You can specify what users have what privileges in the/etc/sudoers file. Usually, the default gives full privileges to members of a certain group, like wheel. You just make sure your cat isn't in the wheel group, and you're good to go. You can also make more fine-grained controls, like allowing one user to restart the web server, but nothing else. You should really read the manual --- you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Talk about tinfoil hats, how paranoid do you have to be to tie a daylight savings change to the Iraq war?
The daylight savings time change is one tiny paragraph of a huge energy policy bill, and by the way provides for a study in 9 months to see if it actually helped, and a potential of reverting back to the 2005 schedule if it didn't help. You may not agree with the policies put forth in the bill, but it certainly wasn't prompted by a desire to avoid appropriating money --- my senators and representative (all republicans) voted against it for anti-pork reasons.
sponsoring legislation for banning violent computer games
Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. The only bills she has sponsored (not cosponsored) that managed to become law named a couple of post offices and a national historic area. And no, I'm not exaggerating.
The only area in which she has shown a modicum of successful leadership is in advocating for 9/11 victims, which frankly any New Yorker with a pulse should be able to do. I don't object to her positions as much as to the fact she has been completely ineffective in promoting any of them.
You make a good point, though. Senator Clinton toes the party line enough to alienate Republicans, but the issues she chooses to deviate on alienate Democrats too. When you cross the aisle, you want to pick up some votes from the other side, but crossing on an issue like a flag burning ban doesn't make sense because so many Republicans oppose a ban too.
Yes, renting is "useful" if the cost of the item is big
Renting is also useful for something that is infrequently used, like a DVD you don't want to buy, or to rent something with different features from the one you own, like a moving truck.
I would like to see software rentals be more like a moving truck rental than an apartment rental. I rent a moving truck when I need to do something my own car can't handle. I'd like to be able to rent a copy of ms office for those rare occasions when my regular word processor isn't compatible with a file I need to use.
An easy way I found to use automatic rules to sort my email:
Anything sent only to me is much more likely to be something I have been waiting for, or something I would want to respond to quickly, so I usually read these right away, even if I don't end up responding right away. Of course, I'm not one of those people who gets email from potential clients, readers, fans, etc.
If my name is in the "To" box, but I'm not the only one, I set aside a few different times during the day to read those.
Anything sent to a mailing list or where I'm only CCed, I only read once a day, and frequently just delete after reading the subject line.
I ignore the "important" flag, except for people I know don't abuse it, like the system administrator who only uses it for stuff like emergency reboots.
I don't check personal email accounts at work.
I've found this allows me to be interrupted when I want to be interrupted, but to make the interruptions minimal. Sometimes, I make specific rules for specific situations, but most of the time, these generic rules work great.
We have nearly all CF bulbs in our house as well. We didn't switch to save energy -- I actually prefer the color temperature and was getting annoyed at having to change incandescent bulbs all the time. Another place you didn't mention that doesn't work is with a dimmer switch.
Walmart.com tried to make a go of every OEM Linux distro known to man.
January 31st came and went with one lone Xandros box remaining.
That's because retailers like Wal-Mart only consider Linux to be a way to make their bottom-of-the-barrel computer even cheaper. However, Linux users are not the type to buy computers from the bottom of the barrel. And, at least for me, Linux allows me to go quite a while between computer upgrades. More than once I've heard of an OEM offering a decent pre-installed desktop Linux, decided to try it out the next time I buy a computer, then before I had a chance to try it they had already given up on it.
Sure, the vast majority of people are uncomfortable with the command line. However, I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority would rather have an expert user tell them exactly what to type on a command line instead of completely reinstalling an operating system. I've seen many people put up with a barely functional computer for several months rather than take the risk of a reinstall. Or has Microsoft finally figured out how to reinstall an operating system without deleting user-level settings and documents?
Changing your internal thinking is entirely possible. I remember after I had been in Australia a few months, a friend from the states mentioned their 60 degree weather and I about died until I realized he meant fahrenheit. I hadn't realized I had stopped converting until then.
An attack helicopter is the coolest thing I ever built. Okay, a few thousand other people helped a teensy bit.
In college, I built a satellite that fits in a soda can, and a remotely piloted vehicle to fly on NASA's KC-135 "weightless wonder."
I built an alarm for a door, including aluminum foil contacts, from scratch one day when I was home sick from junior high. 20 years later my Mom still occasionally comments on the juxtaposition of coming home and having the alarm I built go off when she opened the door, then looking over and seeing me watching an animated disney movie.
their small size - usually much less than 100 people per precinct
I was going to ask where you live, then I saw that infinadyne is in Chandler, right next door to me in Gilbert. Most precincts are about 1000-1500 voters. In Maricopa County, there are only 14 out of 1142 precincts with less than 100 voters. The average precinct size is 1298. Our biggest precinct (0996 in NW Peoria) had 4414 registered voters, and the smallest (1142 in Bartlett Canyon area) had zero registered voters as of the last primary election.
Still, considering turnout varies widely depending on the election, it's still well within easy manual count range. For example, only 57 republicans and 18 democrats went to the polls in my precinct in the September primary, but turnout for presidential elections is in the 600's.
You forgot the most common reason for requesting a recount:
(c) A number of people feel that the majority voted incorrectly.
On an electronic voting system, where votes are recorded anonymously, how can you prove that the vote recorded matches the vote that was actually cast?
I'd like to see a random serial number displayed on the screen that you can use to look up your vote in the official results later. It's still anonymous because you can't prove that you're voter #960 in precinct 304, for example, and you can't prove anything if there is a discrepancy, but at least you could have confidence if it was recorded correctly, and prompt an audit if it wasn't.
For the above reasons, only physical ballots can ultimately be considered as real. Any such voting system that does not print a physical ballot is a fraud.
It's the decision that matters, not the medium on which it is recorded. The counting is outside of the voter's control as soon as he leaves the polling place in any case.
Computerized ballots could actually be more secure if implemented correctly. Unfortunately, the need to provide both anonymity and verifiability is a serious technical challenge. Here is my crack at it:
A voter self-selects a unique ID, which will appear on a public list of ballots cast along with the contests that voter voted in, but not how he voted. This prevents precincts from "misplacing" votes.
A random voter number between 1 and the number of registered voters in a precinct is displayed on the screen after the vote, but no certified receipt is given to associate that number with that person. Results are indexed by that number. The person can then verify their vote was recorded properly, but has no proof of that to give someone who wants to buy their vote.
That still leaves the problem of how to prevent malicious software from giving two people with identical ballots the same random voter number and spoofing another ballot. Suggestions?
Why can't our voting machines work as well as 20-year-old cash register software?
Because voting machine software hasn't been extensively field tested and refined over 20 years. An e-voting machine might handle 100 ballots per election. Think of how many cash registers are within your precinct boundaries; there are maybe 150 in mine, each of which can easily be required to handle several hundred transactions every day.
That the conservatives who convinced Bush to drop her nomination were not a rubber stamp for Bush's judicial nominees, like the person I responded to claimed. A rubber stamp senate would have confirmed her.
And the problem wasn't that she was unqualified, it was that she was unknown.
I think at one point in history the party affiliation of a candidate would have stood for something.
It still does. While there are notable major exceptions, they are rare enough that the media tends to frequently emphasize the difference, making it hard to miss. For example, you often see a sentence that starts something like, "Senator Specter, the pro-choice republican who chairs the judiciary committee,..."
It's still easier to define a candidate by the exceptions to the party platform. For example, my congressman and both of my senators are all members of the same party. I check the congressional record every day, so I know they agree with the party line the vast majority of the time, but I also know what few specific issues they disagree on. It's easy enough to keep straight that they only surprise me once or twice a session.
I would recommend to any "uninformed" voter, to spend a few minutes reading the current republican platform and democratic platform, bearing in mind that they were written at the 2004 national conventions, decide which platform he agrees with more, and vote a straight ticket. The chances that he will select a candidate that deviates so far from the platform that he wouldn't have chosen that candidate are slim. Chances are that an informed straight ticket vote will make him happier with his representation than a pure random choice or letting someone else decide would.
Just informing himself enough to know what party he currently agrees with most is not ideal, but is definitely better than nothing.
Students are supposed to vote from their permanent address, but the law is fuzzy on how you define permanent address. You obviously don't feel part of the local community and don't plan on staying. You probably don't have a long term job there, and just listing your permanent address differently in your school records should be enough to fulfill the legal requirements.
You are in the unique position to choose where you vote. Take advantage of it. You might still have time if your voter registration is current in your hometown. You have the added benefit of being immune to TV smear ads if you are far enough away, while still having access to internet resources.
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Usually in wars people on both sides have weapons. Otherwise the war doesn't last very long.
You can specify what users have what privileges in the /etc/sudoers file. Usually, the default gives full privileges to members of a certain group, like wheel. You just make sure your cat isn't in the wheel group, and you're good to go. You can also make more fine-grained controls, like allowing one user to restart the web server, but nothing else. You should really read the manual --- you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Talk about tinfoil hats, how paranoid do you have to be to tie a daylight savings change to the Iraq war?
The daylight savings time change is one tiny paragraph of a huge energy policy bill, and by the way provides for a study in 9 months to see if it actually helped, and a potential of reverting back to the 2005 schedule if it didn't help. You may not agree with the policies put forth in the bill, but it certainly wasn't prompted by a desire to avoid appropriating money --- my senators and representative (all republicans) voted against it for anti-pork reasons.
Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. The only bills she has sponsored (not cosponsored) that managed to become law named a couple of post offices and a national historic area. And no, I'm not exaggerating.
The only area in which she has shown a modicum of successful leadership is in advocating for 9/11 victims, which frankly any New Yorker with a pulse should be able to do. I don't object to her positions as much as to the fact she has been completely ineffective in promoting any of them.
You make a good point, though. Senator Clinton toes the party line enough to alienate Republicans, but the issues she chooses to deviate on alienate Democrats too. When you cross the aisle, you want to pick up some votes from the other side, but crossing on an issue like a flag burning ban doesn't make sense because so many Republicans oppose a ban too.
You can turn the GUI off even if it is installed on the system. You can turn it on to do maintenance stuff, then turn it back off for server use.
Renting is also useful for something that is infrequently used, like a DVD you don't want to buy, or to rent something with different features from the one you own, like a moving truck.
I would like to see software rentals be more like a moving truck rental than an apartment rental. I rent a moving truck when I need to do something my own car can't handle. I'd like to be able to rent a copy of ms office for those rare occasions when my regular word processor isn't compatible with a file I need to use.
An easy way I found to use automatic rules to sort my email:
- Anything sent only to me is much more likely to be something I have been waiting for, or something I would want to respond to quickly, so I usually read these right away, even if I don't end up responding right away. Of course, I'm not one of those people who gets email from potential clients, readers, fans, etc.
- If my name is in the "To" box, but I'm not the only one, I set aside a few different times during the day to read those.
- Anything sent to a mailing list or where I'm only CCed, I only read once a day, and frequently just delete after reading the subject line.
- I ignore the "important" flag, except for people I know don't abuse it, like the system administrator who only uses it for stuff like emergency reboots.
- I don't check personal email accounts at work.
I've found this allows me to be interrupted when I want to be interrupted, but to make the interruptions minimal. Sometimes, I make specific rules for specific situations, but most of the time, these generic rules work great.We have nearly all CF bulbs in our house as well. We didn't switch to save energy -- I actually prefer the color temperature and was getting annoyed at having to change incandescent bulbs all the time. Another place you didn't mention that doesn't work is with a dimmer switch.
Sure, the vast majority of people are uncomfortable with the command line. However, I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority would rather have an expert user tell them exactly what to type on a command line instead of completely reinstalling an operating system. I've seen many people put up with a barely functional computer for several months rather than take the risk of a reinstall. Or has Microsoft finally figured out how to reinstall an operating system without deleting user-level settings and documents?
Changing your internal thinking is entirely possible. I remember after I had been in Australia a few months, a friend from the states mentioned their 60 degree weather and I about died until I realized he meant fahrenheit. I hadn't realized I had stopped converting until then.
An attack helicopter is the coolest thing I ever built. Okay, a few thousand other people helped a teensy bit.
In college, I built a satellite that fits in a soda can, and a remotely piloted vehicle to fly on NASA's KC-135 "weightless wonder."
I built an alarm for a door, including aluminum foil contacts, from scratch one day when I was home sick from junior high. 20 years later my Mom still occasionally comments on the juxtaposition of coming home and having the alarm I built go off when she opened the door, then looking over and seeing me watching an animated disney movie.
That reminds me of a joke:
A scientist goes to God and says, "We don't need you anymore. I can create a human from nothing more than a handful of dust."
"Alright then, let's see," God replies.
"No problem," says the scientist, and he bends over to scoop up some dust.
"Hold on," God interrupts. "Get your own dust."
I was going to ask where you live, then I saw that infinadyne is in Chandler, right next door to me in Gilbert. Most precincts are about 1000-1500 voters. In Maricopa County, there are only 14 out of 1142 precincts with less than 100 voters. The average precinct size is 1298. Our biggest precinct (0996 in NW Peoria) had 4414 registered voters, and the smallest (1142 in Bartlett Canyon area) had zero registered voters as of the last primary election.
Still, considering turnout varies widely depending on the election, it's still well within easy manual count range. For example, only 57 republicans and 18 democrats went to the polls in my precinct in the September primary, but turnout for presidential elections is in the 600's.
You forgot the most common reason for requesting a recount:
(c) A number of people feel that the majority voted incorrectly.
I'd like to see a random serial number displayed on the screen that you can use to look up your vote in the official results later. It's still anonymous because you can't prove that you're voter #960 in precinct 304, for example, and you can't prove anything if there is a discrepancy, but at least you could have confidence if it was recorded correctly, and prompt an audit if it wasn't.
It's the decision that matters, not the medium on which it is recorded. The counting is outside of the voter's control as soon as he leaves the polling place in any case.
Computerized ballots could actually be more secure if implemented correctly. Unfortunately, the need to provide both anonymity and verifiability is a serious technical challenge. Here is my crack at it:
That the conservatives who convinced Bush to drop her nomination were not a rubber stamp for Bush's judicial nominees, like the person I responded to claimed. A rubber stamp senate would have confirmed her.
And the problem wasn't that she was unqualified, it was that she was unknown.
A large majority of democrat house members you just re-elected voted for the patriot act, and all but one democrat voted for it in the senate.
So much for my one consolation about this election: the hope that democrats would finally stop whining.
It still does. While there are notable major exceptions, they are rare enough that the media tends to frequently emphasize the difference, making it hard to miss. For example, you often see a sentence that starts something like, "Senator Specter, the pro-choice republican who chairs the judiciary committee, ..."
It's still easier to define a candidate by the exceptions to the party platform. For example, my congressman and both of my senators are all members of the same party. I check the congressional record every day, so I know they agree with the party line the vast majority of the time, but I also know what few specific issues they disagree on. It's easy enough to keep straight that they only surprise me once or twice a session.
I would recommend to any "uninformed" voter, to spend a few minutes reading the current republican platform and democratic platform, bearing in mind that they were written at the 2004 national conventions, decide which platform he agrees with more, and vote a straight ticket. The chances that he will select a candidate that deviates so far from the platform that he wouldn't have chosen that candidate are slim. Chances are that an informed straight ticket vote will make him happier with his representation than a pure random choice or letting someone else decide would.
Just informing himself enough to know what party he currently agrees with most is not ideal, but is definitely better than nothing.
Students are supposed to vote from their permanent address, but the law is fuzzy on how you define permanent address. You obviously don't feel part of the local community and don't plan on staying. You probably don't have a long term job there, and just listing your permanent address differently in your school records should be enough to fulfill the legal requirements.
You are in the unique position to choose where you vote. Take advantage of it. You might still have time if your voter registration is current in your hometown. You have the added benefit of being immune to TV smear ads if you are far enough away, while still having access to internet resources.