There is a lot more progress to be made before online voting can become a reality. Authentication, verification, and privacy are all major issues.
But another interesting issue is platform support. Unless you support all platforms, online voting is not going to become reality. The fact that you would exclude people from a form of voting simply based upon their platform is not going to fly in court. Sure you can go out and physically vote, but in sparsly populated states (Montana, Arizona, etc.) this may be much harder and more time consuming than point, click, vote.
Consider the Arizona primary. The online voting allowed was Windows-only. This caused a stir (small, but still...) based on the fact that many people were locked out of voting because they choose not to use Windows.
I too would detest the situations I believe you are refering to. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Putting it in that light, I think we're better off in our new cars, with our cell phones, and our laptops.
Stress is a state of mind, even if you have a lot to do, a lot of stress comes from worrying about the little things. Put it all in prespective and relax.
MS threatened me under NDA while I was testing Office 98 for Mac in beta. Every company does this. There are sites out there that get stuff pulled at MS's request.
What about MS's fucking government trial where they force their product on other companies (Dell, Compaq) and threaten other (NetScape, Apple, RealNetworks). So what were you saying about MS being the angel in this one? Apple isn't being split in two by big-brother for their anti-competative practices.
That's a pretty ignorant statement to make. Apple followed a trend that consumers were looking for, and it really paid off. If you call that unimpressive, at least give it good business sense.
The iMac is positioned well in price. At first, it doesn't look like it, until you see all the WinTel systems that have this:
*:Monitor sold separatly
That is the difference. Apple made a good-looking machine, with good features, and everything is included. I know that the majority of the people who post here probably don't even care what they wear to work, but 90% of the world does, and they like to have a CPU that is "cute" or fashionable.
Third, Apple included a lot of features (Firewire, USB 64-128 RAM, 6-10 gig HD, good monitor) at a low enough price to grab people who aren't programming or high-end video editing on board. That is 99% of the computer using world.
So from your point of view, Apple may not be impressive, but if you look at it from a business point of view, they blew the roof off. They had the number one selling line of CPUs for something like 2 years.
At least give credit where it's due, and open up your closed mind.
That isn't true. They don't want shit getting out to investors early, they don't want their ideas stolen, they don't want their intellectual property violated. Maybe they are being too careful and coming off as big-brother, but they have to be. Look at all those iMac knock-offs. Don't you think some companies would love to be in-bed with the guys who are thinking up the case designs at Apple? If eMachines could just announce a product that Apple was about to release, who would appear to have gotten there first? Even if eMachines had nothing built?
I work for a large networking/communications companies (one of the big three in the US) and we are pretty strict about this stuff too. You leave and aren't careful, and they pad lock your door, investigate, and call lawyers.
Exactly. And did it stop anybody, anybody at all, from getting hard crypto when he wanted it?
So you think that the US government won't mind if Chinga was able to completely hide all their communications from them? If Fling works (in theory) then the US would just let it go as if it was no big deal?
Ahem. US tried to limit exports of hard crypto. The main result was that now a lot of crypto work is done outside of the US (and I have a nice RSA-in-Perl t-shirt). Hard crypto is out of the bag.
Yes, crypto is, but Fling isn't hard crypto. If (that's a big if), Fling could be the next format for data security, the US wouldn't let it out. Just like it used to severly limit hard crypto.
Sure this sounds great in theory, but considering the current state around the world, how would this be received?
The economy is globalizing quickly, and daily interaction across the globe is paramount. So considering China just recently picked Linux over Windows95/98 because it can examine the source code to make sure there aren't any caveats that the US could use to sabotage them in a crisis, and on the other hand, the US is so paranoid about other countries being super-secretive that they delayed the release of Apple's G4 machine because it could perform well in encryption/decryption. Would the US allow China to have this Fling technology? Would it not try to stop certain countries (*cough* Iran, China, Lebanon, North Korea *cough*) from utilizing "super-secure" technology to transport data?
This project may be doomed to the "oh-that-was-a-neat-trick-but-where-is-it-now?" hall of fame from the start.
There's a reason why the front windshild of cars are not allowed to be tinted. Imagine if I could drive around town and run over old ladies with there being no way for me to be discoverd?
So you don't have a license plate huh? And maybe the make of your car can change? God damn, you've got a freaking Bat Mobile.
PS. The Preview button is definitely there for a reason...
Part of the worry though, might be the possibility of some day qualifying as a "target." Follow me as I go a little over-board, but bare with me.
Suppose we allow this to happen, with a little resistance, but in the end the government encroaches upon our privacy more and more. We give up a little privacy here, and a little more there. All in the name of national security, drug wars, what have you.
This is when things go wrong. What happens if people begin to fight against injustice, speak out against toxic dumping, or disagree with the political actions of the government. With all the resitricted privacy, the voice of the people is truly drowned out. Anyone who doesn't agree with the president and might not vote for him could be "quieted." It's not about your slashdot karma now, or your criminal record, it's about preserving what we have for the moments in history when they are needed.
I'm not saying either that right now our government is evil, but I'm saying that the potential for abuse is great. That is why we were given these rights in the first place. The American people are the ultimate form of checks and balances.
so it's probably easy enough for the government to monitor all communications and hone in on key words that are spoken!
It's called Echelon, and it is very real.
Echelon is "sigint." Or signal intelligence. I remember reading an article in Time Magazine shortly after Australia first announced that it was taking part in the project to monitor the worlds private and public communications. Time reported that all email, land-line phone, cell phone, newsgroup, message board, pager, etc was open to interception by this singal monitoring project.
They originally reported that it looks for key words (ie presidential threats). The monitoring has been done by computer which flags suspected transmissions and sends them off for further investigation.
Conclusion: It has long sinc been possible to monitor you phone calls. Big Brother is watching.
Wake up call to Congress? Do you honestly think congress is watching out for your privacy? The same group that supports Echelon? The same one that makes it easier to tap phone lines w/o much red tape?
I seriously doubt this is any sort of wake-up call to a politician.
First off, you don't seem to understand the fundamentals of the reasoning behind OS X. They need to be backwards compatible for three reasons:
1) They have developers already, and a sturdy base of current applications, games, etc. that need to continue to run to ease the transition.
2) The conversion of these apps must be easy.
3) The new OS needs to be rewritten to be more robust and modern.
To do this, they introduced carbon. It is VERY easy for all the Apple developers to port to carbon. Something like only 15% of the APIs that were allowed for OS 7->9 are thrown out, while allowing compatibility through carbon for the other 85%. This gives a much shorter lead time in porting.
Apple also knows that their look and feel is much different than X offers, and it would be MUCH harder and more time consuming for developers to port to an X window manager environment.
Apple allows a good level of backwards compatibility, ease of updating software for the new OS, and still produces a "modern OS." This is a business decision, not an idealistic X UI rewrite.
Check out this article posted today at MacCentral. This is the second of two article covering "Road to Mac OS X: Unix and Mac OS X Part II." The first article is here and contains some more details regarding how this merger is going to take place.
There is also a LOT more information at MacSecurity.org which goes into much more detail regarding all the ill-informed posts here on permissions and questions regarding security.
The optional installs will make the box as secure, or open, as you would imagine. But like an true server, the knowledge of the admin/user is the crucial part in the safety of the system.
All in all, these two articles and one site will give you the answers to most of the questions regarding how this project is coming together.
I think we may be in for a surprise when OS X comes out. Good or bad is yet to be determined.
Speaking strictly of K-12(US) education. College is a totally different story.
Teachers often try too hard to integrate computers in to a classroom. Often, there are too few computers to teach kids with. I think the best thing to teach kids is effective use of the Internet, comfortability with using a computer, and understanding the basics of how computers work.
Teachers are pressed toward improving standardized test scores, not on effectivly integrating computers as learning tools. Too often they aren't used correctly.
That's not necessarily true. Darwin is a very good first step for a large corporation. At least Apple is much more open about their OS than Microsoft has ever been. Microsoft is probably the worst at promoting nothing but proprietary crap.
On the plus side for open source is Darwin. The fundamentals of the BSD kernel are open sourced allowing a lot of space for people to manuever with OS X. It looks promising.
Apple has always had a loyal following and a disproportionatly large amount of freeware/shareware companies doing great things for it. There are some fantastic shareware games for the Macintosh. I think the Mac is probably waiting for a push toward open source. Maybe Mac OS X will be that shove.
For those of you truly interested in this topic, here is an article that has an interview with the CEO of Connectix regarding this issue. It's posted at MacNN.
That is not true. The problem with giving up means that they leave themselves open for Emulation on the new PSX2. While this does leave it unresolved, it's better to be unresolved for Connectix. Connectix can make money off the PSX emu for now, and later on fight with more power, money, and a semi-precident of having done this and gotten away with it before. In my opinion, Sony lost this battle.
The origin of "God" (whatever flavor of God you believe in if any) might be thought of along the same terms as relativity. We can not fathom the origin because it is on a completely different timeframe or existence. Imagine something coming from nothing. If "God" had a true beginning, it/he/she was created out of nothing, or whatever created God had to have come from nothing. So our concept of an origin might not apply to supernatural (read also: religous) phenomena. We can not conceive the timeframe or existence on that sort of level. Our laws most likely don't explain or govern God's origin.
Well, yes. But for the long haul, it is perfect. You are in NYC with your Cell. You make a call, it goes into the network, to a laser transmission device, which beams it to Japan. There it off-loads back onto the cell network (bypassing thousands of miles of local cell traffic, keeping airwaves clear) and to your friend overseas.
Long distance, invisible, laser-light transmission is being worked on right now. In fact, I work down the hall from a guy who is developing it. *If* we run out of bandwidth in the atmosphere as far as wireless is concerned, the move to invisible light is not far away, and a very fast (100 Gb/s currently) medium. Granted, it is a *very* young technology.
I understand that he mentioned ARM. When I said AMD, I was simply stating that your average AMD chip dissipates even more. I was commenting on the CISC architecture of most Wintel boxes. When complaining about power consumption, look first to the Intel and AMD world, then complain about the four G4s which eat as much power as your Pentium.
I think the author fails to see that the reason computers and the Internet have become what they are is the ease with which they facilitate human interaction. It's similar to chicken and egg: the internet evolved and now we need to look at the human interaction with it, or was it that human need to interact facilitated the Internet. The author needs to look at the human drive to be social.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a lot more progress to be made before online voting can become a reality. Authentication, verification, and privacy are all major issues.
But another interesting issue is platform support. Unless you support all platforms, online voting is not going to become reality. The fact that you would exclude people from a form of voting simply based upon their platform is not going to fly in court. Sure you can go out and physically vote, but in sparsly populated states (Montana, Arizona, etc.) this may be much harder and more time consuming than point, click, vote.
Consider the Arizona primary. The online voting allowed was Windows-only. This caused a stir (small, but still...) based on the fact that many people were locked out of voting because they choose not to use Windows.
This article discusses Arizona's online voting.
And this one talks about the disregard for all other platforms in the primary voting.
Very creative, someone moderate this up for humor.
I too would detest the situations I believe you are refering to. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Putting it in that light, I think we're better off in our new cars, with our cell phones, and our laptops.
Stress is a state of mind, even if you have a lot to do, a lot of stress comes from worrying about the little things. Put it all in prespective and relax.
MS threatened me under NDA while I was testing Office 98 for Mac in beta. Every company does this. There are sites out there that get stuff pulled at MS's request.
What about MS's fucking government trial where they force their product on other companies (Dell, Compaq) and threaten other (NetScape, Apple, RealNetworks). So what were you saying about MS being the angel in this one? Apple isn't being split in two by big-brother for their anti-competative practices.
That's a pretty ignorant statement to make. Apple followed a trend that consumers were looking for, and it really paid off. If you call that unimpressive, at least give it good business sense.
The iMac is positioned well in price. At first, it doesn't look like it, until you see all the WinTel systems that have this:
*:Monitor sold separatly
That is the difference. Apple made a good-looking machine, with good features, and everything is included. I know that the majority of the people who post here probably don't even care what they wear to work, but 90% of the world does, and they like to have a CPU that is "cute" or fashionable.
Third, Apple included a lot of features (Firewire, USB 64-128 RAM, 6-10 gig HD, good monitor) at a low enough price to grab people who aren't programming or high-end video editing on board. That is 99% of the computer using world.
So from your point of view, Apple may not be impressive, but if you look at it from a business point of view, they blew the roof off. They had the number one selling line of CPUs for something like 2 years.
At least give credit where it's due, and open up your closed mind.
I work for a large networking/communications companies (one of the big three in the US) and we are pretty strict about this stuff too. You leave and aren't careful, and they pad lock your door, investigate, and call lawyers.
Exactly. And did it stop anybody, anybody at all, from getting hard crypto when he wanted it?
So you think that the US government won't mind if Chinga was able to completely hide all their communications from them? If Fling works (in theory) then the US would just let it go as if it was no big deal?
Ahem. US tried to limit exports of hard crypto. The main result was that now a lot of crypto work is done outside of the US (and I have a nice RSA-in-Perl t-shirt). Hard crypto is out of the bag.
Yes, crypto is, but Fling isn't hard crypto. If (that's a big if), Fling could be the next format for data security, the US wouldn't let it out. Just like it used to severly limit hard crypto.
Sure this sounds great in theory, but considering the current state around the world, how would this be received?
The economy is globalizing quickly, and daily interaction across the globe is paramount. So considering China just recently picked Linux over Windows95/98 because it can examine the source code to make sure there aren't any caveats that the US could use to sabotage them in a crisis, and on the other hand, the US is so paranoid about other countries being super-secretive that they delayed the release of Apple's G4 machine because it could perform well in encryption/decryption. Would the US allow China to have this Fling technology? Would it not try to stop certain countries (*cough* Iran, China, Lebanon, North Korea *cough*) from utilizing "super-secure" technology to transport data?
This project may be doomed to the "oh-that-was-a-neat-trick-but-where-is-it-now?" hall of fame from the start.
There's a reason why the front windshild of cars are not allowed to be tinted. Imagine if I could drive around town and run over old ladies with there being no way for me to be discoverd?
So you don't have a license plate huh? And maybe the make of your car can change? God damn, you've got a freaking Bat Mobile.
PS. The Preview button is definitely there for a reason...
Part of the worry though, might be the possibility of some day qualifying as a "target." Follow me as I go a little over-board, but bare with me.
Suppose we allow this to happen, with a little resistance, but in the end the government encroaches upon our privacy more and more. We give up a little privacy here, and a little more there. All in the name of national security, drug wars, what have you.
This is when things go wrong. What happens if people begin to fight against injustice, speak out against toxic dumping, or disagree with the political actions of the government. With all the resitricted privacy, the voice of the people is truly drowned out. Anyone who doesn't agree with the president and might not vote for him could be "quieted." It's not about your slashdot karma now, or your criminal record, it's about preserving what we have for the moments in history when they are needed.
I'm not saying either that right now our government is evil, but I'm saying that the potential for abuse is great. That is why we were given these rights in the first place. The American people are the ultimate form of checks and balances.
so it's probably easy enough for the government to monitor all communications and hone in on key words that are spoken!
It's called Echelon, and it is very real.
Echelon is "sigint." Or signal intelligence. I remember reading an article in Time Magazine shortly after Australia first announced that it was taking part in the project to monitor the worlds private and public communications. Time reported that all email, land-line phone, cell phone, newsgroup, message board, pager, etc was open to interception by this singal monitoring project.
They originally reported that it looks for key words (ie presidential threats). The monitoring has been done by computer which flags suspected transmissions and sends them off for further investigation.
Conclusion: It has long sinc been possible to monitor you phone calls. Big Brother is watching.
Wake up call to Congress? Do you honestly think congress is watching out for your privacy? The same group that supports Echelon? The same one that makes it easier to tap phone lines w/o much red tape?
I seriously doubt this is any sort of wake-up call to a politician.
But the curiosity to start this dissection of free knowledge needs to be spawned somewhere. That is the importance of teaching children...
First off, you don't seem to understand the fundamentals of the reasoning behind OS X. They need to be backwards compatible for three reasons:
1) They have developers already, and a sturdy base of current applications, games, etc. that need to continue to run to ease the transition.
2) The conversion of these apps must be easy.
3) The new OS needs to be rewritten to be more robust and modern.
To do this, they introduced carbon. It is VERY easy for all the Apple developers to port to carbon. Something like only 15% of the APIs that were allowed for OS 7->9 are thrown out, while allowing compatibility through carbon for the other 85%. This gives a much shorter lead time in porting.
Apple also knows that their look and feel is much different than X offers, and it would be MUCH harder and more time consuming for developers to port to an X window manager environment.
Apple allows a good level of backwards compatibility, ease of updating software for the new OS, and still produces a "modern OS." This is a business decision, not an idealistic X UI rewrite.
Check out this article posted today at MacCentral. This is the second of two article covering "Road to Mac OS X: Unix and Mac OS X Part II." The first article is here and contains some more details regarding how this merger is going to take place.
There is also a LOT more information at MacSecurity.org which goes into much more detail regarding all the ill-informed posts here on permissions and questions regarding security.
The optional installs will make the box as secure, or open, as you would imagine. But like an true server, the knowledge of the admin/user is the crucial part in the safety of the system.
All in all, these two articles and one site will give you the answers to most of the questions regarding how this project is coming together.
I think we may be in for a surprise when OS X comes out. Good or bad is yet to be determined.
Speaking strictly of K-12(US) education. College is a totally different story.
Teachers often try too hard to integrate computers in to a classroom. Often, there are too few computers to teach kids with. I think the best thing to teach kids is effective use of the Internet, comfortability with using a computer, and understanding the basics of how computers work.
Teachers are pressed toward improving standardized test scores, not on effectivly integrating computers as learning tools. Too often they aren't used correctly.
That's not necessarily true. Darwin is a very good first step for a large corporation. At least Apple is much more open about their OS than Microsoft has ever been. Microsoft is probably the worst at promoting nothing but proprietary crap.
On the plus side for open source is Darwin. The fundamentals of the BSD kernel are open sourced allowing a lot of space for people to manuever with OS X. It looks promising.
Apple has always had a loyal following and a disproportionatly large amount of freeware/shareware companies doing great things for it. There are some fantastic shareware games for the Macintosh. I think the Mac is probably waiting for a push toward open source. Maybe Mac OS X will be that shove.
For those of you truly interested in this topic, here is an article that has an interview with the CEO of Connectix regarding this issue. It's posted at MacNN.
That is not true. The problem with giving up means that they leave themselves open for Emulation on the new PSX2. While this does leave it unresolved, it's better to be unresolved for Connectix. Connectix can make money off the PSX emu for now, and later on fight with more power, money, and a semi-precident of having done this and gotten away with it before. In my opinion, Sony lost this battle.
The origin of "God" (whatever flavor of God you believe in if any) might be thought of along the same terms as relativity. We can not fathom the origin because it is on a completely different timeframe or existence. Imagine something coming from nothing. If "God" had a true beginning, it/he/she was created out of nothing, or whatever created God had to have come from nothing. So our concept of an origin might not apply to supernatural (read also: religous) phenomena. We can not conceive the timeframe or existence on that sort of level. Our laws most likely don't explain or govern God's origin.
Well, yes. But for the long haul, it is perfect. You are in NYC with your Cell. You make a call, it goes into the network, to a laser transmission device, which beams it to Japan. There it off-loads back onto the cell network (bypassing thousands of miles of local cell traffic, keeping airwaves clear) and to your friend overseas.
Long distance, invisible, laser-light transmission is being worked on right now. In fact, I work down the hall from a guy who is developing it. *If* we run out of bandwidth in the atmosphere as far as wireless is concerned, the move to invisible light is not far away, and a very fast (100 Gb/s currently) medium. Granted, it is a *very* young technology.
I understand that he mentioned ARM. When I said AMD, I was simply stating that your average AMD chip dissipates even more. I was commenting on the CISC architecture of most Wintel boxes. When complaining about power consumption, look first to the Intel and AMD world, then complain about the four G4s which eat as much power as your Pentium.
I think the author fails to see that the reason computers and the Internet have become what they are is the ease with which they facilitate human interaction. It's similar to chicken and egg: the internet evolved and now we need to look at the human interaction with it, or was it that human need to interact facilitated the Internet. The author needs to look at the human drive to be social.