The central problem with electronic voting lies not with bugs, hardware failures, or security, but rather than with our modern concept of democracy and where we see ourselves going as citizens of a common nation.
It is clear that present electronic voting efforts are the first step in a general program of transforming voting as we know it into an online, decentralized process, with the final goal being a system where voting is an activity as simple and hassle-free as ordering a pizza or sufing to a website.
Therein lies the problem. As citizens of a common nation, our involvement in the democratic process should be something that brings us together, together with people we would not ordinarily encounter, for what can only be called our sacred ritual of casting votes. A ballot should not be a screen with virtual buttons floating in hyperspace, it should be a hefty card, symbolizing the hefty decision that lies with each voter, it shows our seriousness that decision needs is embodied in the real physical ballots that are carefully tallied and counted and not simply disseminated into electronic bits.
The process of voting should be a little inconveniencing, with voters having to drive to the polling station, stand in line, and punch a ballot. It reinforces our sense of civic pride to have to make a bit of an effort to vote. It demeans the democratic system for the voting process to be allowed to atrophy into a simple matter of point-and-click, no need to get out of your chair. Choosing the laws and leadership of a nation should be an act more involved than switching channels.
When the once-proud rituals of democracy are reduced to a set of simple gestures, once the paricipants in the voting process are reduced to a mass of isolated individuals typing on keyboards or pushing buttons on PDAs, a sense of togetherness is lost. The insiduous decentralization of the voting system that is the end result of electronic voting can only lead to the erosion of our sense of citizenship, of being equal paricipants in something larger than ourselves. Could the erosion of democracy itself be far behind? It seems the dystopian corporate-run societies of so-called "cyberpunk" "fiction" more than just sci-fi.
The problem is not bittorrents. The problem is lack of morals among today's youth. If young people are given the opportunity to use bittorrtents, they will steal music, movies, "anime", and so forth, because they have no respect for private intellectual property.
Well, as someone once said, if you can't get respect, you settle for fear. If the makers of Bittorrents, the Kazaa, WebDonkey, etc., want to see their products used for legitimate purposes, they'd best hope the lawsuits by the RIAA and others serve to scare off those who would use their products for stealing intellectual properties. It seems they are not going to cease and desist pirating out of their own sense of right and wrong.
It is a well known fact that military vehicle driving is one of the few high-paying positions that less-educated individuals can qualify for.
It is equally obvious that by using this so-called contest, the Pentagon is trying to obtain for themselves a cheap automated replacement for human vehicle operators. No hazard pay, no training no insurance needed for robots. And a bargain at $1 million.
And where will that leave formerly well-paid and regarded vehicle operators? Walkng across minefields with poking sticks, that's where. I for one am shocked and appalled.
"Kathy Sarvak of Burlington, Vt., points out that European Space Agency's "Beagle 2," named in honor of Charles Darwin's vessel, failed at Mars while NASA's "Spirit," with its quasi-religious name, succeeded. "God's sense of humor is a wonderful thing," she declares."
Personally, I am shocked and appalled that our NASA technicians are giving quasi-religious names to scientific equipment. This shows no faith in reason and deduction. It would not surprise me if the data from Spirit is cooked up by creationists in the Bush administration to shore up their own wacky beliefs.
I hope NASA's scientists use more common sense next time.
So the RIAA's scare tactics work. Huzzah. Welcome to the United States of the Best Attorneys Win.
On a related note, I'm sure a policy or machine-gunning random jaywalkers would result in a sharp increase in the number of people using crosswalks. The possibilites are endless.
This Koppix looks like a good way for a hacker to go around taking over computers. In this age of terrorism, an attacker taking over computers at an airport, traffic light control center, or water treatment plant, could be especially dangerous. I hope the developers have put in appropriate safety measures to prevent this from happening.
In a country where thousands die annually in automobile accidents. here three billionaires are deliberately crashing cars just so they can have overpriced playthings to go joyriding in.
This whole fiasco is a metaphor for everything that's wrong with Microsoft, and by extension, America.
We also need to think about preserving appropriate equipment for retirieving data from elderly cds and dvds. Resources are finite. What's going to happen if we use misuse our laser reserves and there are none left decades hence with which to read all those carefully preserved discs? These are the kinds of issues I would like to see politicans talk more about instead of just tax cuts.
This is just another attempt by Google to control the flow of information on the internet.
As with their search engine, where page ranking hocus pocus hides undesirable sites, who knows what misdeeds Google has planned for the millions of unsuspecting bloggers who use their now temptingly free service?
Remember, Internet Explorer was one the hot free internet application du jour, and be ever careful of geeks bearing gifts.
95 is an impressively long time for a human being to live. I would bet that all the nuclear materials Teller worked with somehow mutated him into having extraordinary longevity. Let's hope they do a comprehensive autopsy on Teller to see if radiation was indeed the cause of his long life.
...and I did nothing up because I was not a spammer.
Then they came for the white hat hackers, and I did nothing because I was not a white hat hacker.
Then they came for the file-traders, and I did nothing because I was not a file-trader.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up.
Or worse, what if all the blocked IPs get together and form a counter-internet and they all start trading kiddie porn and whatnot. What then? People need to think these decisions through more carefully.
Back when high-bit encryption was becoming popular, there was a great effort on the part of the government to control its use, especially the "export" of encryption technology.
With the advent of unbreakable quantum encryption, we are clearly in for more of the same. If you think the line at the arirport is long now, just wait until security starts searching people for nanotubes. Me, I'm seriously considering driving everywhere.
Australia's move may seem like an extreme measure, but it is the only logical one. The alternative would be an ever-escalating technical war between spammers and those trying to block or filter spam, with both sides achieving incrementally more sophisticated gains, until the result is a doomsday technology that brings down the internet or causes similar havoc.
We already saw something like this with the Blaster worm, and that was just one fat boy. Imagine what thousands of feverish techies could do. This is what happens when the freedom to use technology is willfully abused. Let us hope the judicious use of legislation will clear up the spam issue, and also help solve similar problems, such as that of file-trading.
The laws of the United States are based in our founding document, the constitution.
Since this is clearly at bottom a First Amendment case, we need to consider what the Framers meant when they set down the words "Congress shall not restrict freedom of speech." Would men like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison or Thomas Paine really have meant those words to protect obnoxious junk like spam email or pop-up ads? The answer is clearly no.
The health benefits of magnet therapy, useful in the treatment of everything from carpal tunnel syndrome to back pain, are well known.
It is great that such breakthroughs in magentic technology are being made, and I hope that these gains can be put to use in the medical field, especially now with so much of the poplulation entering old age.
"If someone were teaching a course on the brain in high school science, for example, and wanted to find good pictures of the brain, well, they're all over the place," said John Saylor, director of collection development for the NSDL and director on leave from Cornell's engineering library.
"The idea is to come to the NSDL, where you could find some good brain pictures and know where they came from," Saylor said. "They would have a certain level of authority. Every collection is identified for the user."
So it's going to be a collection of information approved by government-funded experts. While this is a good idea and has its uses, I question the assumption that this is what the internet is for.
To me, the internet should be about the free exchange of information, and individuals making their own decisions about what is appropriate.
I couldn't help noticing the Time.com article made reference to crime and terrorism, particularly the September 11 WTC/Pentagon attacks (which happened over a year ago), and to the recent Washington Sniper killings (which ended months ago), in spite of the fact that this article would have been jst as fascinating if they had simply used the business examples as illustration.
In the movie 'Bowling For Columbine' Michael Moore speculates that one of the root causes of gun violence in the US is the type of fearmongering the US media engages in in an effort to keep their sales/ratings up.
It looks like Time.com's gratuitous exploitation of US fears of crime and terrorism might be an example of this.
Aren't the terms "European Space Program" and "Science Fiction" synonymous?
Seriously, this is little more than a perk for the artsy community that controls far too much of the tax outlays in European countries (another example of this is the lavish outlays for state subsidised Opera houses: Berlin has three!).
I love Sci-fi and speculative fiction as much as the next person, but entertainment and science are two totally different areas. In the United States, our space program takes its cues from scientists who are serious professionals with years of training. These men and women work on the kind of basic research projects that don't have the flash and glamour of sci-fi novels and books, but which will one day lead to real breakthroughs in human knowledge and acheivement.
It seems the Europeans would rather have their space agency waste their time trying to develop tricorders and lighsabers. How sad.
This raid could have been for a lot of reasons. It might be a misguided attempt to stem CD piracy, but it could also be that someone at the CD company forgot to (or refused) to pay off certain officials of Mexico's notoriously corrupt government. The Mexican recording industry's ties with organized crime should also be considered. The details of the story that I could make out using my sketchy knowledge of Spanish made the whole thing seem suspicious, particularly with this company being singled out among all Mexican CD-R importers.
I don't see much danger as of yet of this type of incident taking place among the functioning democracies of the developed world, such as those in Europe or North America. I am withholding judgement on this story until futher evidence comes to light.
You thank often for informative very translation! Points of article veritably stated I address must:
According to calculations of the Protective Derechos Association Intelectuales Fonogra'ficos (APDIF), the legal industry purchase per year 20 million discs, as soon as the 10 percent of 200 million that the Soli's matter and sell annually. For that reason they are indicated like the main suppliers of piracy in Mexico.
Generalization infamous this argument specious is. Uses of numerous multiplicity disks can be made to have by consumer. To Piracy assume on simple stupidhead calcuations offhand make, demostrates syllogistically the logic that smells foul.
Between the supposed denounced irregularities, Ildefonso Soli's indicated that in the operative one of the 18 of December, between the 7 million assured discs were 2,8 million units that were seized for the second time, which already had been given back them by Property because the merchandise were legal.
Here weighings awesome of judegmental facts against poor law enforcement lean. Own actions police of past show virgin discs to of unassailable purity innocence uses comprised having been. Whole issue of suspicion frequently corruption singing quietly from under floorboards it cannot be dodged.
Helping the underprivleged in developing countries is a worthy goal. However, caution must be excercised in the implementation of this concept.
Most impoverished areas of developing countries in South America and Africa are hotbeds of illegal activity. Care must be taken to ensure that well-meaning donations of hardware and educational materials do not spawn a worldwide epidemic of hacking and computer crime.
This is depressing. The western tradition of science fiction has given us such meditations on human knowledge, technology, and man's place in the universe as "The Martian Chronicles", "Foundation", "Ender's Game", "E.T., The Extra Terrestrial", "2001: A Space Oddysey", "Star Trek", "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep", "Neuromancer", "Snow Crash", and "Solaris", to name but a very few.
By contrast, the Hello Kittly-loving, schoolgirl-obssessed, infantilized Japanese pop culture machine gives us comic books and cartoons, conisiting of rape scenes, panty shots, giant robot fights, and "nekomimi", along with the occasional destruction of a city. Puerile entertainment that hardly bears mentioning in comparion to real works of science fiction. When the Japanese cartooning industry produces its own "I, Robot", its own "Ringworld", its own "Demon With A Glass Hand and other stories", then I will be impressed. Until then, this whole anime business is just a bunch of sexed up, gory "Transformers" episodes.
Sorry to sound like flamebait, but this is a matter I feel strongly about.
While any device that will help save lives is definitely welcome, the more bigger issue is whether these types of equipment won't actually increase the number of climbing deaths by encouraging inexperienced, overconfident, wealthy thrillseekers to try "bagging" a few "peaks".
Many experienced climbers today complain about the presence of parties of rich people seeking the latest "extreme" sport, being driven or even helicoptered in to a suitable site near a mountain's peak. Cushy base camps featuring the latest in electronic entertainment gear, heated tents, and even portable jacuzzis are not uncommon even along the slopes of such forbidding mountains as Everest and K2.
And now comes life sign monitors, so the hired help can quickly dig some careless wannabe mountaineer out of a snowbank. Complete with body-orientation signals so a stray shovel won't hit their heads. Will these truly help save lives, or only encourage the foolhardy to risk theirs?
Slashdot Mirror
The central problem with electronic voting lies not with bugs, hardware failures, or security, but rather than with our modern concept of democracy and where we see ourselves going as citizens of a common nation.
It is clear that present electronic voting efforts are the first step in a general program of transforming voting as we know it into an online, decentralized process, with the final goal being a system where voting is an activity as simple and hassle-free as ordering a pizza or sufing to a website.
Therein lies the problem. As citizens of a common nation, our involvement in the democratic process should be something that brings us together, together with people we would not ordinarily encounter, for what can only be called our sacred ritual of casting votes. A ballot should not be a screen with virtual buttons floating in hyperspace, it should be a hefty card, symbolizing the hefty decision that lies with each voter, it shows our seriousness that decision needs is embodied in the real physical ballots that are carefully tallied and counted and not simply disseminated into electronic bits.
The process of voting should be a little inconveniencing, with voters having to drive to the polling station, stand in line, and punch a ballot. It reinforces our sense of civic pride to have to make a bit of an effort to vote. It demeans the democratic system for the voting process to be allowed to atrophy into a simple matter of point-and-click, no need to get out of your chair. Choosing the laws and leadership of a nation should be an act more involved than switching channels.
When the once-proud rituals of democracy are reduced to a set of simple gestures, once the paricipants in the voting process are reduced to a mass of isolated individuals typing on keyboards or pushing buttons on PDAs, a sense of togetherness is lost. The insiduous decentralization of the voting system that is the end result of electronic voting can only lead to the erosion of our sense of citizenship, of being equal paricipants in something larger than ourselves. Could the erosion of democracy itself be far behind? It seems the dystopian corporate-run societies of so-called "cyberpunk" "fiction" more than just sci-fi.
The problem is not bittorrents. The problem is lack of morals among today's youth. If young people are given the opportunity to use bittorrtents, they will steal music, movies, "anime", and so forth, because they have no respect for private intellectual property.
Well, as someone once said, if you can't get respect, you settle for fear. If the makers of Bittorrents, the Kazaa, WebDonkey, etc., want to see their products used for legitimate purposes, they'd best hope the lawsuits by the RIAA and others serve to scare off those who would use their products for stealing intellectual properties. It seems they are not going to cease and desist pirating out of their own sense of right and wrong.
It is a well known fact that military vehicle driving is one of the few high-paying positions that less-educated individuals can qualify for.
It is equally obvious that by using this so-called contest, the Pentagon is trying to obtain for themselves a cheap automated replacement for human vehicle operators. No hazard pay, no training no insurance needed for robots. And a bargain at $1 million.
And where will that leave formerly well-paid and regarded vehicle operators? Walkng across minefields with poking sticks, that's where. I for one am shocked and appalled.
I read this in a column on the internet:
"Kathy Sarvak of Burlington, Vt., points out that European Space Agency's "Beagle 2," named in honor of Charles Darwin's vessel, failed at Mars while NASA's "Spirit," with its quasi-religious name, succeeded. "God's sense of humor is a wonderful thing," she declares."
Personally, I am shocked and appalled that our NASA technicians are giving quasi-religious names to scientific equipment. This shows no faith in reason and deduction. It would not surprise me if the data from Spirit is cooked up by creationists in the Bush administration to shore up their own wacky beliefs.
I hope NASA's scientists use more common sense next time.
So the RIAA's scare tactics work. Huzzah. Welcome to the United States of the Best Attorneys Win. On a related note, I'm sure a policy or machine-gunning random jaywalkers would result in a sharp increase in the number of people using crosswalks. The possibilites are endless.
This Koppix looks like a good way for a hacker to go around taking over computers. In this age of terrorism, an attacker taking over computers at an airport, traffic light control center, or water treatment plant, could be especially dangerous. I hope the developers have put in appropriate safety measures to prevent this from happening.
In a country where thousands die annually in automobile accidents. here three billionaires are deliberately crashing cars just so they can have overpriced playthings to go joyriding in.
This whole fiasco is a metaphor for everything that's wrong with Microsoft, and by extension, America.
We also need to think about preserving appropriate equipment for retirieving data from elderly cds and dvds. Resources are finite. What's going to happen if we use misuse our laser reserves and there are none left decades hence with which to read all those carefully preserved discs? These are the kinds of issues I would like to see politicans talk more about instead of just tax cuts.
This is just another attempt by Google to control the flow of information on the internet.
As with their search engine, where page ranking hocus pocus hides undesirable sites, who knows what misdeeds Google has planned for the millions of unsuspecting bloggers who use their now temptingly free service?
Remember, Internet Explorer was one the hot free internet application du jour, and be ever careful of geeks bearing gifts.
95 is an impressively long time for a human being to live. I would bet that all the nuclear materials Teller worked with somehow mutated him into having extraordinary longevity. Let's hope they do a comprehensive autopsy on Teller to see if radiation was indeed the cause of his long life.
http://216.239.33.104/search?q=cache:nZrXhIU65ocJ: www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sws/papers/msmw03.pdf:&hl=en &ie=UTF-8
...and I did nothing up because I was not a spammer.
Then they came for the white hat hackers, and I did nothing because I was not a white hat hacker.
Then they came for the file-traders, and I did nothing because I was not a file-trader.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up.
Or worse, what if all the blocked IPs get together and form a counter-internet and they all start trading kiddie porn and whatnot. What then? People need to think these decisions through more carefully.
Back when high-bit encryption was becoming popular, there was a great effort on the part of the government to control its use, especially the "export" of encryption technology.
With the advent of unbreakable quantum encryption, we are clearly in for more of the same. If you think the line at the arirport is long now, just wait until security starts searching people for nanotubes. Me, I'm seriously considering driving everywhere.
Australia's move may seem like an extreme measure, but it is the only logical one. The alternative would be an ever-escalating technical war between spammers and those trying to block or filter spam, with both sides achieving incrementally more sophisticated gains, until the result is a doomsday technology that brings down the internet or causes similar havoc.
We already saw something like this with the Blaster worm, and that was just one fat boy. Imagine what thousands of feverish techies could do. This is what happens when the freedom to use technology is willfully abused. Let us hope the judicious use of legislation will clear up the spam issue, and also help solve similar problems, such as that of file-trading.
The laws of the United States are based in our founding document, the constitution.
Since this is clearly at bottom a First Amendment case, we need to consider what the Framers meant when they set down the words "Congress shall not restrict freedom of speech." Would men like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison or Thomas Paine really have meant those words to protect obnoxious junk like spam email or pop-up ads? The answer is clearly no.
This ruling should be overturned on appeal.
The health benefits of magnet therapy, useful in the treatment of everything from carpal tunnel syndrome to back pain, are well known.
It is great that such breakthroughs in magentic technology are being made, and I hope that these gains can be put to use in the medical field, especially now with so much of the poplulation entering old age.
To me, the internet should be about the free exchange of information, and individuals making their own decisions about what is appropriate.
In the movie 'Bowling For Columbine' Michael Moore speculates that one of the root causes of gun violence in the US is the type of fearmongering the US media engages in in an effort to keep their sales/ratings up.
It looks like Time.com's gratuitous exploitation of US fears of crime and terrorism might be an example of this.
Seriously, this is little more than a perk for the artsy community that controls far too much of the tax outlays in European countries (another example of this is the lavish outlays for state subsidised Opera houses: Berlin has three!).
I love Sci-fi and speculative fiction as much as the next person, but entertainment and science are two totally different areas. In the United States, our space program takes its cues from scientists who are serious professionals with years of training. These men and women work on the kind of basic research projects that don't have the flash and glamour of sci-fi novels and books, but which will one day lead to real breakthroughs in human knowledge and acheivement.
It seems the Europeans would rather have their space agency waste their time trying to develop tricorders and lighsabers. How sad.
I don't see much danger as of yet of this type of incident taking place among the functioning democracies of the developed world, such as those in Europe or North America. I am withholding judgement on this story until futher evidence comes to light.
Most impoverished areas of developing countries in South America and Africa are hotbeds of illegal activity. Care must be taken to ensure that well-meaning donations of hardware and educational materials do not spawn a worldwide epidemic of hacking and computer crime.
By contrast, the Hello Kittly-loving, schoolgirl-obssessed, infantilized Japanese pop culture machine gives us comic books and cartoons, conisiting of rape scenes, panty shots, giant robot fights, and "nekomimi", along with the occasional destruction of a city. Puerile entertainment that hardly bears mentioning in comparion to real works of science fiction. When the Japanese cartooning industry produces its own "I, Robot", its own "Ringworld", its own "Demon With A Glass Hand and other stories", then I will be impressed. Until then, this whole anime business is just a bunch of sexed up, gory "Transformers" episodes.
Sorry to sound like flamebait, but this is a matter I feel strongly about.
Many experienced climbers today complain about the presence of parties of rich people seeking the latest "extreme" sport, being driven or even helicoptered in to a suitable site near a mountain's peak. Cushy base camps featuring the latest in electronic entertainment gear, heated tents, and even portable jacuzzis are not uncommon even along the slopes of such forbidding mountains as Everest and K2.
And now comes life sign monitors, so the hired help can quickly dig some careless wannabe mountaineer out of a snowbank. Complete with body-orientation signals so a stray shovel won't hit their heads. Will these truly help save lives, or only encourage the foolhardy to risk theirs?
Use a cable modem or better yet wireless service, and a cell phone. All a dialup line gets you is telemarketer calls and another wire to trip over.