Hey folks, how tough can it be to write some software to gather votes and put them in a database? AND print TWO identical receipts, one for the voter, and one for a backup ballot box, in case of recount?
So now you have,b>3 votes. The db, the voter paper copy, and the ballot box paper copy. WHich is te one that gets counted? How do you ensure they match? (And not even going into the issue of the voter copy being used to influence/buy/threaten votes.)
Well...obviously one type of weapon is not proof against all types of attacks.
Consider Desert Storm. This mght have been good against the Iraqi tanks semi buried and used as fixed gun emplacements. And against Saddam's command and control facilities.
For the lone suicide bomber, you employ other tactics.
What would a LiveCD do for the average user that they don't have already?
Ok...they load the CD, boot the PC into Linux, and then what?
You can browse the web, email, work in OpenOffice, etc, etc. SO what?
They do all that already in their current Win OS. What would a LiveCD offer? The fact that it's free? The OS they already have is 'free'. Came with the PC. Not too many people actually went out and bought WinXP retail to upgrade their Win2000 or '98 PC.
The operating system does not matter. Users don't run an OS, they use programs.
The one best thing OSS has going for it is OpenOffice as opposed to Office2000 or XP. And that, only because of the price. Featurewise, OOo is still a little bit behind. And it runs just as happily on Win as it does elsewhere.
Again...what would a LiveCD do for an average non-techie user?
Over the last 3 or so years, our IT dept has analysed the business practices, built the infrastructure, and deployed tools to reduce turnaround time for a specific request from 2 days to 2 hours to 30 minutes. That is a significant impact on the overall business.
We're taking the back end processes from 2 days to mere minutes.
A sales person can write a proposal, offsite somewhere, and have a Y/N answer back in minutes. Minutes, only because a human actually has to review it.
Finance finally has a firm grasp on the actual month to month revenue and revenue prediction. Previously, if you asked 3 people, you'd get 4 answers, after a day or two of futzing around. Now...anyone, incl the CEO, has it at his fingertips, anywhere in the world.
We've created dedicated, outwardlooking tools for our clients (that they didn't even know they wanted) that have directly resulted in new sales. "OMG! That is great. Sign us up!"
Those are specific, bottom line related issues that only IT could bring to the table. It took quite a while for the non-IT people to grasp what we were trying to do. But once they got to work with the actual hardcore benefits...ohh boy, did they see the light.
Another thing I've noticed, is that IT seems to be the glue between all the other factions. Marketing, sales, management, etc. all have their little fiefdoms. And IT can generally bring them together. That also means learning to say NO when required.
Linus has a worldwide army of voluteer and hobbyist developers, testers, etc. Bill has the employees at Microsoft.
But MS also has a worldwide army of volunteer and hobbyist developers, building tools and solutions with MS products. Some good, some not so good. MS also has many, many manufacturers tripping all over themselves building and testing hardware drivers for their products.
It's really a bit like TV makers would have their own TV channels where they would show content made by themselves, and TV sets of their make would only display those channels...
umm...exactly like your cable company. Ever scroll through the cable channels?
[click]"Coming soon! Time Warner's DVR!"
[click]"If you had Digital Cable, you could be enjoying.."
[click]"Starting soon, on pay-per-view..."
wash rinse repeat
They obviously don't restrict you to only their channels, but they do push their own marketing, over their own system, whenever possible.
It's difficult to prevent the use of spam when there's no cost associated with sending thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of e-mails,"
It's also difficult to promote the free interchange of ideas when there is a fee associated with it. Email is one of the true great equalizers of the Internet. Anyone, anywhere with access to a computer can send an email. At the library, school, a kiosk in the mall.
You can't say, `We want it to be totally free and unrestricted and on the other hand we want it to work smoothly and civilly,' "
And if you get your fingers into it, you'll totally dick it up, and not actually solve the problem.
As it says in the article, follow the money. Almost all spam is directed to splitting you from some of your money. Where does that money go? Go get that guy. Don't place a burden on me and hope to screw him over.
very few computers are coming with modems now a days.
Really... The low end Dell does, the low end Gateway does, eMachine/HP/Compaq from BestBuy does. I'm not sure what machines you've been looking at, but a modem is pretty standard.
I can point a rational 10 year old at a bare box (a COMPUTER, get yer mind outta the gutter!) and hand him a windows installation and a AOL disk, and he'll (usually) be up and running.
Is that a secure box? Nope. But quite a lot of peopole are running their PC configured just like that.
Can the same be said for a Linux installation?
It must have a GUI option for just about everything. "Do you want A or B? Click here." It must have standard install locations for programs. No "3 files for this must go in your/system/ folder" (My what?). But that brings some of the same problems inherent in Windows. Monoculture. If all boxes are set up the same, viruses and hacks become much easier.
Linux can be easy to use, once it is set up, and if you never change/install anything. Plug & pray mostly works on Windows. Plug the printer/camera/joystick in, and it's recognised and set up. Rarely do you have to put the accompanying CD in.
A successful neophyte GUI leads the user to the answer, instead of making him look for it.
Now...the question is, does Linux need a 'neophyte GUI'?
Overall GDP, China is #2 at about 1/2 the US. But with 5x the population. Per capita GDP, China falls just below Ukraine, Albania and El Salvador. DVD players only matter if you can eat first.
They are big and getting bigger. It would not be wise to ignore or denigrate them in the long run. But they have a looong way to go.
Let them go it alone for a while and see what happens.
Anybody old enough to know how long it took tapes to become common over LP's or eight tracks?
Caettes never took over LP's. Casettes took over from 8 tracks merely because 8 tracks sucked badly. Early prerecorded casettes were no great shakes as far as fidelity, but better, smaller, and more convienient than 8 track.
iTunes being the first. If the MS product (or Walmart for that matter) has more DRM restrictions than iTunes, I can't see it taking off in a big way.
There have been other online music sourrces (Rhapsody, PressPlay, etc) and none has really taken off, primarily due, IMHO, to restrictive DRM. Sure MS has an advantage in that WMP is already installed. But if it sucks bad enough compared to the other options, I think people *will* look elsewhere.
1. MS delivers a crippled product. No one buys it, and they flop
2. MS delivers a good product (large selection, minimal DRM, smaller price). The consumer wins.
What exactly is the problem here?
Yes, they could try to leverage current WMP installations, but if the product they are selling is fundamentally flawed (as compared to iTunes, for instance) then it will fail.
Or is the/. party line that MS should be barred from entering this particular market? I say bring it on. They have some large competition to deal with.
But rather stealing the representation of my finger.
When the credit card db gets hacked (and it's happened several times), you just have to cancel it and get issued a new card. When the fingerprint db gets hacked, they can't issue me a new finger.
A fleshcolored, spit wetted, rubber sleeve over a finger, with a copy of someone elses finger would work quite well, and be undectable by the minimally interested checkout line clerk.
You just pick and choose what parts of the RIAA's statements you're going to believe based on what best suits your purpose, don't you? Maybe the RIAA just looks in people's shared folders, and assumes that's all downloaded for marketing purposes. Maybe they just do a poll of 10 people, take the average, and multiply it by 100 billion. I don't know. I'm certainly not going to take their statement that there are X downloads as evidence that they know how many downloads there are.
Don't take the RIAA at it's word. Presumably, you've heard of BigChampagne?
No. Obviously they didn't get exactly the top 261 out of millions. But from the very limited information I have about the situation, my guess is that that family was using Kazaa a lot. It wouldn't make sense for the RIAA to randomly pick IP addresses. It wouldn't make sense for them to randomly pick Kazaa users. If they're going to sue people, my guess is that they're going to make an attempt to sue people who are the largest infringers. That is in their best interests.
Obviously, you have more faith in their methods than I do. They may have made an effort to target (in their words) the heaviest downloaders. And in a few cases, they screwed it up. With the minimal legal oversight this has taken, we may never know just how badly.
The initial defense of the family was that it wasn't illegal to download the files. It certainly appears to me like they were breaking the law. If, that is, the whole thing isn't a lie. If you believe the family, then the RIAA didn't screw up. The family admitted committing the crime.
They didn't think it was illegal, because they had 'purchased' a service. Paid money, download music. No problem. The fact that paying for the Kazaa 'service' does not confer actual rights to download anything you may find on the network is never really outlined when you pay for it. Buyer beware, sure. But at the time, I looked closely at the Kazaa page, and the same at emiusic.com and iTunes. Very, very similar in terms and concepts. Pay money, download, burn. It may appear to the non-net savvy person that it is actually legal. Very unclear to know that this one is legal (emusic), and that one (Kazaa) is illegal.
1000 files in the shared folder? 1000 downloaded (how would they figure that out)?
Well...since the RIAA itself uses download stats to market more effectively, evidently there is some mechanism to do just that.
I find it much harder to believe that the RIAA decided to go up against some random 12-year-old who wasn't even using Kazaa.
I find it very easy to believe that the RIAA shotgunned a bunch of lawsuits, and this kid was one of them. Supposedly, they were going after "the heaviest downloaders". 261 out of millions. You really think this kid was in the top 0.0005%?
Were they downloading music 'illegaly'? Sure. Were they among the heaviest? Highly doubtful.
3-I hate the RIAA and MPAA so this is only better for file swapping.
So tell me, how should the government, your government, handle potentially illegal activities, over lines they own, and everyone pays for via tax dollars?
If the headline reads (and it could in a couple of years) "Local government sponsors illegal activities", or "Local government, and your tax dollars, subsidise pornography!"
Will the RIAA take city workers to court, for facilitating illegal file transfers? Or will the city government cut that ability off at the knees, to protect themselves from liability?
I can choose not to patronise a business that sells questionable contentthat I do not agree with, such as Hustler magazine. I can't choose not to patronise the government entity that delivers Hustler.com.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had good experiences with XxXxxxXxx...
Shhh! You'll let the secret out and it won't be so good anymore!. I've used that for years, and have very, very few problems.
Hey folks, how tough can it be to write some software to gather votes and put them in a database? AND print TWO identical receipts, one for the voter, and one for a backup ballot box, in case of recount?
,b>3 votes. The db, the voter paper copy, and the ballot box paper copy. WHich is te one that gets counted? How do you ensure they match? (And not even going into the issue of the voter copy being used to influence/buy/threaten votes.)
So now you have
Doesn't matter which Diebold chose. They appear to be so incompetent as to muck it up no matter what the operating system.
Windows and the specific voting application, just like any other OS+application, can be made secure. Just not by these clowns.
Well...obviously one type of weapon is not proof against all types of attacks.
Consider Desert Storm. This mght have been good against the Iraqi tanks semi buried and used as fixed gun emplacements. And against Saddam's command and control facilities.
For the lone suicide bomber, you employ other tactics.
Personally, I won't be satisfied until all computer control is done via blinking.
Here ya go. Nouse. Tracks your nose via a webcam for mouse movement, and eyeblinks for mouse clicks.
70 indictments led to arrests of 125 people, and some of those have already been convicted in a court of law.
All it means is that some cases have progressed further than others.
OBTW, that's not a Justice Department quote, but rather text from Wired.
Who is dispensing with 'innocent until proven guilty"?
What would a LiveCD do for the average user that they don't have already?
Ok...they load the CD, boot the PC into Linux, and then what?
You can browse the web, email, work in OpenOffice, etc, etc. SO what?
They do all that already in their current Win OS. What would a LiveCD offer? The fact that it's free? The OS they already have is 'free'. Came with the PC. Not too many people actually went out and bought WinXP retail to upgrade their Win2000 or '98 PC.
The operating system does not matter. Users don't run an OS, they use programs.
The one best thing OSS has going for it is OpenOffice as opposed to Office2000 or XP. And that, only because of the price. Featurewise, OOo is still a little bit behind. And it runs just as happily on Win as it does elsewhere.
Again...what would a LiveCD do for an average non-techie user?
Over the last 3 or so years, our IT dept has analysed the business practices, built the infrastructure, and deployed tools to reduce turnaround time for a specific request from 2 days to 2 hours to 30 minutes. That is a significant impact on the overall business.
We're taking the back end processes from 2 days to mere minutes.
A sales person can write a proposal, offsite somewhere, and have a Y/N answer back in minutes. Minutes, only because a human actually has to review it.
Finance finally has a firm grasp on the actual month to month revenue and revenue prediction. Previously, if you asked 3 people, you'd get 4 answers, after a day or two of futzing around. Now...anyone, incl the CEO, has it at his fingertips, anywhere in the world.
We've created dedicated, outwardlooking tools for our clients (that they didn't even know they wanted) that have directly resulted in new sales. "OMG! That is great. Sign us up!"
Those are specific, bottom line related issues that only IT could bring to the table. It took quite a while for the non-IT people to grasp what we were trying to do. But once they got to work with the actual hardcore benefits...ohh boy, did they see the light.
Another thing I've noticed, is that IT seems to be the glue between all the other factions. Marketing, sales, management, etc. all have their little fiefdoms. And IT can generally bring them together. That also means learning to say NO when required.
I'm sure most of you have seen this before, but here it is again.
Linus has a worldwide army of voluteer and hobbyist developers, testers, etc. Bill has the employees at Microsoft.
But MS also has a worldwide army of volunteer and hobbyist developers, building tools and solutions with MS products. Some good, some not so good.
MS also has many, many manufacturers tripping all over themselves building and testing hardware drivers for their products.
It's really a bit like TV makers would have their own TV channels where they would show content made by themselves, and TV sets of their make would only display those channels...
umm...exactly like your cable company. Ever scroll through the cable channels?
[click]"Coming soon! Time Warner's DVR!"
[click]"If you had Digital Cable, you could be enjoying.."
[click]"Starting soon, on pay-per-view..."
wash rinse repeat
They obviously don't restrict you to only their channels, but they do push their own marketing, over their own system, whenever possible.
It's difficult to prevent the use of spam when there's no cost associated with sending thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of e-mails,"
It's also difficult to promote the free interchange of ideas when there is a fee associated with it. Email is one of the true great equalizers of the Internet. Anyone, anywhere with access to a computer can send an email. At the library, school, a kiosk in the mall.
You can't say, `We want it to be totally free and unrestricted and on the other hand we want it to work smoothly and civilly,' "
And if you get your fingers into it, you'll totally dick it up, and not actually solve the problem.
As it says in the article, follow the money. Almost all spam is directed to splitting you from some of your money. Where does that money go? Go get that guy. Don't place a burden on me and hope to screw him over.
very few computers are coming with modems now a days.
Really...
The low end Dell does, the low end Gateway does, eMachine/HP/Compaq from BestBuy does. I'm not sure what machines you've been looking at, but a modem is pretty standard.
I can point a rational 10 year old at a bare box (a COMPUTER, get yer mind outta the gutter!) and hand him a windows installation and a AOL disk, and he'll (usually) be up and running.
/system/ folder" (My what?). But that brings some of the same problems inherent in Windows. Monoculture. If all boxes are set up the same, viruses and hacks become much easier.
Is that a secure box? Nope. But quite a lot of peopole are running their PC configured just like that.
Can the same be said for a Linux installation?
It must have a GUI option for just about everything. "Do you want A or B? Click here."
It must have standard install locations for programs. No "3 files for this must go in your
Linux can be easy to use, once it is set up, and if you never change/install anything.
Plug & pray mostly works on Windows. Plug the printer/camera/joystick in, and it's recognised and set up. Rarely do you have to put the accompanying CD in.
A successful neophyte GUI leads the user to the answer, instead of making him look for it.
Now...the question is, does Linux need a 'neophyte GUI'?
Says who? China is THE big boy,...
Overall GDP, China is #2 at about 1/2 the US. But with 5x the population.
Per capita GDP, China falls just below Ukraine, Albania and El Salvador. DVD players only matter if you can eat first.
They are big and getting bigger. It would not be wise to ignore or denigrate them in the long run. But they have a looong way to go.
Let them go it alone for a while and see what happens.
Anybody old enough to know how long it took tapes to become common over LP's or eight tracks?
Caettes never took over LP's. Casettes took over from 8 tracks merely because 8 tracks sucked badly. Early prerecorded casettes were no great shakes as far as fidelity, but better, smaller, and more convienient than 8 track.
Albums lasted throughout. Until CD's took over.
Either way. Once the db is compromised, are you going to trust it for the next 50 years?
iTunes being the first. If the MS product (or Walmart for that matter) has more DRM restrictions than iTunes, I can't see it taking off in a big way.
There have been other online music sourrces (Rhapsody, PressPlay, etc) and none has really taken off, primarily due, IMHO, to restrictive DRM. Sure MS has an advantage in that WMP is already installed. But if it sucks bad enough compared to the other options, I think people *will* look elsewhere.
1. MS delivers a crippled product. No one buys it, and they flop
/. party line that MS should be barred from entering this particular market?
2. MS delivers a good product (large selection, minimal DRM, smaller price). The consumer wins.
What exactly is the problem here?
Yes, they could try to leverage current WMP installations, but if the product they are selling is fundamentally flawed (as compared to iTunes, for instance) then it will fail.
Or is the
I say bring it on. They have some large competition to deal with.
But rather stealing the representation of my finger.
When the credit card db gets hacked (and it's happened several times), you just have to cancel it and get issued a new card.
When the fingerprint db gets hacked, they can't issue me a new finger.
A fleshcolored, spit wetted, rubber sleeve over a finger, with a copy of someone elses finger would work quite well, and be undectable by the minimally interested checkout line clerk.
You just pick and choose what parts of the RIAA's statements you're going to believe based on what best suits your purpose, don't you? Maybe the RIAA just looks in people's shared folders, and assumes that's all downloaded for marketing purposes. Maybe they just do a poll of 10 people, take the average, and multiply it by 100 billion. I don't know. I'm certainly not going to take their statement that there are X downloads as evidence that they know how many downloads there are.
Don't take the RIAA at it's word. Presumably, you've heard of Big Champagne?
No. Obviously they didn't get exactly the top 261 out of millions. But from the very limited information I have about the situation, my guess is that that family was using Kazaa a lot. It wouldn't make sense for the RIAA to randomly pick IP addresses. It wouldn't make sense for them to randomly pick Kazaa users. If they're going to sue people, my guess is that they're going to make an attempt to sue people who are the largest infringers. That is in their best interests.
Obviously, you have more faith in their methods than I do. They may have made an effort to target (in their words) the heaviest downloaders. And in a few cases, they screwed it up. With the minimal legal oversight this has taken, we may never know just how badly.
The initial defense of the family was that it wasn't illegal to download the files. It certainly appears to me like they were breaking the law. If, that is, the whole thing isn't a lie. If you believe the family, then the RIAA didn't screw up. The family admitted committing the crime.
They didn't think it was illegal, because they had 'purchased' a service. Paid money, download music. No problem. The fact that paying for the Kazaa 'service' does not confer actual rights to download anything you may find on the network is never really outlined when you pay for it. Buyer beware, sure. But at the time, I looked closely at the Kazaa page, and the same at emiusic.com and iTunes. Very, very similar in terms and concepts. Pay money, download, burn. It may appear to the non-net savvy person that it is actually legal. Very unclear to know that this one is legal (emusic), and that one (Kazaa) is illegal.
1000 files in the shared folder? 1000 downloaded (how would they figure that out)?
Well...since the RIAA itself uses download stats to market more effectively, evidently there is some mechanism to do just that.
I find it much harder to believe that the RIAA decided to go up against some random 12-year-old who wasn't even using Kazaa.
I find it very easy to believe that the RIAA shotgunned a bunch of lawsuits, and this kid was one of them. Supposedly, they were going after "the heaviest downloaders". 261 out of millions. You really think this kid was in the top 0.0005%?
Were they downloading music 'illegaly'? Sure. Were they among the heaviest? Highly doubtful.
3-I hate the RIAA and MPAA so this is only better for file swapping.
So tell me, how should the government, your government, handle potentially illegal activities, over lines they own, and everyone pays for via tax dollars?
If the headline reads (and it could in a couple of years) "Local government sponsors illegal activities", or "Local government, and your tax dollars, subsidise pornography!"
Will the RIAA take city workers to court, for facilitating illegal file transfers? Or will the city government cut that ability off at the knees, to protect themselves from liability?
I can choose not to patronise a business that sells questionable contentthat I do not agree with, such as Hustler magazine. I can't choose not to patronise the government entity that delivers Hustler.com.
I inferred dialup, due to the fact of them being in subsidised housing. An extra $45 for cable/DSL might be tough.
1000 files was supposedly the cutoff for being a target of the RIAA. Hell, there aren't 1000 songs that would appeal to the average 12 year old.
Her brother was 9.
Or maybe, just maybe, the RIAA screwed up.
A simple wall-shaped opponent pressed right against the net, with a large enough surface area, will beat any opponent.
Until you just lob it over the 'wall'.