This is a computer programmed by invisible software. The only record of a vote is a little counter in the guts of the computer program. There is absolutely no way to make it secure. Any system that records votes directly electronically is wide open.
The only difference is who can commit vote fraud. Now anyone who walks up to the machine can commit vote fraud. Even if all of these bugs fixed, large classes of vote fraud remain. The only difference would be that any random person on the street couldn't cheat. However, any custodian would still be able to re-image the drive. Any programmer at Diebold would be able to embed a trapdoor. In short, anyone with exclusive access to open the machine can cause it to cheat. And this 'best case' is only if they fix all of the bugs.
Thats not a lot better. Even the writers of the paper couldn't make a cheat-proof DRE voting program. If an adversary controls the hardware, they control the software. Fundamentally, any non-trivial computer system is not trustworthy; any system whose security depends on a computer should be transformed where the security no longer depends on the correctness of the computer.
For instance, the only nominally trustworthy computer voting scheme is to have the computer be nothing other than a super-intelligent pencil. The voter uses the computer which prints out a paper ballot. The user observes and confirms the paper ballot is correct, then the ballot is dropped into a box. The computer may record results, but as the computer is untrustworthy, those results are untrustworthy. Now, the security and trustworthyness of the computer doesn't matter.
Every security researcher, including the authors of the paper advocates this scheme, but they are ignored by election officials. This includes the two professors who authored the paper, Peter Neumann, and Douglas Jones from the NY Times article, Rivest---the R in RSA--- and hundreds of others.
See: http://www.verifiedvoting.org/index.asp
This is a secure voting system. Brazil has it (and at a tenth the price). Any system without a printer requires 'trusted hardware' in an adversarial environment. Control the hardware, control the election.
They are required to submit a signed affadavit attesting both that the work under question is XX and they represent the copyright holder of XX, and that they believe there is infringment, before the subpoenea. If the work in question isn't XX or they do not represent the copyright holder, they are guilty of perjury. Fine them ten times the damages they are claiming.
I want a high standard they have to meet to avoid chilling effects.
Where's the evidence that the person whose privacy they are raping is even running a file sharing application? The burden of proof is 'Hey, subpoena the ISP for this information because I requested it'. Even if that burden was met, secondly, where is the evidence that they are in fact distributing copyrithed material. Its not infringement to clone a title. Its not infringment (which ONE OpenOffice mirror got a C&D letter about) to have a file called/windows/OpenOffice-1.2.3-tar.gz. It *may* be infringement if that file contains MS-Office, but if they don't check, they don't know... And we get violated.
In the DirecTV cases. Since when does 'I bought a smart card interface kit from you' suddenly become equated with 'I have committed what is considered an illegal act'.
Remember an article on slashdot about a week ago where an uncle commited a crime, leaving behind DNA evidence. 20 years later, that evidence was analyzed and searched in a database. He wasn't in the database. However, his nephew however did sommit a crime 15 years later and *was* in the database. When doing the search, they found the guy's nephew, and then him.
Thats rather impressive. A swab from a 20 year old crime was linked to a 5 year old swab from the criminals relative.If thats not a broadband database search, what is?
Would the LRP have happened at all if he hadn't used other GPL software? He laments bitterly about how he was never thanked or paid handsomly for his worok, but did he thank the people whose code he used? Did he pay them handsomly? Did he do little else but whine to other people that their software wasn't exactly what he wanted or needed?
Thats an issue; this whole situation is symmetric. Every author of every line of code he used in this project can, perhaps even should have the exact same bitterness, at him.
You're right. Linux is just a ripoff of BSD. BSD is just a ripoff of UNIX. The Windows is just a ripoff of the Mac. The Mac is a ripoff of the computer at PARC. Slashdot is just a ripoff of USENET. Clone computers are ripoffs too; do YOU have an authentic IBM machine?
The parent comment is just a ripoff of other comments. Big deal. How many clones of Doom have come out over the last decade? Freecraft may be similar to warcraft/starcraft but who gives a shit. This is just a company going for a landgrab and cybersquatting. This is a bully threatening others.
Really, this is incident is like Walmart sending hired goons to threaten a lemonaid stand across the street. Sure, it 'competes' with the in-store drinks, it may even be a 'clone' of the in-store lemonaid, but there is nothing illegal abouot that.
I'm just sad that the frightened people at FreeCraft didn't remove the downloads and post the letter and let the discussion rage, (like bnetd) rather than fold up and immediately disappear.
The project page is http://www.cs.rice.edu/~scrosby/hash/ and actually has details about individual vulnerable applications and test files for several systems.
(And is kinder on the server for those who don't want to download the whole paper.)
Then there was the AHRA from about 15 years ago (which killed off DAT as a consumer audio technology) Oh, and the levy on blank CDR's.
I dunno, did they lobby for the DMCA, or is 5 years too old to consider it? The reason the DMCA applies to DVD's is because they *do* include an access control technology. CDDA's don't. If you broke the access control technology on SACD, I'll bet you dollars to donuts that they'll come on you like a ton of bricks.
They've agreed to lobby against CBDTPA, however, we don't know what backroom deals were involved in this. Something like: ''The RIAA will stop pressuring Congress to institute mandatory copy-protection in new computers, and the tech groups will stop lobbying for enhanced personal-use rights to media.'' appears to be the case.
You went through all 5824 messages to confirm they were spam? If not, then what you said is false. Rather, you have a statistics that says not that 69.89% of your mail is spam, but that spamassassin thinks that 69.89% of your email is spam. The actual amount of spam could be higher or lower than that, indicating false positives or false negatives.
You're not the only one to make this sort of a false claim.
Someone else made this point a few weeks ago on slashdot that I paraphrase here:
The early 1800's southern plantation and the current media economy have a lot of parallels. In both cases, change (the industrial revolution and the computer revolution) greatly changed the economic landscape by efficiency growths of orders of magnitude. Both are entrenched styles of business that are or did fight a war to maintain the status quo. In both cases, the issues extended far beyond the actual issue, to entire industries and ways of life.
This sort of revolution and change has a history that goes back much farther. For instance, the Gutenberg press made it orders of magnitude cheaper to disseminate knowledge. It destroyed entire ways of life and caused many wars.
In the case of slavery, slavery was an important part of the economy. Getting rid of it would be wrong, because all those plantation owners put a lot of work into the slaves. Also, the economy would tank without slave labor. And, if you abolished slavery, who would grow cotton? Why, the whole south would just disintigrate. All of the out of work slaves and plantation owners would all just move to the country and take up fishing.
So, you see, abolishing slavery doesn't affect just the slave owners, it affects everyone in the south. It also affects anyone who buys agricultural products.
And, like slavery or post-gutenberg europe, there are two choices: draconian control legistlation, which both did try, or to accept that the clock of history cannot be stopped and change must come. It took a war that time, and its taking a war now.
When things change by orders of magnitude, civilization *must* accept a readjustment. It happened with the Gutenberg press, it happened with the industrial revolution, and its happening now with modern communication mechanism.
Ultimately, the copyright debate is for control of the communications mechanism, just as the slavery debate was for control of slaves, and as the gutenberg debate was for control of the minds of the populace.
Mickey mouse was raped, So was most of Jazz, so was rock&roll. Come on, you don't SERIOUSLY think that a dozen people all independently came up with the same style of music all at once, did you?
Or, how about the homage that sci-fi must give to HG Wells. Or have is our current sci-fi authordom just a collection of gang-rapists that are screwing the sould of HG Wells?
Almost no creation is completely origional; with sufficient background, you can usually trace where they came from. And, when you start burning books and authors because they were inspired by someone, at what point do you stop? Do stop the second rock&roll, or jazz or rapper artist. Do you stop the second author who writes sci-fi? Do you stop after the first RPG and forever deny all others the same chance to be inspired?
If this is the future you want, go to hell.
Nobody is perfect. Nobody, sometimes especially the origional creator, can lay a claim on having perfect vision. If sharing an alternative viewpoint of a fictional world is rape, then you deserve the dreary world you will get.
For instance, I like it that a non-topmost window can have the keyboard focus. I like the click-drag to copy and click to paste. Those are features not defects.
What you're claiming is tantemount to ''Someone wants their desktop to have a pastel blue color that commercial offerings have had for years, and they are told to go look for an abandoned sourceforge page somewhere''
Desktop design no more revolves around my choice in background color than it revolves around your choice of copy&paste interface. Dare I ask you how easily I could find a program that gives the X semantics above to all windows programs? You'll probably tell me to look at some abandonded CNET download page somewhere. (HOW DARE YOU?!?!?!):)
Just because someone somewhere in the past did it differently and you liked that style doesn't make it superior, or inferior.
Sender pays will create a distorted economy unless the billed cost to the recipient ISP is the same as the actual cost to the ISP of handling the message.
As the actual costs (I've had nobody dispute this so far!) $.00001/message, then a throwaway account can ship out 10k emails/1$. That won't 'break the bank'.
If there is a cartel to set the billed cost to $.01/message or higher, then various abuses now become possible, because the cartel can bill services at 100x their actual cost. Any fraudster need only join the cartel, and cause mayhem. For instance, a worm that made a million windows machines all send 10 emails to the fraudster would be worth a cool $100k. At $.10/message, a cool million.
Such a cartel would also destroy mailing lists, without some exception mechanism. And any such exception mechanism is likely to be abused.
True, we've only got a few thousand years of mined uranium, but you see, uranium exists in sea water at a few parts per billion, and is extractable for a reasonable cost (about 10x the current market rate). There's a lot of cubic km of seawater, enough that this supply can last millions of years. By then, erosion kicks in and puts more into the sea, enough to sustain us for a billion years. All we need are breeder reactors. (Oh, and there's even more thorium in earths crust.)
Incidently, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant produces about four times as much energy a year than all 13000 bird-choppers in California, COMBINED. Look it up on the california wind-power page and on last year's power production at Diablo Canyon. 750 acres of land, including the exclusion zone, produces more power than every wind turbine in the US! (given that cali has 30% of US windpower)
Actually it doesn't even prove what software I am running. It allows anyone who knows the master keys, (or keys signed by the master keys) to claim that I am running something. The implication, but not the requirement, is that the this only occurs if I am running software of your choosing. (For example, he who controls or knows the master keys can fake being an interoperable computer and suck down medical records 'protected' by this technology. One wonders if people will be tricked into believing that this is 'perfect security' and not have any backup security perimiter for this situation.)
In any case, assuming that hypothesis correct, then this is control. You can coerce interoperable software to behave however you fashion, and control interoperability. While it is true that I could coerce you just as much as you coerce me, (I won't let you send me music unless you run a particular music server that serves OGG files.) most business-to-consumer relationships are not equitable power relationships. Thus, the control, while theoretically both ways, will in practice be one-way. (You run XYZ, or else we won't send you a copy of this electronic-only textbook you need for a class you need to graduate.)
Palladium is a mechanism that is perfectly suitable in situations where it really is a voluntary consentual relationship. I would have no problems with Palladium if this was its scope. However and again, many person-to-business relationships are not exactly consentual. (Look at people trying to get refunds for the windows tax on laptops. Or, look at the copy-control cartel.) In the real world of not-entirely-consentual relationships, Palladium will be used for coercion and extortion of citizens.
As-is, and barring the fact that it cannot actually prove to a different machine what software I am running, Palladium is not per-se a completely bad idea. I like it in ways. The problem is that it is one of those things that is guarenteed to be abused, and it will be abused in really nasty ways.
In this real world, Palladium allows digital extortion. Just because I used your software to write my book does not mean that you have any right to control how, when, and where I use my book. That is why I'm against it.
Palladium lets me control how my software will run on your computer. I should consider that a good thing.
However, what isn't stated is that Palladium lets you control how I use my computer. That I do not like.
Thus, Palladium is equal and symmetric, except for one thing. Given the power relationship between me and (say) a typical software company, Palladium will only be used to maintain and strengthen their power over me through abuse and control.
Thus, although it nominally gives me the ability to control others, that control will be useless to me in practice. This is much like how copyright supposedly gives band's the control over the music industry. *laugh*
At least for a few years we could survive with scorched sky's. Mankind is not so limited by the Sun as it once was. Given a decade of notice, we could build tens of thousands of nuclear reactors, and stockpile tens of millions of tons of equipment and high-tech supplies.
With nuclear power comes electricity. With electricity comes light and energy. From energy comes food. With luck, many could survive. The greatest danger would be the almost cessation of widespread survace industry and trade. Thus, one would need a huge stockpile of spare parts and equipment. If the average human needs 2000 Calories, thats only 2kW*h of energy/day. A single nuclear reactor produces 24,000,000x that in electricity, and three times that in the form of heat.
Given a decade notice, I don't think its too unreasonable to think that the majority of the industrialized world would survive.
I remember reading their home page 4-5 years ago. They were giving the same sorts of unsubstantiated claims back then.
The amusing part is that MegaNET is actually the name for a chain-letter anti-cheating program that also dates back 6-8 years. (The idea would be that you had to get a code from the other people before you could 'unlock' the program and send out your own responses.)
Personally, I suspect that both of em are about equally honest of endeavors. And I'll believe MegaNET's security claims when I see a review of a *full* description of their algorithm.
You can't lose health insurance after you lose your job for, I believe it is 18 months. COBRA. But, you have to pay the premiums. Pay em, and remain covered until you hopefully find another job. If one doesn't save up sufficient assets to tide them over for if they accidently lose their job, then they're screwed, whether or not they get hit by a bus. Saving $1200 for a year for health insurance in case you get hit by a bus isn't much. Hell, postpone getting that laptop for a year and you're golden.
Maybe I'm being a bit unfair. I don't live paycheck-to-paycheck. I have discipline to avoid continoully getting gadgets and toys. (My desktop just celebrated its third birthday, laptop gets its 3rd birthday in 2 months) I have chosen a standard of living that would let me get by on as little as $15k/year of income (in both houston and pittsburgh). That leaves a lot of pocket change to cover the percentage insurance won't cover and to cover the premium's for a long time.
Also to reply to the other guy. You get what you pay for.:)
For health insurance, I have insurance that pretty much covers catastrophy's. (hospital stays and such) to 100%, and most other stuff to 90%.
Yes, the US has widely differing tax regimes, it makes it hard to determine how much of your money actually is taken in taxes, but lower bounds can be estimated. For instance, the Canadian federal budget is about 1/6 of the GDP, thus, at least one out of every six dollars is going to the federal gov't alone. Tack on the provincial and local governments on top of that. Not that the US is much better, 20% of the income in the US is taken by the federal budget. (Though, given my income level, my federal tax burden is lower than the per-capita.)
Incidently, for germany, half of the GDP is going to the federal gov't budget. (CITE: CIA world factbook and the canadian department of finance) A 16% VAT isn't going to cover that. Any idea what is?
And, generally, different areas get taxes in different forms. Federal is mostly income tax based. State is sales-tax based (and sometimes augmented with a little income tax) Local is property tax based (pay a percentage of the assesed value of the land and the facilities on that land), augmented with a bit of sales tax. When you buy a product, you end up paying all 3 of them before entering the store (income tax), implicitly (increased price from the property tax) and explicitly, (sales tax) by the time the transaction is all done.
I'm not sure what you mean about 'if it doesn't go to the state it goes to a company'. A company cannot coerce the fruits of my labor from me. I have the choice of whether and how much they deserve, the exact choice. ON the other hand, the gov't can and does coerce from me the fruits of my labor. Although in a representative republic, I nominally have some control over how it is redirected, that control is greatly diluted.
Where we find out that apparently the yearly budget for health care was 30 billion. And, as the population of canada is 30 million, that means that $700-1000 of your salary went to that 'free' health care. Most likely more than that, if you account for having an above-average tax bill.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. And a lunch that isn't picked over by vultures (beaurocrats) will be more filling than one that hasn't.
I've done some software coding on my own, and I suspect the BSA may be using my software in an unlicensed fashion. (I'm working on an implementation of PacWar.)
As such, and given the EULA, I would like to audit the BSA's computers to confirm that my software is not installed.
Any idea how easy a subpoena their software reciepts to confirm that they haven't pirated my code? Also, I have 'friends' who also write software and thus need to do the same thing. Who knows, the fines could be tens of thousands of dollars, and the auditing fees could also be worth thousands. I have a lot of friends who are short of cash.
''Computer manufatures. If I was a computer manufacturer, I'd be pretty upset with 3rd part disruption of my vision of a computer without porn''
Big deal. You have no control over my computer, or what I do with goods I have purchased. I could eat banana, or give it to a friend to use as a dildo. Those who pick and sell the banana have no right to control what I may or may not do with it, regardless of whether or not they're unhappy with it.
I got into UIUC (third ranked CS program in the country) with a mere 3.2 GPA (Carnegie Mellon). I took lots of hard courses, and never got a C. I ended up not choosing to go to UIUC, but I got in. Get research experience, and they won't mind the GPA.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a computer programmed by invisible software. The only record of a vote is a little counter in the guts of the computer program. There is absolutely no way to make it secure. Any system that records votes directly electronically is wide open.
The only difference is who can commit vote fraud. Now anyone who walks up to the machine can commit vote fraud. Even if all of these bugs fixed, large classes of vote fraud remain. The only difference would be that any random person on the street couldn't cheat. However, any custodian would still be able to re-image the drive. Any programmer at Diebold would be able to embed a trapdoor. In short, anyone with exclusive access to open the machine can cause it to cheat. And this 'best case' is only if they fix all of the bugs.
Thats not a lot better. Even the writers of the paper couldn't make a cheat-proof DRE voting program. If an adversary controls the hardware, they control the software. Fundamentally, any non-trivial computer system is not trustworthy; any system whose security depends on a computer should be transformed where the security no longer depends on the correctness of the computer.
For instance, the only nominally trustworthy computer voting scheme is to have the computer be nothing other than a super-intelligent pencil. The voter uses the computer which prints out a paper ballot. The user observes and confirms the paper ballot is correct, then the ballot is dropped into a box. The computer may record results, but as the computer is untrustworthy, those results are untrustworthy. Now, the security and trustworthyness of the computer doesn't matter.
Every security researcher, including the authors of the paper advocates this scheme, but they are ignored by election officials. This includes the two professors who authored the paper, Peter Neumann, and Douglas Jones from the NY Times article, Rivest---the R in RSA--- and hundreds of others.
See: http://www.verifiedvoting.org/index.asp
This is a secure voting system. Brazil has it (and at a tenth the price). Any system without a printer requires 'trusted hardware' in an adversarial environment. Control the hardware, control the election.
They are required to submit a signed affadavit attesting both that the work under question is XX and they represent the copyright holder of XX, and that they believe there is infringment, before the subpoenea. If the work in question isn't XX or they do not represent the copyright holder, they are guilty of perjury. Fine them ten times the damages they are claiming.
I want a high standard they have to meet to avoid chilling effects.
Here's the problem with the subpoena's.
/windows/OpenOffice-1.2.3-tar.gz. It *may* be infringement if that file contains MS-Office, but if they don't check, they don't know... And we get violated.
Where's the evidence that the person whose privacy they are raping is even running a file sharing application? The burden of proof is 'Hey, subpoena the ISP for this information because I requested it'. Even if that burden was met, secondly, where is the evidence that they are in fact distributing copyrithed material. Its not infringement to clone a title. Its not infringment (which ONE OpenOffice mirror got a C&D letter about) to have a file called
In the DirecTV cases. Since when does 'I bought a smart card interface kit from you' suddenly become equated with 'I have committed what is considered an illegal act'.
Remember an article on slashdot about a week ago where an uncle commited a crime, leaving behind DNA evidence. 20 years later, that evidence was analyzed and searched in a database. He wasn't in the database. However, his nephew however did sommit a crime 15 years later and *was* in the database. When doing the search, they found the guy's nephew, and then him.
Thats rather impressive. A swab from a 20 year old crime was linked to a 5 year old swab from the criminals relative.If thats not a broadband database search, what is?
Would the LRP have happened at all if he hadn't used other GPL software? He laments bitterly about how he was never thanked or paid handsomly for his worok, but did he thank the people whose code he used? Did he pay them handsomly? Did he do little else but whine to other people that their software wasn't exactly what he wanted or needed?
Thats an issue; this whole situation is symmetric. Every author of every line of code he used in this project can, perhaps even should have the exact same bitterness, at him.
You're right. Linux is just a ripoff of BSD. BSD is just a ripoff of UNIX. The Windows is just a ripoff of the Mac. The Mac is a ripoff of the computer at PARC. Slashdot is just a ripoff of USENET. Clone computers are ripoffs too; do YOU have an authentic IBM machine?
The parent comment is just a ripoff of other comments. Big deal. How many clones of Doom have come out over the last decade? Freecraft may be similar to warcraft/starcraft but who gives a shit. This is just a company going for a landgrab and cybersquatting. This is a bully threatening others.
Really, this is incident is like Walmart sending hired goons to threaten a lemonaid stand across the street. Sure, it 'competes' with the in-store drinks, it may even be a 'clone' of the in-store lemonaid, but there is nothing illegal abouot that.
I'm just sad that the frightened people at FreeCraft didn't remove the downloads and post the letter and let the discussion rage, (like bnetd) rather than fold up and immediately disappear.
Thats not quite true. A university or a biotechnology company usually has at least built a prototype or a sample.
Here, we have people who will never build anything, including a prototype, with a patent designed to derail others. (unless they pay the bribe)
The project page is http://www.cs.rice.edu/~scrosby/hash/ and actually has details about individual vulnerable applications and test files for several systems. (And is kinder on the server for those who don't want to download the whole paper.)
Well, the webcaster royalty payment law.
Then there was the AHRA from about 15 years ago (which killed off DAT as a consumer audio technology) Oh, and the levy on blank CDR's.
I dunno, did they lobby for the DMCA, or is 5 years too old to consider it? The reason the DMCA applies to DVD's is because they *do* include an access control technology. CDDA's don't. If you broke the access control technology on SACD, I'll bet you dollars to donuts that they'll come on you like a ton of bricks.
They've agreed to lobby against CBDTPA, however, we don't know what backroom deals were involved in this. Something like: ''The RIAA will stop pressuring Congress to institute mandatory copy-protection in new computers, and the tech groups will stop lobbying for enhanced personal-use rights to media.'' appears to be the case.
They're lobbying against MOCA.
You went through all 5824 messages to confirm they were spam? If not, then what you said is false. Rather, you have a statistics that says not that 69.89% of your mail is spam, but that spamassassin thinks that 69.89% of your email is spam. The actual amount of spam could be higher or lower than that, indicating false positives or false negatives.
You're not the only one to make this sort of a false claim.
Someone else made this point a few weeks ago on slashdot that I paraphrase here:
The early 1800's southern plantation and the current media economy have a lot of parallels. In both cases, change (the industrial revolution and the computer revolution) greatly changed the economic landscape by efficiency growths of orders of magnitude. Both are entrenched styles of business that are or did fight a war to maintain the status quo. In both cases, the issues extended far beyond the actual issue, to entire industries and ways of life.
This sort of revolution and change has a history that goes back much farther. For instance, the Gutenberg press made it orders of magnitude cheaper to disseminate knowledge. It destroyed entire ways of life and caused many wars.
In the case of slavery, slavery was an important part of the economy. Getting rid of it would be wrong, because all those plantation owners put a lot of work into the slaves. Also, the economy would tank without slave labor. And, if you abolished slavery, who would grow cotton? Why, the whole south would just disintigrate. All of the out of work slaves and plantation owners would all just move to the country and take up fishing.
So, you see, abolishing slavery doesn't affect just the slave owners, it affects everyone in the south. It also affects anyone who buys agricultural products.
And, like slavery or post-gutenberg europe, there are two choices: draconian control legistlation, which both did try, or to accept that the clock of history cannot be stopped and change must come. It took a war that time, and its taking a war now.
When things change by orders of magnitude, civilization *must* accept a readjustment. It happened with the Gutenberg press, it happened with the industrial revolution, and its happening now with modern communication mechanism.
Ultimately, the copyright debate is for control of the communications mechanism, just as the slavery debate was for control of slaves, and as the gutenberg debate was for control of the minds of the populace.
Mickey mouse was raped, So was most of Jazz, so was rock&roll. Come on, you don't SERIOUSLY think that a dozen people all independently came up with the same style of music all at once, did you?
Or, how about the homage that sci-fi must give to HG Wells. Or have is our current sci-fi authordom just a collection of gang-rapists that are screwing the sould of HG Wells?
Almost no creation is completely origional; with sufficient background, you can usually trace where they came from. And, when you start burning books and authors because they were inspired by someone, at what point do you stop? Do stop the second rock&roll, or jazz or rapper artist. Do you stop the second author who writes sci-fi? Do you stop after the first RPG and forever deny all others the same chance to be inspired?
If this is the future you want, go to hell.
Nobody is perfect. Nobody, sometimes especially the origional creator, can lay a claim on having perfect vision. If sharing an alternative viewpoint of a fictional world is rape, then you deserve the dreary world you will get.
Thats the problem, your feature is my misfeature.
:)
For instance, I like it that a non-topmost window can have the keyboard focus. I like the click-drag to copy and click to paste. Those are features not defects.
What you're claiming is tantemount to ''Someone wants their desktop to have a pastel blue color that commercial offerings have had for years, and they are told to go look for an abandoned sourceforge page somewhere''
Desktop design no more revolves around my choice in background color than it revolves around your choice of copy&paste interface. Dare I ask you how easily I could find a program that gives the X semantics above to all windows programs? You'll probably tell me to look at some abandonded CNET download page somewhere. (HOW DARE YOU?!?!?!)
Just because someone somewhere in the past did it differently and you liked that style doesn't make it superior, or inferior.
Sender pays will create a distorted economy unless the billed cost to the recipient ISP is the same as the actual cost to the ISP of handling the message.
As the actual costs (I've had nobody dispute this so far!) $.00001/message, then a throwaway account can ship out 10k emails/1$. That won't 'break the bank'.
If there is a cartel to set the billed cost to $.01/message or higher, then various abuses now become possible, because the cartel can bill services at 100x their actual cost. Any fraudster need only join the cartel, and cause mayhem. For instance, a worm that made a million windows machines all send 10 emails to the fraudster would be worth a cool $100k. At $.10/message, a cool million.
Such a cartel would also destroy mailing lists, without some exception mechanism. And any such exception mechanism is likely to be abused.
A billion years of nuclear power.
True, we've only got a few thousand years of mined uranium, but you see, uranium exists in sea water at a few parts per billion, and is extractable for a reasonable cost (about 10x the current market rate). There's a lot of cubic km of seawater, enough that this supply can last millions of years. By then, erosion kicks in and puts more into the sea, enough to sustain us for a billion years. All we need are breeder reactors. (Oh, and there's even more thorium in earths crust.)
Incidently, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant produces about four times as much energy a year than all 13000 bird-choppers in California, COMBINED. Look it up on the california wind-power page and on last year's power production at Diablo Canyon. 750 acres of land, including the exclusion zone, produces more power than every wind turbine in the US! (given that cali has 30% of US windpower)
Actually it doesn't even prove what software I am running. It allows anyone who knows the master keys, (or keys signed by the master keys) to claim that I am running something. The implication, but not the requirement, is that the this only occurs if I am running software of your choosing. (For example, he who controls or knows the master keys can fake being an interoperable computer and suck down medical records 'protected' by this technology. One wonders if people will be tricked into believing that this is 'perfect security' and not have any backup security perimiter for this situation.)
In any case, assuming that hypothesis correct, then this is control. You can coerce interoperable software to behave however you fashion, and control interoperability. While it is true that I could coerce you just as much as you coerce me, (I won't let you send me music unless you run a particular music server that serves OGG files.) most business-to-consumer relationships are not equitable power relationships. Thus, the control, while theoretically both ways, will in practice be one-way. (You run XYZ, or else we won't send you a copy of this electronic-only textbook you need for a class you need to graduate.)
Palladium is a mechanism that is perfectly suitable in situations where it really is a voluntary consentual relationship. I would have no problems with Palladium if this was its scope. However and again, many person-to-business relationships are not exactly consentual. (Look at people trying to get refunds for the windows tax on laptops. Or, look at the copy-control cartel.) In the real world of not-entirely-consentual relationships, Palladium will be used for coercion and extortion of citizens.
As-is, and barring the fact that it cannot actually prove to a different machine what software I am running, Palladium is not per-se a completely bad idea. I like it in ways. The problem is that it is one of those things that is guarenteed to be abused, and it will be abused in really nasty ways.
In this real world, Palladium allows digital extortion. Just because I used your software to write my book does not mean that you have any right to control how, when, and where I use my book. That is why I'm against it.
Palladium lets me control how my software will run on your computer. I should consider that a good thing.
However, what isn't stated is that Palladium lets you control how I use my computer. That I do not like.
Thus, Palladium is equal and symmetric, except for one thing. Given the power relationship between me and (say) a typical software company, Palladium will only be used to maintain and strengthen their power over me through abuse and control.
Thus, although it nominally gives me the ability to control others, that control will be useless to me in practice. This is much like how copyright supposedly gives band's the control over the music industry. *laugh*
At least for a few years we could survive with scorched sky's. Mankind is not so limited by the Sun as it once was. Given a decade of notice, we could build tens of thousands of nuclear reactors, and stockpile tens of millions of tons of equipment and high-tech supplies.
With nuclear power comes electricity. With electricity comes light and energy. From energy comes food. With luck, many could survive. The greatest danger would be the almost cessation of widespread survace industry and trade. Thus, one would need a huge stockpile of spare parts and equipment. If the average human needs 2000 Calories, thats only 2kW*h of energy/day. A single nuclear reactor produces 24,000,000x that in electricity, and three times that in the form of heat.
Given a decade notice, I don't think its too unreasonable to think that the majority of the industrialized world would survive.
I remember reading their home page 4-5 years ago. They were giving the same sorts of unsubstantiated claims back then.
The amusing part is that MegaNET is actually the name for a chain-letter anti-cheating program that also dates back 6-8 years. (The idea would be that you had to get a code from the other people before you could 'unlock' the program and send out your own responses.)
Personally, I suspect that both of em are about equally honest of endeavors. And I'll believe MegaNET's security claims when I see a review of a *full* description of their algorithm.
You can't lose health insurance after you lose your job for, I believe it is 18 months. COBRA. But, you have to pay the premiums. Pay em, and remain covered until you hopefully find another job. If one doesn't save up sufficient assets to tide them over for if they accidently lose their job, then they're screwed, whether or not they get hit by a bus. Saving $1200 for a year for health insurance in case you get hit by a bus isn't much. Hell, postpone getting that laptop for a year and you're golden.
:)
Maybe I'm being a bit unfair. I don't live paycheck-to-paycheck. I have discipline to avoid continoully getting gadgets and toys. (My desktop just celebrated its third birthday, laptop gets its 3rd birthday in 2 months) I have chosen a standard of living that would let me get by on as little as $15k/year of income (in both houston and pittsburgh). That leaves a lot of pocket change to cover the percentage insurance won't cover and to cover the premium's for a long time.
Also to reply to the other guy. You get what you pay for.
For health insurance, I have insurance that pretty much covers catastrophy's. (hospital stays and such) to 100%, and most other stuff to 90%.
Yes, the US has widely differing tax regimes, it makes it hard to determine how much of your money actually is taken in taxes, but lower bounds can be estimated. For instance, the Canadian federal budget is about 1/6 of the GDP, thus, at least one out of every six dollars is going to the federal gov't alone. Tack on the provincial and local governments on top of that. Not that the US is much better, 20% of the income in the US is taken by the federal budget. (Though, given my income level, my federal tax burden is lower than the per-capita.)
Incidently, for germany, half of the GDP is going to the federal gov't budget. (CITE: CIA world factbook and the canadian department of finance) A 16% VAT isn't going to cover that. Any idea what is?
And, generally, different areas get taxes in different forms. Federal is mostly income tax based. State is sales-tax based (and sometimes augmented with a little income tax) Local is property tax based (pay a percentage of the assesed value of the land and the facilities on that land), augmented with a bit of sales tax. When you buy a product, you end up paying all 3 of them before entering the store (income tax), implicitly (increased price from the property tax) and explicitly, (sales tax) by the time the transaction is all done.
I'm not sure what you mean about 'if it doesn't go to the state it goes to a company'. A company cannot coerce the fruits of my labor from me. I have the choice of whether and how much they deserve, the exact choice. ON the other hand, the gov't can and does coerce from me the fruits of my labor. Although in a representative republic, I nominally have some control over how it is redirected, that control is greatly diluted.
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/english/budget/2000/healthc are.htm
http://www.fin.gc.ca/budget01/bp/bpch6e.htm
Where we find out that apparently the yearly budget for health care was 30 billion. And, as the population of canada is 30 million, that means that $700-1000 of your salary went to that 'free' health care. Most likely more than that, if you account for having an above-average tax bill.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. And a lunch that isn't picked over by vultures (beaurocrats) will be more filling than one that hasn't.
I've done some software coding on my own, and I suspect the BSA may be using my software in an unlicensed fashion. (I'm working on an implementation of PacWar.)
As such, and given the EULA, I would like to audit the BSA's computers to confirm that my software is not installed.
Any idea how easy a subpoena their software reciepts to confirm that they haven't pirated my code? Also, I have 'friends' who also write software and thus need to do the same thing. Who knows, the fines could be tens of thousands of dollars, and the auditing fees could also be worth thousands. I have a lot of friends who are short of cash.
''Computer manufatures. If I was a computer manufacturer, I'd be pretty upset with 3rd part disruption of my vision of a computer without porn''
Big deal. You have no control over my computer, or what I do with goods I have purchased. I could eat banana, or give it to a friend to use as a dildo. Those who pick and sell the banana have no right to control what I may or may not do with it, regardless of whether or not they're unhappy with it.
I got into UIUC (third ranked CS program in the country) with a mere 3.2 GPA (Carnegie Mellon). I took lots of hard courses, and never got a C. I ended up not choosing to go to UIUC, but I got in. Get research experience, and they won't mind the GPA.