I heard that, when comparing government data to private sector weather reports, the private newscast usually has weather a little better than the government. This is aledgedly done because the consumers prefer news with an optimist outlook on the weather.
Because of no public news source, the US already only has glorified tabloids biased towards sensational news. Would you really want to lose another unbiased source of data?
" well, if you think you're going to learn enough about any scientific field to make a meaningful contribution to the human body of knowledge in that area without a formal education, you're insane."
Not necessarily. It depends on the domain of interest you pick. If you pick a domain that has been well researched already sure its hard to make new discoveries. If you pick an emmerging science. something new, you might be able to make dicoveries just being self thaught.
Part of the genious of people who make discoveries is they have the creativity to come up with the next research field and they are good at orienting the choice of research they make. I believe they are the type of people who get exited at doing their own thing and not continuing work that has already been done.
Astrophysics is old. quite frankly I think you're not the smartest if you try to discover something there without education or if you go in that field "for the advancement of science".
New things that are emmerging lately are from artificial intelligence: social networks, semantic webs, natural language processing. I doubt Wikipedia, amazon.com, del.icio.us were all developped by PHds. These are all technologies that are making serious progress. Someone could find a new aproach to AI and considering the free/open ressources available on the internet (including scientific literature), it wouldn't have to be a PHd. You just have to be a little visionary an predict the next big thing. If you judge a domain is still in its infancy, it's the time to try to make a discovery in that domain.
He's not nitpicking, if a person writes the code he can do whatever he likes with it even after he GPLed it. He can put it in another GPL project, put it in another non-GPL project or anywhere else. You just can't take somebody elses code that has been GPLed and use it under another license. You can with your own code. Do you understand the distinction? You have no rights to someone elses GPL code besides the rights he has granted you trough the GPL. (unless you have a contract with that person) You have all rights to the code you wrote. (copyrights)
The reason it would be practicly impossible to buy a commersial licence to Linux's code is because you would have to go see all the contributers and ask their permission(buy the code from them) There are just too many contributors to do this. Theoritically though it is possible. With small GPL projects with few contributors it is possible for a company to buy the code from the contributors. Not so many companies want to do that because they would now be competing against the GPL version that is out there.
Social services are an investment. They have been shown to increase the flow of money because people in good health are more productive. There are all kinds of psychological and physical advantages to having these programs. Why do you think that even the most money driven corporations usually force their employees at taking a huge part of their salary in benefices? It is because they know those healthy employees are productive employees. If the government provided a greater part of these things to its citizens it would increase productivity and quality of life in general. You have to increase taxes so that it is viable but the tax increase to corporations isn't as high as it looks. It won't drive companies away because they also save a lot. They don't need to provide as much benefices to their employees since the government provides it instead. The companies benefit from workers that have profited from social services all their life and are therefore more qualified, more psychologically balanced and are able to compete better in the global economy. Therefore, the number of jobs increases, specially the good ones that need higher education and that have good pay.
Some government services like roads, a legal system, police, etc... are an obvious boost to the economy. Some services have a less obvious boost but that doesn't mean we should not have those services. Experts in different fields will tell you that offering services save money. For example, a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists are convinced that if they could give free therapy to families and children with problems early in their life they could prevent a lot of them from becoming criminals and thus reduce the cost of crime police, and reduce criminal influence (criminals turn their peers into criminals) in the long term.
True, there are cheaters in the system. And there are probably lots of them. But I believe you should not go out of your way to punish them, that's just punishing yourself. You should try to do everything you can that dissuade the cheating by tailoring the system so that it is not advantageous to cheat, but only if it doesn't impair your lifestyle to do so. Cutting social services impairs your lifestyle and raises the cost of living. I know humans have an instinct against freeloaders, there's a bell that rings in our head at the thought of the possibility of being exploited. Basic instincts can help us lots of times, but we have the advantage over animals that we are intellectual beings. Don't let that basic instinct get to you when your intellect can tell you that you are better off if you just ignore the freeloaders sometimes. Be proud of your legacy to society and to America. Don't be scared it will just benefit the freeloaders. Be glad that you made a better place to live for the other hard workers which are doing the same for you. Yes if you look at it directly I can see how it can seem to benefit mostly others, but it is as much for your benefit, the benefit of the economy and of corporations. You have to look at the big picture. It will be very beneficial for you that everyone around you is competent and sane. There are high costs associated with the opposite situation. You're right taking your hard earned money and forcing you to give it to others for no reason is bad. But this is for your benefit. It also acts as a kind of insurance to you. If ever you or a member of your family gets really sick or you loose your house and everything you own in a disaster, you will have government help to fall on. One of the nice things with social services is that it is multiplicative. When people are taken car of, they can themselves help others who can help even more people.
I firmly believe capitalism (or profit maximization) is the only way for countries to work well. It is a form of economic survival of the fittest where the better, easier, cheaper alternative is the one that thrives. It is the most natural way to efficient life. But I still think you have to be intelligent about it and not view only the direct obvious
I think there is a bigger issue behind all of this. People really are starting to trust the free and open source software community more than commercial software companies. This is no surprise since private companies act as your enemy as soon as you buy something from them. They try to extort money from you by pushing upgrades that patch vulnerabilities and making sure your product only stays compatible for a short period. They make you subject to small prints, EULAs with mysterious and suspicious content, advertisement that is manipulative, misleading and dishonest. They give you poor quality support for their products and even worst support if the product is more than a year old. They push expensive insurance on everything you buy.
Before the advent of opensource/free software consumers had no alternatives so they had to deal with unethical deceitful entities. But now open source has proven to be much more competitive on the ethical and honesty front. If private companies want to keep their market share they are going to have to earn the trust of the consumers. They will have to stop trying the fsck everyone in the behind all the time by pulling charlatan licensing tricks on everyone otherwize consumers will slowly move away from them.
The people in the country that buys the thing can do the support. sheesh. They are as smart as we are. Their labor is cheap so they can offer support for a very low cost, and with linux, they can learn everything they need to know on the web or by reading the code. It wont help them if they can't have their own computer companies and depend on M$ for all their needs. They do need versatile machines to get their industry going. They have to have independence and be able to take care of their own needs.
It all translates to, if it aint usefull to us, it aint usefull to them.
If it break you re-install the OS. These people aren't stupider than we are you know. We dealth with constant reinstalling in the Win95 area and still wanted to be able to install software even if it sometimes broke the OS. And I'm sure since its new tech it wont need to be installed nearly as often as win95 did.
First of all, text is no that hard to count. Text is the way it works in many countries. Secondly, it would be easy to print out a machine and human readable scantron type of thing. It doesn't have to be that easy to read by humans, as long as it is readable. Not everyone will want to re-read their whole ballot, but if they want to, they should have the option. At least this way widescale fraud would be easely detectable. It is OK that some parts are done with computers for convenience, but we should always be able to go back to the piece of papers, to verify that the computers are working correctly and are free of fraudulence. I'm not saying that we should count the votes by hand. The hand counting should only be done as a control, in random counties or suspect machines. The point is that you need to have the option to do it. If you are a comp. sci as you claim, you damn well know that it would be much easyer to do undetectable mass fraud with a computer than with the paperballots. In both situations you have elections volonteers that watch for fraud, but in the case of electronic machines, they can stare at every part of the machines all they want, they aren't going to be able to see the fraud unless they can compare with a printout. A single programmer at Diebold could easily have rigged the election.
Using SSN has other issues, I agree that this would be the safest way, but people wont let that happen.
So how would you know the checksum program is not rigged. You can't verify software with another piece of software. You need to have something that can be verified with human eyes. e.g. A PIECE OF PAPER.
It doesn't matter, electronic voting without a paper trail is inherently unsafe.
I just don't understand you americans. I have undergrad studies in electrical/electronic engineering and I am currently mastering in comp. sci. I guess I could be considered an expert in electronique machines. If this was happening in my country I would be sending letters to my government and urging my peers, all experts in the domain, to give their opinion to the government. I am sure they would agree with me that we could say that our expert opinion is that electronic voting can't be done securely without a paper printout. I would make an expert only petition to support this claim.
Data in computers is very volatile, it can be changed on a large scale, in seconds without leaving a trace behind. It is invisible to the naked eye. The problem is not that fraud is that more likely with electroninc machine, the problem is that it is as easy to change a million vote on a computer, than it is to change one, you can do it in advance by putting some kind of malware in the system and you can do it without leaving a trace behind.
With paper ballots changing a million votes would requirer, that you physically destroy/modify ballots. It would take time, it would leave traces of evidence behind and it be much easyer to monitor the ballots to prevent fraud because you can see them with your eyes.
Were experts in the US ever surveiled about security of electronic voting? I would like to see the results.
I think there is a bigger issue behind all of this. People really are starting to trust free and open source software more than commercial software. It is no surprise as private companies act as your enemy as soon as you buy something from them. They try to extort money from you by pushing upgrades because of vulnerabilities and compatibility. They make you subject to small print, EULAs with mysterious and suspicious content, advertisement that is manipulative, misleading and dishonest while giving you poor quality support for their products. They push expensive insurance on everything you buy.
Just they other day I had to throw out a perfectly good scanner because the company that made it (agfa) stopped making new drivers for it and it won't work under XP.
Before the advent of opensource/free software consumers had no alternatives so they had to deal with unethical deceitful entities. But now open source has proven to be much more competitive on the ethical and honesty front. If private companies want to keep their market share they are going to have to earn their trust. They will have to stop trying the fsck everyone in the behind all the time by pulling charlatan licensing tricks on you or people will slowly move away from them.
Evil isn't just a philosophical construct, nor is it a metaphor, it exists.
There is very little that we can do about this other than refuse to do business with American companies, which is nearly impossible unless you want to go live in a mud hut someplace.
When someone lies, they're wrong, and obscuring information is just another form of lying.
Hopefully one day freedom will come to America, but not today.
Actually it is North Korea that the world needs to focus its attention on. The sooner Kim Jong il is removed from power the better. As bad as Saddam was, he's a frelling nobel peace prize winner compared to Kim. A very special place in the fires of hades is even now being prepared for his punk ass
I think it would be interesting for it to have no HD only a big USB hub for memsticks (and periferal) and cd rom. You could either boot from the CD or a mem stick and have your/HOME on another stick or something. When the sticks are getting old just replace them.
I had mono about 5-6 years ago (I was 18 years old at the time), and I'm just starting to feel better now. I also had weird allergies that made me tired. I even quit my job one summer (two year after I got mono) because I was too tired. This year I feel I'm getting better. What made the biggest difference was starting Yoga. I think it's the breathing in yoga that helped me. For some reason when I got mono I think it changed my body rhythm. It mostly affected the way I was breathing. I wasn't breathing enough. It's my girlfriend that noticed that I seemed to be breathing very little especially when I was concentrating (coding in from of the computer or something) The fact that I constantly didn't have enough air made gave me all sorts of trouble including low energy, difficulty at doing exercise, difficulty sleeping etc. I think I'm also the nervous type and Yoga help control that too. I've gotten used to breathing more and in a more relaxed way. I have increased my body rhythm in general. I feel more alert and without having to take coffee or other stimulus (like things that make me nervous) and I feel better since. I'm not even doing the Yoga anymore. I think I just had to do it for a while to learn the concepts. My body just acts better naturally now.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard that, when comparing government data to private sector weather reports, the private newscast usually has weather a little better than the government. This is aledgedly done because the consumers prefer news with an optimist outlook on the weather.
Because of no public news source, the US already only has glorified tabloids biased towards sensational news. Would you really want to lose another unbiased source of data?
Please can someone tell me what is the difference with this and eMule
"The libertarian paradox: private property is protected by the state."
I think a lot of them also think its protected by their shotgun.
" well, if you think you're going to learn enough about any scientific field to make a meaningful contribution to the human body of knowledge in that area without a formal education, you're insane."
Not necessarily. It depends on the domain of interest you pick. If you pick a domain that has been well researched already sure its hard to make new discoveries. If you pick an emmerging science. something new, you might be able to make dicoveries just being self thaught.
Part of the genious of people who make discoveries is they have the creativity to come up with the next research field and they are good at orienting the choice of research they make. I believe they are the type of people who get exited at doing their own thing and not continuing work that has already been done.
Astrophysics is old. quite frankly I think you're not the smartest if you try to discover something there without education or if you go in that field "for the advancement of science".
New things that are emmerging lately are from artificial intelligence: social networks, semantic webs, natural language processing. I doubt Wikipedia, amazon.com, del.icio.us were all developped by PHds. These are all technologies that are making serious progress. Someone could find a new aproach to AI and considering the free/open ressources available on the internet (including scientific literature), it wouldn't have to be a PHd. You just have to be a little visionary an predict the next big thing. If you judge a domain is still in its infancy, it's the time to try to make a discovery in that domain.
He's not nitpicking, if a person writes the code he can do whatever he likes with it even after he GPLed it. He can put it in another GPL project, put it in another non-GPL project or anywhere else. You just can't take somebody elses code that has been GPLed and use it under another license. You can with your own code. Do you understand the distinction? You have no rights to someone elses GPL code besides the rights he has granted you trough the GPL. (unless you have a contract with that person) You have all rights to the code you wrote. (copyrights)
The reason it would be practicly impossible to buy a commersial licence to Linux's code is because you would have to go see all the contributers and ask their permission(buy the code from them) There are just too many contributors to do this. Theoritically though it is possible. With small GPL projects with few contributors it is possible for a company to buy the code from the contributors. Not so many companies want to do that because they would now be competing against the GPL version that is out there.
Social services are an investment. They have been shown to increase the flow of money because people in good health are more productive. There are all kinds of psychological and physical advantages to having these programs. Why do you think that even the most money driven corporations usually force their employees at taking a huge part of their salary in benefices? It is because they know those healthy employees are productive employees. If the government provided a greater part of these things to its citizens it would increase productivity and quality of life in general. You have to increase taxes so that it is viable but the tax increase to corporations isn't as high as it looks. It won't drive companies away because they also save a lot. They don't need to provide as much benefices to their employees since the government provides it instead. The companies benefit from workers that have profited from social services all their life and are therefore more qualified, more psychologically balanced and are able to compete better in the global economy. Therefore, the number of jobs increases, specially the good ones that need higher education and that have good pay.
Some government services like roads, a legal system, police, etc... are an obvious boost to the economy. Some services have a less obvious boost but that doesn't mean we should not have those services. Experts in different fields will tell you that offering services save money. For example, a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists are convinced that if they could give free therapy to families and children with problems early in their life they could prevent a lot of them from becoming criminals and thus reduce the cost of crime police, and reduce criminal influence (criminals turn their peers into criminals) in the long term.
True, there are cheaters in the system. And there are probably lots of them. But I believe you should not go out of your way to punish them, that's just punishing yourself. You should try to do everything you can that dissuade the cheating by tailoring the system so that it is not advantageous to cheat, but only if it doesn't impair your lifestyle to do so. Cutting social services impairs your lifestyle and raises the cost of living. I know humans have an instinct against freeloaders, there's a bell that rings in our head at the thought of the possibility of being exploited. Basic instincts can help us lots of times, but we have the advantage over animals that we are intellectual beings. Don't let that basic instinct get to you when your intellect can tell you that you are better off if you just ignore the freeloaders sometimes. Be proud of your legacy to society and to America. Don't be scared it will just benefit the freeloaders. Be glad that you made a better place to live for the other hard workers which are doing the same for you. Yes if you look at it directly I can see how it can seem to benefit mostly others, but it is as much for your benefit, the benefit of the economy and of corporations. You have to look at the big picture. It will be very beneficial for you that everyone around you is competent and sane. There are high costs associated with the opposite situation. You're right taking your hard earned money and forcing you to give it to others for no reason is bad. But this is for your benefit. It also acts as a kind of insurance to you. If ever you or a member of your family gets really sick or you loose your house and everything you own in a disaster, you will have government help to fall on. One of the nice things with social services is that it is multiplicative. When people are taken car of, they can themselves help others who can help even more people.
I firmly believe capitalism (or profit maximization) is the only way for countries to work well. It is a form of economic survival of the fittest where the better, easier, cheaper alternative is the one that thrives. It is the most natural way to efficient life. But I still think you have to be intelligent about it and not view only the direct obvious
I think there is a bigger issue behind all of this. People really are starting to trust the free and open source software community more than commercial software companies. This is no surprise since private companies act as your enemy as soon as you buy something from them. They try to extort money from you by pushing upgrades that patch vulnerabilities and making sure your product only stays compatible for a short period. They make you subject to small prints, EULAs with mysterious and suspicious content, advertisement that is manipulative, misleading and dishonest. They give you poor quality support for their products and even worst support if the product is more than a year old. They push expensive insurance on everything you buy.
Before the advent of opensource/free software consumers had no alternatives so they had to deal with unethical deceitful entities. But now open source has proven to be much more competitive on the ethical and honesty front. If private companies want to keep their market share they are going to have to earn the trust of the consumers. They will have to stop trying the fsck everyone in the behind all the time by pulling charlatan licensing tricks on everyone otherwize consumers will slowly move away from them.
Well since the article is from Microsoft I think they know.
The people in the country that buys the thing can do the support. sheesh. They are as smart as we are. Their labor is cheap so they can offer support for a very low cost, and with linux, they can learn everything they need to know on the web or by reading the code. It wont help them if they can't have their own computer companies and depend on M$ for all their needs. They do need versatile machines to get their industry going. They have to have independence and be able to take care of their own needs.
It all translates to, if it aint usefull to us, it aint usefull to them.
If it break you re-install the OS. These people aren't stupider than we are you know. We dealth with constant reinstalling in the Win95 area and still wanted to be able to install software even if it sometimes broke the OS. And I'm sure since its new tech it wont need to be installed nearly as often as win95 did.
I've been studying linguistics in the past year. The more I know about linguistics the less I trust grammar.
First of all, text is no that hard to count. Text is the way it works in many countries. Secondly, it would be easy to print out a machine and human readable scantron type of thing. It doesn't have to be that easy to read by humans, as long as it is readable. Not everyone will want to re-read their whole ballot, but if they want to, they should have the option. At least this way widescale fraud would be easely detectable. It is OK that some parts are done with computers for convenience, but we should always be able to go back to the piece of papers, to verify that the computers are working correctly and are free of fraudulence. I'm not saying that we should count the votes by hand. The hand counting should only be done as a control, in random counties or suspect machines. The point is that you need to have the option to do it. If you are a comp. sci as you claim, you damn well know that it would be much easyer to do undetectable mass fraud with a computer than with the paperballots. In both situations you have elections volonteers that watch for fraud, but in the case of electronic machines, they can stare at every part of the machines all they want, they aren't going to be able to see the fraud unless they can compare with a printout. A single programmer at Diebold could easily have rigged the election.
Using SSN has other issues, I agree that this would be the safest way, but people wont let that happen.
So how would you know the checksum program is not rigged. You can't verify software with another piece of software. You need to have something that can be verified with human eyes. e.g. A PIECE OF PAPER.
I don't think this would be enough because it is very hard to prove that the binaries used are from the sourcecode provided.
a paper printout is necessary.
"Seems odd to me too... "
My electric engineering/computer scientist reaction is that it completely baffles me. Jeezus! Someone do something! I know if I was american I would.
It doesn't matter, electronic voting without a paper trail is inherently unsafe.
I just don't understand you americans. I have undergrad studies in electrical/electronic engineering and I am currently mastering in comp. sci. I guess I could be considered an expert in electronique machines. If this was happening in my country I would be sending letters to my government and urging my peers, all experts in the domain, to give their opinion to the government. I am sure they would agree with me that we could say that our expert opinion is that electronic voting can't be done securely without a paper printout. I would make an expert only petition to support this claim.
Data in computers is very volatile, it can be changed on a large scale, in seconds without leaving a trace behind. It is invisible to the naked eye. The problem is not that fraud is that more likely with electroninc machine, the problem is that it is as easy to change a million vote on a computer, than it is to change one, you can do it in advance by putting some kind of malware in the system and you can do it without leaving a trace behind.
With paper ballots changing a million votes would requirer, that you physically destroy/modify ballots. It would take time, it would leave traces of evidence behind and it be much easyer to monitor the ballots to prevent fraud because you can see them with your eyes.
Were experts in the US ever surveiled about security of electronic voting? I would like to see the results.
" I think you can reasonably accurately predict (with some exceptions of course)..."
You're probably aproximately correct.
I think there is a bigger issue behind all of this. People really are starting to trust free and open source software more than commercial software. It is no surprise as private companies act as your enemy as soon as you buy something from them. They try to extort money from you by pushing upgrades because of vulnerabilities and compatibility. They make you subject to small print, EULAs with mysterious and suspicious content, advertisement that is manipulative, misleading and dishonest while giving you poor quality support for their products. They push expensive insurance on everything you buy.
Just they other day I had to throw out a perfectly good scanner because the company that made it (agfa) stopped making new drivers for it and it won't work under XP.
Before the advent of opensource/free software consumers had no alternatives so they had to deal with unethical deceitful entities. But now open source has proven to be much more competitive on the ethical and honesty front. If private companies want to keep their market share they are going to have to earn their trust. They will have to stop trying the fsck everyone in the behind all the time by pulling charlatan licensing tricks on you or people will slowly move away from them.
"then the stock market is inheriently evil,"
this is news to ya?
If you're and american you're quite the ignorant one.
http://www.redrat.net/BUSH_WAR/fas.htm
Evil isn't just a philosophical construct, nor is it a metaphor, it exists.
There is very little that we can do about this other than refuse to do business with American companies, which is nearly impossible unless you want to go live in a mud hut someplace.
When someone lies, they're wrong, and obscuring information is just another form of lying.
Hopefully one day freedom will come to America, but not today.
Actually it is North Korea that the world needs to focus its attention on. The sooner Kim Jong il is removed from power the better. As bad as Saddam was, he's a frelling nobel peace prize winner compared to Kim. A very special place in the fires of hades is even now being prepared for his punk ass
Now you know how the rest of the world feels about the US.
statistically???
I think it would be interesting for it to have no HD only a big USB hub for memsticks (and periferal) and cd rom. You could either boot from the CD or a mem stick and have your /HOME on another stick or something. When the sticks are getting old just replace them.
I had mono about 5-6 years ago (I was 18 years old at the time), and I'm just starting to feel better now. I also had weird allergies that made me tired. I even quit my job one summer (two year after I got mono) because I was too tired. This year I feel I'm getting better. What made the biggest difference was starting Yoga. I think it's the breathing in yoga that helped me. For some reason when I got mono I think it changed my body rhythm. It mostly affected the way I was breathing. I wasn't breathing enough. It's my girlfriend that noticed that I seemed to be breathing very little especially when I was concentrating (coding in from of the computer or something) The fact that I constantly didn't have enough air made gave me all sorts of trouble including low energy, difficulty at doing exercise, difficulty sleeping etc. I think I'm also the nervous type and Yoga help control that too. I've gotten used to breathing more and in a more relaxed way. I have increased my body rhythm in general. I feel more alert and without having to take coffee or other stimulus (like things that make me nervous) and I feel better since. I'm not even doing the Yoga anymore. I think I just had to do it for a while to learn the concepts. My body just acts better naturally now.