"The EMMDAR steps through two hundred frequencies, spaced two megahertz apart from 3101 MHz to 3499 MHz, one at a time. It transmits on one frequency for 75 microseconds with a peak instantaneous power of 31.6 milliwatts, followed by a 17.5-microsecond "off time" between frequency steps. The complete cycle repeats every 18.5 milliseconds, resulting in a duty cycle for each frequency of 0.41%."
Notice, this things emits a maximum of 0.0316 watts, which is somewhat less that the several hundred watts used to cook your chicken pot pie.
Depositing the receipts with a trusted third party of the voter's choice is only marginally better than not having the anonymised vote numbers, since it means that your still relying on someone else to verify the counting process, and so the only benefit over having "trusted" audits of the voting machines is for those voters who decide to take the inconvenient option of keeping their receipts and checking in the newspaper themselves.
TBH, if you're introducing receipts into the process, why not have the voting machine print a receipt which is seen by the voter and then deposited into a ballot box, and provide for these receipts to be counted in the event of a dispute about the accuracy of the results from the machines? In this scenario, concerns about the lack of transparency with voting machines are lessened, because the machines are not providing the "definitive" result, they are just speeding up the initial count. (See my other post on this article for why I prefer this option.)
Unless you're relying on people to remember their vote numbers, you need to issue the numbers in a written format. And the person wanting to know how you have voted can demand that you show them this written copy of your vote number.
I agree that your system would work if the mapping from voter to vote number can be kept private, but bear in mind that any crypto system involving people is vulnerable to rubber hosing.
In addition to Mr. Freeman's points, this would weaken ballot secrecy - at present, if someone wants to find out how you voted, their only method is to ask you, and they have no way to verify your answer. With your system, they can demand your voter number and then check the newspaper.
I beg to differ. Of course it's not possible for one individual to observe the entire election, but with paper ballots anyone can understand how the election works:
voter goes to polling centre
collect & mark ballot paper
place ballot paper into locked ballot box
when polling is over the locked boxes are taken to the counting location and opened
ballot papers are then counted by hand (machines can be used the speed up the counting, but the option of hand-counting is still there) and the result is announced.
Anyone can understand how this process works, and can observe it in full (except for the actual point when the voter marks their ballot paper, since it's a secret ballot.) And here in the UK, there are observers throughout, not least from the various political parties (each of whom has an interest in ensuring that there isn't any fraud being committed against them) and the media. And if there's a dispute about the result, the counting can be easily verified.
Compare this to using an electronic voting machine:
voter goes to polling centre
select preferred candidate on screen and click "vote" (or whatever the UI is)
...
when polling is over, the numbers from the machines are collated and the result is announced.
(I have deliberately left out how the votes are actually counted, as I'm not familiar with the actual systems in use, and (more importantly) this is how it will appear to most voters - as a magic box that takes their selections as an input and spits out a result as the output, with no understanding of how it does that.)
In this system the vast majority of the electorate will have no understanding of how it works, and nobody can observe the actual counting, they are reliant on techies checking the machines and saying "yes, this works properly." And if there is a dispute about whether the machines have counted the votes properly, there is no way to do a recount to verify the result. (I am deliberately ignoring electronic voting machines which produce a paper receipt, because in the event of a dispute the receipts can be counted - the machine is there just providing a faster method of counting.)
The first step to transparency is for people to be able to understand how the system is meant to work, only then can you move on to confirming that the system does work as it is meant to.
Do you see now why paper voting is more transparent that electronic voting?
One system that I've seen is Pay by Phone. I've not used it myself, but how it works is that each parking space has a number which you enter over the phone along with your vehicle registration number, how long you're staying, and your credit card details. The system allows you to add extra time over the phone, and avoids problems with broken/vandalised meters.
I regularly cycle from zone 3 into central London, and would agree with everything xaxa has said. My two top tips are to try the TfL cycle journey planner (it uses the same information as the maps, and gives the distance and timings for the route) and, if you're going to commute by bike, ride the route at a weekend first to get a feel for it.
The traffic around Holborn definitely is rather crazy, but there are a lot of side streets that avoid most of it, and in rush hour most of it isn't moving anyway:-)
In the case of Gmail, yes. Simply go in to your account settings and ensure that IMAP is enabled (or POP, if you prefer it) and then point your favourite mail client at imap.googlemail.com.
Sometimes I think "the Church" makes things complicated on purpose, just to make it easier for them to retain control.
I think a version of Hanlon's razor may apply here - the setting of a fixed date for Easter would require agreement on what date to pick, and efforts on that front haven't got very far.
Ahh, but a number of Orthodox churches use the Julian calendar. And December 25th in the Julian calendar is January 7th in the Gregorian (for the next 92 years - 2100 will be a Julian leap year, and the difference will increase by another day.)
So, yes, Christmas is always December 25th, but not everyone agrees which day that is...
Only problem is, your way isn't always right, because the date of Easter is always calculated from March 21st even if (as this year) the northern hemisphere spring equinox doesn't fall on that date.
...he has dedicated himself to filling a gap that has been missing in the Emacs operating system for a long time; the lack of a robust, powerful, yet easy-to-use editor.
What are you talking about? There's an excellent text editor for Emacs, you just enter M-x viper-mode and away you go...
Why couldn't they have a split end on the keyboard cable with the DC input and USB connections, that way you would have no DC cable in sight.
Yeah, but then there would be people complaining that they use a custom cable, and asking "why couldn't thy have separate USB and DC input connections, that way you wouldn't have to use their proprietary cable that only comes in one length."
It's a bit of a "heads I win, tails you loose" situation.
I think the big hurdle is partitioning off a part of each hard drive so that the user can't access it, so what they don't know about they can't be angry about losing.
In a Windows domain, it is simple to make a drive on users' machines hidden via group policy (specifically, the Hides these specified drives in My Computer setting.) Combined with appropriate file & folder permissions, this can create a partition that Windows never shows to the user and doesn't let them access even if they do find out about it.
That section, about local councils being able to overrule the BBFC, only applies to films in cinemas. The BBFC's classifications for videos, DVDs, computer games etc. are legally binding. So contacting your local council is, in this case, pointless. Rockstar, as the distributor, can appeal the decision to the Video Appeals Committee (and could, presumably, apply to the High Court for judicial review of the decision if they are still unhappy.) And you, as a member of the public, can contact the BBFC to make your views known, if you choose.
While "Cletus told me to do it" probably doesn't get you off, "Cletus told me it was his and that I could have it, and I had no reason to no believe him" may well do.
And let's not forget people have been going on and on about Google building it's own computers, operating systems, etc., and yet none of these things has appeared.
It's a search engine in a box. Whilst that box is, obviously, a computer which is running an operating system and Google software, what you are buying with those devices is not a general-purpose computer or OS, it is black (blue/yellow) box that provides you with search functionality for your systems.
A land value tax is another one which I don't mind. Inheritance taxes on million dollar (and up) estates...
Basically if you're getting taxed it should be directly tied to something the government is providing you with, though. The government doesn't really provide me with anything when I earn income.
What is the governement providing you with that's dependent on the value of your land? Or the size of your inheritance?
And regarding your view that taxes should be directly tied to serives provided, how would you fund servuces such as law enforcement? "That you for reporting that rape. The fee for our investigation will be..."? Or fire-fighting: if your neighbour's house is on fire, you probably want the fire to be put out before if spread to your house, even if your neighbour isn't going to pay the fire fighters.
First, I didn't relize that in the EU and Norway people put a gun to your haed and forced you to use an iPod. That's wierd.
Consider the following:
You buy an iPod
You buy music from ITMS
Your iPod breaks
What music player to you buy to replace your broken iPod? If you buy a non-iPod, your new player will be unable to play the music that you bought from ITMS. There's the lock-in.
Name one [smartphone] that plays wide screen movies? Name one with a full web browser? Name one with a full desktop OS? Name a current one with a screen that size? There are dozens of other features I've never seen in a cell phone.
Let's take, as an example, the Nokia 9500 Communicator, which came out towards the end of 2004. It plays movies and, with a resolution of 640*200 is distinctly wide-screen. For a web browser, it has Opera, which is just as much a full web browser as Safari. The screen is 4.5" diagonal, although the iPhone has a slightly larger screen area (3870 mm^2 against the Communicator's 3850 mm^2) and more pixels per inch (160 on the iPhone, 148 on the Communicator.) Yes, the 9500 doesn't have a full desktop OS, it runs Symbian, an OS designed for use on PDAs and smartphones, but it makes no sense to have a "full desktop OS" on a device like a phone, which has very different (and far more limited) hardware than a desktop computer - but then, the iPhone will be running a stripped-down version of OS X, not the "full desktop OS". (In my book, if it will only run apps written for the iPhone then no matter how much it shares with the desktop OS, it's not the same OS.)
As far as I can see, the only feature of the iPhone that makes it stand out from its fellow smartphones is the interface, which is pretty damn funky. Apple have, like they usually do, produced a great UI - the applications that it's the interface to, OTOH, don't seem to be anything new.
Article 10
1.An island is a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high
tide.
2.The territorial sea of an island is measured in accordance with the provisions of these articles.
1982 wording:
Article 121 Regime of islands
1. An island is a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide.
2. Except as provided for in paragraph 3, the territorial sea, the contiguous zone, the exclusive economic zone and the continental shelf of an island are determined in accordance with the provisions of this Convention applicable to other land territory.
3. Rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf.
Now, IANAL, but it seems to me that if the newer version means that Sealand would have no territorial sea, then so does the older one that predates Bates' occupation of Roughs Tower/Sealand.
The post I was replying to argued for a return to the gold standard, saying that gold has intrinsic value. Of course gold is valuable, I am not denying that, but the reason for its value is that people generally recognise it as being valuable, not because of any intrinsic property of gold. In that respect it is little different from paper money as a form of currency - both have value because they are generally accepted as being valuable, and both have a limited supply (gold because there is a finite amount of it, paper money because the production of it is restricted by law.)
Slashdot Mirror
From the waiver, which was linked to in TFA:
"The EMMDAR steps through two hundred frequencies, spaced two megahertz apart from 3101 MHz to 3499 MHz, one at a time. It transmits on one frequency for 75 microseconds with a peak instantaneous power of 31.6 milliwatts, followed by a 17.5-microsecond "off time" between frequency steps. The complete cycle repeats every 18.5 milliseconds, resulting in a duty cycle for each frequency of 0.41%."
Notice, this things emits a maximum of 0.0316 watts, which is somewhat less that the several hundred watts used to cook your chicken pot pie.
Depositing the receipts with a trusted third party of the voter's choice is only marginally better than not having the anonymised vote numbers, since it means that your still relying on someone else to verify the counting process, and so the only benefit over having "trusted" audits of the voting machines is for those voters who decide to take the inconvenient option of keeping their receipts and checking in the newspaper themselves.
TBH, if you're introducing receipts into the process, why not have the voting machine print a receipt which is seen by the voter and then deposited into a ballot box, and provide for these receipts to be counted in the event of a dispute about the accuracy of the results from the machines? In this scenario, concerns about the lack of transparency with voting machines are lessened, because the machines are not providing the "definitive" result, they are just speeding up the initial count. (See my other post on this article for why I prefer this option.)
Unless you're relying on people to remember their vote numbers, you need to issue the numbers in a written format. And the person wanting to know how you have voted can demand that you show them this written copy of your vote number.
I agree that your system would work if the mapping from voter to vote number can be kept private, but bear in mind that any crypto system involving people is vulnerable to rubber hosing.
In addition to Mr. Freeman's points, this would weaken ballot secrecy - at present, if someone wants to find out how you voted, their only method is to ask you, and they have no way to verify your answer. With your system, they can demand your voter number and then check the newspaper.
Anyone can understand how this process works, and can observe it in full (except for the actual point when the voter marks their ballot paper, since it's a secret ballot.) And here in the UK, there are observers throughout, not least from the various political parties (each of whom has an interest in ensuring that there isn't any fraud being committed against them) and the media. And if there's a dispute about the result, the counting can be easily verified.
Compare this to using an electronic voting machine:
(I have deliberately left out how the votes are actually counted, as I'm not familiar with the actual systems in use, and (more importantly) this is how it will appear to most voters - as a magic box that takes their selections as an input and spits out a result as the output, with no understanding of how it does that.)
In this system the vast majority of the electorate will have no understanding of how it works, and nobody can observe the actual counting, they are reliant on techies checking the machines and saying "yes, this works properly." And if there is a dispute about whether the machines have counted the votes properly, there is no way to do a recount to verify the result. (I am deliberately ignoring electronic voting machines which produce a paper receipt, because in the event of a dispute the receipts can be counted - the machine is there just providing a faster method of counting.)
The first step to transparency is for people to be able to understand how the system is meant to work, only then can you move on to confirming that the system does work as it is meant to. Do you see now why paper voting is more transparent that electronic voting?
One system that I've seen is Pay by Phone. I've not used it myself, but how it works is that each parking space has a number which you enter over the phone along with your vehicle registration number, how long you're staying, and your credit card details. The system allows you to add extra time over the phone, and avoids problems with broken/vandalised meters.
Another London cyclist here!
I regularly cycle from zone 3 into central London, and would agree with everything xaxa has said. My two top tips are to try the TfL cycle journey planner (it uses the same information as the maps, and gives the distance and timings for the route) and, if you're going to commute by bike, ride the route at a weekend first to get a feel for it.
The traffic around Holborn definitely is rather crazy, but there are a lot of side streets that avoid most of it, and in rush hour most of it isn't moving anyway :-)
In the case of Gmail, yes. Simply go in to your account settings and ensure that IMAP is enabled (or POP, if you prefer it) and then point your favourite mail client at imap.googlemail.com.
Ahh, but a number of Orthodox churches use the Julian calendar. And December 25th in the Julian calendar is January 7th in the Gregorian (for the next 92 years - 2100 will be a Julian leap year, and the difference will increase by another day.)
So, yes, Christmas is always December 25th, but not everyone agrees which day that is...
Only problem is, your way isn't always right, because the date of Easter is always calculated from March 21st even if (as this year) the northern hemisphere spring equinox doesn't fall on that date.
It's a bit of a "heads I win, tails you loose" situation.
It could be Free free beer...
That section, about local councils being able to overrule the BBFC, only applies to films in cinemas. The BBFC's classifications for videos, DVDs, computer games etc. are legally binding. So contacting your local council is, in this case, pointless. Rockstar, as the distributor, can appeal the decision to the Video Appeals Committee (and could, presumably, apply to the High Court for judicial review of the decision if they are still unhappy.) And you, as a member of the public, can contact the BBFC to make your views known, if you choose.
And, dear slashdotters, that post is an example of why the preview button was invented...
The offence of theft can require intent. For example, in English law, "A person is guilty of theft, if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it". If a similar case happened in England, the people who took stuff would probably be able to argue that they honestly believed that they had permission from the owner, and that they are therefore not guilty of theft.
While "Cletus told me to do it" probably doesn't get you off, "Cletus told me it was his and that I could have it, and I had no reason to no believe him" may well do.
And regarding your view that taxes should be directly tied to serives provided, how would you fund servuces such as law enforcement? "That you for reporting that rape. The fee for our investigation will be..."? Or fire-fighting: if your neighbour's house is on fire, you probably want the fire to be put out before if spread to your house, even if your neighbour isn't going to pay the fire fighters.
- You buy an iPod
- You buy music from ITMS
- Your iPod breaks
What music player to you buy to replace your broken iPod? If you buy a non-iPod, your new player will be unable to play the music that you bought from ITMS. There's the lock-in.As far as I can see, the only feature of the iPhone that makes it stand out from its fellow smartphones is the interface, which is pretty damn funky. Apple have, like they usually do, produced a great UI - the applications that it's the interface to, OTOH, don't seem to be anything new.
1958 wording: 1982 wording: Now, IANAL, but it seems to me that if the newer version means that Sealand would have no territorial sea, then so does the older one that predates Bates' occupation of Roughs Tower/Sealand.
The post I was replying to argued for a return to the gold standard, saying that gold has intrinsic value. Of course gold is valuable, I am not denying that, but the reason for its value is that people generally recognise it as being valuable, not because of any intrinsic property of gold. In that respect it is little different from paper money as a form of currency - both have value because they are generally accepted as being valuable, and both have a limited supply (gold because there is a finite amount of it, paper money because the production of it is restricted by law.)