Call me a cynic but I'm going to be 40 this year. When I was a kid I figured that we'd be making our first attempt at Mars about now having setup our Moon base in the 80s.
Now I'm convinced that mankind will never reach Mars in my lifetime and unlikely to do so even when my grand children are old and dying. Assuming that they don't get nuked first.
Personally the way global politics is shaping up and American corporate greed is growing I doubt that we will have the money or the time to go to Mars as we will be busy cleaning up the mess from several small nuclear wars.
Clearly this needs more regulation. A license to mod perhaps.
And modders when you slap this as flamebait, troll, or offtopic, be gentle, I'm recovering from a bad sinus headache and those headslaps hurt. Other then that I've got the karma to burn.
I'm not trying to troll here...but hear me out: People simply don't trust electronic voting...as a geek this makes me very sad, because voting is something that could and should be more automated.
Why should voting be more automated? The only reason ballot counters are used is to rig the election. Several contries around the world conduct elections with hand marked and hand counted ballots and do just fine. Automation just makes it that much easier to rig the vote. Voting SHOULD be difficult, hard to quickly count, and should envolve lots of people in the process. When one person or a small group gets to count the ballot or gets to build an automatic system to count the ballots it is far easier to bribe or threaten that small group and rig the election. Any kind of automatic system should be questioned, be it scantron systems, pull lever voting machines, or computers. It is all designed to hide the vote from the public NOT make voting safer. I don't trust computers not because I am ignorant of what they can do because I know exactly what they are able to do and how easy it would be to rig an election.
If it is not a paper ballot and the ballot isn't counted at the polling place in public view then you shouldn't trust that vote. Most places in the USA the ballots are not counted at the poll. They are hauled away to the court house and counted out of public view. No way to be certain that the ballot box is the same one that left the polling place and no way to have the public watch the counting. This is by design to aid in vote fraud. We haven't had a free election in most places in the country in years.
And how many slashdotters who are NOT programmers have downloaded and used free software and never gave the authors any money for it? Isn't buying a Linux distro a way of giving back to the community if you're not a programmer.
Typical Open Source hypocrisy: Programmers that whine about paying for programs and demanding that it has to "Be Free as in Freedom" and then get pissed off because someone takes you up on that. Don't want someone to rip-off your work? Don't make it Free.
The price of "freedom in programming" is the freeloader.
But since you aren't exercising your right to vote... would you mind sending your absentee ballot over to my house so I can "test" the voter fraud system myself?
Well that depends...How much do you want to pay for it?
It is not a question of exercising my right to vote. One cannot exercise what one does not really have, can they? I refuse to play a role in a fake vote. I the kind of guy that Hussian would have had shot because I wouldn't have voted in his "election" either. We don't have elections in this country. We have carefully managed "shell games" that appear to be an election but are not. Note this doesn't occur everywhere which is one of the reasons they are so gun-ho on voting machines so that they can take more direct control over even more elections.
I quit voting some time back because of the rampant voter fraud that ALREADY exists in the system. The Canadian voting system is far superior then what we have now. As long as the ballots aren't counted in plain sight at the polling place BEFORE they are taken to the court house you will never have a fair election. We already have rigged votes. Voting machines are NOT going to make cleaner elections. It is just going to raise the scale of voter fraud one more notch. Florida was just the beginning.
You got it backwards. Ignorant/stupid/lazy(pick one) end users will always pick NO. They are too afraid to change anything and they don't read. Have you never had a user that clicked NO to the question; "Windows was unable to connect to your networked drive. Would you like to reconnect in the future?" I can't tell you how many peer to peer clients I've had to go a remap drives for because they didn't clearly read that question. They answered NO because they thought that was the answer that would change nothing. I had some clients that I wrote "Fix it" batch files that reconnected the drives.
Seriously, POPfile nabbed it and just pulled it out of my spam can. I would have missed it otherwise. Most all of my Yahoo/SBCdsl is so loaded with advertising that I miss things like service annoncements, billing, etc...
I guess, but considering that companies already sell such things(even if they be software only) that you can attach to your networks. So I still wonder if such a unit can be made cheap enough to be worth it.
Ok so he build a really fast sort of flashable memory hardward virus scanner. It will be lightning fast but will it not be extremly expensive? I can't see the speed benifit outwaying the cost of the unit. But I'm not an EE so can someone who is tell me if it can be done cheap?
I do not understand the prevailing viewpoint that we can't hand count all ballots and not have safe elections.
Machines can be rigged. I don't trust a optical scanner, nor a lever voting booth, nor a punch card reader, nor an ATM machine to count my votes.
Our biggest problem is that we don't count the votes at the voting place in most areas. Most areas lock up the ballot box and haul them to the court house. The first chance to rig the vote is at the poll, the second when the ballots are in transit, and the third when they are counted out of public view in some upstairs court house room.
Most polls will have only several hundred votes in the box max. It doesn't take that long to count ballots by hand and so what if it takes all damn night. How is that a problem.
Voting machines or counting machines are just devices designed to hide the vote counting process from the public and thus rig the vote.
Most ATMs run OS/2 warp. I know cause I've seen one boot up. I was in a 7-11 in a thunderstorm when they lost power for 2 seconds. Long enough for the ATM to go down. I watch as it reboot and gave me Intel BIOS and then the boot up for OS/2. I think if I'd seen it boot Win98 I'd pull out all my money and use my mattress.
I've got an client that is a dry cleaner that runs all of his stuff on old 486's and some Pentiums running a DOS 6.0 based application to drive it all. He hasn't upgraded because he doesn't need to. The software does everything he needs it to do and he has a hard enough time trying to teach illiterate non english speaking hispanics (or worse the U.S. born high school drop outs) how to run the stuff.
And just how would you FORCE it hmm? A mandatory cut off period of trade bills for coin would piss enough off to effect relection. Simply withdrawing the money would eventually work but people and business would hoard ONEs to keep them out of banks. Hoarding money causes inflation as business raise prices on the "things you have to buy".
Yes they should but our money is valued only on how much it is used and not on a fixed item like gold. So if a large part of the population avoids the dollar, even short term, bad things happen. Usually inflation. In 1979 we were still shruging off high inflation. So introducing something that would cause inflation at that time period would have been very bad on the economy.
I don't recall a ton of outrage over either dollar coin -- merely apathy. The only outrage I've had over the Sacajawea dollar is that the postal service machines will happily issue it, but generally don't accept it (I think my mug is in a database somewhere for abusing the machine after that incident).
Back in 1979 when Carter tried to issue the dang coins there was a LOT of outrage about it. The plan was to remove dollar bills from use and replace them with the coins and $2 bills. The plan was quickly abandoned when the market refused to use them. The golden dollar was just issued as a political stunt and was never intended to replace $1 bills. So it is met with Appathy or hoarded as trinkets. The government could have said "too bad" use them or do without but as our money system is now unbacked fiat money acceptance is required or the value of the money drops.
This whole story smells IMHO. If the game was to be released to market for X-Mas then it would be going to the printers now if not already being shipped to warehouses to be on the shelves by Thanksgiving day. A code leak while anoying is no worse then the program appearing on Kazza and 500,000 warez sites within hours of it hitting the shelves.
I would think that game makers would be targets of hacker/cracker all the time so one would think that they would have pretty good security. I've read comments about Outlook preview pane buffer overruns and blaming the lastest IE hole on this leak. Makes a great story and alot of M$ bashers will believe it but I have my doubts.
Also this line In a statement today, the games publisher said that Half Life 2, an expected blockbuster, will now contribute to 2004 results. shows the real reason. They want to delay the profits onto the 2004 books. It's all a bunch of Marketing bullshit. I wouldn't be suprised that the code was LEAKed. After all they didn't get all the code if I heard correctly. They managed to get breached yet DIDN'T get the whole code? Yeah right...
The real supporters of electronic voting want such a system so they CAN rig it! Why do we use mechanical voting machines? Why do we use electronic ballot counters? Why do we NOT count ballots at the polling place before we haul them to the court house? All of that is done to make elections EASIER to rig. It sounds like it is safer but it really is just a shell game designed to hide the methods behind trickery. Ask any magician. You hide your tricks with distractions and illusions that are just the opposite of what is really happening.
Most people can't understand computers so they think "Well it MUST be good. This is sophisticated and I'm too stupid to understand this so it must be well designed." Many people have problems with computers but they almost always think that THEY are the problem (I don't know how to use this, I must be doing something wrong.) not that the software is written badly. The American public loves gadgetry and we equate that with goodness and safety. We think we can build a better car or a building that can take a hit from a 767 or a tamperproof election.
So either we should make it a law that all geeks have dates -- I'd have supported such a law when I was a teenager
So Linus supports open source dating. Well I can support that but the putting up a girlfriend on CVS for anyone to "contribute" to is just sleezy. On the other hand back in high school there was this girl that might have been the open source poster child...
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Call me a cynic but I'm going to be 40 this year. When I was a kid I figured that we'd be making our first attempt at Mars about now having setup our Moon base in the 80s.
Now I'm convinced that mankind will never reach Mars in my lifetime and unlikely to do so even when my grand children are old and dying. Assuming that they don't get nuked first.
Personally the way global politics is shaping up and American corporate greed is growing I doubt that we will have the money or the time to go to Mars as we will be busy cleaning up the mess from several small nuclear wars.
Clearly this needs more regulation. A license to mod perhaps.
And modders when you slap this as flamebait, troll, or offtopic, be gentle, I'm recovering from a bad sinus headache and those headslaps hurt. Other then that I've got the karma to burn.
to find the virus and found none. But the US and England launched a DDoS attack on Irag.gov anyway.
I'm not trying to troll here...but hear me out: People simply don't trust electronic voting...as a geek this makes me very sad, because voting is something that could and should be more automated.
Why should voting be more automated? The only reason ballot counters are used is to rig the election. Several contries around the world conduct elections with hand marked and hand counted ballots and do just fine. Automation just makes it that much easier to rig the vote. Voting SHOULD be difficult, hard to quickly count, and should envolve lots of people in the process. When one person or a small group gets to count the ballot or gets to build an automatic system to count the ballots it is far easier to bribe or threaten that small group and rig the election. Any kind of automatic system should be questioned, be it scantron systems, pull lever voting machines, or computers. It is all designed to hide the vote from the public NOT make voting safer. I don't trust computers not because I am ignorant of what they can do because I know exactly what they are able to do and how easy it would be to rig an election.
If it is not a paper ballot and the ballot isn't counted at the polling place in public view then you shouldn't trust that vote. Most places in the USA the ballots are not counted at the poll. They are hauled away to the court house and counted out of public view. No way to be certain that the ballot box is the same one that left the polling place and no way to have the public watch the counting. This is by design to aid in vote fraud. We haven't had a free election in most places in the country in years.
...The new Battlestar Galatica series summed up in one line.
And how many slashdotters who are NOT programmers have downloaded and used free software and never gave the authors any money for it? Isn't buying a Linux distro a way of giving back to the community if you're not a programmer.
Typical Open Source hypocrisy: Programmers that whine about paying for programs and demanding that it has to "Be Free as in Freedom" and then get pissed off because someone takes you up on that. Don't want someone to rip-off your work? Don't make it Free.
The price of "freedom in programming" is the freeloader.
Well my new DVD player is broken too! Guess we'll be both in line at Best Buy tomorrow!
More like my bullet proof vest.
But since you aren't exercising your right to vote... would you mind sending your absentee ballot over to my house so I can "test" the voter fraud system myself?
Well that depends...How much do you want to pay for it?
It is not a question of exercising my right to vote. One cannot exercise what one does not really have, can they? I refuse to play a role in a fake vote. I the kind of guy that Hussian would have had shot because I wouldn't have voted in his "election" either. We don't have elections in this country. We have carefully managed "shell games" that appear to be an election but are not. Note this doesn't occur everywhere which is one of the reasons they are so gun-ho on voting machines so that they can take more direct control over even more elections.
I quit voting some time back because of the rampant voter fraud that ALREADY exists in the system. The Canadian voting system is far superior then what we have now. As long as the ballots aren't counted in plain sight at the polling place BEFORE they are taken to the court house you will never have a fair election. We already have rigged votes. Voting machines are NOT going to make cleaner elections. It is just going to raise the scale of voter fraud one more notch. Florida was just the beginning.
You got it backwards. Ignorant/stupid/lazy(pick one) end users will always pick NO. They are too afraid to change anything and they don't read. Have you never had a user that clicked NO to the question; "Windows was unable to connect to your networked drive. Would you like to reconnect in the future?" I can't tell you how many peer to peer clients I've had to go a remap drives for because they didn't clearly read that question. They answered NO because they thought that was the answer that would change nothing. I had some clients that I wrote "Fix it" batch files that reconnected the drives.
Seriously, POPfile nabbed it and just pulled it out of my spam can. I would have missed it otherwise. Most all of my Yahoo/SBCdsl is so loaded with advertising that I miss things like service annoncements, billing, etc...
I guess, but considering that companies already sell such things(even if they be software only) that you can attach to your networks. So I still wonder if such a unit can be made cheap enough to be worth it.
Ok so he build a really fast sort of flashable memory hardward virus scanner. It will be lightning fast but will it not be extremly expensive? I can't see the speed benifit outwaying the cost of the unit. But I'm not an EE so can someone who is tell me if it can be done cheap?
I do not understand the prevailing viewpoint that we can't hand count all ballots and not have safe elections.
Machines can be rigged. I don't trust a optical scanner, nor a lever voting booth, nor a punch card reader, nor an ATM machine to count my votes.
Our biggest problem is that we don't count the votes at the voting place in most areas. Most areas lock up the ballot box and haul them to the court house. The first chance to rig the vote is at the poll, the second when the ballots are in transit, and the third when they are counted out of public view in some upstairs court house room.
Most polls will have only several hundred votes in the box max. It doesn't take that long to count ballots by hand and so what if it takes all damn night. How is that a problem.
Voting machines or counting machines are just devices designed to hide the vote counting process from the public and thus rig the vote.
Most ATMs run OS/2 warp. I know cause I've seen one boot up. I was in a 7-11 in a thunderstorm when they lost power for 2 seconds. Long enough for the ATM to go down. I watch as it reboot and gave me Intel BIOS and then the boot up for OS/2. I think if I'd seen it boot Win98 I'd pull out all my money and use my mattress.
I've got an client that is a dry cleaner that runs all of his stuff on old 486's and some Pentiums running a DOS 6.0 based application to drive it all. He hasn't upgraded because he doesn't need to. The software does everything he needs it to do and he has a hard enough time trying to teach illiterate non english speaking hispanics (or worse the U.S. born high school drop outs) how to run the stuff.
And just how would you FORCE it hmm? A mandatory cut off period of trade bills for coin would piss enough off to effect relection. Simply withdrawing the money would eventually work but people and business would hoard ONEs to keep them out of banks. Hoarding money causes inflation as business raise prices on the "things you have to buy".
Yes they should but our money is valued only on how much it is used and not on a fixed item like gold. So if a large part of the population avoids the dollar, even short term, bad things happen. Usually inflation. In 1979 we were still shruging off high inflation. So introducing something that would cause inflation at that time period would have been very bad on the economy.
Back in 1979 when Carter tried to issue the dang coins there was a LOT of outrage about it. The plan was to remove dollar bills from use and replace them with the coins and $2 bills. The plan was quickly abandoned when the market refused to use them. The golden dollar was just issued as a political stunt and was never intended to replace $1 bills. So it is met with Appathy or hoarded as trinkets. The government could have said "too bad" use them or do without but as our money system is now unbacked fiat money acceptance is required or the value of the money drops.
This whole story smells IMHO. If the game was to be released to market for X-Mas then it would be going to the printers now if not already being shipped to warehouses to be on the shelves by Thanksgiving day. A code leak while anoying is no worse then the program appearing on Kazza and 500,000 warez sites within hours of it hitting the shelves.
I would think that game makers would be targets of hacker/cracker all the time so one would think that they would have pretty good security. I've read comments about Outlook preview pane buffer overruns and blaming the lastest IE hole on this leak. Makes a great story and alot of M$ bashers will believe it but I have my doubts.
Also this line In a statement today, the games publisher said that Half Life 2, an expected blockbuster, will now contribute to 2004 results. shows the real reason. They want to delay the profits onto the 2004 books. It's all a bunch of Marketing bullshit. I wouldn't be suprised that the code was LEAKed. After all they didn't get all the code if I heard correctly. They managed to get breached yet DIDN'T get the whole code? Yeah right...
The real supporters of electronic voting want such a system so they CAN rig it! Why do we use mechanical voting machines? Why do we use electronic ballot counters? Why do we NOT count ballots at the polling place before we haul them to the court house? All of that is done to make elections EASIER to rig. It sounds like it is safer but it really is just a shell game designed to hide the methods behind trickery. Ask any magician. You hide your tricks with distractions and illusions that are just the opposite of what is really happening.
Most people can't understand computers so they think "Well it MUST be good. This is sophisticated and I'm too stupid to understand this so it must be well designed." Many people have problems with computers but they almost always think that THEY are the problem (I don't know how to use this, I must be doing something wrong.) not that the software is written badly. The American public loves gadgetry and we equate that with goodness and safety. We think we can build a better car or a building that can take a hit from a 767 or a tamperproof election.
So Linus supports open source dating. Well I can support that but the putting up a girlfriend on CVS for anyone to "contribute" to is just sleezy. On the other hand back in high school there was this girl that might have been the open source poster child...
And this would be a bad thing?
goods. If I steal a car stereo and sell it at a pawn shop the pawn shop can be busted for accepting stolen property.