I mean, I know it's obvious, but on so many points:
Michael Speck said ISPs relied on illegal music downloads for 20 per cent of their revenue
Oh, and I suppose they've got verifiable statistics from the ISPs they're about to sue to back this up? (more on this later)
... and were aware customers were flouting copyright laws but did nothing to stop them.
Well it's not their job to be police here, they provide a service which is mostly legitimately used.
"We understand from employees of Internet companies that up to 20 per cent of their revenue in many cases comes from traffic created by downloading illegal sound recordings.
Oh here it is, the old unnamed source trick. Dubya likes that one too! And how many people really told them this, out of how many ISPs? Somehow, I doubt that's going to be a high ratio.
"There aren't many business that could survive if 20 per cent of their revenue disappeared
Reality check time. I should think quite a lot of companies have seen at least this much reduction in revenue in the last couple of years. They may have laid off a heckuvalot of people, but I think they survived! And, ISPs will all go bust if MP3s are no longer downloaded? Come on! Even assuming this wild 20% number, maybe they'll just adjust their business models, adapt to the changing environment, you know, like they do all the time anyway. The internet has such a fast rate of change that this is perfectly normal for any company based around it.
Mr Speck urged ISPs to halt the practice by blocking access to illegal music download sites and programs or "by other arrangements".
This brings us back all the usual censorship arguments, like who gets to decide which sites are blocked, on what grounds, with what oversigth, what appeals process etc. etc. Like I said before, ISPs are not police, and are certainly not judge/jury/executioner.
music piracy was "a growing market"
And your proof of this is? Your sales have also declined, in the middle of a global depression? Right!
What a load of bull! I know the writer of the article does present both sides, but she could have tried to find some real figures herself, instead of just presenting a series of quotes and counterquotes. Don't these people know what research is? Why should people get away with spouting whatever wild claims they like with no backup?
>But smeagol was never an evil character, just weak and pathetic But also pitiful remember.
>and as for him not being easily corrupted, he must have been. Well he was just an ordinary dude. Remember most people who came into contact with the ring were some of the greatest representatives of their race, and even they had trouble resisting it. The only exception is the Hobbits, who drew their strengths from their ancestry, and their hardy race.
The whole thing'd be something like twenty movies if it were complete.
Now there's a corker of an idea! One normal length movie coming out every 6 months for 10 years. Then they can cover the entire book, with nothing at all left out.
It's not so far fetched, how long have we had to wait to get 6 Star Wars movies? And I can remember my mum saying how she used to look forward to the next book coming out, back when Tolkien was first writing them, it's worth waiting for.
Go to it Pete!
but I loved it when we had the words from the book
That's definitely one of the things I liked most too. In fact, even though it's many years since I last read the book, I found it almost possible to tell which lines were original Tolkein ones, and there did seem to be a lot of them. There just seems to be a certain style to them that hasn't quite been caught by the dialog writers, although of course it's mostly the meaningful and important lines like the one you mention that are used.
If these companies wouldn't provide exactly the service they are paid for they would be out of business already.
Exactly right. It's not 'hackers' or 'crackers' I'm afraid of, it's the guys these companies are working for. And we sure as hell know who Walden O'Dell is working for! "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." How much more conflict of interest do you need?
>'What if' we killed no Iraqis in Bush's war? If we could have taken out Saddam with zero deaths (including the 'post-war' period), don't you think there'd be a helluvalot more happier Iraqis than there are now? Why do you think the war was over so quick? Due to the superior planning and execution of the US military? Get real, it was because most of the Iraqi soldiers put up as little as resistance as they possibly could before running away, in the face of totally overwhelming firepower. They didn't want to die for Saddam or anybody.
>if you don't kill your enemy, he lives to fight another day and teach his children to hate you too Whereas if you kill him his children will love you and greet you with flags and flowers?
The other problem you have, of course, is defining who the enemy is. This comes back to the old problem of intelligence, which the US doesn't seem to have much of (possibly in more ways than one;-) ).
>If you can't stomach it, don't play that game. Many people can't, and don't want to. There are *always* other ways.
Nice one I like it, this is a really good illustration of why you cannot have even a single 'black box' step in the process. Unfortunately the word 'proprietary' these days is like a magic word that makes anyone that hears it completely stupid. I mean, it's like: "Hey you, we want to see how you count the votes, NOW!". "Sorry ma'am, it's proprietary." "Oh I'm so sorry I didn't realise, please take me take me all the way big boy. And add an extra few mill to your contract while your at it!"
the anonymity demands of the secret ballot
Why does the machine need to know who you are? To check you only vote once? In the UK, you can only vote in one place, and when you do, they tick your name off on a list so you can't vote again. This system would work regardless of the actual voting mechanism. So let's not make the problem harder than it is. Make the machines count, and that's all.
ATMs are armored safes
Yeah because they're full of greenbacks. The actual value of the contents is very large and immediately disposable. This is not the case with a voting machine.
makes infeasible a whole host of security problems - theft, modification, vandalism
Well, the way this is done with voting machines is to have them personally supervised at all times. Preferably by several people. This shouldn't be a problem. And if a machine gets stolen before the election, well hopefully you can block that machine from trying to register its votes with the main server or something, or you can only activate it with a memory card which is kept separately etc.
And there's no higher power to appeal to
Sure there is, what do you think happened in Florida. The appeals went all the way up. But of course, this only works if there's a proper audit trail.
Patchy measures...have no place in elections
Absolutely right, that's why its so important to get this stuff right, and not have stupid howlers like 20 times more votes than voters.
What happens if voting machines break? Who's motivated to pay to avoid that consequence?
The voters? The country? The government? Anybody who cares about upholding the constitution? In fact, I think many people who live in a democracy would be horrified that you even asked the question!
But you're right! It does seem like nobody cares, at least, of the people who are implementing the stuff. Hence the title of my original post.
Well I agree that any system like this is bound to have some errors, however with the ATM example this happens very very rarely. The size and magnitude of errors that we are seeing in some of these voting machines seems to be orders of magnitude worse, regardless of which way they skewed the results. And some of them just smack of basic lack of testing, like the problem reported the other day where a memory card filled up. It just sounds to me like the quality of these machines isn't taken seriously, and it damn well should be.
Sure, but they have to get the trust of the users *before* they do that, and if they keep coming up with howlers like this, nobody will ever trust them.
> It is harder than you think.
Well, I was just talking about getting the friggin numbers added up right, I didn't touch on security, but let's go back to the ATM example...
>Votes must not be able to be forged.
Cash withdrawals must not be able to be forged
>There must be an audit trail of every vote cast
There must be an audit trail of every withdrawal
>Yet voting must be 100% anonymous.
Nobody else should be able to access my bank account.
>it is still a nontrivial problem.
Agreed, but not unsolvable. Didn't Australia develop a system that seems to work for something like $125,000?
>It MUST be available to public scrutiny...Open source is the only way.
Well, here are some other alternatives:
Random spotchecks. There should be a considerable number of these, at least 1% of the votes should be manually counted and compared with the machine totals. This implies a voter-verified paper trail produced by the machines.
Specify that there must be machines from more than one manufacturer used in each voting region to prevent one company from being dominant.
A sincere amount of third party testing before the elections. This seems to be severely lacking at the moment.
Trained officials from each interested party overseeing the whole setup and usage of the machine, from the time it is delivered, to the time the election is completely over (this one is also true of open source), to make sure the right code you is actually what is on the machines.
I mean really, how difficult can this be. Lots of people vote, you add up the totals, we're not talking rocket science here.
When was the last time your local ATM machine gave you $1500 instead of the $50 that you asked for. Doesn't happen too often right? Maybe it's because the banks are damned sure they're not going to give their money away. It's a pity the people in charge don't take democracy that seriously.
>The two situations, the two men, are two different things and can not be compared
Well I agree that things are different, but I would say that there enough similarities that the two events are bound to be compared. It doesn't make them the same: comparing things can also highlight differences.
Having said that, no one actually explicitly compared them until you did!
>The arguments will come in that 9/11 has nothing to do with Iraq
Strangely enough, there won't be a single sustainable argument that Iraq did have something to do with 9/11. I wonder why?
>current news
Well let's wait until current news actually makes its mind up shall we:
"we have not been able to establish definitively that they were al-Qaeda members" (from the first article).
And you know, it's really not too surprising to find Al-Qaeda in Iraq at the present time, seeing as it's basically open day for any terrorist in the middle east. Whether they were there in any serious way a couple of years ago is a completely different question.
With all that, it is perhaps a slightly contentious article to illustrate the original post with, but then the whole point is that it's exactly that sort of article that is likely to undergo revisionism.
>Keep reading Yes you're right, sorry about that, you just can't say RTFA too much can you;-). But it's still useful to have some concrete examples of how it can work.
I think you can illustrate the source of the problems by looking at the attitudes of the companies making the machines. In America, it's "Our code is all secret and our CEO is a public supporter of "whichever" party, but hey you can trust us, we test it properly honest". Whereas down under, they say "Why the hell should you trust us? Here's the code check it out for yourself. After all this is the foundation of the free world we're talking about, we think it's quite important to get it right". And some of these problems that are coming out: memory cards filling up, the server being overloaded because too many machines phoned home at the same time. Hey we could never have predicted that one, nobody knew all the voting stations would close at nearly the same time. WTF? What did they do, test it with 5 votes and then say, fine that'll scale up to handle 50 million votes no problem. The Aussie guy also said he was completely boggled by what's going on in the US. I think I and several billion other people outside the US concur with that one.
(Chicago? Dead people? Well in the UK, if you know you won't be able to get to your allocated polling station on the day, you get a postal vote, would that help?)
>the main argument against it here is scale Sorry that's not on, pencil and paper scales very well. If you have more people to vote, you also have more people available to count the votes. What's the problem? It works fine in the UK with a population of 65 million.
>it is very easy to go to several polling locations Well, in the UK, you are registered with a particular voting station, and that is the only one you can vote at. They tick your name off after you vote so no fraud of that type is possible.
There we go, all problems solved, anything else we can help you with?
>He often climbs on top of the Mont Blanc Not at the moment he doesn't In summary - Mont Blanc is closed to climbers because it's falling apart, due to the melting permafrost which used to hold things together.
A choice quote:
'Big banks will no longer give loans for new ski industry constructions,' he said, adding that from 1850 to 1980 Alpine glaciers lost half their volume, and in the 20 years from 1980 to 2000, another quarter of what was left was also lost.
>It however doesn't mean that we should not pollute.
I completely agree with you here. Whether we have global warming as a long term thing, or are still pulling out of the cold spell from the previous few hundred years, it still doesn't make sense to chuck out millions of tons of rubbish into the atmosphere. It's not just global warming we have to worry about, but global *pollution* in general, if we want to have clean air to breath, and clean water to drink etc.
Novell today also announced that IBM intends to make a $50 million investment in Novell
Now that is a very interesting number indeed!
And I think it sends a very powerful message to all those businesses out there that are succumbing to the SCO FUD (hey can we shorten that to SCUD!). IBM are basically putting their money where they're mouth is to show their confidence in the future of Linux. Nice one.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean something took off their tin foil hat? Now they're in trouble!
Michael Speck said ISPs relied on illegal music downloads for 20 per cent of their revenue
Oh, and I suppose they've got verifiable statistics from the ISPs they're about to sue to back this up? (more on this later)
Well it's not their job to be police here, they provide a service which is mostly legitimately used.
"We understand from employees of Internet companies that up to 20 per cent of their revenue in many cases comes from traffic created by downloading illegal sound recordings.
Oh here it is, the old unnamed source trick. Dubya likes that one too! And how many people really told them this, out of how many ISPs? Somehow, I doubt that's going to be a high ratio.
"There aren't many business that could survive if 20 per cent of their revenue disappeared
Reality check time. I should think quite a lot of companies have seen at least this much reduction in revenue in the last couple of years. They may have laid off a heckuvalot of people, but I think they survived! And, ISPs will all go bust if MP3s are no longer downloaded? Come on! Even assuming this wild 20% number, maybe they'll just adjust their business models, adapt to the changing environment, you know, like they do all the time anyway. The internet has such a fast rate of change that this is perfectly normal for any company based around it.
Mr Speck urged ISPs to halt the practice by blocking access to illegal music download sites and programs or "by other arrangements".
This brings us back all the usual censorship arguments, like who gets to decide which sites are blocked, on what grounds, with what oversigth, what appeals process etc. etc. Like I said before, ISPs are not police, and are certainly not judge/jury/executioner.
music piracy was "a growing market"
And your proof of this is? Your sales have also declined, in the middle of a global depression? Right!
What a load of bull! I know the writer of the article does present both sides, but she could have tried to find some real figures herself, instead of just presenting a series of quotes and counterquotes. Don't these people know what research is? Why should people get away with spouting whatever wild claims they like with no backup?
OK, I stand corrected.
So, the whole thing was finished, but the readers of the first part then had to wait until the next installment was published? Sounds familiar.
>But smeagol was never an evil character, just weak and pathetic
But also pitiful remember.
>and as for him not being easily corrupted, he must have been.
Well he was just an ordinary dude. Remember most people who came into contact with the ring were some of the greatest representatives of their race, and even they had trouble resisting it. The only exception is the Hobbits, who drew their strengths from their ancestry, and their hardy race.
The whole thing'd be something like twenty movies if it were complete.
Now there's a corker of an idea! One normal length movie coming out every 6 months for 10 years. Then they can cover the entire book, with nothing at all left out.
It's not so far fetched, how long have we had to wait to get 6 Star Wars movies? And I can remember my mum saying how she used to look forward to the next book coming out, back when Tolkien was first writing them, it's worth waiting for.
Go to it Pete!
but I loved it when we had the words from the book
That's definitely one of the things I liked most too. In fact, even though it's many years since I last read the book, I found it almost possible to tell which lines were original Tolkein ones, and there did seem to be a lot of them. There just seems to be a certain style to them that hasn't quite been caught by the dialog writers, although of course it's mostly the meaningful and important lines like the one you mention that are used.
>Possible exception -- Smeagol
Eh? Have you not read "The Hobbit"? Smeagol had the ring for something like a hundred years!
Penitentiary? Hell let's get the trial moved to Virginia and push for the death penalty! "In the ground" should be the answer.
Exactly right. It's not 'hackers' or 'crackers' I'm afraid of, it's the guys these companies are working for. And we sure as hell know who Walden O'Dell is working for! "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." How much more conflict of interest do you need?
>'What if' we killed no Iraqis in Bush's war?
;-) ).
If we could have taken out Saddam with zero deaths (including the 'post-war' period), don't you think there'd be a helluvalot more happier Iraqis than there are now?
Why do you think the war was over so quick? Due to the superior planning and execution of the US military? Get real, it was because most of the Iraqi soldiers put up as little as resistance as they possibly could before running away, in the face of totally overwhelming firepower. They didn't want to die for Saddam or anybody.
>if you don't kill your enemy, he lives to fight another day and teach his children to hate you too
Whereas if you kill him his children will love you and greet you with flags and flowers?
The other problem you have, of course, is defining who the enemy is. This comes back to the old problem of intelligence, which the US doesn't seem to have much of (possibly in more ways than one
>If you can't stomach it, don't play that game.
Many people can't, and don't want to. There are *always* other ways.
Nice one I like it, this is a really good illustration of why you cannot have even a single 'black box' step in the process.
Unfortunately the word 'proprietary' these days is like a magic word that makes anyone that hears it completely stupid. I mean, it's like:
"Hey you, we want to see how you count the votes, NOW!".
"Sorry ma'am, it's proprietary."
"Oh I'm so sorry I didn't realise, please take me take me all the way big boy. And add an extra few mill to your contract while your at it!"
>One might even call him The Omega Penguin.
Surely he should be the Alpha Penguin, being the first Linux developer.
Why does the machine need to know who you are? To check you only vote once? In the UK, you can only vote in one place, and when you do, they tick your name off on a list so you can't vote again. This system would work regardless of the actual voting mechanism. So let's not make the problem harder than it is. Make the machines count, and that's all.
ATMs are armored safes
Yeah because they're full of greenbacks. The actual value of the contents is very large and immediately disposable. This is not the case with a voting machine.
makes infeasible a whole host of security problems - theft, modification, vandalism
Well, the way this is done with voting machines is to have them personally supervised at all times. Preferably by several people. This shouldn't be a problem. And if a machine gets stolen before the election, well hopefully you can block that machine from trying to register its votes with the main server or something, or you can only activate it with a memory card which is kept separately etc.
And there's no higher power to appeal to
Sure there is, what do you think happened in Florida. The appeals went all the way up. But of course, this only works if there's a proper audit trail.
Patchy measures ...have no place in elections
Absolutely right, that's why its so important to get this stuff right, and not have stupid howlers like 20 times more votes than voters.
What happens if voting machines break? Who's motivated to pay to avoid that consequence?
The voters? The country? The government? Anybody who cares about upholding the constitution? In fact, I think many people who live in a democracy would be horrified that you even asked the question!
But you're right! It does seem like nobody cares, at least, of the people who are implementing the stuff. Hence the title of my original post.
Well I agree that any system like this is bound to have some errors, however with the ATM example this happens very very rarely. The size and magnitude of errors that we are seeing in some of these voting machines seems to be orders of magnitude worse, regardless of which way they skewed the results. And some of them just smack of basic lack of testing, like the problem reported the other day where a memory card filled up.
It just sounds to me like the quality of these machines isn't taken seriously, and it damn well should be.
Sure, but they have to get the trust of the users *before* they do that, and if they keep coming up with howlers like this, nobody will ever trust them.
Well, I was just talking about getting the friggin numbers added up right, I didn't touch on security, but let's go back to the ATM example...
>Votes must not be able to be forged.
Cash withdrawals must not be able to be forged
>There must be an audit trail of every vote cast
There must be an audit trail of every withdrawal
>Yet voting must be 100% anonymous.
Nobody else should be able to access my bank account.
>it is still a nontrivial problem.
Agreed, but not unsolvable. Didn't Australia develop a system that seems to work for something like $125,000?
>It MUST be available to public scrutiny...Open source is the only way.
Well, here are some other alternatives:
Random spotchecks. There should be a considerable number of these, at least 1% of the votes should be manually counted and compared with the machine totals. This implies a voter-verified paper trail produced by the machines.
Specify that there must be machines from more than one manufacturer used in each voting region to prevent one company from being dominant.
A sincere amount of third party testing before the elections. This seems to be severely lacking at the moment.
Trained officials from each interested party overseeing the whole setup and usage of the machine, from the time it is delivered, to the time the election is completely over (this one is also true of open source), to make sure the right code you is actually what is on the machines.
I mean really, how difficult can this be. Lots of people vote, you add up the totals, we're not talking rocket science here. When was the last time your local ATM machine gave you $1500 instead of the $50 that you asked for. Doesn't happen too often right? Maybe it's because the banks are damned sure they're not going to give their money away. It's a pity the people in charge don't take democracy that seriously.
>The two situations, the two men, are two different things and can not be compared
Well I agree that things are different, but I would say that there enough similarities that the two events are bound to be compared. It doesn't make them the same: comparing things can also highlight differences.
Having said that, no one actually explicitly compared them until you did!
>The arguments will come in that 9/11 has nothing to do with Iraq
Strangely enough, there won't be a single sustainable argument that Iraq did have something to do with 9/11. I wonder why?
>current news
Well let's wait until current news actually makes its mind up shall we: "we have not been able to establish definitively that they were al-Qaeda members" (from the first article). And you know, it's really not too surprising to find Al-Qaeda in Iraq at the present time, seeing as it's basically open day for any terrorist in the middle east. Whether they were there in any serious way a couple of years ago is a completely different question.
With all that, it is perhaps a slightly contentious article to illustrate the original post with, but then the whole point is that it's exactly that sort of article that is likely to undergo revisionism.
>Keep reading ;-). But it's still useful to have some concrete examples of how it can work.
Yes you're right, sorry about that, you just can't say RTFA too much can you
I think you can illustrate the source of the problems by looking at the attitudes of the companies making the machines. In America, it's "Our code is all secret and our CEO is a public supporter of "whichever" party, but hey you can trust us, we test it properly honest". Whereas down under, they say "Why the hell should you trust us? Here's the code check it out for yourself. After all this is the foundation of the free world we're talking about, we think it's quite important to get it right".
And some of these problems that are coming out: memory cards filling up, the server being overloaded because too many machines phoned home at the same time. Hey we could never have predicted that one, nobody knew all the voting stations would close at nearly the same time. WTF? What did they do, test it with 5 votes and then say, fine that'll scale up to handle 50 million votes no problem.
The Aussie guy also said he was completely boggled by what's going on in the US. I think I and several billion other people outside the US concur with that one.
(Chicago? Dead people? Well in the UK, if you know you won't be able to get to your allocated polling station on the day, you get a postal vote, would that help?)
Oh yes, you're right, whoops, but it's still useful to have a concrete example to back it up with.
>the main argument against it here is scale
Sorry that's not on, pencil and paper scales very well. If you have more people to vote, you also have more people available to count the votes. What's the problem? It works fine in the UK with a population of 65 million.
>it is very easy to go to several polling locations
Well, in the UK, you are registered with a particular voting station, and that is the only one you can vote at. They tick your name off after you vote so no fraud of that type is possible.
There we go, all problems solved, anything else we can help you with?
Not at the moment he doesn't
In summary - Mont Blanc is closed to climbers because it's falling apart, due to the melting permafrost which used to hold things together.
A choice quote: 'Big banks will no longer give loans for new ski industry constructions,' he said, adding that from 1850 to 1980 Alpine glaciers lost half their volume, and in the 20 years from 1980 to 2000, another quarter of what was left was also lost.
>It however doesn't mean that we should not pollute.
I completely agree with you here. Whether we have global warming as a long term thing, or are still pulling out of the cold spell from the previous few hundred years, it still doesn't make sense to chuck out millions of tons of rubbish into the atmosphere. It's not just global warming we have to worry about, but global *pollution* in general, if we want to have clean air to breath, and clean water to drink etc.
I don't know why I'm bothering to answer this, but...
ONE GRAMMATICAL MISTAKE DOES NOT MAKE ME A MORON.
Now piss off back to your juvenile chat group where they like that sort of shit!
Now that is a very interesting number indeed!
And I think it sends a very powerful message to all those businesses out there that are succumbing to the SCO FUD (hey can we shorten that to SCUD!). IBM are basically putting their money where they're mouth is to show their confidence in the future of Linux. Nice one.