Okay, like I said before, I understand the drive behind getting more people to vote. However, in a country that holds freedom to be a basic inalienable right, I should have the freedom to choose whether I vote or not, without negative consequence.
Here's the negative consequence I speak of: I have Social Security deductions from my paycheck. In a theoretical world, I would be getting this money back after retirement (probably won't happen, but this is theory, not practice). If something is enacted that makes it so that by using a basic freedom (to vote or not) I don't get MY money back, don't you see that as being wrong?
Don't you think that this system would screw over a whole lot of people that are getting bilked out of voting due to some technicality or another? Here's an example: In the State of Oregon (where I live) you have to register to vote 60 days before the election. This includes address changes. What happens if I move 37 days before the election, and cannot vote due to moving across polling districts? Sure, you could build in some clauses to protect against all that, but now we have another taxpayer burden to pay for administration of this new system, as well as people that will inevitably try to cheat it in some way or another, so you have more legal and law enforcement costs for the county / state / federal government to incur, to say nothing about if it would be stricken down by some superior court judge the first time the Social Security Agency ruled against someone's claim.
Besides, if you force everyone into going to the polling place, and they fill out the ballot with pure unbridled bullshit, how much waste would be generated at the local elections office when they have to weed through all that in the effort to count and certify election results?
You say "The entire point of this is to persuade citizens to preform their civic duty," however because of the financial penalty, this is more of a government-sponsored racketeering program. Positive incentives work way better than negative ones. You have good intentions, but introducing more costly government administration at the taxpayer expense, and financial penalties to the non-voting citizen is not a way to improve the voter turnout or statistics, IMHO.
However, you just might get Mickey Mouse elected for the US Senate!
Passenger: "Dude you need to be in the left lane" Driver: "Ok, let me just..." *BZZZNYRRRGHT* Driver (panting after extreme electrical shock): "Ok, maybe it isn't clear over there just yet..."
Ok, and one more question... if you have this system, is that damn light going to be constantly on if you are in the right lane of a street where they allow curbside parking? That would be enough to get me to remove the bulb from the indicator.
I don't understand this concept. If we cherish the freedom provided by the Constitution of the United States of America, why should we take steps towards removing the freedom to not act?
BTW, I am a registered voter, and I do vote; but I don't think it's right to move down this road. This line of thought smacks of systems where you have to be a member of a certain political party in order to participate in society (Stalinesque Communism, National Socialism done the Nazi way), or the Heinlin "citizen" concept from Starship Troopers.
Penalizing people for not voting is like penalizing someone for not having an opinion on every and all subjects.
I have had the T720 since it was available, and I count the number of times it has done something wierd on ZERO fingers.
However, my brother (and the company I work for) has had nothing but trouble from the StarTac phones. They drop calls when you walk under a tree, antenna break off if you look at them funny, doesn't ring when someone calls you, yet informs you of a missed call, etc. etc.
The only way to get into that encrypted disk image is with the proper password, or the master password.
These are also the only two passwords that can change it. As it is a disk image which has the encryption key stored within itself, and not in NetInfo (user passwords for local install are there) the change password thingy on the install CD will not get you in. All that change password thing does is a call to niutil on the CLI to alter the UID 501 password record in the local NetInfo database.
Don't ask me why I know all this, but the short answer is if you don't know the password to the image, and you don't have the master password, you're boned. D:
The Open Firmware password is stored in the firmware, so moving the hard disk to another box will circumvent it completely. You are correct here.
FileVault does not work as some people around here think it does. All FileVault does is create an encrypted disk image, and mount it to where your home directory usually is. It uses the user password, and leaves the sync job to Keychain. FileVault does _not_ encrypt anything but the ~/ tree, and if one person on that box uses FileVault, that doesn't mean everyone is. If someone else logs in and looks in the/Users directory, they will see disk images with a cute disk and safe combination tumbler icon.
You can boot off of a CD / iPod / Zip / NetBoot / what-have-you and you will still see the encrypted disk image. The only way in, other than the password it was encrypted with is to use the "Master Password" which is set by that box's admin (the paranoid guy that owns the stuff you are trying to pry into).
If you lose those passwords, you will NOT be getting that data back without being a l33t hax0r and breaking the encryption in a hackers-esque fake Hollywood manner. Apple gives a warning to this effect in the security control applet where you enable FileVault.
Open Firmware passwords on a Mac are only as secure as the RAM inside it.
You did know that you can obliterate an open firmware password by changing the amount of physical RAM in the box and then doing a good ol' fashioned PRAM zap right? This takes all of 30 seconds to circumvent on a G4, and x2 on a laptop due to having to remove the keyboard to get at the SODIMM slots.
When I heard about this virus, the first thing I thought was "ha ha!" and then.02 microseconds later I thought, "wow. that's really not a good way to get ANY point across."
Using some windows worm to try to make a point just demeans the whole open source community as a bunch of problem-causers, rather than problem-solvers.
Creating aliases may be what appears to happen, but it's not. It however, is a useful metaphor for what is happening so continue to use it; but for correctness I thought I would throw out what is actually happening
When you drag something into the dock, it creates an XML entry in the ~\Library\Preferences\com.apple.dock.plist file. This is actually better than creating aliases if you are on a Open Directory domain, as you can then have the dock point at a location on multiple machines, rather than having an alias break because the inode doesn't match up.
Did I also mention that some of the other behaviors people want to change are in here? This is what the dock preferences pane sets.
"There is no defense fund for Linux users. Linux users will fall into a quagmire and will kill themselves at the gates to our corporate headquarters. We shall be victorious."
Oh wait - that's that other guy who was spreading misinformation in the press last year...
Didn't Congress just pass legislation about this one? I think the prescription drugs are covered by Medicare now.
homeless people fill out city streets
This is a legitimate problem, but not one throwing money at will fix. Re-education, retraining, mental medical help, etc. will help, and these plans exist, but my feeling I get is that most homeless people have too much pride to get help / want help.
AIDs is destroying Africa
... and we sent lots of money this year to help (see the last State of the Union address), and challenged the rest of the world to match it. By the way, you know what would stem the tide in the AIDS crisis in Africa? Mix in some condoms. Even if we give them out to everyone, we can't force their use; unless of course you want to go personally put them on for people.
people are starving in North Korea
... who's own government is more concerned with building nuclear weapons than feeding their people. Oh, they also wouldn't take aid from us if we sent it (as we have done in the past, and they did). Maybe you should protest that to them. Ohh, that's right! You can't because they don't have free speech, again due to their oppressive government.
In 1961 people could think of a thousand better things to do than launch three people to the moon and back. However, I don't hear many of those people complaining about their use of the products and equipment that have spawned from that effort, you inclusive. Simple things that we take for granted today did not exist prior to the national effort to get to the Moon and back.
1. Education Discounts - Find a kid or a teacher. 2. Apple Consultants Network - http://consultants.apple.com 3. Apple Employees - that's some good action if you can get the hookup. I'd rather not say much about that for fear of an Apple Lawyer shoving a sock down my throat. (It's where I scored my iPod from, and I'm a certified ACN member) 4. CompUSA employees - they can buy at CompUSA's cost.
The discounts are out there, you just may have to put yourself in indentured servitude or buy a bunch of beer for someone (especially in the case of the CompUSA employee, Apple employee, or the kid).
If you call ANY hardware support line for ANY company, they will ask for information, and if you don't give them the information they need to properly troubleshoot the issue, then you aren't going to get help.
In addition to that, if you are under the published system requirements, they have every right to tell you to sod off, as there are reasons the minumums are set there. Reasons such as driver support, performance considerations, and more likely in Apple's case, chipset support and removing the god-awful backwards compatibility engineering costs of supporting machines that are 6+ years old.
It's not just Apple that does this. Go buy ANY hardware OR software that you don't meet the minimum requirements for and call support saying it doesn't work, and see what response you get.
Oh, and nice blast at the end about people making money where others didn't have the vision to see what they had. I seem to recall Xerox executives voluntarily showing Jobs & Co the Smalltalk systems, above the protests of the PARC employees at the time.
I remember the iMac dropping the floppy drive in 1998, three years before Dell made it an OPTION rather than removing it all together, where it still sits.
I also remember the iMac in 1998 having exactly ZERO legacy peripheral connectivity. Dell STILL is using PS/2, parallel, and serial COM ports, and on models that they aren't, guess what - there is still an ISA bridge in the chipset from Intel, and the IDE controller is sitting on it.
Even earlier than that, with the Power Macintosh 7200 / 8200 / 9200 series where they eradicated all internal connectivity in favor of PCI. In 1997. Dell didn't do this until late in the Pentium III models where they finally got rid of that last ISA slot that was on the bottom of the board.
The first two companies to standardize on Intel's PCI architecture were not using Intel processors. They were Apple (PowerPC) and DEC (Alpha). This is widely known.
Oh, and I guess that Apple didn't ship the 20th Anniversary Mac with an LCD screen in 1997 did they?
Please read the upper left corner of your browser:
"News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
Dell doesn't do anything that radically new... ever. Apple does it every quarter.
If you want to see where the PC industry is headed in the future, look no farther than Apple's product announcements of today. Examples:
Elimination of legacy peripheral connectivity and standardization on PCI, USB, IEEE1394
Gigabit ethernet built-in on EVERYTHING
Stylish industrial design
802.11x wireless networking available before anyone else
Multimonitor support in early 1990s (Windows didn't have this until SP3 of NT4 and Windows 98) ... and many others. What was the last innovation that Dell came up with that everyone else has integrated into their product lines?
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft and AOL are evil.
Spam is evil.
Microsoft and AOL are fighting spam.
Microsoft and AOL are fighting evil?
My brain hurts...
You say that like they don't already have control.
Damn, what the hell is that black helicopter doing hovering above my hou*(&H#R~(*#Q
NO CARRIER
And hey, imagine how awesome the country would be if Mickey Mouse were president!
Even though the name on the door has changed for the last 16 years, I thought Mickey Mouse WAS president...
Okay, like I said before, I understand the drive behind getting more people to vote. However, in a country that holds freedom to be a basic inalienable right, I should have the freedom to choose whether I vote or not, without negative consequence.
Here's the negative consequence I speak of: I have Social Security deductions from my paycheck. In a theoretical world, I would be getting this money back after retirement (probably won't happen, but this is theory, not practice). If something is enacted that makes it so that by using a basic freedom (to vote or not) I don't get MY money back, don't you see that as being wrong?
Don't you think that this system would screw over a whole lot of people that are getting bilked out of voting due to some technicality or another? Here's an example: In the State of Oregon (where I live) you have to register to vote 60 days before the election. This includes address changes. What happens if I move 37 days before the election, and cannot vote due to moving across polling districts? Sure, you could build in some clauses to protect against all that, but now we have another taxpayer burden to pay for administration of this new system, as well as people that will inevitably try to cheat it in some way or another, so you have more legal and law enforcement costs for the county / state / federal government to incur, to say nothing about if it would be stricken down by some superior court judge the first time the Social Security Agency ruled against someone's claim.
Besides, if you force everyone into going to the polling place, and they fill out the ballot with pure unbridled bullshit, how much waste would be generated at the local elections office when they have to weed through all that in the effort to count and certify election results?
You say "The entire point of this is to persuade citizens to preform their civic duty," however because of the financial penalty, this is more of a government-sponsored racketeering program. Positive incentives work way better than negative ones. You have good intentions, but introducing more costly government administration at the taxpayer expense, and financial penalties to the non-voting citizen is not a way to improve the voter turnout or statistics, IMHO.
However, you just might get Mickey Mouse elected for the US Senate!
Noise? No...
Lights? No...
Electric shock?
Now we're talking...
Passenger: "Dude you need to be in the left lane"
Driver: "Ok, let me just..."
*BZZZNYRRRGHT*
Driver (panting after extreme electrical shock): "Ok, maybe it isn't clear over there just yet..."
Ok, and one more question... if you have this system, is that damn light going to be constantly on if you are in the right lane of a street where they allow curbside parking? That would be enough to get me to remove the bulb from the indicator.
I don't understand this concept. If we cherish the freedom provided by the Constitution of the United States of America, why should we take steps towards removing the freedom to not act?
BTW, I am a registered voter, and I do vote; but I don't think it's right to move down this road. This line of thought smacks of systems where you have to be a member of a certain political party in order to participate in society (Stalinesque Communism, National Socialism done the Nazi way), or the Heinlin "citizen" concept from Starship Troopers.
Penalizing people for not voting is like penalizing someone for not having an opinion on every and all subjects.
I have had the T720 since it was available, and I count the number of times it has done something wierd on ZERO fingers.
However, my brother (and the company I work for) has had nothing but trouble from the StarTac phones. They drop calls when you walk under a tree, antenna break off if you look at them funny, doesn't ring when someone calls you, yet informs you of a missed call, etc. etc.
The only way to get into that encrypted disk image is with the proper password, or the master password.
These are also the only two passwords that can change it. As it is a disk image which has the encryption key stored within itself, and not in NetInfo (user passwords for local install are there) the change password thingy on the install CD will not get you in. All that change password thing does is a call to niutil on the CLI to alter the UID 501 password record in the local NetInfo database.
Don't ask me why I know all this, but the short answer is if you don't know the password to the image, and you don't have the master password, you're boned. D:
The Open Firmware password is stored in the firmware, so moving the hard disk to another box will circumvent it completely. You are correct here.
/Users directory, they will see disk images with a cute disk and safe combination tumbler icon.
FileVault does not work as some people around here think it does. All FileVault does is create an encrypted disk image, and mount it to where your home directory usually is. It uses the user password, and leaves the sync job to Keychain. FileVault does _not_ encrypt anything but the ~/ tree, and if one person on that box uses FileVault, that doesn't mean everyone is. If someone else logs in and looks in the
You can boot off of a CD / iPod / Zip / NetBoot / what-have-you and you will still see the encrypted disk image. The only way in, other than the password it was encrypted with is to use the "Master Password" which is set by that box's admin (the paranoid guy that owns the stuff you are trying to pry into).
If you lose those passwords, you will NOT be getting that data back without being a l33t hax0r and breaking the encryption in a hackers-esque fake Hollywood manner. Apple gives a warning to this effect in the security control applet where you enable FileVault.
Open Firmware passwords on a Mac are only as secure as the RAM inside it.
You did know that you can obliterate an open firmware password by changing the amount of physical RAM in the box and then doing a good ol' fashioned PRAM zap right? This takes all of 30 seconds to circumvent on a G4, and x2 on a laptop due to having to remove the keyboard to get at the SODIMM slots.
When I heard about this virus, the first thing I thought was "ha ha!" and then .02 microseconds later I thought, "wow. that's really not a good way to get ANY point across."
Using some windows worm to try to make a point just demeans the whole open source community as a bunch of problem-causers, rather than problem-solvers.
Yarr!
Heave to and prepare to pay yer $799, ya scaliwags!
Ok, I'm confused. Since when do two false's make a positive.
That happens when you use a NOT, much like Darl the knothead
*ducks*
Creating aliases may be what appears to happen, but it's not. It however, is a useful metaphor for what is happening so continue to use it; but for correctness I thought I would throw out what is actually happening
When you drag something into the dock, it creates an XML entry in the ~\Library\Preferences\com.apple.dock.plist file. This is actually better than creating aliases if you are on a Open Directory domain, as you can then have the dock point at a location on multiple machines, rather than having an alias break because the inode doesn't match up.
Did I also mention that some of the other behaviors people want to change are in here? This is what the dock preferences pane sets.
Property List Editor is your friend!
"There is no defense fund for Linux users. Linux users will fall into a quagmire and will kill themselves at the gates to our corporate headquarters. We shall be victorious."
Oh wait - that's that other guy who was spreading misinformation in the press last year...
Schools are crappy, teachers are underpaid,
... and we sent lots of money this year to help (see the last State of the Union address), and challenged the rest of the world to match it. By the way, you know what would stem the tide in the AIDS crisis in Africa? Mix in some condoms. Even if we give them out to everyone, we can't force their use; unless of course you want to go personally put them on for people.
... who's own government is more concerned with building nuclear weapons than feeding their people. Oh, they also wouldn't take aid from us if we sent it (as we have done in the past, and they did). Maybe you should protest that to them. Ohh, that's right! You can't because they don't have free speech, again due to their oppressive government.
This must account for your spelling and grammar.
old people have to pay tons of money for pills
Didn't Congress just pass legislation about this one? I think the prescription drugs are covered by Medicare now.
homeless people fill out city streets
This is a legitimate problem, but not one throwing money at will fix. Re-education, retraining, mental medical help, etc. will help, and these plans exist, but my feeling I get is that most homeless people have too much pride to get help / want help.
AIDs is destroying Africa
people are starving in North Korea
In 1961 people could think of a thousand better things to do than launch three people to the moon and back. However, I don't hear many of those people complaining about their use of the products and equipment that have spawned from that effort, you inclusive. Simple things that we take for granted today did not exist prior to the national effort to get to the Moon and back.
Try to be less short sighted in the future mmkay?
Behold, more proof that most people don't understand what Irony is.
Here it is again for the cheap seats:
a. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.
b. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning.
Here you go:
1. Education Discounts - Find a kid or a teacher.
2. Apple Consultants Network - http://consultants.apple.com
3. Apple Employees - that's some good action if you can get the hookup. I'd rather not say much about that for fear of an Apple Lawyer shoving a sock down my throat. (It's where I scored my iPod from, and I'm a certified ACN member)
4. CompUSA employees - they can buy at CompUSA's cost.
The discounts are out there, you just may have to put yourself in indentured servitude or buy a bunch of beer for someone (especially in the case of the CompUSA employee, Apple employee, or the kid).
Especially when Apple disables the root user by default. This guy had to go in and turn it on!
Yeah, because watching hi-res video on a two inch screen is something that EVERYONE wants to see.
Would YOU want to watch any of the Lord of the Rings movies on your color cellphone? That's what you are asking for.
If you call ANY hardware support line for ANY company, they will ask for information, and if you don't give them the information they need to properly troubleshoot the issue, then you aren't going to get help.
In addition to that, if you are under the published system requirements, they have every right to tell you to sod off, as there are reasons the minumums are set there. Reasons such as driver support, performance considerations, and more likely in Apple's case, chipset support and removing the god-awful backwards compatibility engineering costs of supporting machines that are 6+ years old.
It's not just Apple that does this. Go buy ANY hardware OR software that you don't meet the minimum requirements for and call support saying it doesn't work, and see what response you get.
Oh, and nice blast at the end about people making money where others didn't have the vision to see what they had. I seem to recall Xerox executives voluntarily showing Jobs & Co the Smalltalk systems, above the protests of the PARC employees at the time.
For the most part, clock speed != performance.
Yes it goes to a large part of it within the same processor family, but it doesn't scale at 1:1.
Really?
I remember the iMac dropping the floppy drive in 1998, three years before Dell made it an OPTION rather than removing it all together, where it still sits.
I also remember the iMac in 1998 having exactly ZERO legacy peripheral connectivity. Dell STILL is using PS/2, parallel, and serial COM ports, and on models that they aren't, guess what - there is still an ISA bridge in the chipset from Intel, and the IDE controller is sitting on it.
Even earlier than that, with the Power Macintosh 7200 / 8200 / 9200 series where they eradicated all internal connectivity in favor of PCI. In 1997. Dell didn't do this until late in the Pentium III models where they finally got rid of that last ISA slot that was on the bottom of the board.
The first two companies to standardize on Intel's PCI architecture were not using Intel processors. They were Apple (PowerPC) and DEC (Alpha). This is widely known.
Oh, and I guess that Apple didn't ship the 20th Anniversary Mac with an LCD screen in 1997 did they?
Care to try again?
What happens? Simple.
One of the licensees of SysV buys the rights and codebase for pennies on the dollar in bankruptcy court.
Life goes on, hoping that the new owner actually posesses more intelligence than a bag of rusty hammers.
Please read the upper left corner of your browser:
... and many others. What was the last innovation that Dell came up with that everyone else has integrated into their product lines?
"News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
Dell doesn't do anything that radically new... ever. Apple does it every quarter.
If you want to see where the PC industry is headed in the future, look no farther than Apple's product announcements of today. Examples:
Elimination of legacy peripheral connectivity and standardization on PCI, USB, IEEE1394
Gigabit ethernet built-in on EVERYTHING
Stylish industrial design
802.11x wireless networking available before anyone else
Multimonitor support in early 1990s (Windows didn't have this until SP3 of NT4 and Windows 98)