well. Makes you feel robbed. Now if you deliberately have set the level up, it's understandable, you did it to yourself.
I think the point is to benchmark the performance of the gpu. If your fav-game-of-the-month looks fabulous on your friend's hopped up system with xyz graphics card, you expect to get the same graphics performance if you buy the same card, despite having a lower class processor. If the game is already taxing your friend's CPU to play smoothly, imagine the reduced gameplay AND graphics you'll get when you try it on your system, since it's trying to offload GPU work to your already burdened CPU?
There's simply no excuse for changing your behavior when you detect a benchmark app is running. Fraud, fraud, fraud. That's no better than the driver software screwing with the benchmark app as it runs or modifying its output before it's displayed, bugging it into displaying completely made-up numbers of their choosing.
That does reek of tinfoil hats, but you shouldn't have to have a serious concern to adopt a backup strategy - timecapsule or otherwise.
That being said, we have yet to see a single person raise this complaint where I work. When one comes in it'll get my full attention and we'll find out why it's happening.
Speculating somewhat wildly since I don't have a specimen to examine, it probably has to do with the deletion of the temp data from the guest session. Seeing users manage to disconnect their home folder from their account has been seen before, and causes everything to appear to "go away", but it's all just in another folder. Major inconvenience to fix (or bring it to us) but nothing is lost. So I'm interested to know if this is a problem of data hiding or truly being erased. Though since it's related to the guest account I'm suspecting data loss as previously described.
Getting back to time capsule though, I don't like it myself (rsync me baby) but our customers have been very happy with it and it's saved their bacon on dozens of failed hard drives we've had to (warranty) replace. Even if only used for a backup, a $170 1TB HD sure beats a $2,500 bill from drivesavers or total recall etc. I'm amazed other companies (dell etc) don't bundle some sort of backup software. They're all using the same HDs as apple so it's not like anyone is more or less proof against HD failure.
Is being "linked to al qaeda" illegal now?
Tiananmen Square was a protest, not an attempt at negotiations.
but ya, china has no patience for protests for much the same reason. If you never give an inch on a tactic the 'opposition' tries, they will eventually quit trying it because then it's only being a waste of time, energy, and resources.
They're worse than domain name squatters though, because you can't even enter into negotiation with them.
The way I look at any "hostage situation" is that negotiation is what gives them their power. If you refuse to negotiate with them, and they know that negotiation isn't an option, it severely limits what they can do or what benefits they can reap from their actions. Look at china, they have a simple rule, they do not negotiate with criminals under any circumstances. You don't see anywhere near the hostage-ish problems over there because any criminal knows they have little to gain.
Its the same way with domain squatting. The reason they do it is so they can extort or gouge you for a fortune to get the name because they can negotiate with you. If it wasn't possible for them to contact you or you to contact them to negotiate, domain squatting wouldn't be 1/100th the problem it is now. The LAST thing in the world the ITMS needs is some way for a squatter to be contacted by someone that wants the name.
The solution here is as the article mentions, the same thing that was done to domain tasting recently, for Apple to make it impractical by limiting how long someone can squat without using the name.