It's not a trivial problem, after all you'd like the device to be battery-free, but maybe you'd have to abandon that requirement. Wouldn't be so horrible to put one of those watch batteries into it, since if the battery was lost or went dead you could just get a new one at the border. Then you can put a button on the damn thing so it's only transmitting when you press the button. And then you can have your digitally signed photo, which is the whole point of this in the first place.
And they're going to enclose it in a RF shield, so that it can only be read close-up, with someone to open the shield. And someone thinks that this is a good idea?
True, it makes no sense to me that they'd use RFID in the first place. Surely they can come up with a technology which is on by demand (press a button) rather than which is always on. Or maybe there's a way to put a digital signature on the photo itself. I guess it wouldn't be a digital signature then, though, as photos aren't digital. What about a 2D barcode? How much data can you squeeze into one of those, enough for a low-res picture?
We're talking about RFID here, these things aren't powerful enough to do any processing themselves, you can just read data from them. So if you use encryption, then you've gotta give anyone who needs to read the thing a decryption key - customs agents in every country of the world. It would be a matter of minutes before the decryption key got into the hands of criminals.
The way the election laws work here, Rob MacKenna wouldn't have even been allowed to talk about a political issue such as requiring a paper trail if the election were declared non-partisan. It was a pretty sad state of affairs in the county court judge race, where you go to the candidates website and they show you their degree and the rest of their resume and they're not allowed to say anything else.
First you started out arguing that people shouldn't be free to express themselves.
I certainly never said that. People should be able to express themselves, even if they happen to form a corporation to more efficiently express themselves.
But then, as an example of why political expression is unnecessary, you cite the fact that in 2000 you made a massively bad political decision and voted for the wrong candidate. How does that add up? How are you not totally contradicting yourself here?
I don't consider my vote in 2000 to have been incorrect, and I don't think political expression is unnecessary.
As I've said, if I'm the exception, then we're screwed anyway. You can't have a working democracy if you don't have intelligent voters, no matter how much campaign financing reform you do.
I fail to see how telling people they have to get a license accomplishes anything. My car still starts without a license. Requiring licenses isn't going to stop bad or underage drivers from driving.
Any DRM that prevents me from making a backup copy, or a media its stored on change or prevents me from playing that movie again via any kind of long term storage, restricts my fair use of the material I bought and paid for.
No it doesn't. You still have a fair use defense under copyright law. You just don't have an easy technical means to exercise it.
Insanity is a legal defense to murder. That doesn't mean that anyone who stops you from committing murder is restricting your insanity. Yes, murder is a more serious charge than copyright infringement, but that doesn't change the basic point. Fair use is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement, not a right which you must be provided with by any creator of a copyrighted work.
In other words, understand that by your demanding that the distributor use some sort of a copy protection that interferes with my fair use costs you the sale.
Feel free to be a martyr for some nonexistent cause. I'll continue to buy a product so long as the DRM doesn't interfere with my intended use. Not that I ever buy CDs anyway. Where DRM is most promising is with regard to free products.
Copyright, thats another sore subject with me, and IMO, the copyright belongs to the author/composer, and cannot be transfered to a second party ever.
IMO copyright is a farse. But we weren't really talking about copyright, we were talking about DRM.
His aim was to sue the government, not the airport. And he does have ID, he has a passport. And, if he didn't have ID, then he would be allowed to fly. He was disallowed because he had ID but refused to show it.
I don't see this as unreasonable at all, since there is an age requirement to drive, as well as that you have to be a legal resident of the US to get a US driver's license.
The only part I see unreasonable is that you have to get a driver's license in the first place.
Intelligence of the public doesn't matter if they never hear about all of the candidates.
A website only costs what, $5 a month?
The campaign adds are distractions that are designed to prevent intelligent decisions.
I was subjected to the same campaign "adds" as everyone else in 2000, but somehow I still managed to find out about and vote for Nader. I guess it was the huge amount of cash that he spent on those rallies.
Because - there is no other way to confirm that a person pressed "Vote for John Kerry", the machine displayed "You have indicated that you are voting for John Kerry. Is this correct (Y/N)", and then recorded a vote for George W Bush.
Couldn't you just look at the code? Hell, it's simple enough you could write the top layer in assembly and then it'd be quite reasonable to look at the source code and the compiler. Have the top layer store to a drive which is only accessible by that layer...it could even be a write-only device like a CD-R. The rest could be audited electronically.
If you trust an ATM with your money -- couldn't we trust it with votes?
I don't really trust an ATM with my money. I trust my bank to refund my money if the machine screws up, because it's not in the best interest of the bank to lose my business and quite possibly face criminal charges (there's a camera there after all) over something like $200 (which is about the maximum I'd ever transact in cash through an ATM).
If a bank screwed 1,000 people out of $20 in a day, you can bet that this would be discovered. If diebold screwed 100,000 people out of their vote, it's likely no one would know the difference, because this is quite within the margin of error of the exit polls (especially when the exit polls get changed after the results come in).
Why do you think that? Democrats have always been in favor of a paper trail. The Democratic nominee for Supervisor of elections for our County even ran (and lost) with the motto "Get a paper trail".
As for paper ballots, the idea is good, but will it really work well in practice? The machines will have to be able to void individual paper ballots if the voter, looking through the viewplate, realizes he didn't vote the right way.
Why would it need to void the paper ballot? As long as each person only puts one paper ballot into the ballot box, it doesn't matter if the ballot has been voided.
A tidal wave of well funded speech will drown out the ripples of individual and not so well funded speech.
What you're saying is that the public is too stupid to find out the best candidate to vote for and vote for him or her; that the public needs to have billions of dollars spent shoving campaign ads in their faces.
Perhaps you're right, but if you are it really doesn't matter whether or not corporations can donate to politicians, we're screwed anyway.
I really can't think of any foolproof way to keep corporations from using their checkbooks to buy out politicians
We could always stop voting for whoever spends the most money on their campaign...
If Halliburton wants to give the Republican party a billion dollars they spend it on the most kickass Republican National Convention ever, it really doesn't matter to me, I'm still not going to vote for the guy.
except to outlaw all campaign contributions, but that may do more harm than good.
Personally I think limiting campaign contributions does more harm than good for exactly the same reason as eliminating them does.
Thats why campaign contributions should only be able to be made by those legally able to vote.
It's a fine idea in theory, but how are you going to implement it? There are lots of ways to contribute to a campaign short of writing a check to the person's campaign organization, and you can't possibly make them all illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, mag stripe, good point.
Now I see why I don't have this problem. I haven't even figured out how to install flash on firefox.
The problem with a motherboard BIOS is that it's tailored to the motherboard.
Not all that much of a different problem from a device driver that's tailored to the device.
PDF417 allows for 1100 bytes. That's not enough.
It's not a trivial problem, after all you'd like the device to be battery-free, but maybe you'd have to abandon that requirement. Wouldn't be so horrible to put one of those watch batteries into it, since if the battery was lost or went dead you could just get a new one at the border. Then you can put a button on the damn thing so it's only transmitting when you press the button. And then you can have your digitally signed photo, which is the whole point of this in the first place.
And they're going to enclose it in a RF shield, so that it can only be read close-up, with someone to open the shield. And someone thinks that this is a good idea?
True, it makes no sense to me that they'd use RFID in the first place. Surely they can come up with a technology which is on by demand (press a button) rather than which is always on. Or maybe there's a way to put a digital signature on the photo itself. I guess it wouldn't be a digital signature then, though, as photos aren't digital. What about a 2D barcode? How much data can you squeeze into one of those, enough for a low-res picture?
We're talking about RFID here, these things aren't powerful enough to do any processing themselves, you can just read data from them. So if you use encryption, then you've gotta give anyone who needs to read the thing a decryption key - customs agents in every country of the world. It would be a matter of minutes before the decryption key got into the hands of criminals.
The way the election laws work here, Rob MacKenna wouldn't have even been allowed to talk about a political issue such as requiring a paper trail if the election were declared non-partisan. It was a pretty sad state of affairs in the county court judge race, where you go to the candidates website and they show you their degree and the rest of their resume and they're not allowed to say anything else.
First you started out arguing that people shouldn't be free to express themselves.
I certainly never said that. People should be able to express themselves, even if they happen to form a corporation to more efficiently express themselves.
But then, as an example of why political expression is unnecessary, you cite the fact that in 2000 you made a massively bad political decision and voted for the wrong candidate. How does that add up? How are you not totally contradicting yourself here?
I don't consider my vote in 2000 to have been incorrect, and I don't think political expression is unnecessary.
As I've said, if I'm the exception, then we're screwed anyway. You can't have a working democracy if you don't have intelligent voters, no matter how much campaign financing reform you do.
I fail to see how telling people they have to get a license accomplishes anything. My car still starts without a license. Requiring licenses isn't going to stop bad or underage drivers from driving.
Any DRM that prevents me from making a backup copy, or a media its stored on change or prevents me from playing that movie again via any kind of long term storage, restricts my fair use of the material I bought and paid for.
No it doesn't. You still have a fair use defense under copyright law. You just don't have an easy technical means to exercise it.
Insanity is a legal defense to murder. That doesn't mean that anyone who stops you from committing murder is restricting your insanity. Yes, murder is a more serious charge than copyright infringement, but that doesn't change the basic point. Fair use is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement, not a right which you must be provided with by any creator of a copyrighted work.
In other words, understand that by your demanding that the distributor use some sort of a copy protection that interferes with my fair use costs you the sale.
Feel free to be a martyr for some nonexistent cause. I'll continue to buy a product so long as the DRM doesn't interfere with my intended use. Not that I ever buy CDs anyway. Where DRM is most promising is with regard to free products.
Copyright, thats another sore subject with me, and IMO, the copyright belongs to the author/composer, and cannot be transfered to a second party ever.
IMO copyright is a farse. But we weren't really talking about copyright, we were talking about DRM.
His aim was to sue the government, not the airport. And he does have ID, he has a passport. And, if he didn't have ID, then he would be allowed to fly. He was disallowed because he had ID but refused to show it.
I don't see this as unreasonable at all, since there is an age requirement to drive, as well as that you have to be a legal resident of the US to get a US driver's license.
The only part I see unreasonable is that you have to get a driver's license in the first place.
Hmmm ... It sounds like he/she lost in an election that didn't have a paper trail.
It's worse than that. He lost in an election without a paper trail to the incumbent who was supervisor of the very election he was running in.
Intelligence of the public doesn't matter if they never hear about all of the candidates.
A website only costs what, $5 a month?
The campaign adds are distractions that are designed to prevent intelligent decisions.
I was subjected to the same campaign "adds" as everyone else in 2000, but somehow I still managed to find out about and vote for Nader. I guess it was the huge amount of cash that he spent on those rallies.
All very good points. I suspect these could be resolved, but it's not as easy as I first suspected.
Because - there is no other way to confirm that a person pressed "Vote for John Kerry", the machine displayed "You have indicated that you are voting for John Kerry. Is this correct (Y/N)", and then recorded a vote for George W Bush.
Couldn't you just look at the code? Hell, it's simple enough you could write the top layer in assembly and then it'd be quite reasonable to look at the source code and the compiler. Have the top layer store to a drive which is only accessible by that layer...it could even be a write-only device like a CD-R. The rest could be audited electronically.
If you trust an ATM with your money -- couldn't we trust it with votes?
I don't really trust an ATM with my money. I trust my bank to refund my money if the machine screws up, because it's not in the best interest of the bank to lose my business and quite possibly face criminal charges (there's a camera there after all) over something like $200 (which is about the maximum I'd ever transact in cash through an ATM).
If a bank screwed 1,000 people out of $20 in a day, you can bet that this would be discovered. If diebold screwed 100,000 people out of their vote, it's likely no one would know the difference, because this is quite within the margin of error of the exit polls (especially when the exit polls get changed after the results come in).
Why do you think that? Democrats have always been in favor of a paper trail. The Democratic nominee for Supervisor of elections for our County even ran (and lost) with the motto "Get a paper trail".
As for paper ballots, the idea is good, but will it really work well in practice? The machines will have to be able to void individual paper ballots if the voter, looking through the viewplate, realizes he didn't vote the right way.
Why would it need to void the paper ballot? As long as each person only puts one paper ballot into the ballot box, it doesn't matter if the ballot has been voided.
You fundamentally cannot implement effective DRM without shredding fair use.
Fair use is a defense to copyright infringement. DRM is a technology. The two are not at all interrelated.
A tidal wave of well funded speech will drown out the ripples of individual and not so well funded speech.
What you're saying is that the public is too stupid to find out the best candidate to vote for and vote for him or her; that the public needs to have billions of dollars spent shoving campaign ads in their faces.
Perhaps you're right, but if you are it really doesn't matter whether or not corporations can donate to politicians, we're screwed anyway.
I really can't think of any foolproof way to keep corporations from using their checkbooks to buy out politicians
We could always stop voting for whoever spends the most money on their campaign...
If Halliburton wants to give the Republican party a billion dollars they spend it on the most kickass Republican National Convention ever, it really doesn't matter to me, I'm still not going to vote for the guy.
except to outlaw all campaign contributions, but that may do more harm than good.
Personally I think limiting campaign contributions does more harm than good for exactly the same reason as eliminating them does.
Thats why campaign contributions should only be able to be made by those legally able to vote.
It's a fine idea in theory, but how are you going to implement it? There are lots of ways to contribute to a campaign short of writing a check to the person's campaign organization, and you can't possibly make them all illegal.
Perhaps this was for the pre-release versions of Firefox (or could just be a hoax).