I still assert that for the most part e-voting is a solution in search of a problem.
While there were serious discrepancies in Florida in the US 2000 Presidential Election[1], the solution to that problem is to go to a fundamentally simpler system, not one wrought with complexity.
Everyone agrees that election systems have to be accurate,
tamper-proof, easy to use for both voters and polling-place officials,
accessible to all voters (including the blind), and auditable. Those
requirements are tough to meet, but an additional requirement is the
killer: anonymity. A recorded ballot cannot be traced back to an
individual voter, nor can a voter be able to use a ballot to obtain
payment for a vote. Says David Dill, a Stanford computer scientist:
"Unlike almost any other application, voting systems must discard
critical information."
1: Do not think for one minute they were partisan - I think it was just luck of the draw that Gore lost - and had the results been the opposite, we would have heard precisely the same level of whining from the Republican camp that we heard from the Democrats.
Is it not possible that many students were still registered at their principal domicile, and went home to vote (or voted absentee if the travel was onerous)?
While I re-registered with my student address - so I could participate in elections that actually matter (Local) - many MANY students in the dorms voted at their permanent addresses.
Well -- get some of that h3rb@l v|@9RA and you will have non-stop naked people:)
I had to stop buying things from spammers when my breasts got so big that I couldn't see my enormous penis, and I had no need to work because I lowered the interest on my mortgage so much, the bank was paying me!
(This is parallel to an old aviation joke: If I put everything on my PA22 that would shave a half-gph off my fuel consumption and give me an extra knot of airspeed, I could go mach2, but would have to stop every couple of hours to drain my tanks as they accumulated fuel)
I agree with you 100% - which is why I included the paragraph following.
What irritates me about "file sharing" is: People exercising this pretty-clearly-not-fair-use sharing are, as an unintended consequence, nibbling away at my actual-fair-use rights.
What I like about "file sharing" is: I honestly believe in my heart-of-hearts that the state-of-the-art in music distribution and remuneration to artists is defective as stands, and needs to be overhauled. Maybe this "civil disobedience" will lead to genuine reform.
But don't come crying to me when your civil obedience leads you to civil court and fat punitive judgements. You knew what you were doing, you knew it was illegal-but-necessary, and you did it anyway
Then why not put that text on the "hijacked images" website? The way it stands now, it seems disingenuous.
Just to be clear -- I am in favor of him exercising his rights of authorship however he chooses, and I think there is enough primae-facie evidence that Linspire's use is infringing (although, other posts have brought up some interesting issues, vis default-licensing and "who pays teh bills")
If your offer up your creative material with no copyright protection and state that it is free for all to use, why shouldn't...
Previous to the recent application of license, WAS there a specific disclaimer that it was "free for all to use"? Or are you speculating that merely publishing an image on a website is an abandonment of rights of authorship?
I think we can agree that copyright is in general a Good Thing
The entire space of the music "sharing" discussion is: Does giving my friend Joe a copy of this track/disc/collection constitute fair use or not?
For my part, I think it frequently does not, but I am not sitting on a jury, so my opinion is of little to no value
I am reminded of the Simpson's where Bart goes to work for the mob, and Fat Tony is justifying their criminal enterprise, Suppose your family don't like bread, but instead they like cigarettes
I really respect that Lindows^WLinspire is doing what it can to give OSS an outlet to the non-/. public
That being said -- there is something about that organization that rubs me the Wrong Way
Another fact about this story that leaves me wondering -- the Klown website very sneakily says (paraphrased) as of 24 April is licensed under... Well, inquiring minds want to know: PREVIOUS to 24 April, under which (if any) license was it released under?
Of course, I am sure I don't need to point out that under US Copyright law (assuming for the moment that the artist is producing his work in that country -- and Linspire is definitely based in the US ofA ), the mere production of the work attaches copyright to the creator of the work, and s/he is under no obligation whatsoever to delineate the ways in which it can be used by others.
This is important people: Whatever you write is copyright by definition. In absence of verbiage to the contrary (i.e. GPL, CC, BSD), nobody can usurp your product. Another question: Can someone who Is A Lawyer quote some caselaw on active-protection as applied to copyright? (I know how it applies to trademarks, but copyright != patent != trademark )
Oh, sure, all the/. teenyboppers (emphasis on bop) will be saying, "sounds like my dream job", but it really was horrible.
While it is not a requirement that porn companies be run by schizoid paranoic losers, they all seem to be.
This gig was no exception. The guy who ran the place clearly suffered from chronic depression, only barely understood how web technology worked, and was mind-bogglingly penny-wise/pound-foolish.
An illustrative example. For another client, I was being sent on an expense-paid trip to the colo facilty they shared, so I told Nutcase, "If you can get me a pile of CDs of the latest content-tree, I can load it onto the server while I am in town" This led to a several-day whine-a-thon how his CD burner was on the fritz, and he was going to have to go to great lengths to borrow a friends and blah blah blah. "Well, that's fine -- I leave for Los Angeles on Tuesday at the crack of dawn, so if you get them into DHL for morning delivery Monday at my house, I can load them up."
I get back from LA later that week, and he asks, "Did you get the content up?" "No," I reply, "I never got the discs in time..." "Why didn't you cancel the trip!! This is really vital for me!"
I patiently explained that this wasn't his trip, and I will deal with his content when I get the media.
Some weeks later, I finally get a box of CDs (he had sent them parcel post. Mean shipping time between the US and Mexico for parcels is like six weeks), and tell him, "Okay.. I got the CDs today. Do you want to pay for a trip to L.A. to do the load up, or what?"
"I thought you said it would be free... "
"I said it would be free if I were making the trip on other-client's nickel. That is: If I were in town for his thing, I could stick your CDs in the drive while I was there. Now, you've MISSED that window, so what do you want to do?"
"You're always trying to fuck me over like this.... OKay -- I won't pay for the travel, but you can upload them from there, right?"
I think to myself: God, I hate this man.
"Sure, I can do that... "
So, he paid me USD 25 an hour, for dozens of hours, to use a very slow connection to upload twenty CDs worth of content, because he did not want to spring for a fifty dollar round-trip train ticket to LA.
Or, another time, we're having some issues with one of the admin tools, so I'm on the phone with him. But he doesn't want to talk about the ####ing site, he's busy bragging how he's nailing this model or that model.
I am not the kind of guy to break his balls because he has figured out how to pay for sex without calling it prostitution, but I really could not care LESS who was waxing whos chili. I just want to get this problem resolved and close the ticket. But I do not get that. I get three and a half billable hours listening to him talk about his sex life.
On top of that, it's a harsh development environment. You have every horny hacker-nerd out there trying to steal your content, so you have to be on top of every possible security loophole. You get slammed bandwidth wise at random intervals as the whims of the horny public swing around in the wind.
Finally, it's a real negative point on your resume. Other employers will steer away from you, because you must be "tainted" in some way.
I'd do Telemarketing before I do programming for another pr0n site.
Written by Scotty Blum, c. 1986 while working at Startpoint Software, on Central Avenue in Yreka, California. I was a tech writer for them at the time. It was stored in otherwise unused sectors on the DiSector 3.0 distribution media. Other sectors had other weird stories, useless facts, etc.
I still have 3 GDM 1962s all hanging off of my SS1000, all in a row. The one on the left is for Opera and Firebird -- the one in the middle is where most of my xterms live, and the one on the right runs nothing but a maximized Emacs.
I surely am going to die from excessive X-Ray exposure.
In the US, there are VHF television bands from 54 to 72 (channels 2,3,4), 76 to 88 (channels 5 and 6) and 174 to 216 MHz (channels 7 through 13). UHF is an enormous wasteland of spectrum from 470MHz to 806 MHz. I am guessing from the context that Australia has similar allocations.
Penetration (of structures) is relatively good at low VHF frequencies, even at relatively low power levels, and LOS can be improved with the simple addition of artificial height (tower). Also, at the frequencies they are using there is perceptible refraction, so there is maybe a 25% range gain over optical horizon.
Generating modest amounts of power (20 to 200 Watts) is very economical and easy - and reasonable gain omni antennas at 50ish MHz are a well solved puzzle. At the customer end, a cheap channel-cut yagi can provide considerable gain at very low cost, something that would require much finer tolerances at a frequency seven octaves higher. First rule of radio: Antennas are cheaper than amplifiers. Ten dB of system gain in the antenna system is almost always much cheaper than that same 10dB in power gain. My utterly ignorant opinion of Australian bush is a vast basically-flat tract of territory with occasional hills and dales, but no enormous mountains. Perfect terrain for low-band VHF.
Atmospheric impulse noise can be a problem, but good coding can mitigate that, and a 7 MHz wide channel at a conservative modulation should provide fiveish megabits of gross bandwidth even with heavy error correction, subject to some loss for turnaround loss (I am imagining here something like Slotted Aloha).
High bitrates and HF are pretty much mutually exclusive. To get any reasonable amount of data would require a modulation format so dense to fit in the available bandwidth that you would need a physics-defying level of SNR and still suffer a super-unity BER.
On your last point, I think the reason that satellite internet is being adopted so slowly is the horrible latency. 500 mS ping times make interactive applications (telnet - ssh ) all but unusable. When LEO becomes a reality, then I might see it competing effectively with terrestrial Wireless/Wired technologies. Until then, for me it is a non-starter.
There are lots of legitimate activities you may engage in that you want to keep to yourself, or a small cadre of conconspirators. Your correspondance with your paramour telling her that what she did last time really turned your crank, and could she bring the golden retriever again this week.
Or, suppose you are a member of a group citizens petitioning the government for redress, to change some statute you find out-dated, or overly opressive. There are enough hot-button issues that are so politically charged, that anyone who even has the temerity to suggest that they be changed, is branded a pervert, a criminal, a traitor, or worse. (e.g. issues around gun control, legalizing marijuana or prostitution, lowering the age of consent)
I posit that in the US at this moment, it is actually very difficult for citizens to engage in cogent public discourse on these topics, for fear of being branded. It would behoove you to do your political organizing in private.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly: Just because one wishes to hold something private with their compatriots, does not mean they are planning a terrorist attack or a bank heist. What I choose to keep private is not subject to debate.
Now, the second point you make - at the current state of the art, using strong encryption is sufficiently difficult, that it is, in and of itself, a "red flag" that something might not be kosher. The only solution for that is for more and more people to use it more and more frequently.
This is of course, not without political expense: If suddenly 80% of all person-to-person e-mail is encrypted, and all person-to-group e-mail is at least signed, encryption technology will be front page on the Wall Street Journal, and the political powers for the suppression of thought-crime will demand that it be tightly regulated.
Encryption technology is restricted under export rules as a "munition." Perhaps a case could be made under the second amendment, that our fundamental freedoms are dependant on not only the right to bear arms in the form of an SKS, but also in the form of PGP.
I think you misunderstand Mr. Griffin - I believe that he posits a Copyrisk pool as one method to reward artists.
There is nothing about this Copyrisk Commons Plan to stop an individual artist from collecting a revenue stream from selling artifacts (shiny discs of plastic covered with bits), performing in public (whether it be Lincoln Center, or the Harvard Square T station), or any other lawful pursuit of revenue (except buying SCOX).
Naturally, poor writing, direction, acting and acting have nothing to do with its decline.
More frequent and longer commercial breaks, split-screens during credits, product placement and other techniques are thought to IMPROVE the viewing experience.
I do not think the confusion comes from the type of the show over the crawl, but that the entire idea of a lower-third crawl is to present news content that is out-of-band with regard to the program currently being aired.
This conversation has been going on over in alt.tv.simpsons for a few days now. And the succulent nutmeat is: Apart from class-clown Matt Groening saying so on an NPR interview, there is, as yet, no evidence brought to light that any lawsuit was considered, or forthcoming.
I would not accuse Matt of lying, but perhaps of saying something that is not exactly true for comedic value.
While I cannot imagine Fox filing suit against themselves (as entertaining as Fox v. Fox would be to see on the docket), it is not unimaginable that they might file against Film Roman.
Slashdot Mirror
I still assert that for the most part e-voting is a solution in search of a problem.
While there were serious discrepancies in Florida in the US 2000 Presidential Election[1], the solution to that problem is to go to a fundamentally simpler system, not one wrought with complexity.
1: Do not think for one minute they were partisan - I think it was just luck of the draw that Gore lost - and had the results been the opposite, we would have heard precisely the same level of whining from the Republican camp that we heard from the Democrats.
Is it not possible that many students were still registered at their principal domicile, and went home to vote (or voted absentee if the travel was onerous)?
While I re-registered with my student address - so I could participate in elections that actually matter (Local) - many MANY students in the dorms voted at their permanent addresses.
Well -- get some of that h3rb@l v|@9RA and you will have non-stop naked people :)
I had to stop buying things from spammers when my breasts got so big that I couldn't see my enormous penis, and I had no need to work because I lowered the interest on my mortgage so much, the bank was paying me!
(This is parallel to an old aviation joke: If I put everything on my PA22 that would shave a half-gph off my fuel consumption and give me an extra knot of airspeed, I could go mach2, but would have to stop every couple of hours to drain my tanks as they accumulated fuel)
I agree with you 100% - which is why I included the paragraph following.
What irritates me about "file sharing" is: People exercising this pretty-clearly-not-fair-use sharing are, as an unintended consequence, nibbling away at my actual-fair-use rights.
What I like about "file sharing" is: I honestly believe in my heart-of-hearts that the state-of-the-art in music distribution and remuneration to artists is defective as stands, and needs to be overhauled. Maybe this "civil disobedience" will lead to genuine reform.
But don't come crying to me when your civil obedience leads you to civil court and fat punitive judgements. You knew what you were doing, you knew it was illegal-but-necessary, and you did it anyway
I stand educated.
And actually was aware that this did reflect reversal from common law somewhere in the late 1970s or early 80s
Then why not put that text on the "hijacked images" website? The way it stands now, it seems disingenuous.
Just to be clear -- I am in favor of him exercising his rights of authorship however he chooses, and I think there is enough primae-facie evidence that Linspire's use is infringing (although, other posts have brought up some interesting issues, vis default-licensing and "who pays teh bills")
Previous to the recent application of license, WAS there a specific disclaimer that it was "free for all to use"? Or are you speculating that merely publishing an image on a website is an abandonment of rights of authorship?
I think we can agree that copyright is in general a Good Thing
The entire space of the music "sharing" discussion is: Does giving my friend Joe a copy of this track/disc/collection constitute fair use or not?
For my part, I think it frequently does not, but I am not sitting on a jury, so my opinion is of little to no value
I am reminded of the Simpson's where Bart goes to work for the mob, and Fat Tony is justifying their criminal enterprise, Suppose your family don't like bread, but instead they like cigarettes
I really respect that Lindows^WLinspire is doing what it can to give OSS an outlet to the non-/. public
That being said -- there is something about that organization that rubs me the Wrong Way
Another fact about this story that leaves me wondering -- the Klown website very sneakily says (paraphrased) as of 24 April is licensed under ... Well, inquiring minds want to know: PREVIOUS to 24 April, under which (if any) license was it released under?
Of course, I am sure I don't need to point out that under US Copyright law (assuming for the moment that the artist is producing his work in that country -- and Linspire is definitely based in the US ofA ), the mere production of the work attaches copyright to the creator of the work, and s/he is under no obligation whatsoever to delineate the ways in which it can be used by others.
This is important people: Whatever you write is copyright by definition. In absence of verbiage to the contrary (i.e. GPL, CC, BSD), nobody can usurp your product. Another question: Can someone who Is A Lawyer quote some caselaw on active-protection as applied to copyright? (I know how it applies to trademarks, but copyright != patent != trademark )
Oh, sure, all the /. teenyboppers (emphasis on bop) will be saying, "sounds like my dream job", but it really was horrible.
While it is not a requirement that porn companies be run by schizoid paranoic losers, they all seem to be.
This gig was no exception. The guy who ran the place clearly suffered from chronic depression, only barely understood how web technology worked, and was mind-bogglingly penny-wise/pound-foolish.
An illustrative example. For another client, I was being sent on an expense-paid trip to the colo facilty they shared, so I told Nutcase, "If you can get me a pile of CDs of the latest content-tree, I can load it onto the server while I am in town" This led to a several-day whine-a-thon how his CD burner was on the fritz, and he was going to have to go to great lengths to borrow a friends and blah blah blah. "Well, that's fine -- I leave for Los Angeles on Tuesday at the crack of dawn, so if you get them into DHL for morning delivery Monday at my house, I can load them up."
I get back from LA later that week, and he asks, "Did you get the content up?" "No," I reply, "I never got the discs in time..." "Why didn't you cancel the trip!! This is really vital for me!"
I patiently explained that this wasn't his trip, and I will deal with his content when I get the media.
Some weeks later, I finally get a box of CDs (he had sent them parcel post. Mean shipping time between the US and Mexico for parcels is like six weeks), and tell him, "Okay .. I got the CDs today. Do you want to pay for a trip to L.A. to do the load up, or what?"
"I thought you said it would be free ... "
"I said it would be free if I were making the trip on other-client's nickel. That is: If I were in town for his thing, I could stick your CDs in the drive while I was there. Now, you've MISSED that window, so what do you want to do?"
"You're always trying to fuck me over like this.... OKay -- I won't pay for the travel, but you can upload them from there, right?"
I think to myself: God, I hate this man.
"Sure, I can do that ... "
So, he paid me USD 25 an hour, for dozens of hours, to use a very slow connection to upload twenty CDs worth of content, because he did not want to spring for a fifty dollar round-trip train ticket to LA.
Or, another time, we're having some issues with one of the admin tools, so I'm on the phone with him. But he doesn't want to talk about the ####ing site, he's busy bragging how he's nailing this model or that model.
I am not the kind of guy to break his balls because he has figured out how to pay for sex without calling it prostitution, but I really could not care LESS who was waxing whos chili. I just want to get this problem resolved and close the ticket. But I do not get that. I get three and a half billable hours listening to him talk about his sex life.
On top of that, it's a harsh development environment. You have every horny hacker-nerd out there trying to steal your content, so you have to be on top of every possible security loophole. You get slammed bandwidth wise at random intervals as the whims of the horny public swing around in the wind.
Finally, it's a real negative point on your resume. Other employers will steer away from you, because you must be "tainted" in some way.
I'd do Telemarketing before I do programming for another pr0n site.
Vigorous approval ... SOAR is one of my "I have a tab in it just about always" sites.
in that last I used c. 1986 in the sense "cerca" not "copyright". I also think he published it in at least one other place.
Written by Scotty Blum, c. 1986 while working at Startpoint Software, on Central Avenue in Yreka, California. I was a tech writer for them at the time. It was stored in otherwise unused sectors on the DiSector 3.0 distribution media. Other sectors had other weird stories, useless facts, etc.
Another (awful) movie with graffiti robots.
I surely am going to die from excessive X-Ray exposure.
I just sent him a fiver. You should too.
Penetration (of structures) is relatively good at low VHF frequencies, even at relatively low power levels, and LOS can be improved with the simple addition of artificial height (tower). Also, at the frequencies they are using there is perceptible refraction, so there is maybe a 25% range gain over optical horizon.
Generating modest amounts of power (20 to 200 Watts) is very economical and easy - and reasonable gain omni antennas at 50ish MHz are a well solved puzzle. At the customer end, a cheap channel-cut yagi can provide considerable gain at very low cost, something that would require much finer tolerances at a frequency seven octaves higher. First rule of radio: Antennas are cheaper than amplifiers. Ten dB of system gain in the antenna system is almost always much cheaper than that same 10dB in power gain. My utterly ignorant opinion of Australian bush is a vast basically-flat tract of territory with occasional hills and dales, but no enormous mountains. Perfect terrain for low-band VHF.
Atmospheric impulse noise can be a problem, but good coding can mitigate that, and a 7 MHz wide channel at a conservative modulation should provide fiveish megabits of gross bandwidth even with heavy error correction, subject to some loss for turnaround loss (I am imagining here something like Slotted Aloha).
High bitrates and HF are pretty much mutually exclusive. To get any reasonable amount of data would require a modulation format so dense to fit in the available bandwidth that you would need a physics-defying level of SNR and still suffer a super-unity BER.
On your last point, I think the reason that satellite internet is being adopted so slowly is the horrible latency. 500 mS ping times make interactive applications (telnet - ssh ) all but unusable. When LEO becomes a reality, then I might see it competing effectively with terrestrial Wireless/Wired technologies. Until then, for me it is a non-starter.
Or, suppose you are a member of a group citizens petitioning the government for redress, to change some statute you find out-dated, or overly opressive. There are enough hot-button issues that are so politically charged, that anyone who even has the temerity to suggest that they be changed, is branded a pervert, a criminal, a traitor, or worse. (e.g. issues around gun control, legalizing marijuana or prostitution, lowering the age of consent)
I posit that in the US at this moment, it is actually very difficult for citizens to engage in cogent public discourse on these topics, for fear of being branded. It would behoove you to do your political organizing in private.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly: Just because one wishes to hold something private with their compatriots, does not mean they are planning a terrorist attack or a bank heist. What I choose to keep private is not subject to debate.
Now, the second point you make - at the current state of the art, using strong encryption is sufficiently difficult, that it is, in and of itself, a "red flag" that something might not be kosher. The only solution for that is for more and more people to use it more and more frequently.
This is of course, not without political expense: If suddenly 80% of all person-to-person e-mail is encrypted, and all person-to-group e-mail is at least signed, encryption technology will be front page on the Wall Street Journal, and the political powers for the suppression of thought-crime will demand that it be tightly regulated.
Encryption technology is restricted under export rules as a "munition." Perhaps a case could be made under the second amendment, that our fundamental freedoms are dependant on not only the right to bear arms in the form of an SKS, but also in the form of PGP.
Ummm .. but where are Alice and Bob?
There is nothing about this Copyrisk Commons Plan to stop an individual artist from collecting a revenue stream from selling artifacts (shiny discs of plastic covered with bits), performing in public (whether it be Lincoln Center, or the Harvard Square T station), or any other lawful pursuit of revenue (except buying SCOX).
More frequent and longer commercial breaks, split-screens during credits, product placement and other techniques are thought to IMPROVE the viewing experience.
I do not think the confusion comes from the type of the show over the crawl, but that the entire idea of a lower-third crawl is to present news content that is out-of-band with regard to the program currently being aired.
I would not accuse Matt of lying, but perhaps of saying something that is not exactly true for comedic value.
While I cannot imagine Fox filing suit against themselves (as entertaining as Fox v. Fox would be to see on the docket), it is not unimaginable that they might file against Film Roman.