$1 billion seems out of line. McDonald's only is giving away $55,283,390 worth of Best Buy money, not all of which will be turned in undoubtably, in the current Monopoly Best Chance Game promotion. $54,983,390 of that will be in the form of 54,983,390 $1 pieces.
When you add it all up, there's only 55,000,000 Best Buy pieces in cirulation... and that's from a pretty full tilt campaign by McDs standards. Therefore, I think that's the reasonable cap on how many songs total McDs could give away if such a promotion happens.
Huh? There's no difference between the "Internet community" and the general public anymore. You're not gonna get a solution from the "Internet community" before you have a worldwide government first...
The problem with this unit is what's DRM-free today doesn't have to be that way in 2005. Echostar could very easily add "broadcast flag auto-delete" support as part of a software update that's pushed down along with the guide data.
There's nothing to hack here. All that needs to be done to defeat this is to record just like you always did despite the fact there's a "no recording this!" sign hanging in the data...
I'm not quite sure how breaking an FCC rule can be against the law here... the FCC doesn't make laws, it can only oversee the enforcement of the ones already passed by the usual process through the Congress... what kind of teeth is this going to have?
$1000 in cold-hard-cash is a tax nightmare. Remember, even the holiday bonus, no matter what form it takes, is taxable income. If the IRS gets wind of this, that gift could trigger IRS audits on each and every employee and a back debt of $250ish.
Yeah, it's not likely the IRS will notice, but it's quite the mess if they do...
Re:It is Christmas, give them what they REALLY wan
on
Christmas Bonuses?
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· Score: 1
Here's the downside to this plan:
If some people buy twin flat screens, and others buy nice chairs, and others buy the year's supply of nice coffee, then what happens when a new employee joins with only the standard equipment. You don't want to have newcomers feeling outside the established group, you don't want somebody to have more in their cube than the newcomer.
So, if it is going to be something that stays in the office forever, it should be something that the whole group (including those who you haven't yet hired) can use.
Is it just me, or did Apple put out the patch only after the media storm? They could have killed the story yesterday simply by promising that the patch was on its way...
Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it
on
SCO Madness Reigns Supreme
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· Score: 3, Interesting
In the unlikely event that all GPL released works become public domain per SCO's request... wouldn't that include SCO's own Linux release, therefore killing whatever ownership of any fragement code they might have had?
You may be on to something... create an organization that accepts code and stores it with a datestamp forevermore. No need for random-access hard disk, just archive the material to tapes, CDs, or DVDs and properly maintain them. If your ownerhsip of the code is ever called into question, you can obtain 3rd party proof that the code was on that time period's record, proving you had the code as of that time.
It's easier to come up with the list of holdouts. They're five for five on the major RIAA companies, and they've got an easy enough program for the indies. There are a few artists making a stink of the one-by-one selling of their songs (mostly, the artists who die under this scheme, the ones who only have one or two good song per ablum...) but if you cared about any of those artists you likely would have learned about it already.
The problem is, PayPal's Mastercard program requires the account be verified to be from the USA... so it's good for the uncardable but not the international user.
Yep. That's the reason why we don't give voters reciepts for their ballots... it's too easy for an employer to require that everyone take the "optional" receipt and bring it with them to work, and if it doesn't show the desired candidate fire the employees.
Such schemes become impossible when there's no way to prove to someone else who you voted for even if you tried...
- Why bother to transmit the "secret" totals? If they're so secret, nobody needs to know them until the election's done.
- Who needs servers? Your system would in fact be more secure if the in-booth units never spoke to the ballot box units in their election day configuration. There's no need for them to be networked, physical access controls (the cop standing next to the ballot box unit...) should be more than enough to insure anything inserted was an actual ballot. Oh, and having the wrong questions candidates for the day's election would be a dead giveaway for the system.
- 48 hours is a little tight of a timeframe to lockdown the code if you want to make sure every site is running the right version. Try locking in a few months ahead, with the only thing left in play is the ballot-definition file that defines exact questions and candidates which should be rather easy to create once the officials certify which questions and candidates deserve to appear.
- Why bother to encrypt the metadata on the ballot? Just leave it in human-readable form, what better of an audit trail is that. Besides, I'm sure somebody will notice and complain if a mis-set machine is printing a wildly wrong time or wrong location...
The most statistically significant sample is 100%.
Any discrepancy between the electronic and paper numbers should be resolved. (I.E. The computer has three more votes for Smith, and there were three unreadable paper ballots... we can safely assume the smudged ballots most likely read "Smith" before being ruined.)
the counties with the punchcard ballots had more accurate results than counties using any other kind of system, save for the Eagle optical scanner used in San Francisco county
Translation: Everybody should be using the optical scanner San Francisco is using...
It's not just the Democrats. It's anybody who loses a close election who wants a recount. In fact, most states have a standard in their laws that automatically trigger a recount without anybody needing to ask when the election results are too close.
The problems come up when the numbers in the recount don't exactly confirm that the numbers that came from the first count. If there's a mismatch that can't easily be explained, we've got a real problem. What Florida 2000 exposed were many voters who thought they were voting for a candidate, but either marked their ballot to indicate another candidate or didn't mark their ballot clearly enough for readers to be certain of their intention. That's why the punch card system has got to go... we're not supposed to have uncertainty when it comes to the contents of a ballot.
"Lost" ballot boxes do sometimes happen, but let's face it: Most of those cases pertain to elections where the outcome wasn't in doubt because even if all of the unaccounted for ballots were for the 2nd place candidate it still wouldn't have changed the outcome. If a ballot box was missing in Florida in 2000, there would have been enough politically-connected complainers who would have forced a statewide search.
If you doubt the accuracy of your local elections, call your city hall. I'm sure they'll let you watch them go through the process next election day, and they might even ask you to help...
Receipts in the voter's hands are useless. If one wanted to accurately recount those recepts, there would be problems with lost receipts and those that are fraudlently brought forward...
Those recepts don't belong in the voter's hands, they belong in a ballot box. That way, they're nice and easy to watch and secure so that nobody can tamper with them in case a recount needs to be done. If the numbers from that recount don't match the numbers the computers are giving you... throw out those computers!
The student who made a fool out of the airport security system was conducting an act of civil disobedience, but the part of civil disobedience everyone seems to keep forgetting is it involves a public crime done to get attention, of course he's gonna get arrested and charged for it. He should be, he didn't just say "Somebody could.." he went out and did it.
Let's just hope the Feds are smart enough to sentance him to a community service project... telling them how they should have stopped him!
We seem to have forgotten something here. The paper ballot system isn't broken. What failed wad the punchcard system, and more specific efforts to explain proper operation of it.
The ideal ballot is one that results in a piece of paper that is both human-readable and machine readable. There hasn't been many problems with the "fill in the bubble" system of balloting, even though that system is open to a risk of users who don't understand that an X or checkmark in the bubble doesn't work.
The place for touchscreens is to help the user create a perfect ballot that is machine readable for speed counting, with the votes also in human readable terms for manual spot checks and recounting, and the most important spot check: The one the voter does before walking over to the ballot box. If the printout doesn't say what they thought it did, they hand the spoiled ballot to the officials and go try again.
The idea of having any form of electronic memory conduct counting within the in-booth devices is crazy. It opens the system into too much risk of data loss or data manipulation. There needs to be an audit trail, and that trail belongs in the ballot box.
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$1 billion seems out of line. McDonald's only is giving away $55,283,390 worth of Best Buy money, not all of which will be turned in undoubtably, in the current Monopoly Best Chance Game promotion. $54,983,390 of that will be in the form of 54,983,390 $1 pieces.
When you add it all up, there's only 55,000,000 Best Buy pieces in cirulation... and that's from a pretty full tilt campaign by McDs standards. Therefore, I think that's the reasonable cap on how many songs total McDs could give away if such a promotion happens.
You can't draw the conclusion that McD is working on it from their denial, they may or may not be... the pondering work got done by the media.
Huh? There's no difference between the "Internet community" and the general public anymore. You're not gonna get a solution from the "Internet community" before you have a worldwide government first...
TiVo already has the same situation with hacking required to extract video by FTP... but I'd hardly call the solution to that "a bit of tinkering".
The problem with this unit is what's DRM-free today doesn't have to be that way in 2005. Echostar could very easily add "broadcast flag auto-delete" support as part of a software update that's pushed down along with the guide data.
Nah, we want something bigger than a handheld TV...
There's nothing to hack here. All that needs to be done to defeat this is to record just like you always did despite the fact there's a "no recording this!" sign hanging in the data...
I'm not quite sure how breaking an FCC rule can be against the law here... the FCC doesn't make laws, it can only oversee the enforcement of the ones already passed by the usual process through the Congress... what kind of teeth is this going to have?
$1000 in cold-hard-cash is a tax nightmare. Remember, even the holiday bonus, no matter what form it takes, is taxable income. If the IRS gets wind of this, that gift could trigger IRS audits on each and every employee and a back debt of $250ish.
Yeah, it's not likely the IRS will notice, but it's quite the mess if they do...
Here's the downside to this plan: If some people buy twin flat screens, and others buy nice chairs, and others buy the year's supply of nice coffee, then what happens when a new employee joins with only the standard equipment. You don't want to have newcomers feeling outside the established group, you don't want somebody to have more in their cube than the newcomer. So, if it is going to be something that stays in the office forever, it should be something that the whole group (including those who you haven't yet hired) can use.
Is it just me, or did Apple put out the patch only after the media storm? They could have killed the story yesterday simply by promising that the patch was on its way...
In the unlikely event that all GPL released works become public domain per SCO's request... wouldn't that include SCO's own Linux release, therefore killing whatever ownership of any fragement code they might have had?
You may be on to something... create an organization that accepts code and stores it with a datestamp forevermore. No need for random-access hard disk, just archive the material to tapes, CDs, or DVDs and properly maintain them. If your ownerhsip of the code is ever called into question, you can obtain 3rd party proof that the code was on that time period's record, proving you had the code as of that time.
It's easier to come up with the list of holdouts. They're five for five on the major RIAA companies, and they've got an easy enough program for the indies. There are a few artists making a stink of the one-by-one selling of their songs (mostly, the artists who die under this scheme, the ones who only have one or two good song per ablum...) but if you cared about any of those artists you likely would have learned about it already.
Easier than that, just figure out who wants or needs to pay a 20% markup to get access to their service and let them in the front door....
The problem is, PayPal's Mastercard program requires the account be verified to be from the USA... so it's good for the uncardable but not the international user.
That's what we're arguing for, but that's not what Diebold and friends are selling...
Yep. That's the reason why we don't give voters reciepts for their ballots... it's too easy for an employer to require that everyone take the "optional" receipt and bring it with them to work, and if it doesn't show the desired candidate fire the employees.
Such schemes become impossible when there's no way to prove to someone else who you voted for even if you tried...
I've only got a few problems...
- Why bother to transmit the "secret" totals? If they're so secret, nobody needs to know them until the election's done.
- Who needs servers? Your system would in fact be more secure if the in-booth units never spoke to the ballot box units in their election day configuration. There's no need for them to be networked, physical access controls (the cop standing next to the ballot box unit...) should be more than enough to insure anything inserted was an actual ballot. Oh, and having the wrong questions candidates for the day's election would be a dead giveaway for the system.
- 48 hours is a little tight of a timeframe to lockdown the code if you want to make sure every site is running the right version. Try locking in a few months ahead, with the only thing left in play is the ballot-definition file that defines exact questions and candidates which should be rather easy to create once the officials certify which questions and candidates deserve to appear.
- Why bother to encrypt the metadata on the ballot? Just leave it in human-readable form, what better of an audit trail is that. Besides, I'm sure somebody will notice and complain if a mis-set machine is printing a wildly wrong time or wrong location...
The most statistically significant sample is 100%.
Any discrepancy between the electronic and paper numbers should be resolved. (I.E. The computer has three more votes for Smith, and there were three unreadable paper ballots... we can safely assume the smudged ballots most likely read "Smith" before being ruined.)
the counties with the punchcard ballots had more accurate results than counties using any other kind of system, save for the Eagle optical scanner used in San Francisco county
Translation: Everybody should be using the optical scanner San Francisco is using...
It's not just the Democrats. It's anybody who loses a close election who wants a recount. In fact, most states have a standard in their laws that automatically trigger a recount without anybody needing to ask when the election results are too close.
The problems come up when the numbers in the recount don't exactly confirm that the numbers that came from the first count. If there's a mismatch that can't easily be explained, we've got a real problem. What Florida 2000 exposed were many voters who thought they were voting for a candidate, but either marked their ballot to indicate another candidate or didn't mark their ballot clearly enough for readers to be certain of their intention. That's why the punch card system has got to go... we're not supposed to have uncertainty when it comes to the contents of a ballot.
"Lost" ballot boxes do sometimes happen, but let's face it: Most of those cases pertain to elections where the outcome wasn't in doubt because even if all of the unaccounted for ballots were for the 2nd place candidate it still wouldn't have changed the outcome. If a ballot box was missing in Florida in 2000, there would have been enough politically-connected complainers who would have forced a statewide search.
If you doubt the accuracy of your local elections, call your city hall. I'm sure they'll let you watch them go through the process next election day, and they might even ask you to help...
Receipts in the voter's hands are useless. If one wanted to accurately recount those recepts, there would be problems with lost receipts and those that are fraudlently brought forward...
Those recepts don't belong in the voter's hands, they belong in a ballot box. That way, they're nice and easy to watch and secure so that nobody can tamper with them in case a recount needs to be done. If the numbers from that recount don't match the numbers the computers are giving you... throw out those computers!
You're off-topic and off-base at the same time...
The student who made a fool out of the airport security system was conducting an act of civil disobedience, but the part of civil disobedience everyone seems to keep forgetting is it involves a public crime done to get attention, of course he's gonna get arrested and charged for it. He should be, he didn't just say "Somebody could.." he went out and did it.
Let's just hope the Feds are smart enough to sentance him to a community service project... telling them how they should have stopped him!
We seem to have forgotten something here. The paper ballot system isn't broken. What failed wad the punchcard system, and more specific efforts to explain proper operation of it.
The ideal ballot is one that results in a piece of paper that is both human-readable and machine readable. There hasn't been many problems with the "fill in the bubble" system of balloting, even though that system is open to a risk of users who don't understand that an X or checkmark in the bubble doesn't work.
The place for touchscreens is to help the user create a perfect ballot that is machine readable for speed counting, with the votes also in human readable terms for manual spot checks and recounting, and the most important spot check: The one the voter does before walking over to the ballot box. If the printout doesn't say what they thought it did, they hand the spoiled ballot to the officials and go try again.
The idea of having any form of electronic memory conduct counting within the in-booth devices is crazy. It opens the system into too much risk of data loss or data manipulation. There needs to be an audit trail, and that trail belongs in the ballot box.
Who's offering a legit store selling MP3 or Ogg files?