An ATM is simply a self-service machine that replaces the human teller for most simple transactions. Instead of the bank employee entering your account number, you give a card and a PIN. Instead of the bank employee typing in the value you're requesting, you type it in. Instead of the bank employee counting the cash, the machine does. Instead of the bank employee handing you the money and the reciept, you take it out of the slot. In the end, the same computer and physical records are created.
What these ballot-less voting systems are doing wrong is taking away a level of physical security by eliminating the paper ballot. The election scandals of 2000 weren't based on the paper ballots losing their security, it was that paper ballots were unclear as to what they meant. What we need is easier to read ballots, not electronic ones.
What good to the user is a receipt that proves nothing to the user, since he can't even decode his own hash. We don't let people take a stub of their paper ballot now...
Use the computer to make a human and machine readable paper ballot, walk ballot over to box, leave it there... any complexities beyond that is just asking for trouble.
What's wrong with the current system? The voter looks at the paper, and if they like it take it to the locked ballot box that's next to the exits, and if they don't they hand it to an offcial who stamps "VOID" on it and they get another blank to try again...
But let's make this clear: The printout goes in the ballot box and gets left at the polling place... voters should not have the option of taking a receipt home. Voters should not have any way of obtaining proof they voted a certain way, because that'll lead to kickback schemes and bosses requiring their employees proving they voted a certain way.
Electronic counting is okay, but they need to be counting physical ballots, not bits. There needs to be a physical paper trail that leads back to clearly-marked ballots that indicate what the voters intended.
The phone-in system is also a bit nonsensical. Ideally, the local counts should be published in each locality as quickly as possible, so that news organizations can do the math on their own, and any error introduced at any step in the way would quickly be noticed when numbers that are supposed to be the same don't check.
Diebold seems to be in the business of selling solitions that are worse than the problems they claim to solve.
Uhm... why not just bit-copy the data to another media format that doesn't self destruct? Afterall, you don't need the actual disc, just to keep the bits.
One more "It's our property, and we don't trust you, the consumer, with it." from the big organizations has met consumers who are dissatisfied with their garbage and unwilling to pay for it.
People didn't reject the technology as much as they rejected the pricing. This had no more limits on it than a DVD you have to bring back, but it cost twice as much...
Blockbuster, Netflix, and cable Pay-per-view offerings are still standing, so rental content isn't exactly dead. Both this and Divx didn't fail because of their self-destruct element as much as the fact they were priced higher than the already existing systems...
The cause of death on this idea seems rather simple to find... going rate for a movie that you get to watch once/twice then give back is $3-$4, and this came in at more than $6. Between this project and MovieBeam, Disney seems to be testing out every form of rental content distribution possible, but it seems like there's no such thing as one that works any better than the models that already exist. The Circuit City-backed Divx project should have been the first clue...
Most of the cops-catch-bad-guy-via-computer-hack stories have involved the cops having a trusted friend send a greeting-card-ish program that installs a key logger which eventually grabs the password and suddenly all is decrypted.
Is there something about the design of the Mac that makes it harder to sneak in such a Trojan Horse program?
What is the FCC doing wrong in terms of allocations?
Almost any consumer device you can think of exists at 900MHz, 2.4gHz, or 5.8gHz, and I don't see any stuck on the drawing board devices waiting for more bandwidth to be available. The rest of the frequencies are of course going to be devided up by the highest bidders, there's a finite quanity that has to be split up otherwise a tragedy of the commons would occur.
RF users need to spend their time looking for better ways to use the bandwidth they already have access to rather than just waiting for the FCC to issue more...
This isn't meant for sharing. It's meant for a tight-beam point-to-point protocol for backbone connections in remote areas where wires are hard to run.
WiMax is not a replacement for WiFi, it's a backbone protocol for long-haul RF connections. It'll take place on licensed bandwidth which will be illegal to try to jam, as opposed to WiFi where there's nothing stoping your neighbor from using the same frequencies...
I didn't say that the system as presently set up works. What I said was that if there were no patents, there would be no drug research, and therefore no new drugs.
I wonder how much it would cost them if someone, say, automated searching for those links on Google
Google would pull the ad as soon as it appoaches the daily limit. You might be able to mute the ads by seeing to it that you're the only one who sees them, but you wouldn't be able to drive them over their budget.
Sadly, once a patent is gotten, it tends to take a life of it's own because of investor pressures. Patents do not help the honest littel inventor in the back yard (99% of the time) - I wish we could just get rid of them.
Yet, patents are something we just can't get rid of. Think of the medicine industry. To get a new drug, they have to do lots of research and testing... and sometimes the tests end in a failure which means all the money spent on the project is lost, it's a dud. When a working pill is invented, it might take only pennies to make the actual pill, but the research company has got to be paid for its effort. That's where the patent protection comes in, it allows the company to charge an inflated price for a specified number of years in order to recoop that investment... after which time the buzzer sounds and the generics rush in and the price plumets to be in line with the cost of the pill itself and not the discovery of the pill.
How long that protection lasts, and what's enough of an advance to qualify for protection are both points for debate, but we can't exactly throw out patents all together if we want research to go forward...
In most such setups, yes. However, somebody trying to guess their way in would eventually get noticed... IP traffic will start coming from an address the server hasn't leased to anybody, and there's a MAC that's not on the approved list trying to get out.
MAC spoofing might be a possible hole, but it would eventually get caught when the same user appears to be in two places at the same time.
Most schools have a similar setup for incoming students on wired networks... and this company is claiming their patent is not specific to wireless.
The trick is simple to explain... it's a conditional DHCP server. If the MAC address is recognized, the user is supplied valid DHCP information and is allowed to go about their way to the open Internet. If the MAC address is not on the guest list, then the user is supplied an IP address that's in a firewall-restricted range so they can't get out, and DNS server that will map any domain name to the same place, the internal "Please pay..." server. No matter what the user's homepage is, all requests on port 80 will lead to the "Please pay..." page, and all other requests will get dropped on the floor. The internal DHCP settings are set to renew very frequently, so once the user pays they just have to wait a few seconds for their current DHCP settings to expire, an the next lease comes with the proper info.
Still, that setup could be complex to be patented...
But there's a $2000 per candidate per election total cap that you cannot break even via multiple sources. If you've given $2000 elsewhere, even a $5 contribution through Amazon is illegal. Therefore, Amazon has to relay the identity of all contributors to the campaign. And that's disclosed in the FAQ, so there's no privacy policy breach. You will get other mail from the campaign, count on it.
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What is the point in giving people a number so well encrypted they can't do anything with it?
Be careful which fictional character you pick... we don't want Disney after the fact trying to claim that the election was valid...
An ATM is simply a self-service machine that replaces the human teller for most simple transactions. Instead of the bank employee entering your account number, you give a card and a PIN. Instead of the bank employee typing in the value you're requesting, you type it in. Instead of the bank employee counting the cash, the machine does. Instead of the bank employee handing you the money and the reciept, you take it out of the slot. In the end, the same computer and physical records are created.
What these ballot-less voting systems are doing wrong is taking away a level of physical security by eliminating the paper ballot. The election scandals of 2000 weren't based on the paper ballots losing their security, it was that paper ballots were unclear as to what they meant. What we need is easier to read ballots, not electronic ones.
What good to the user is a receipt that proves nothing to the user, since he can't even decode his own hash. We don't let people take a stub of their paper ballot now...
Use the computer to make a human and machine readable paper ballot, walk ballot over to box, leave it there... any complexities beyond that is just asking for trouble.
What's wrong with the current system? The voter looks at the paper, and if they like it take it to the locked ballot box that's next to the exits, and if they don't they hand it to an offcial who stamps "VOID" on it and they get another blank to try again...
But let's make this clear: The printout goes in the ballot box and gets left at the polling place... voters should not have the option of taking a receipt home. Voters should not have any way of obtaining proof they voted a certain way, because that'll lead to kickback schemes and bosses requiring their employees proving they voted a certain way.
Electronic counting is okay, but they need to be counting physical ballots, not bits. There needs to be a physical paper trail that leads back to clearly-marked ballots that indicate what the voters intended.
The phone-in system is also a bit nonsensical. Ideally, the local counts should be published in each locality as quickly as possible, so that news organizations can do the math on their own, and any error introduced at any step in the way would quickly be noticed when numbers that are supposed to be the same don't check.
Diebold seems to be in the business of selling solitions that are worse than the problems they claim to solve.
Uhm... why not just bit-copy the data to another media format that doesn't self destruct? Afterall, you don't need the actual disc, just to keep the bits.
One more "It's our property, and we don't trust you, the consumer, with it." from the big organizations has met consumers who are dissatisfied with their garbage and unwilling to pay for it.
People didn't reject the technology as much as they rejected the pricing. This had no more limits on it than a DVD you have to bring back, but it cost twice as much...
Blockbuster, Netflix, and cable Pay-per-view offerings are still standing, so rental content isn't exactly dead. Both this and Divx didn't fail because of their self-destruct element as much as the fact they were priced higher than the already existing systems...
The cause of death on this idea seems rather simple to find... going rate for a movie that you get to watch once/twice then give back is $3-$4, and this came in at more than $6. Between this project and MovieBeam, Disney seems to be testing out every form of rental content distribution possible, but it seems like there's no such thing as one that works any better than the models that already exist. The Circuit City-backed Divx project should have been the first clue...
Most of the cops-catch-bad-guy-via-computer-hack stories have involved the cops having a trusted friend send a greeting-card-ish program that installs a key logger which eventually grabs the password and suddenly all is decrypted.
Is there something about the design of the Mac that makes it harder to sneak in such a Trojan Horse program?
ERROR: Parameter for switch_providers cannot be Null.
What is the FCC doing wrong in terms of allocations?
Almost any consumer device you can think of exists at 900MHz, 2.4gHz, or 5.8gHz, and I don't see any stuck on the drawing board devices waiting for more bandwidth to be available. The rest of the frequencies are of course going to be devided up by the highest bidders, there's a finite quanity that has to be split up otherwise a tragedy of the commons would occur.
RF users need to spend their time looking for better ways to use the bandwidth they already have access to rather than just waiting for the FCC to issue more...
This isn't meant for sharing. It's meant for a tight-beam point-to-point protocol for backbone connections in remote areas where wires are hard to run.
WiMax is not a replacement for WiFi, it's a backbone protocol for long-haul RF connections. It'll take place on licensed bandwidth which will be illegal to try to jam, as opposed to WiFi where there's nothing stoping your neighbor from using the same frequencies...
I didn't say that the system as presently set up works. What I said was that if there were no patents, there would be no drug research, and therefore no new drugs.
I wonder how much it would cost them if someone, say, automated searching for those links on Google
Google would pull the ad as soon as it appoaches the daily limit. You might be able to mute the ads by seeing to it that you're the only one who sees them, but you wouldn't be able to drive them over their budget.
But that brings up an interesting question... why buy the AdWords keywords when you're already the natural #1 hit result?
Anybody see the details? That $250k is made up of Linux IP licenses and SCOX stock...
Sadly, once a patent is gotten, it tends to take a life of it's own because of investor pressures. Patents do not help the honest littel inventor in the back yard (99% of the time) - I wish we could just get rid of them.
Yet, patents are something we just can't get rid of. Think of the medicine industry. To get a new drug, they have to do lots of research and testing... and sometimes the tests end in a failure which means all the money spent on the project is lost, it's a dud. When a working pill is invented, it might take only pennies to make the actual pill, but the research company has got to be paid for its effort. That's where the patent protection comes in, it allows the company to charge an inflated price for a specified number of years in order to recoop that investment... after which time the buzzer sounds and the generics rush in and the price plumets to be in line with the cost of the pill itself and not the discovery of the pill.
How long that protection lasts, and what's enough of an advance to qualify for protection are both points for debate, but we can't exactly throw out patents all together if we want research to go forward...
In most such setups, yes. However, somebody trying to guess their way in would eventually get noticed... IP traffic will start coming from an address the server hasn't leased to anybody, and there's a MAC that's not on the approved list trying to get out.
MAC spoofing might be a possible hole, but it would eventually get caught when the same user appears to be in two places at the same time.
Most schools have a similar setup for incoming students on wired networks... and this company is claiming their patent is not specific to wireless.
The trick is simple to explain... it's a conditional DHCP server. If the MAC address is recognized, the user is supplied valid DHCP information and is allowed to go about their way to the open Internet. If the MAC address is not on the guest list, then the user is supplied an IP address that's in a firewall-restricted range so they can't get out, and DNS server that will map any domain name to the same place, the internal "Please pay..." server. No matter what the user's homepage is, all requests on port 80 will lead to the "Please pay..." page, and all other requests will get dropped on the floor. The internal DHCP settings are set to renew very frequently, so once the user pays they just have to wait a few seconds for their current DHCP settings to expire, an the next lease comes with the proper info.
Still, that setup could be complex to be patented...
But there's a $2000 per candidate per election total cap that you cannot break even via multiple sources. If you've given $2000 elsewhere, even a $5 contribution through Amazon is illegal. Therefore, Amazon has to relay the identity of all contributors to the campaign. And that's disclosed in the FAQ, so there's no privacy policy breach. You will get other mail from the campaign, count on it.
Especially when dealing with a 45.00mm part. The errant parts were off by close to 2% of their proper size.