yea I got little kids that don't need to be hearing certain things. Its called adult responsibility.
Exactly! It's your adult responsibility to make sure your kids are not watching smut. If you leave your 5 year-old unattended in front of the TV with the remote, then that's your parenting fail. If you can't trust your 12 year-old to not watch smut when you're not around, then again, that's your [NSFW] parenting fail. Expecting the government to instill and uphold morality in your family is ridiculous. That is your job.
There has always been opportunity for kids to make poor moral choices and be exposed to media and events that were outside the parents' moral-comfort zone. If you lived in 18th century Paris, you had the choice to go to the guillotine, or you could keep your kids home. It has and always will be up to the parents. If you let your kids run wild and don't take the time to set expectations, they're going to do wrong. Expecting some hand in the sky, or white-house, or capital hill to come in and do it for you is just plain crazy.
Spend time with your kids. Talk to them. Explain why you make choices and how you feel about their choices. No amount of legislation will substitute that.
I hope we can find a better way to "regulate" OTA TV and radio. I prefer a more libertarian approach here. If CBS wants to show boobies after a reasonable time, say, 9:00 (the internationally accepted "Boobie Hour), have swear words and show people's heads exploding like a melon, let them. The market will sort things out. People will either watch and support CBS' decision and CBS will show more boobies. If people don't watch, CBS will move away from that type of programing, or go out of business. Little kids that are up at 9:00 watching porn are already suffering from parenting fail and no amount of FCC nanying is going to save them.
If all the OTA networks paid say.5% (or some other equally made up number) of their advertising revenue into a PBS fund that focused on education, solid news and community events, that could satisfy everybody. Anybody who wants to watch TV at the boobie hour, without seeing boobies still has an option and the rest of us can see our boobies and hear fill of swear words. Problem solved. Next?
Besides, I think that seeing a flaming and charred body fly out of an exploding meth-lab-camper on Bones this week is way more scarring to me and just about any kid than hearing an occasional "fuck".
You just made my day! I was wondering when the faithful 1999 game of Doom would come to light. We probably need to start impeachment hearings before Obama is even sworn into office due to his affiliation with such a dangerous person as Kevin Mitnick.
After all, we no longer need to FREE KEVIN because KEVIN FREE. He is free to point out security holes and run his security consulting firm. What ever are we going to do?
Hehe, I had an old Subaru that had a FREE KEVIN sticker on it. People used to pull up along side me on city streets, parking lots, stop lights, even the highway and ask, "WHO'S KEVIN!?". It was a special challenge to explain that at a 60 second stop light, or 75 mph.
It is refreshing to see that Obama is pulling from academia and groups such as ICANN, rather than just from industry to populate his cabinet. I believe that those that have served in industry can offer some of the best insight into policy, but choosing a significant number of executives definitely skews policy in the wrong direction. For that matter, having too many of any one group leads to problems.
I hope that Obama can see beyond what his party wants, and make decisions based on advice from all sides. Lincoln and Kennedy were both known for filling their cabinets with diverse members from a wide political and social background. After the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs Kennedy sought to limit group think - where all dissenting opinions are squashed by excessive group homogeneity - Kennedy specifically divided up similar advisors and brought in outside experts to help successfully diffuse the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had the political savvy to understand that difficult decisions have no right answer, just answers that are more or less positive for everyone.
Hopefully Obama will balance his cabinet appointments in a similar way. Drawing from universities is a good start, but some industry experts mixed into the bunch is an excellent step in the right direction as well. As L. B. Johnson said of Hoover, "I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in." It's better to have dissenting opinions inside helping you make positive choices, rather than showering you from outside and making your life more difficult.
Indeed, I didn't do my research carefully enough. Thanks for pointing that out.
I think that even if FISA taps are biased, at least there is some oversight. I appreciate that there is, if nothing else, an illusion of oversight. There is a judge who is not directly linked to the investigation reviewing and vetting the requests. Under the current warrantless system, no one outside the investigation ever gets to know what's going on. There's not even an illusion of oversight. We all just have to hope that one of our acquaintances doesn't look dodgy enough to justify a wiretap on us.
FISA - The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - of 1978 provided the president a method to tap communications without a warrant in a "Ticking Time Bomb" situation. FISA allows investigators begin surveillance without proper documents as long as the activities are reported to a judge for review within 72 hours. In any Time-Bomb scenario, 72 hours should be ample time for the investigators to gather the needed information to prove that their hasty wire-tap was legitimate. The judge will sign the warrant and everybody is happy.
In any other case, the judge will surveillance must be shut down and the records sealed immediately. This law has been so effective that out of the hundreds of FISA taps exactly ZERO have been denied.
This is why the Bush administrations new warrantless wiretapping is so distressing. The system wasn't broken! It worked very well. This is simply yet another attempt by the administration to do an end run around due-process. Bush and Cheney have done more to erode the constitution than any other duo in this country's history.
Lets all hope that our next president will restore some order to the land and respect the laws that provide his power. If we allow our executive to choose which laws he will follow, we're on a short trip to the disaster that won't be unlike Russia's "Democracy".
This sounds like a whole lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt. developers are already subject to upgrading software as patches emerge. Business clients are likely to push out security and operability patches as they are released. They will demand the same level of service they receive now with Azure if the patches break their apps. Remember, new != scarry; new==different.
Magnetic fields won't have much effect on an RFID chip. Maybe a really strong one like an MRI might provide would toast the chip, but I doubt it. The chip is tuned to radio, not magnetic flux.
It will be considered a mangled document. Never mind that it's also an old style passport, if the RFID tag is broken then it's considered the same as if the passport was dipped in ink or burned too badly to read.
Having a toasted RFID chip would be much like having a gunked up, but not deliberately defaced passport number. The OCR machines are notoriously bad at reading the data at the bottom of the document. A fried, but not obviously physically damaged chip would appear to the border offical as if the chip or the reader had malfunctioned. They would most likely simply input the data by hand and send you on your way. If you use a hole punch to remove the chip, it's a completely different story. Then it looks like you're up to no good. They key hear is to look innocent;)
A moulding nail works great for smashing the hell out of just the RFID chip. My new AmEx came with one and I immediately crushed the hell out of it. I was thinking about doing the same to my new passport when it arrives. I decided that the plausible deniability might be a little slim for a precisely placed hole over the chip though. Perhaps another destructive method might be in order. Who knows what might happen if I accidentaly stood too close to a strong microwave emitter... I hear that the microwave oven is good for drying out wet passports too.
How abvout erasing the memory of the first time you had warm apple pie? Then, you get to try it for the first time every night.
That's the saddest thing I think I've ever heard. If I lost my "apple pie" memories, I'd loose all the great moments of sitting at my grandparents house at thanksgiving, tasting warm pie on a brisk fall day and all the other wonderful associated memories. Memories are amazing things and tied to so many different parts of our being.
All this talk about removing great movies, books, events etc. fails to realize what makes those things so great. It's not just that the book is wonderful to experience, but rather your interaction with the book. Harry Potter was fun to read, but I've already gone and erased it naturally. It was entertaining but had no depth. It didn't stay with me for a reason. To Kill a Mocking Bird, on the other hand is so fantastic because I've read it half a dozen times and it stays with me. I think about the characters, I imagine what it would be like to talk to them, what they look like, how they would react. They become almost real to me. If I lost that book, I would loose all the depth and beauty that I have created on top of what Harper Lee brought to me.
Perhaps I love the book so much because of the moment that it entered my life. If I had read it at another time, perhaps it wouldn't have been so special. I'm pretty sure that if I watched Star Wars for the first time at 30, with no knowledge of the SW universe and mythos, I would think (rightly so) that Mark Hammil is a hack, Kerri Fisher can't act and that the screen play was written by a sixth grader. I now choose to overlook those short comings because I grew up with Star Wars. It rocked my world as a little kid. I loved the ewoks, played with my AT-AT for hours, desperately wanted a light saber, and refused to go into the basement until my dad took down the scary-ass poster of Darth Vader (I thought he was going to reach out of the poster and choke me). If I lost all that, Star Wars would just be another over hyped piece of 70s junk that got stuck to my shoe.
Our memories are fragile complex things, erasing or losing even a few of them has potentially drastic effects on who we are and how we think. I don't want nobody touchin' my brain!
That is the most amazing and terrible idea I have ever heard. How wonderful would it be to help soldiers not feel guilty about doing their duty and yet so utterly terrifying. Part of what makes war a "last resort" option is the horror that it causes. If we removed the pain of war, perhaps it would become far to easy to wage it.
While I do not wish PTSD upon any person, and wish that no person should ever fight in a war ever again, I cannot condone taking the sting out of war. Contraptions like remote bombing drones, cruise missiles and robotic fighters remove one side from the killing and take away the reality and the horror of war. War is terrible, awful, hellish and traumatic. The trauma and horror are what make us abhor it. Every time we remove one of those elements, we make it easier for us to wage war. It also makes it easier for us to kill them, whomever they may be.
Anything that makes it easier for us to kill them takes away a little bit of our humanity. Robotic killing machines, remorseless soldiers and supid ideas like Rods From God all take the killer too far away from their victim. It's significantly easier to maim and kill when it's a glob of pixels on the screen. Seeing and knowing the person you are killing makes it much more difficult. War should remain messy and terrible; it's the mess and the horror of it that makes us think twice about waging it.
I would have been amazed if a structure as complex as this worked the first time the switch was thrown. Think about how simply enormous the LHC is. It has miles of wire, gigantic magnets that have to be perfectly synced and placed with amazing accuracy. It's not like LHCs are turned out every week. Gigantic super colliders are HARD to build.
They'll eventually iron out all the problems and can proceed to cause the world to end.
I don't think the problem is the lack of caring, but rather the lack of understanding. When I talk to my mom about this problem, her eyes glaze over and I can tell that she can't quite wrap her head around this problem. She doesn't get the mechanics of the problem and gets frustrated. Once she's frustrated, she can't move on to the other points and develop an opinion.
I saw this when I sold computers and cell phones. People would come in, not knowing what they wanted, try to ask some questions and then end up frustrated when they didn't "get it". They would usually leave empty handed, or buy the one that fit their price point the best. It's not that they didn't care, but rather they couldn't hold all the variables in their head. This problem is similar, non-technical people can't quite conceive of the problem and its intricacies so they'd rather not be frustrated and just ignore it.
This means that those of us that do "get it" need to be responsible in advocating for proper solutions.
Why don't we just go with a web based voting system. Everyone could vote from home. Surely noone could figure out how to break that.
You're right. The inter-tubes are perfectly secure and safe. It's unpossible that anyone could break them;)
Ooh, how about american idol style. And the candidate you vote for could send you a personalized message back asking for more donations.
Now yer on to sumthin. Vote by texting REPUB or DEMO to 6657. Normaltextmessagingfeesapply.
The idea of web voting is a really interesting one, with some really interesting consequences. If you look at broadband penetration and home computing numbers, you'll see an interesting pattern. The highest connectivity to the web is among affluent white folks. These are the same folks that shop from their bathrobes at 2:00 am.
One possible consequence of online voting is that the bathrobe-shoppers are more likely to vote than if they have to go to a poling place. Because they are more likely to vote and represent only one segment of the population, the vote can become skewed in one particular direction or another. It could effectively disenfranchise other groups that are less likely to have computers at home.
I mean this is the sort of thing which Open Source would be perfect for.
There would be no shortage of coders willing to review the code and point out any problems.
It would help with the "open" part of "open and fair" election
You make an excellent point. A community reviewed and verifiable voting machine system is the best way to ensure that the voters have faith in the vote. Democracy as a concept is worthless if the voters have no ability to verify the vote. If voters can not have faith in the system of elections, then the voters cannot have faith in their government. Electronic voting machines are eroding voters faith in their government and faith in democracy. It's hard to convince people to trust their government if they can't even trust the system that elects the government.
How can law makers think that it is OK to buy and deploy unproven, closed-source devices to measure elections? There is no other segment of our society that would allow such a mission critical piece of technology to be deployed without independent or redundant systems. My electric tea kettle has been more rigorously tested by third parties than these voting machines.
The only reasons I can come up with are these: 1. The senators are deaf, dumb and can't hear our collective screams or 2. Appreciate the uncertainty that electronic voting machines provide. I believe both could be true varying degrees for most of our representatives. We have certainly all been screaming enough that they should have heard us by now.
What can we do? I've written to my representatives only to get a form letter back acknowledging their sincere concern for my "issue". When I lived in Colorado, I insisted on voting by mail. At least vote-by-mail provided a physically countable ballot. Unfortunately, in the 2004 election, my county clerk FORGOT to mail out a chunk of ballots and I had to vote by fax because I was out of the country. Perhaps the absolute worst way I could possibly vote other than a touch screen.
If you are afflicted by touch screen voting, I suggest registering to vote by mail. At least then there's a chance that some real person will really count your ballot and really record the proper vote. Seems like only a chance these days though.
Yeah, but can its new-fangled computer brain defy the laws of physics and jump the bus over an incomplete highway overpass at 70 mph? I didn't think so. Until we can make an artificial replacement for Keanu Reeves, I won't trust it. It's gotta be able to say, "I know kung-fu" too.
I suppose it's good business sense to write software for the most popular platform. With around 75% of the OS hits being from Windows, it would be prudent to sink resources into a windows browser, rather than Mac or Linux.
On the other hand, Mac use is steadily climbing and climbing among young people. Young people are typically drawn to free and shiny (one might say, Chromed) things. They're also good at starting and perpetuating trends. In that light, it might make sense for Google to sink more resources into making an OS X version. It's important to not only have a good product, but to make it fashionable to use that product. Lord knows how many people are still using IE, not because they like it, but rather because they don't know there's anything faster or better out there out there.
They might as well forget about Linux though. Everybody knows that Linux users are crotchety and only really want to use wget and for really special pages, lynx. I for one can't remember the last time I used a window manager and LIKED that new fangled environment. Too many colors and flashing lights, it's like those arcades that them darn kids like to visit.
I've just spent the last two days with a POS gateway, Knopix and many, many hard drives dangling out of the case while I write randomized cruft to the 600 some gigs of old drives.
I guess I have to take the author's word for it that the recovery companies refused to work on the drive and disregard the "conventional wisdom". I'm really tempted to format one of the drives, dump some data, dd it and see if I can pull anything worth while off of it. Has anyone tried this themselves with any of the forensics tools out there?
Well, I'm almost done with all the old drives; I might as well finish up the project.
Picasa is Free. Free!=production ready in most cases. Yes, I know linux is free, air is free and so are many other things. However, most FREE software is not made with the professional, full time user in mind. Get over it and get a job. Photoshop isn't THAT expensive. Besides, there's apps like Bibble that are VERY reasonable
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yea I got little kids that don't need to be hearing certain things. Its called adult responsibility.
Exactly! It's your adult responsibility to make sure your kids are not watching smut. If you leave your 5 year-old unattended in front of the TV with the remote, then that's your parenting fail. If you can't trust your 12 year-old to not watch smut when you're not around, then again, that's your [NSFW] parenting fail. Expecting the government to instill and uphold morality in your family is ridiculous. That is your job.
There has always been opportunity for kids to make poor moral choices and be exposed to media and events that were outside the parents' moral-comfort zone. If you lived in 18th century Paris, you had the choice to go to the guillotine, or you could keep your kids home. It has and always will be up to the parents. If you let your kids run wild and don't take the time to set expectations, they're going to do wrong. Expecting some hand in the sky, or white-house, or capital hill to come in and do it for you is just plain crazy.
Spend time with your kids. Talk to them. Explain why you make choices and how you feel about their choices. No amount of legislation will substitute that.
I hope we can find a better way to "regulate" OTA TV and radio. I prefer a more libertarian approach here. If CBS wants to show boobies after a reasonable time, say, 9:00 (the internationally accepted "Boobie Hour), have swear words and show people's heads exploding like a melon, let them. The market will sort things out. People will either watch and support CBS' decision and CBS will show more boobies. If people don't watch, CBS will move away from that type of programing, or go out of business. Little kids that are up at 9:00 watching porn are already suffering from parenting fail and no amount of FCC nanying is going to save them.
If all the OTA networks paid say .5% (or some other equally made up number) of their advertising revenue into a PBS fund that focused on education, solid news and community events, that could satisfy everybody. Anybody who wants to watch TV at the boobie hour, without seeing boobies still has an option and the rest of us can see our boobies and hear fill of swear words. Problem solved. Next?
Besides, I think that seeing a flaming and charred body fly out of an exploding meth-lab-camper on Bones this week is way more scarring to me and just about any kid than hearing an occasional "fuck".
You just made my day! I was wondering when the faithful 1999 game of Doom would come to light. We probably need to start impeachment hearings before Obama is even sworn into office due to his affiliation with such a dangerous person as Kevin Mitnick.
After all, we no longer need to FREE KEVIN because KEVIN FREE . He is free to point out security holes and run his security consulting firm. What ever are we going to do?
Hehe, I had an old Subaru that had a FREE KEVIN sticker on it. People used to pull up along side me on city streets, parking lots, stop lights, even the highway and ask, "WHO'S KEVIN!?". It was a special challenge to explain that at a 60 second stop light, or 75 mph.
It is refreshing to see that Obama is pulling from academia and groups such as ICANN, rather than just from industry to populate his cabinet. I believe that those that have served in industry can offer some of the best insight into policy, but choosing a significant number of executives definitely skews policy in the wrong direction. For that matter, having too many of any one group leads to problems.
I hope that Obama can see beyond what his party wants, and make decisions based on advice from all sides. Lincoln and Kennedy were both known for filling their cabinets with diverse members from a wide political and social background. After the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs Kennedy sought to limit group think - where all dissenting opinions are squashed by excessive group homogeneity - Kennedy specifically divided up similar advisors and brought in outside experts to help successfully diffuse the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had the political savvy to understand that difficult decisions have no right answer, just answers that are more or less positive for everyone.
Hopefully Obama will balance his cabinet appointments in a similar way. Drawing from universities is a good start, but some industry experts mixed into the bunch is an excellent step in the right direction as well. As L. B. Johnson said of Hoover, "I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in." It's better to have dissenting opinions inside helping you make positive choices, rather than showering you from outside and making your life more difficult.
Indeed, I didn't do my research carefully enough. Thanks for pointing that out.
I think that even if FISA taps are biased, at least there is some oversight. I appreciate that there is, if nothing else, an illusion of oversight. There is a judge who is not directly linked to the investigation reviewing and vetting the requests. Under the current warrantless system, no one outside the investigation ever gets to know what's going on. There's not even an illusion of oversight. We all just have to hope that one of our acquaintances doesn't look dodgy enough to justify a wiretap on us.
FISA - The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - of 1978 provided the president a method to tap communications without a warrant in a "Ticking Time Bomb" situation. FISA allows investigators begin surveillance without proper documents as long as the activities are reported to a judge for review within 72 hours. In any Time-Bomb scenario, 72 hours should be ample time for the investigators to gather the needed information to prove that their hasty wire-tap was legitimate. The judge will sign the warrant and everybody is happy.
In any other case, the judge will surveillance must be shut down and the records sealed immediately. This law has been so effective that out of the hundreds of FISA taps exactly ZERO have been denied.
This is why the Bush administrations new warrantless wiretapping is so distressing. The system wasn't broken! It worked very well. This is simply yet another attempt by the administration to do an end run around due-process. Bush and Cheney have done more to erode the constitution than any other duo in this country's history.
Lets all hope that our next president will restore some order to the land and respect the laws that provide his power. If we allow our executive to choose which laws he will follow, we're on a short trip to the disaster that won't be unlike Russia's "Democracy".
This sounds like a whole lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt. developers are already subject to upgrading software as patches emerge. Business clients are likely to push out security and operability patches as they are released. They will demand the same level of service they receive now with Azure if the patches break their apps. Remember, new != scarry; new==different.
Magnetic fields won't have much effect on an RFID chip. Maybe a really strong one like an MRI might provide would toast the chip, but I doubt it. The chip is tuned to radio, not magnetic flux.
It will be considered a mangled document. Never mind that it's also an old style passport, if the RFID tag is broken then it's considered the same as if the passport was dipped in ink or burned too badly to read.
Having a toasted RFID chip would be much like having a gunked up, but not deliberately defaced passport number. The OCR machines are notoriously bad at reading the data at the bottom of the document. A fried, but not obviously physically damaged chip would appear to the border offical as if the chip or the reader had malfunctioned. They would most likely simply input the data by hand and send you on your way. If you use a hole punch to remove the chip, it's a completely different story. Then it looks like you're up to no good. They key hear is to look innocent ;)
A moulding nail works great for smashing the hell out of just the RFID chip. My new AmEx came with one and I immediately crushed the hell out of it. I was thinking about doing the same to my new passport when it arrives. I decided that the plausible deniability might be a little slim for a precisely placed hole over the chip though. Perhaps another destructive method might be in order. Who knows what might happen if I accidentaly stood too close to a strong microwave emitter... I hear that the microwave oven is good for drying out wet passports too.
How abvout erasing the memory of the first time you had warm apple pie? Then, you get to try it for the first time every night.
That's the saddest thing I think I've ever heard. If I lost my "apple pie" memories, I'd loose all the great moments of sitting at my grandparents house at thanksgiving, tasting warm pie on a brisk fall day and all the other wonderful associated memories. Memories are amazing things and tied to so many different parts of our being.
All this talk about removing great movies, books, events etc. fails to realize what makes those things so great. It's not just that the book is wonderful to experience, but rather your interaction with the book. Harry Potter was fun to read, but I've already gone and erased it naturally. It was entertaining but had no depth. It didn't stay with me for a reason. To Kill a Mocking Bird, on the other hand is so fantastic because I've read it half a dozen times and it stays with me. I think about the characters, I imagine what it would be like to talk to them, what they look like, how they would react. They become almost real to me. If I lost that book, I would loose all the depth and beauty that I have created on top of what Harper Lee brought to me.
Perhaps I love the book so much because of the moment that it entered my life. If I had read it at another time, perhaps it wouldn't have been so special. I'm pretty sure that if I watched Star Wars for the first time at 30, with no knowledge of the SW universe and mythos, I would think (rightly so) that Mark Hammil is a hack, Kerri Fisher can't act and that the screen play was written by a sixth grader. I now choose to overlook those short comings because I grew up with Star Wars. It rocked my world as a little kid. I loved the ewoks, played with my AT-AT for hours, desperately wanted a light saber, and refused to go into the basement until my dad took down the scary-ass poster of Darth Vader (I thought he was going to reach out of the poster and choke me). If I lost all that, Star Wars would just be another over hyped piece of 70s junk that got stuck to my shoe.
Our memories are fragile complex things, erasing or losing even a few of them has potentially drastic effects on who we are and how we think. I don't want nobody touchin' my brain!
That is the most amazing and terrible idea I have ever heard. How wonderful would it be to help soldiers not feel guilty about doing their duty and yet so utterly terrifying. Part of what makes war a "last resort" option is the horror that it causes. If we removed the pain of war, perhaps it would become far to easy to wage it.
While I do not wish PTSD upon any person, and wish that no person should ever fight in a war ever again, I cannot condone taking the sting out of war. Contraptions like remote bombing drones, cruise missiles and robotic fighters remove one side from the killing and take away the reality and the horror of war. War is terrible, awful, hellish and traumatic. The trauma and horror are what make us abhor it. Every time we remove one of those elements, we make it easier for us to wage war. It also makes it easier for us to kill them, whomever they may be.
Anything that makes it easier for us to kill them takes away a little bit of our humanity. Robotic killing machines, remorseless soldiers and supid ideas like Rods From God all take the killer too far away from their victim. It's significantly easier to maim and kill when it's a glob of pixels on the screen. Seeing and knowing the person you are killing makes it much more difficult. War should remain messy and terrible; it's the mess and the horror of it that makes us think twice about waging it.
NASA will flip a switch and kick in the backup system.
The story is pretty light on details. It reads like a 6th grader wrote it.
Totally off topic, but I love your sig!
Don't forget: It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere.
Red Dwarf is quite possibly one of best sci-fi comedies ever to be produced.
I would have been amazed if a structure as complex as this worked the first time the switch was thrown. Think about how simply enormous the LHC is. It has miles of wire, gigantic magnets that have to be perfectly synced and placed with amazing accuracy. It's not like LHCs are turned out every week. Gigantic super colliders are HARD to build.
They'll eventually iron out all the problems and can proceed to cause the world to end.
I don't think the problem is the lack of caring, but rather the lack of understanding. When I talk to my mom about this problem, her eyes glaze over and I can tell that she can't quite wrap her head around this problem. She doesn't get the mechanics of the problem and gets frustrated. Once she's frustrated, she can't move on to the other points and develop an opinion.
I saw this when I sold computers and cell phones. People would come in, not knowing what they wanted, try to ask some questions and then end up frustrated when they didn't "get it". They would usually leave empty handed, or buy the one that fit their price point the best. It's not that they didn't care, but rather they couldn't hold all the variables in their head. This problem is similar, non-technical people can't quite conceive of the problem and its intricacies so they'd rather not be frustrated and just ignore it.
This means that those of us that do "get it" need to be responsible in advocating for proper solutions.
Why don't we just go with a web based voting system. Everyone could vote from home. Surely noone could figure out how to break that.
You're right. The inter-tubes are perfectly secure and safe. It's unpossible that anyone could break them ;)
Ooh, how about american idol style. And the candidate you vote for could send you a personalized message back asking for more donations.
Now yer on to sumthin. Vote by texting REPUB or DEMO to 6657. Normaltextmessagingfeesapply.
The idea of web voting is a really interesting one, with some really interesting consequences. If you look at broadband penetration and home computing numbers, you'll see an interesting pattern. The highest connectivity to the web is among affluent white folks. These are the same folks that shop from their bathrobes at 2:00 am.
One possible consequence of online voting is that the bathrobe-shoppers are more likely to vote than if they have to go to a poling place. Because they are more likely to vote and represent only one segment of the population, the vote can become skewed in one particular direction or another. It could effectively disenfranchise other groups that are less likely to have computers at home.
I mean this is the sort of thing which Open Source would be perfect for. There would be no shortage of coders willing to review the code and point out any problems. It would help with the "open" part of "open and fair" election
You make an excellent point. A community reviewed and verifiable voting machine system is the best way to ensure that the voters have faith in the vote. Democracy as a concept is worthless if the voters have no ability to verify the vote. If voters can not have faith in the system of elections, then the voters cannot have faith in their government. Electronic voting machines are eroding voters faith in their government and faith in democracy. It's hard to convince people to trust their government if they can't even trust the system that elects the government.
How can law makers think that it is OK to buy and deploy unproven, closed-source devices to measure elections? There is no other segment of our society that would allow such a mission critical piece of technology to be deployed without independent or redundant systems. My electric tea kettle has been more rigorously tested by third parties than these voting machines.
The only reasons I can come up with are these: 1. The senators are deaf, dumb and can't hear our collective screams or 2. Appreciate the uncertainty that electronic voting machines provide. I believe both could be true varying degrees for most of our representatives. We have certainly all been screaming enough that they should have heard us by now.
What can we do? I've written to my representatives only to get a form letter back acknowledging their sincere concern for my "issue". When I lived in Colorado, I insisted on voting by mail. At least vote-by-mail provided a physically countable ballot. Unfortunately, in the 2004 election, my county clerk FORGOT to mail out a chunk of ballots and I had to vote by fax because I was out of the country. Perhaps the absolute worst way I could possibly vote other than a touch screen.
If you are afflicted by touch screen voting, I suggest registering to vote by mail. At least then there's a chance that some real person will really count your ballot and really record the proper vote. Seems like only a chance these days though.
come to think of it, Keanu is just this side of a clever IRC bot.
Yeah, but can its new-fangled computer brain defy the laws of physics and jump the bus over an incomplete highway overpass at 70 mph? I didn't think so. Until we can make an artificial replacement for Keanu Reeves, I won't trust it. It's gotta be able to say, "I know kung-fu" too.
I suppose it's good business sense to write software for the most popular platform. With around 75% of the OS hits being from Windows, it would be prudent to sink resources into a windows browser, rather than Mac or Linux.
On the other hand, Mac use is steadily climbing and climbing among young people. Young people are typically drawn to free and shiny (one might say, Chromed) things. They're also good at starting and perpetuating trends. In that light, it might make sense for Google to sink more resources into making an OS X version. It's important to not only have a good product, but to make it fashionable to use that product. Lord knows how many people are still using IE, not because they like it, but rather because they don't know there's anything faster or better out there out there.
They might as well forget about Linux though. Everybody knows that Linux users are crotchety and only really want to use wget and for really special pages, lynx. I for one can't remember the last time I used a window manager and LIKED that new fangled environment. Too many colors and flashing lights, it's like those arcades that them darn kids like to visit.
I've just spent the last two days with a POS gateway, Knopix and many, many hard drives dangling out of the case while I write randomized cruft to the 600 some gigs of old drives.
I guess I have to take the author's word for it that the recovery companies refused to work on the drive and disregard the "conventional wisdom". I'm really tempted to format one of the drives, dump some data, dd it and see if I can pull anything worth while off of it. Has anyone tried this themselves with any of the forensics tools out there?
Well, I'm almost done with all the old drives; I might as well finish up the project.
Probably. Wine is made by the crossover people. I just haven't taken the time to try it.
Picasa is Free. Free!=production ready in most cases. Yes, I know linux is free, air is free and so are many other things. However, most FREE software is not made with the professional, full time user in mind. Get over it and get a job. Photoshop isn't THAT expensive. Besides, there's apps like Bibble that are VERY reasonable
Damnit I took the troll bait. I'm done for.