I modded my own PS2. Guess how many pirated games I have?
NONE.
I modded my PS2 so I can use it to play imports, and region DVD's, VCD's, MP3's and do whatever else I want. I also did it just for the principle of the thing:
Every DVD player I own is region-free and has no lockouts.
I'm not about to have MY hardware tell me what I can and can't do.
If my car had a speed limiter, I'd remove that too. If I own the equipment, I'm not about to let someone else impose stupid, artificial restrictions on what I can do.
And the thing you don't realize is this also means the muggers have guns.
Yes, because if guns are illegal there is absolutely no way that a criminal might gain access to 1920's technology, especially since it's a given that he's willing to break the law. [/sarcasm]
And guess what? Having a gun is useless when a mugger pulls one on you first.
Riiighhht......because:
A. A mugger NEVER asks you to take anything out of your pocket.
B. There isn't even the slightest possibility that you might ummmmm SEE SOMEONE COMING.
Do you think he's just going to sit there and let you pull out your gun?
No he's going to expect you to get you wallet from your back pocket. Instead of giving him your wallet, you give him a bullet or five.
(The VW 924 does not count, since it was a never meant to be a Porsche).
You seem confused. It's a Porsche 924.
I'm sorry but YOU don't get to decide what is and is not a Porsche. Porsche does that.
but is perhaps the first real Porsche to have made concessions towards fashion and cost.
The 924 and 944 did this first. In reality nearly ALL cars do this to a certain extent, otherwise every car Porsche makes would cost upwards of a million dollars.
I think the 944 is exactly the type of car that Porsche should start making again......something the average Joe might actually have a hope of buying, yet undeniably a "sports-car".
The 944 seems more like a Miata or an MG. It's also strangely similar to my '86 RX-7:) They're cars that may not obliterate everyone else in a stop-light drag race, but they are FUN!
They're the type of car that makes you want to take an hour long road trip, only to turn around and drive back.
Any publicity is good and good publicity is even better"
Repeating something a million times doesn't make it true!
Certain publicity is 100% BAD. Like Ford ignition switches busting into flames.
There's no positive angle to that. Even if you didn't know who Ford was, is that news going to make you want to do business with them? Are you going to think, "Gee, I'd like a car that might randomly burst into flames. I should go check out my nearest Ford dealership!"
Discussing rights just muddles up the issue and generally leads to circular arguments, such as yours. "Rights" are merely an expression of what the law permits, and they shouldn't be treated as a separate entities. You have rights because the law gives them to you.
Only if you don't believe in the concept of "fundamental human rights". (Or course there's room for plently of debate on what those rights are.)
For instance, drug use by an individual does not directly cause harm to someone else.
But is can and does cause indirect harm, hence it can still be viewed as your exercise of your rights interfering with my own rights.
It's true that it gets muddy, but it is possible to view a great many things in terms of a your rights vs. my rights tradeoff.
Nobody has an absolute right to telephone service.
Nobody's arguing the "right" to telephone service.
They're arguing the right to a fair market in which to buy telephone service. In some cases, pure capitalism doesn't provide a "fair market" because there's a natural monopoly.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but don't you think any body of laws represents a moral code? Every law legislates morality in some form or another.
Not necessarily. There are other ways look at it. One other way to view the situation is one of your rights vs. my rights.
One could decide the murder is wrong because you're interfering with my "right" to life.
You could try and say that our "rights" are really just a moral code, but I don't really believe that. I think moral codes have certainly played a role in deciding what rights a person should have, but so has basic human nature. We seek to protect many of these "rights" naturally the same way an animal might. (Property, life, etc.)
Laws should be justified in terms of whether or not they are good for society, not whether or not they agree with someone's morality.
The difference is one of rational justification WRT actual impact on other vs. possibly being upset about something that really doesn't affect you at all (like gay people having sex).
The real reason for the human readable part is so the voter can verify it themselves at the poll.
Obviously. This is why using a barcode for the paper recipt would be silly.
The whole point of having the paper recipt is to have something that you can use to verify the computer (the computer printing the reciepts can already do the counting). If you use a barcode, you need yet another computer to verify the barcode. Then you need a way to verify the second computer. This leaves you right back where you started.
Only if you're an idiot.
Try being less incendiary and thinking about this more.
Barcode readers are 100% worthless because you still need ANOTHER reader. It doesn't matter how cheap they are, you're trying to fit a round peg in a square hole.
Also, as I said before election fraud is not some random process. In order to have a certain level of confidence in your data by checking only a small fraction of it, you MUST make assumptions about how that data is distributed.
We're not talking about radioactive decay here. If someone stuffs a ballot box, checking 5 other ballot boxes tells you nothing about that first box. The only way to have say 95% confidence is to check 95% of the votes.
The design problem for the paper reciepts is really one of designing a printout that is easily readable by both humans and computers, with an extremly low error rate.
OCR text is a possible solution, but it might requre the development of an OCR font that includes some type of forward error correction as part of its characters.
All EV1 did was sign a deal that prevents them from getting the lawsuit that apparently landed in AutoZone's lap.
EV1 was using Redhat!
Even if they DID get sued, Redhat would have indemnified them.
What EV1 did was 100% stupid. Not only did it "cover" an issue that was already covered, it also opened them up to the possibility of a breech-of-contract lawsuit where none existed before.
If I were an investor, I would be happy to have found a businessman who will admit to his mistakes.
Yeah, at least that way you'll know why you don't have any money left!..........oh wait, maybe it would be better if he just spent the money wisely in the first place.
Being targetted by SCO would then become a can't-win situation. Either you pay SCO and then get shunned by the Linux world, or you don't pay and SCO sues you to death.
And how is SCO going to sue you to death?
SCO: We want to sue company X for infringing on our IP!
Company X: You honor, SCO has yet to prove they even own anything, we request that this case be stalled until a verdict is reached in the IBM case.
Judge: Agreed! (It's less work for me anyways.)
SCO really isn't in a position to sue anyone to death. It should be easy to get any court dates moved out to a point in time where SCO will have been thoroughly crushed by IBM.
Tell me again how that means they made 1.8 Billion in profit?
Simple, the debt was pre-existing. What that report shows it that while the USPS was and still is in debt, they are well on their way to paying it off.
It's a simple concept. If I owe $100K on a house, I can have an income of less that $100K and still be considered to be making money.
Study up before calling folks who have studied the issue at length "unaware".
Maybe you should bother to make correct statements then?
That report clearly shows the USPS doing better than "breaking even". Sure they, have a large amount of debt, but this number is decreasing, not increasing. If they were unable to "break even" their debt would be going UP not DOWN.
It seems like you have the concepts "debt-free" and "having positive revenue" confused.
When I was in grade school, I used to think that PC gaming was vastly superior to console gaming. Better graphics, more buttons, etc.
Now that I'm an adult, the only games I play are on consoles.
What changed?
I went from windows to linux.
I don't have time to troubleshoot my 3d drivers, soundcard, etc.
Generally, when I want to play a game, I just want to relax.
IMO, the quality of console gaming has increased immensely.
With games like Metal Gear Solid out there, I just don't feel like I'm missing anything.
Couple that with something that "just works" and I'm sold.
There are lots of ways to do this so it's nearly impossible to fool, especially with proper oversight by interested parties (who are, of course, watching all the runs and picking their own random samples to cross-check and hand-verify -- while being watched by the opposition to ensure no ballots are mishandled).
One of the problems with e-voting is that many of the same methods that have been applied to rigging slot machines can also be applied to it. And example would be making the machine behave improperly, but only when a very specfic sequence of votes has been cast. It's not really possible to test every possible sequence of input, with every possible time delay in between them. Maybe someone rigged it to trigger if you tap the beat of "ode to joy" on the cancel button, etc.
It presents a serious problem validating the machines, that I think can only be resolved by ripping them apart.
Just because people have become dependent on a device that makes life easier and faster doesn't mean it has anything to do with the general welfare of the public.
Read that sentence a few times.
If you can't understand what's wrong with that statement, there's really no hope for you.
A shitty small-town telco is not a monopoly. They are the only game in town because nobody else wants to play in that location.
Do you even know what the word monopoly means?
USPS: government-run monopoly SPECIFICALLY authorized by the US Constitution.
Are you aware the the telephone DID NOT EXIST when the constitution was written?
Items affecting the lives, mostly pertaining to the protection of rights, of the public at large.
Having decent telephone service doesn't fall under this umbrella.
WTF are you talking about!? Of course it does. Try never using a telephone again and see how it affects your life.
I'm truely amazed at all the crackhead "the gov't has no business interfering with industry" trolls my post has brought out of the woodwork.
Here are some choice tidbits for anyone else who bothers to read this:
"If phone lines were government-owned you would have no DSL, VOIP or Fax lines. "
Yeah, because the gov't has totally held back the development of the internet. All those private corporations were trying to create it and the gov't just kept getting in their way.[/sarcasm]
The postal system is a disaster and an unnecessary govt monopoly.
Yet somehow my letters get where they're going from any convenient drop-box I choose, at a rate lower than many other countries?
There are plenty of countries out there that will suit your needs and opinion. Move.
I wasn't aware having an opinion was a deportable offense. It's a great day to be an American!
For you liberal, treehuggers - do you think we'd have as many millions of cars polluting the air if not for the interstate highway system?
And somehow the success of the interstate highway system is a failure? Even though you apparently dislike "liberal, [sic] treehuggers"? You seem very confused.
I'm sorry, X11 is a pain in the ass. For now anyway a real office app for Mac means Microsoft (even as old-timers still pine for the days of Word 5.1 and its elegant simplicity).
You're contradicting yourself.
This statement:
"For now anyway a real office app for Mac means Microsoft"
Is wrong. You know it.
Maybe you don't LIKE the idea of installing X, but that doesn't mean the option isn't there. It's like saying there are no real 3D games for Windows because you don't like directx.
You also don't mention that it absolutely hemorrhages money. It's been forever since it actually broke even.
Actually it hasn't.Net income from the last quaterly report is listed as 1.817 Billion dollars.
I don't know why you're posting financial information from 2001, but things have changed quite significantly since then. Either you were unaware, or you're one of those types who believes that "the gov't can do anything right and we might as well do away with it."
The government's purpose is not to provide you with cheap utilities.
Actually, in some cases it is. (Roads, Buses, etc)
Consider the postal system for example. It's a government-run monopoly that seems to work just fine, doesn't it?
The gov't DOES have a place providing services like this when whoever provides the service is going to have a local, regional, or country-wide monopoly. Without heavy government regulation, or a gov't run service, customers are going to be forced to pay the "monopoly price" instead of the "fair market price" this is a bad thing for everyone except the monopolist.
The gov'ts purpose is to provide for the welfare of its citizens. Keeping them from getting raped for telephone service falls under this goal.
IMO, the power and phone lines should be gov't owned, just like the roads. They are a public utility.
Why do people keep saying this? It's not peanuts, not to Microsoft, not to anyone. It is a considerable fine.
Because it is.
Do you any idea how much money Microsoft is losing on their own attempting to extend their monopoly to the console market?
Do you grasp the magnitude of the extra money that Microsoft has been able to make by buying up or driving their competition out of business and rolling products into the cost of windows?
I take serious exception to the analogy:
Programming:CS::"Cleaning Test Tubes":"Molecular Biology"
Programming:CS::Engineering:Physics
would be a lot more accurate.
No, it wouldn't.
Engineers are acutally supposed to understand both the theory and application of their respective discipline. In many schools, such as the one I went to CS is considered engineering.
A valid analogy would actually be:
Programming:CS::Mechanic:Mechanical Engineer
A programmer doesn't necessarily understand set theory and algorithms any more than a mechanic understands stress & strain or thermodynamics.
Programming is the essense of Computer Science.
No, MATH is the essence of computer science.
Programming isn't the essence of computer science any more than running a lathe is the essence of mechincal engineering.
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I modded my own PS2. Guess how many pirated games I have?
NONE.
I modded my PS2 so I can use it to play imports, and region DVD's, VCD's, MP3's and do whatever else I want. I also did it just for the principle of the thing:
Every DVD player I own is region-free and has no lockouts.
I'm not about to have MY hardware tell me what I can and can't do.
If my car had a speed limiter, I'd remove that too. If I own the equipment, I'm not about to let someone else impose stupid, artificial restrictions on what I can do.
And the thing you don't realize is this also means the muggers have guns.
Yes, because if guns are illegal there is absolutely no way that a criminal might gain access to 1920's technology, especially since it's a given that he's willing to break the law. [/sarcasm]
And guess what? Having a gun is useless when a mugger pulls one on you first.
Riiighhht......because:
A. A mugger NEVER asks you to take anything out of your pocket.
B. There isn't even the slightest possibility that you might ummmmm SEE SOMEONE COMING.
Do you think he's just going to sit there and let you pull out your gun?
No he's going to expect you to get you wallet from your back pocket. Instead of giving him your wallet, you give him a bullet or five.
(The VW 924 does not count, since it was a never meant to be a Porsche).
:)
You seem confused. It's a Porsche 924.
I'm sorry but YOU don't get to decide what is and is not a Porsche. Porsche does that.
but is perhaps the first real Porsche to have made concessions towards fashion and cost.
The 924 and 944 did this first. In reality nearly ALL cars do this to a certain extent, otherwise every car Porsche makes would cost upwards of a million dollars.
I think the 944 is exactly the type of car that Porsche should start making again......something the average Joe might actually have a hope of buying, yet undeniably a "sports-car".
The 944 seems more like a Miata or an MG. It's also strangely similar to my '86 RX-7
They're cars that may not obliterate everyone else in a stop-light drag race, but they are FUN!
They're the type of car that makes you want to take an hour long road trip, only to turn around and drive back.
Any publicity is good and good publicity is even better"
Repeating something a million times doesn't make it true!
Certain publicity is 100% BAD. Like Ford ignition switches busting into flames.
There's no positive angle to that. Even if you didn't know who Ford was, is that news going to make you want to do business with them? Are you going to think, "Gee, I'd like a car that might randomly burst into flames. I should go check out my nearest Ford dealership!"
Discussing rights just muddles up the issue and generally leads to circular arguments, such as yours. "Rights" are merely an expression of what the law permits, and they shouldn't be treated as a separate entities. You have rights because the law gives them to you.
Only if you don't believe in the concept of "fundamental human rights". (Or course there's room for plently of debate on what those rights are.)
For instance, drug use by an individual does not directly cause harm to someone else.
But is can and does cause indirect harm, hence it can still be viewed as your exercise of your rights interfering with my own rights.
It's true that it gets muddy, but it is possible to view a great many things in terms of a your rights vs. my rights tradeoff.
Nobody has an absolute right to telephone service.
Nobody's arguing the "right" to telephone service.
They're arguing the right to a fair market in which to buy telephone service. In some cases, pure capitalism doesn't provide a "fair market" because there's a natural monopoly.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but don't you think any body of laws represents a moral code? Every law legislates morality in some form or another.
Not necessarily. There are other ways look at it. One other way to view the situation is one of your rights vs. my rights.
One could decide the murder is wrong because you're interfering with my "right" to life.
You could try and say that our "rights" are really just a moral code, but I don't really believe that. I think moral codes have certainly played a role in deciding what rights a person should have, but so has basic human nature. We seek to protect many of these "rights" naturally the same way an animal might. (Property, life, etc.)
Laws should be justified in terms of whether or not they are good for society, not whether or not they agree with someone's morality.
The difference is one of rational justification WRT actual impact on other vs. possibly being upset about something that really doesn't affect you at all (like gay people having sex).
The real reason for the human readable part is so the voter can verify it themselves at the poll.
Obviously. This is why using a barcode for the paper recipt would be silly.
The whole point of having the paper recipt is to have something that you can use to verify the computer (the computer printing the reciepts can already do the counting). If you use a barcode, you need yet another computer to verify the barcode. Then you need a way to verify the second computer. This leaves you right back where you started.
Only if you're an idiot.
Try being less incendiary and thinking about this more.
Barcode readers are 100% worthless because you still need ANOTHER reader. It doesn't matter how cheap they are, you're trying to fit a round peg in a square hole.
Also, as I said before election fraud is not some random process. In order to have a certain level of confidence in your data by checking only a small fraction of it, you MUST make assumptions about how that data is distributed.
We're not talking about radioactive decay here. If someone stuffs a ballot box, checking 5 other ballot boxes tells you nothing about that first box. The only way to have say 95% confidence is to check 95% of the votes.
The design problem for the paper reciepts is really one of designing a printout that is easily readable by both humans and computers, with an extremly low error rate.
OCR text is a possible solution, but it might requre the development of an OCR font that includes some type of forward error correction as part of its characters.
Bzzzt, wrong! You MUST allow write-ins. Any system that doesn't is broken far beyond the niggling complaints you're bringing up here.
Easy there cowboy!
I never said write-in weren't allowed. There are all sorts of ways that could be handled. Slow down and think about it.
All EV1 did was sign a deal that prevents them from getting the lawsuit that apparently landed in AutoZone's lap.
EV1 was using Redhat!
Even if they DID get sued, Redhat would have indemnified them.
What EV1 did was 100% stupid. Not only did it "cover" an issue that was already covered, it also opened them up to the possibility of a breech-of-contract lawsuit where none existed before.
If I were an investor, I would be happy to have found a businessman who will admit to his mistakes.
Yeah, at least that way you'll know why you don't have any money left!..........oh wait, maybe it would be better if he just spent the money wisely in the first place.
Being targetted by SCO would then become a can't-win situation. Either you pay SCO and then get shunned by the Linux world, or you don't pay and SCO sues you to death.
And how is SCO going to sue you to death?
SCO: We want to sue company X for infringing on our IP!
Company X: You honor, SCO has yet to prove they even own anything, we request that this case be stalled until a verdict is reached in the IBM case.
Judge: Agreed! (It's less work for me anyways.)
SCO really isn't in a position to sue anyone to death. It should be easy to get any court dates moved out to a point in time where SCO will have been thoroughly crushed by IBM.
Tell me again how that means they made 1.8 Billion in profit?
Simple, the debt was pre-existing. What that report shows it that while the USPS was and still is in debt, they are well on their way to paying it off.
It's a simple concept. If I owe $100K on a house, I can have an income of less that $100K and still be considered to be making money.
Study up before calling folks who have studied the issue at length "unaware".
Maybe you should bother to make correct statements then?
That report clearly shows the USPS doing better than "breaking even". Sure they, have a large amount of debt, but this number is decreasing, not increasing. If they were unable to "break even" their debt would be going UP not DOWN.
It seems like you have the concepts "debt-free" and "having positive revenue" confused.
From now on, I'm only doing text input with charmap!
Sure it may be a little slower, but hey, I'm paid by the hour!
When I was in grade school, I used to think that PC gaming was vastly superior to console gaming. Better graphics, more buttons, etc.
Now that I'm an adult, the only games I play are on consoles.
What changed?
I went from windows to linux.
I don't have time to troubleshoot my 3d drivers, soundcard, etc.
Generally, when I want to play a game, I just want to relax.
IMO, the quality of console gaming has increased immensely.
With games like Metal Gear Solid out there, I just don't feel like I'm missing anything.
Couple that with something that "just works" and I'm sold.
I've seen these rules posted before, propably by you, and I think they're are great idea.
Perhaps you should send Mr. Leahy an email/letter/giant billboard in front of his house?
There are lots of ways to do this so it's nearly impossible to fool, especially with proper oversight by interested parties (who are, of course, watching all the runs and picking their own random samples to cross-check and hand-verify -- while being watched by the opposition to ensure no ballots are mishandled).
One of the problems with e-voting is that many of the same methods that have been applied to rigging slot machines can also be applied to it. And example would be making the machine behave improperly, but only when a very specfic sequence of votes has been cast. It's not really possible to test every possible sequence of input, with every possible time delay in between them. Maybe someone rigged it to trigger if you tap the beat of "ode to joy" on the cancel button, etc.
It presents a serious problem validating the machines, that I think can only be resolved by ripping them apart.
As I see it, dependency on anything is a personal problem.
So you grow your own food, make your own tools, etc?
Being dependent on various services, products, etc is part of living in a modern culture.
Just because people have become dependent on a device that makes life easier and faster doesn't mean it has anything to do with the general welfare of the public.
Read that sentence a few times.
If you can't understand what's wrong with that statement, there's really no hope for you.
A shitty small-town telco is not a monopoly. They are the only game in town because nobody else wants to play in that location.
Do you even know what the word monopoly means?
USPS: government-run monopoly SPECIFICALLY authorized by the US Constitution.
Are you aware the the telephone DID NOT EXIST when the constitution was written?
Items affecting the lives, mostly pertaining to the protection of rights, of the public at large. Having decent telephone service doesn't fall under this umbrella.
WTF are you talking about!? Of course it does. Try never using a telephone again and see how it affects your life.
I'm truely amazed at all the crackhead "the gov't has no business interfering with industry" trolls my post has brought out of the woodwork.
Here are some choice tidbits for anyone else who bothers to read this:
"If phone lines were government-owned you would have no DSL, VOIP or Fax lines. "
Yeah, because the gov't has totally held back the development of the internet. All those private corporations were trying to create it and the gov't just kept getting in their way.[/sarcasm]
The postal system is a disaster and an unnecessary govt monopoly.
Yet somehow my letters get where they're going from any convenient drop-box I choose, at a rate lower than many other countries?
There are plenty of countries out there that will suit your needs and opinion. Move.
I wasn't aware having an opinion was a deportable offense. It's a great day to be an American!
For you liberal, treehuggers - do you think we'd have as many millions of cars polluting the air if not for the interstate highway system?
And somehow the success of the interstate highway system is a failure? Even though you apparently dislike "liberal, [sic] treehuggers"? You seem very confused.
I'm sorry, X11 is a pain in the ass. For now anyway a real office app for Mac means Microsoft (even as old-timers still pine for the days of Word 5.1 and its elegant simplicity).
You're contradicting yourself.
This statement:
"For now anyway a real office app for Mac means Microsoft"
Is wrong. You know it.
Maybe you don't LIKE the idea of installing X, but that doesn't mean the option isn't there. It's like saying there are no real 3D games for Windows because you don't like directx.
You also don't mention that it absolutely hemorrhages money. It's been forever since it actually broke even.
Actually it hasn't. Net income from the last quaterly report is listed as 1.817 Billion dollars.
I don't know why you're posting financial information from 2001, but things have changed quite significantly since then. Either you were unaware, or you're one of those types who believes that "the gov't can do anything right and we might as well do away with it."
The government's purpose is not to provide you with cheap utilities.
Actually, in some cases it is. (Roads, Buses, etc)
Consider the postal system for example. It's a government-run monopoly that seems to work just fine, doesn't it?
The gov't DOES have a place providing services like this when whoever provides the service is going to have a local, regional, or country-wide monopoly. Without heavy government regulation, or a gov't run service, customers are going to be forced to pay the "monopoly price" instead of the "fair market price" this is a bad thing for everyone except the monopolist.
The gov'ts purpose is to provide for the welfare of its citizens. Keeping them from getting raped for telephone service falls under this goal.
IMO, the power and phone lines should be gov't owned, just like the roads. They are a public utility.
Why do people keep saying this? It's not peanuts, not to Microsoft, not to anyone. It is a considerable fine.
Because it is.
Do you any idea how much money Microsoft is losing on their own attempting to extend their monopoly to the console market?
Do you grasp the magnitude of the extra money that Microsoft has been able to make by buying up or driving their competition out of business and rolling products into the cost of windows?
I take serious exception to the analogy: Programming:CS::"Cleaning Test Tubes":"Molecular Biology" Programming:CS::Engineering:Physics would be a lot more accurate.
No, it wouldn't.
Engineers are acutally supposed to understand both the theory and application of their respective discipline. In many schools, such as the one I went to CS is considered engineering.
A valid analogy would actually be:
Programming:CS::Mechanic:Mechanical Engineer
A programmer doesn't necessarily understand set theory and algorithms any more than a mechanic understands stress & strain or thermodynamics.
Programming is the essense of Computer Science.
No, MATH is the essence of computer science.
Programming isn't the essence of computer science any more than running a lathe is the essence of mechincal engineering.