It's been pretty well established that we won't have a fair and functional voting system until we have a considerably greater level of transparency and accountability.
You won't have transparency until every part of the voting process has been moved into the open source domain for thorough examination and auditing. The current systems are all closed source, and the system which "prevents" cheating is controlled by the same people responsible for gerimandering, and is readily bypassed via "emergency" updates.
Furthermore, we shouldn't have to file Freedom of Information Act requests in order to have ballot results released. This information should be freely available, preferably on the websites of the various counties that do the tallying.
Also, a person's vote absolutely must be recorded in a non-electronic manner at the time of polling. Paper ballots are essential. Even if those paper ballots are printed by the voting machine after the voter casts their votes, it must be produced. Otherwise, a recount is no different than refreshing the calculations on a spreadsheet.
While this is all a good idea, it isn't like a system like I described actually exists. I believe MIT formed a group to produce such a system, but four years later they've mostly just produced research papers. There is a group which is currently working on such a system, but they are currently suffering from severe under-funding and various bits of social blockage. They're the Open Voting Consortium. I strongly urge everyone to go check them out.
I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that C++ is headed the way of Cobol. I've been told by recruiters that it is just beginning to be difficult to find people to fill all of the jobs, that the employer/employee balance is tipping the other way.
I'm absolutely certain that, if I had a stronger background in Java or C# (like any appreciable experience), that I'd have my pick of jobs right now. I get inquiries on a nearly weekly basis regarding open Java positions. As it stands, 13 years of C/C++ software engineering building everything from VoIP applications to multi-tiered high performance statistical servers just doesn't cut the cake in terms of finding work these days.
I think that employer's days of demanding someone with experience in C# that goes back to its release date are numbered, but the same is also true about the job prospects of a C++ programmer in Colorado.
I remember that during the tech boom, anyone who could talk the talk could get a job for long enough to rake in some money, add it to his resume, and get out of it before his employer figured out how pathetic that person's skill level was. As a person who is morally incapable of adding something to my resume unless I'm confidently competent, I don't relish the return of those days either.
Oh, yea, those were the days. At one point I helped a friend set up a cement slab poured onto a set of drums resting on inner tubes, resting on a huge bed of sand. We definitely handled the vibration thing, but the first images were still faint because we bounced the laser too far.
While this kit may, in fact, have everything you technically need to produce a hologram, I rather doubt that you can produce something beyond curiosity value. Using a 20mw photocopier laser and a rather elaborate setup, we still only produced images of minimal quality.
I purchased a couple of Gateway Wirelessly connected DVD players, one for each main entertainment area of my house. These things come with software that you run on your Windows PC, and stream media over 802.11g to the DVD players; video, audio, and photo slideshows.
They aren't bad, although it took about eight hours on the phone and four months of prodding for them to eventually send the correct PCMCIA cards for them. They have a nasty habit of "locking up" while playing DVD's, too. Upgrading the bios hasn't even fixed that. After the PC card fiasco, however, I've just decided to live with them.
Generallys speaking, their feature set is impressive, but the implementation is quite buggy. Although I'd like to try similar products released by other vendors, I wouldn't suggest this specific product.
I took a long, mathematical look at the numbers for Florida and have to admit that I was wrong in this the "expected" number is based on voter registrations, but the dixiecrat effect does make up for much of the difference.
I extrapolated 2004 based on 2000 numbers, adjusting for changes in voter registration and the increase in voter base, and have had to change my mind on this. As it turns out, there is only an average 3% variance from the projection in opscan counties, but an average 11% variance from projection in e-voting counties.
If anyone wants to examine these numbers and how I derived them, they can be found on this web page.
Kathy would like everyone to know that the optical scan machines are of the brands "Diebold" and "ES&S". It was stated in the head article that the e-voting machines were Diebold, but that the optical scan machines were not. It has also been stated in several places in this thread that there were three vendors for op-scan machines, but there were in fact only two.
A lot of people have been trying to dismiss this as a statistical anomoly. Let me throw a couple of numbers at you to show how unlikely this explanation is.
In the touchscreen counties, there were roughly 29% more Republicans voting than expected and 26% more Democrats than expected
In the optical scan counties, there were roughly 46% more Republicans than expected and.9% (that's less than one percent) more Democrats than expected.
Read the common dreams report on that one - it's pretty thorough. This, along with the unprecedented inaccuracy of the exit polls should make everyone suspicious. Don't let them get away with it just because your side won.
Nothing to see here. Go look at the results from 2000 and they show the same thing:
The effect was notably more extreme in these areas this time around. This explaination is the City/Rural arguement, where the Dixiecrats tend to vote Dem in local elections, but vote Rep for national elections. This is disprovable because the Op-scan machines even show this skew in non-rural precincts.
This is definitely a mis-perception, usually based on the fact that most evolutionary descriptions only describe those things that lead up to humans. Plants are, in many cases, more highly evolved than animals are. Even than humans are. They just haven't specialized for intelligence.
It is a mistake to think that supremacy in one area (intelligence) means supremacy in all areas. Some people pride themselves on being efficient workers, others pride themselves on being paid well to do very little. In the biological world, plants would be the "blue pill" type of creature, the type B personalities, and they're REALLY REALLY good at it.
When I was working at Monsanto, I was told that wheat has a genetic strand about three times as long as the human genetic strand. This may or may not have relevance to the rest of the post, but I thought I'd toss it in just because it's interesting.
As another point, the length of the strand doesn't necessarily indicate a more evolved state. It can be assumed that some strands are more efficient than others, and thus don't NEED to be as long. Take Microsoft code, for instance. Just because they take more code to do the job doesn't mean it's a superior product.
if the passenger is delivering fuel to the rock, the energy content of that fuel would have to be exactly the same as it would have taken the passenger to get into orbit by himself. Conservation of energy and all that.
Not necessarily. Your friend didn't take into account the weight of the booster rockets that a dragged ship could avoid having built in. On the other hand, it also doesn't account for drag on the cable, which would not be trivial.
I don't think that catching ships headed for the surface is your answer. In both the cases of launching and catching, you are loosing orbital height to gravity. Think of it the other way around - the energy it takes to catch a falling object, then throw it back upward again.
That's a good start, but a whole lot more would be needed. What we'd really need to look at is the amount of drag it would incur by dropping a cable a few miles into the atmosphere, then pulling the cable and passenger (and fuel for the rock) up out of said atmosphere. Unfortunately, my understanding of the math behind friction is poor.
How big a rock would you need to make sure that the rock pulls the passenger out instead of the passenger pulling the rock in? How much thrust would it take to put the rock back into its original orbit? Would it be less fuel than to just to push the passenger in the first place, accounting for drag on the cable? Could this be offset by being able to use an ion jet on the rock instead of chemical rockets on the passenger? Like I said, lots of math.
You're right in assuming that I haven't used a recent version of Outlook. Outlook has been banned from my home network for being a blatant security risk.
Security runs on track records. Track records are based on "problems they've had in the past". We deride them, not for any specific problem that they've had in the past, but for the quantity of problems that they've had in the past, their slow reaction to fixing them, and their continual culture of denial of the problem (or, even worse, unfounded claims of attention to the problem).
Until Microsoft earns a track record of stronger security, we will continue to hold its past against it.
Having been corrected on this, I often feel a need to pass it on.
The moon is:
just over 1/4th of earth's diameter (27%) roughly 1/6th of earth's gravity, (17%) roughly 1/81st of earth's mass (1.2%). roughly 3/5th of earth's density.
The mass part is one of the highest in the solar system, but I believe that Pluto/Charon have us beat by a comfortable margin. Of course, a lot of people want to have Pluto rescheduled as something besides a planet, but that's an argument for another thread.
That's got to be the first seriously original though on how to get things into orbit that I've heard in a long time. Definitely worthy of a place in science fiction, if nothing else. It would take quite a bit of work to figure out the physics behind it, how low the rock would have to dip to make it possible, etc. Nonetheless, one of those thoughts that gets imaginations going.
What good ol' Bill was trying to say is that the security flaws aren't his fault because OTHER people write third party software that can crack into it. This is all made worse because stupid end users keep downloading and running it. Well, kind of, anyway. They get email with the viruses, and Outlooks actually does the runnning part of it. Come to think of it, Outlook does the downloading, too. But it's THOSE people's email, so it must be THEIR fault, or at least the fault of the people who sent the email, and definitly, certainly NOT Microsoft's fault, so there.
What I want to know is why a ceramic len is more useful than a glass one. I presume it's more durable, but I don't remember the last time a lens in a consumer electronics digital camera broke before the CCD went kaput. Does it have a higher defraction index? Is it more transparent to a wider range of colors? What's up with that?
You could use something like this to air programming that commercial stations won't broadcast because it's not commercially viable or because it doesn't fit in with the interests of big media.
This is a highly flawed concept, because "broadcast" of programming of this type would require the coopertion of hundreds of transmitters, which would interfere with each other at the edges of their individual ranges. Cell phones fixed that problem by broadcasting on a range of frequencies instead of just one, but that isn't practical when you have to manually adjust your dial.
Most audio programs with this kind of popularity problem will, instead, perform their show as normal, then put an MP3 of their show on the web for people to download. Here's a good example of this:
By "session", I presume that it means any time you have to log out or shut down, it ends a session. What other reasons also require shutdown?
Note that I use the word "require" here. This measurement is meaningless because it doesn't analize why people shut down, just how often those shutdowns are forced by software failure.
Does it include shutdowns due to subtle malfunctions as failures? I regularly have to shut down simply because Word is misbehaving - consistently misformatting a page, for instance. Closing Word doesn't actually unload it from memory, so I have to reboot to fix that. These don't look like a crash, but they're close enough.
Heck, this week I've had to reboot my machine about a dozen times because Thunderbird stops fetching my mail when I run City of Heros. Do they include that kind of thing? Probably not.
What might actually be useful is a chart that says "if you've run Windows for X hours, you have a N% chance of Windows packing it in without notice". That, at least, would tell me when I'm pressing my luck.
No, I don't shut down at night. My experience with computers is that every time you turn one off and on, you increase your chances of hardware failure. Maintaining a steady power state increases the longevity of your parts, and I don't consider filling landfills faster to be an appropriate price to pay for using less electricity.
I have to agree with this poster. Moore's movies are crafted to pursuade, not to inform. They exceed the boundary of what we would call a "documentary" and move into the territory of "Political Infomercials", similar to the O'Reilly factor and almost any other program shown on Fox.
If you turn it around to slow your fall into the next system, then it becomes a solar parachute, right?
A solar wind, by the way, isn't just the light. It's a very light breeze of all of the particles that the sun throws out as it burns (explodes). At something like three times the orbit of Pluto, these particles loose enough momentum that they're completely countered by the existing particles in deep space. That's the heliopause. You'd definitely have to close your sail at that point.
Has anyone ever calculated how much speed you could get from a solar wind? I'd like to see an experiment to measure one.
The concept of whether light-sails would work is still very much in doubt. There are people on both sides of the debate of whether you can push yourself along by reflecting light. The idea that photons act like pingpong balls to push you along makes sense, but apparently the physics doesn't pan out.
In the case of IBM, the first item was a mainframe and the second item was a service contract. In the case of Windows, the first item was the operating system and the seconds are the browser and/or the multimedia software.
The case here is a little more complicated. You can play other music on your IPod, but ITunes has an exclusive on the rights-managed music protocol. Other companies can't sell music under other rights-management schemes and have them play them on the iPod. Since the iPod has a massive market share in the digital rights managed music player department, that constitutes a monopoly that they're shutting the record industry out of.
Protocols and languages are both methods of transimitting information from one entity to another. Certainly protocols aren't NATURAL languages or human languages -they have a much smaller bredth of information that they need to be flexible enough to transmit - but the analogy is sound.
On that legal case, I'm going to have to recind my statement about patenting a language, I meant to say "copyright". A man named James Cooke Brown invented a language named Loglan around 1950. I'll spare you the details about the synthetic language, but around 1987, a sub group of the Loglan community decided that they had a different goal in mind for the language. They altered the vocabulary in order to create a new language called Lojban. Brown sued them for copyright violation and lost on the grounds mentioned above. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to that lawsuit.
You're right in that there is no law like the one you discussed. I never said that there was, unless you want to reference the Sherman Act as mentioned in the above IBM case. I'm saying that allowing interface patents creates a situation that violates the Sherman Act.
It was determined a long time ago that requiring someone to purchase a second item with a first item was a monopolistic tactic. IBM lost that one when they were requiring a service contract with their computers.
Interface patents do the same thing. It allows a company on one side of that interface to monopolize the sale of the software or hardware on the other side of the interface.
This comes up a lot, expecially when people attempt to use the DMCA to protect their right to do these things.
Interfaces are essentially a language. It has already been tested in court that you can't patent a language, simply because you need to release it into the public domain for it to be useful. Interfaces are a little different - you don't have to release them into the public domain for them to be useful, but you do have to do so if you aren't attempting to hold a monopoly on both ends of its use.
Ok, points taken. Everything has to start somewhere, though.
Since you seem to be an expert on this, I'll ask the question: If you were to attempt to branch a browser to make a secure browser, which browser would you start with?
I'd like to point out, however, that the Mozilla code base is as complicated as it is because it isn't a single entity. The job could be simplified by pinching off the entities and auditing them one at a time.
I'm not saying that this isn't a monumental task. I'm saying that (a) the open source community could do it, and that (b) it would be worth the effort.
Microsoft figured out early that whoever controls the portals to the internet will be able to control those who write content. Web authors already have to write standards non-compliant code just so that IE will display it properly. They push their horribly insecure ActiveX objects. If this continues, you will eventually need a Microsoft Web Authoring tool in order to create any content at all.
I'd like to see their supremecy broken before it goes too far. Their biggest flaw is their lack of security. If you think Mozilla is a tangled mass of code, Microsoft's code bases are worse, and they have to PAY people to fix it.
Microsoft obviously doesn't think they can afford to fix these things, or they don't think they can. The Opensource community has shown that it can do this type of thing. I'm suggesting that it does.
Pick a better starting point if you want, but don't discard the idea because it would be difficult.
This brings up an interesting concept. It has been the conjecture of most people on this forum that opensource is more secure because it's more freely examined. This doesn't hold true if the opensource code in question is never actually examined.
A number of years ago, an initiative was created to make FreeBSD the most secure operating system on the planet. OpenBSD is the result, and I have to say that they did a darn fine job of it.
I'd like to propose that the Opensource community do the same thing with Mozilla. Start a line-by-line security audit of the Mozilla code base. Leverage the opensource massively distributed model and create the first browser that can be called truely secure.
If you don't want to do it to create a truely awesome product, then just do it to rub Microsoft's nose in something that they are completely incapable of. *evil grin*
Much worse than that. If you're logging on from "anywhere", then you have to trust the system you log in through to not download and record all of your passwords, data, etc. You have to trust your terminal to not be pre-bugged.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been pretty well established that we won't have a fair and functional voting system until we have a considerably greater level of transparency and accountability.
You won't have transparency until every part of the voting process has been moved into the open source domain for thorough examination and auditing. The current systems are all closed source, and the system which "prevents" cheating is controlled by the same people responsible for gerimandering, and is readily bypassed via "emergency" updates.
Furthermore, we shouldn't have to file Freedom of Information Act requests in order to have ballot results released. This information should be freely available, preferably on the websites of the various counties that do the tallying.
Also, a person's vote absolutely must be recorded in a non-electronic manner at the time of polling. Paper ballots are essential. Even if those paper ballots are printed by the voting machine after the voter casts their votes, it must be produced. Otherwise, a recount is no different than refreshing the calculations on a spreadsheet.
While this is all a good idea, it isn't like a system like I described actually exists. I believe MIT formed a group to produce such a system, but four years later they've mostly just produced research papers. There is a group which is currently working on such a system, but they are currently suffering from severe under-funding and various bits of social blockage. They're the Open Voting Consortium. I strongly urge everyone to go check them out.
I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that C++ is headed the way of Cobol. I've been told by recruiters that it is just beginning to be difficult to find people to fill all of the jobs, that the employer/employee balance is tipping the other way.
I'm absolutely certain that, if I had a stronger background in Java or C# (like any appreciable experience), that I'd have my pick of jobs right now. I get inquiries on a nearly weekly basis regarding open Java positions. As it stands, 13 years of C/C++ software engineering building everything from VoIP applications to multi-tiered high performance statistical servers just doesn't cut the cake in terms of finding work these days.
I think that employer's days of demanding someone with experience in C# that goes back to its release date are numbered, but the same is also true about the job prospects of a C++ programmer in Colorado.
I remember that during the tech boom, anyone who could talk the talk could get a job for long enough to rake in some money, add it to his resume, and get out of it before his employer figured out how pathetic that person's skill level was. As a person who is morally incapable of adding something to my resume unless I'm confidently competent, I don't relish the return of those days either.
Oh, yea, those were the days. At one point I helped a friend set up a cement slab poured onto a set of drums resting on inner tubes, resting on a huge bed of sand. We definitely handled the vibration thing, but the first images were still faint because we bounced the laser too far.
While this kit may, in fact, have everything you technically need to produce a hologram, I rather doubt that you can produce something beyond curiosity value. Using a 20mw photocopier laser and a rather elaborate setup, we still only produced images of minimal quality.
I purchased a couple of Gateway Wirelessly connected DVD players, one for each main entertainment area of my house. These things come with software that you run on your Windows PC, and stream media over 802.11g to the DVD players; video, audio, and photo slideshows.
They aren't bad, although it took about eight hours on the phone and four months of prodding for them to eventually send the correct PCMCIA cards for them. They have a nasty habit of "locking up" while playing DVD's, too. Upgrading the bios hasn't even fixed that. After the PC card fiasco, however, I've just decided to live with them.
Generallys speaking, their feature set is impressive, but the implementation is quite buggy. Although I'd like to try similar products released by other vendors, I wouldn't suggest this specific product.
I took a long, mathematical look at the numbers for Florida and have to admit that I was wrong in this the "expected" number is based on voter registrations, but the dixiecrat effect does make up for much of the difference.
I extrapolated 2004 based on 2000 numbers, adjusting for changes in voter registration and the increase in voter base, and have had to change my mind on this. As it turns out, there is only an average 3% variance from the projection in opscan counties, but an average 11% variance from projection in e-voting counties.
If anyone wants to examine these numbers and how I derived them, they can be found on this web page.
Kathy would like everyone to know that the optical scan machines are of the brands "Diebold" and "ES&S". It was stated in the head article that the e-voting machines were Diebold, but that the optical scan machines were not. It has also been stated in several places in this thread that there were three vendors for op-scan machines, but there were in fact only two.
A lot of people have been trying to dismiss this as a statistical anomoly. Let me throw a couple of numbers at you to show how unlikely this explanation is.
.9% (that's less than one percent) more Democrats than expected.
In the touchscreen counties, there were roughly 29% more Republicans voting than expected and 26% more Democrats than expected
In the optical scan counties, there were roughly 46% more Republicans than expected and
Read the common dreams report on that one - it's pretty thorough. This, along with the unprecedented inaccuracy of the exit polls should make everyone suspicious. Don't let them get away with it just because your side won.
Nothing to see here. Go look at the results from 2000 and they show the same thing:
The effect was notably more extreme in these areas this time around. This explaination is the City/Rural arguement, where the Dixiecrats tend to vote Dem in local elections, but vote Rep for national elections. This is disprovable because the Op-scan machines even show this skew in non-rural precincts.
This is definitely a mis-perception, usually based on the fact that most evolutionary descriptions only describe those things that lead up to humans. Plants are, in many cases, more highly evolved than animals are. Even than humans are. They just haven't specialized for intelligence.
It is a mistake to think that supremacy in one area (intelligence) means supremacy in all areas. Some people pride themselves on being efficient workers, others pride themselves on being paid well to do very little. In the biological world, plants would be the "blue pill" type of creature, the type B personalities, and they're REALLY REALLY good at it.
When I was working at Monsanto, I was told that wheat has a genetic strand about three times as long as the human genetic strand. This may or may not have relevance to the rest of the post, but I thought I'd toss it in just because it's interesting.
As another point, the length of the strand doesn't necessarily indicate a more evolved state. It can be assumed that some strands are more efficient than others, and thus don't NEED to be as long. Take Microsoft code, for instance. Just because they take more code to do the job doesn't mean it's a superior product.
if the passenger is delivering fuel to the rock, the energy content of that fuel would have to be exactly the same as it would have taken the passenger to get into orbit by himself. Conservation of energy and all that.
Not necessarily. Your friend didn't take into account the weight of the booster rockets that a dragged ship could avoid having built in. On the other hand, it also doesn't account for drag on the cable, which would not be trivial.
I don't think that catching ships headed for the surface is your answer. In both the cases of launching and catching, you are loosing orbital height to gravity. Think of it the other way around - the energy it takes to catch a falling object, then throw it back upward again.
That's a good start, but a whole lot more would be needed. What we'd really need to look at is the amount of drag it would incur by dropping a cable a few miles into the atmosphere, then pulling the cable and passenger (and fuel for the rock) up out of said atmosphere. Unfortunately, my understanding of the math behind friction is poor.
How big a rock would you need to make sure that the rock pulls the passenger out instead of the passenger pulling the rock in? How much thrust would it take to put the rock back into its original orbit? Would it be less fuel than to just to push the passenger in the first place, accounting for drag on the cable? Could this be offset by being able to use an ion jet on the rock instead of chemical rockets on the passenger? Like I said, lots of math.
You're right in assuming that I haven't used a recent version of Outlook. Outlook has been banned from my home network for being a blatant security risk.
Security runs on track records. Track records are based on "problems they've had in the past". We deride them, not for any specific problem that they've had in the past, but for the quantity of problems that they've had in the past, their slow reaction to fixing them, and their continual culture of denial of the problem (or, even worse, unfounded claims of attention to the problem).
Until Microsoft earns a track record of stronger security, we will continue to hold its past against it.
Having been corrected on this, I often feel a need to pass it on.
The moon is:
just over 1/4th of earth's diameter (27%)
roughly 1/6th of earth's gravity, (17%)
roughly 1/81st of earth's mass (1.2%).
roughly 3/5th of earth's density.
The mass part is one of the highest in the solar system, but I believe that Pluto/Charon have us beat by a comfortable margin. Of course, a lot of people want to have Pluto rescheduled as something besides a planet, but that's an argument for another thread.
That's got to be the first seriously original though on how to get things into orbit that I've heard in a long time. Definitely worthy of a place in science fiction, if nothing else. It would take quite a bit of work to figure out the physics behind it, how low the rock would have to dip to make it possible, etc. Nonetheless, one of those thoughts that gets imaginations going.
What good ol' Bill was trying to say is that the security flaws aren't his fault because OTHER people write third party software that can crack into it. This is all made worse because stupid end users keep downloading and running it. Well, kind of, anyway. They get email with the viruses, and Outlooks actually does the runnning part of it. Come to think of it, Outlook does the downloading, too. But it's THOSE people's email, so it must be THEIR fault, or at least the fault of the people who sent the email, and definitly, certainly NOT Microsoft's fault, so there.
What I want to know is why a ceramic len is more useful than a glass one. I presume it's more durable, but I don't remember the last time a lens in a consumer electronics digital camera broke before the CCD went kaput. Does it have a higher defraction index? Is it more transparent to a wider range of colors? What's up with that?
You could use something like this to air programming that commercial stations won't broadcast because it's not commercially viable or because it doesn't fit in with the interests of big media.
This is a highly flawed concept, because "broadcast" of programming of this type would require the coopertion of hundreds of transmitters, which would interfere with each other at the edges of their individual ranges. Cell phones fixed that problem by broadcasting on a range of frequencies instead of just one, but that isn't practical when you have to manually adjust your dial.
Most audio programs with this kind of popularity problem will, instead, perform their show as normal, then put an MP3 of their show on the web for people to download. Here's a good example of this:
Cultural Baggage
By "session", I presume that it means any time you have to log out or shut down, it ends a session. What other reasons also require shutdown?
Note that I use the word "require" here. This measurement is meaningless because it doesn't analize why people shut down, just how often those shutdowns are forced by software failure.
Does it include shutdowns due to subtle malfunctions as failures? I regularly have to shut down simply because Word is misbehaving - consistently misformatting a page, for instance. Closing Word doesn't actually unload it from memory, so I have to reboot to fix that. These don't look like a crash, but they're close enough.
Heck, this week I've had to reboot my machine about a dozen times because Thunderbird stops fetching my mail when I run City of Heros. Do they include that kind of thing? Probably not.
What might actually be useful is a chart that says "if you've run Windows for X hours, you have a N% chance of Windows packing it in without notice". That, at least, would tell me when I'm pressing my luck.
No, I don't shut down at night. My experience with computers is that every time you turn one off and on, you increase your chances of hardware failure. Maintaining a steady power state increases the longevity of your parts, and I don't consider filling landfills faster to be an appropriate price to pay for using less electricity.
I have to agree with this poster. Moore's movies are crafted to pursuade, not to inform. They exceed the boundary of what we would call a "documentary" and move into the territory of "Political Infomercials", similar to the O'Reilly factor and almost any other program shown on Fox.
If you turn it around to slow your fall into the next system, then it becomes a solar parachute, right?
A solar wind, by the way, isn't just the light. It's a very light breeze of all of the particles that the sun throws out as it burns (explodes). At something like three times the orbit of Pluto, these particles loose enough momentum that they're completely countered by the existing particles in deep space. That's the heliopause. You'd definitely have to close your sail at that point.
Has anyone ever calculated how much speed you could get from a solar wind? I'd like to see an experiment to measure one.
The concept of whether light-sails would work is still very much in doubt. There are people on both sides of the debate of whether you can push yourself along by reflecting light. The idea that photons act like pingpong balls to push you along makes sense, but apparently the physics doesn't pan out.
In the case of IBM, the first item was a mainframe and the second item was a service contract. In the case of Windows, the first item was the operating system and the seconds are the browser and/or the multimedia software.
The case here is a little more complicated. You can play other music on your IPod, but ITunes has an exclusive on the rights-managed music protocol. Other companies can't sell music under other rights-management schemes and have them play them on the iPod. Since the iPod has a massive market share in the digital rights managed music player department, that constitutes a monopoly that they're shutting the record industry out of.
Protocols and languages are both methods of transimitting information from one entity to another. Certainly protocols aren't NATURAL languages or human languages -they have a much smaller bredth of information that they need to be flexible enough to transmit - but the analogy is sound.
On that legal case, I'm going to have to recind my statement about patenting a language, I meant to say "copyright". A man named James Cooke Brown invented a language named Loglan around 1950. I'll spare you the details about the synthetic language, but around 1987, a sub group of the Loglan community decided that they had a different goal in mind for the language. They altered the vocabulary in order to create a new language called Lojban. Brown sued them for copyright violation and lost on the grounds mentioned above. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to that lawsuit.
You're right in that there is no law like the one you discussed. I never said that there was, unless you want to reference the Sherman Act as mentioned in the above IBM case. I'm saying that allowing interface patents creates a situation that violates the Sherman Act.
It was determined a long time ago that requiring someone to purchase a second item with a first item was a monopolistic tactic. IBM lost that one when they were requiring a service contract with their computers.
Interface patents do the same thing. It allows a company on one side of that interface to monopolize the sale of the software or hardware on the other side of the interface.
This comes up a lot, expecially when people attempt to use the DMCA to protect their right to do these things.
Interfaces are essentially a language. It has already been tested in court that you can't patent a language, simply because you need to release it into the public domain for it to be useful. Interfaces are a little different - you don't have to release them into the public domain for them to be useful, but you do have to do so if you aren't attempting to hold a monopoly on both ends of its use.
Ok, points taken. Everything has to start somewhere, though.
Since you seem to be an expert on this, I'll ask the question: If you were to attempt to branch a browser to make a secure browser, which browser would you start with?
I'd like to point out, however, that the Mozilla code base is as complicated as it is because it isn't a single entity. The job could be simplified by pinching off the entities and auditing them one at a time.
I'm not saying that this isn't a monumental task. I'm saying that (a) the open source community could do it, and that (b) it would be worth the effort.
Microsoft figured out early that whoever controls the portals to the internet will be able to control those who write content. Web authors already have to write standards non-compliant code just so that IE will display it properly. They push their horribly insecure ActiveX objects. If this continues, you will eventually need a Microsoft Web Authoring tool in order to create any content at all.
I'd like to see their supremecy broken before it goes too far. Their biggest flaw is their lack of security. If you think Mozilla is a tangled mass of code, Microsoft's code bases are worse, and they have to PAY people to fix it.
Microsoft obviously doesn't think they can afford to fix these things, or they don't think they can. The Opensource community has shown that it can do this type of thing. I'm suggesting that it does.
Pick a better starting point if you want, but don't discard the idea because it would be difficult.
This brings up an interesting concept. It has been the conjecture of most people on this forum that opensource is more secure because it's more freely examined. This doesn't hold true if the opensource code in question is never actually examined.
A number of years ago, an initiative was created to make FreeBSD the most secure operating system on the planet. OpenBSD is the result, and I have to say that they did a darn fine job of it.
I'd like to propose that the Opensource community do the same thing with Mozilla. Start a line-by-line security audit of the Mozilla code base. Leverage the opensource massively distributed model and create the first browser that can be called truely secure.
If you don't want to do it to create a truely awesome product, then just do it to rub Microsoft's nose in something that they are completely incapable of. *evil grin*
Much worse than that. If you're logging on from "anywhere", then you have to trust the system you log in through to not download and record all of your passwords, data, etc. You have to trust your terminal to not be pre-bugged.
Never, never, never.