I don't think it would work that way. The publication of rebuttals is quite common in European newspapers, but it's far from taking up so much space in newspapers that it could become a problem. In many cases, newspapers only publish a rebuttal after a court decides they have to. I think that makes sense - rather than only having the option of suing for getting compensation payments or even banning a text on one hand or doing nothing, at all, you can just demand that your differing views about something that concerns you and is imbalanced are published in the same place. I think that's quite reasonable. In practice, the "threat" that you may have to publish an opposing view certainly hinders freedom of speech much less than the threat of multi-million damage claims - in contrary, the right to have a rebuttal published in the mainstream medium where there was a biased article and not only somewhere else where it is read by much fewer people is quite important for freedom of speech. If someone tries to abuse this right to cause someone else bandwidth costs, they can just refuse to publish the rebuttal, and the courts will then support this decision (e.g. if the person who wants to write the rebuttal wasn't really concerned by what was written in the original text, if there is no basis for the rebuttal, if the rebuttal is disproportionately long etc.)
Well, an SMS would not really be required to know which network you are using, the phone shows that, anyway, usually directly on the display and if you have configured the display differently, it can always be looked up. I think these "welcome messages" are quite annoying when you're travelling, but at least they only occur in clearly defined circumstances.
When you meet a follower of the current US administration's doctrine:
1. Punch him in the face as hard as you can
2. As long as he hasn't fallen to the ground repeat step 1
3. Tell him that it was necessary to punch him because otherwise he might have punched you or gained the abilitry to punch you in a few years
4. When he is getting up again, this shows that you were right, the likelihood of him punching you in the future rises again. Therefore continue with 1.
Repeat all this until he admits that the idea of pre-emptive strikes was not meant to be used by anyone else, is actually the same like the "right" of the stronger and doesn't make sense as a general principle.
Unfortunately, I haven't found new data, but here is a list of January 2001.
The top ranks are:
1..com: 21,174,751
2..net: 2,806,721
3..uk: 2,078,474
4..de: 1,732,994
5..org: 1,614,740
6..nl: 416,842
7..kr: 325,203 ...
The numbers have certainly changed since then, but perhaps the ranks are still similar. Maybe someone has found new data?
PostgreSQL is particularly good when you don't just store and retrieve data, but want to use complex queries, do a lot of calculations with the data, write your own functions etc. Not only is support for standard SQL more complete with PostgreSQL than with MySQL, PostgreSQL has many extensions that can be very useful. Using these extensions can, of course, mean that moving to another DB system will be difficult, but there are manuals how to port between Oracle and PostgreSQL (e.g. plpgsql and oracle pl/sql). Migrating applications that use extensions of the Microsoft SQL server would certainly be harder because there are fewer similarities than with Oracle. I don't have very much experience with MySQL, when I saw some time ago how few in-built functions it has and and didn't see an easy way for programming own functions, I moved to PostgreSQL. It's possible that MySQL has become better in that respect in the meantime. I mainly use PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL server, and I'd say that from a programming perspective PostgreSQL is better for extensions. I'm not sure if newer versions of Microsoft SQL server now support writing your own aggregate functions and have got rid of the maximum nesting level in stored procedures, in any case none of this has been a problem with PostgreSQL for a long time.
As has been mentioned, an important reason why PostgreSQL isn't mentioned as often as MySQL probably is that it doesn't run natively on windows.
Still, why should mandated labeling by any problem, at all, in connection with the First Amendment? After all, I thought the First Amendment was about free speech, not about coercion of people to receive messages.
I don't think it's the case, but if the First Amendment had the absurd consequence of restricting people's rights to decide which messages they want to see, I guess the wording of the First Amendment should be changed.
Spamcop is very good for reporting Spam. It analyzes the headers automatically, and I think it's very good at doing that. I report all my spam via Spamcop. Quite a lot of spam comes from China, but it's all over the world (there's a lot of spam from servers in Brazil, for example). There's nearly always someone to report to - if there's an open relay that doesn't add useful Received headers report to the upstream provider of that open relay (and saving IP addresses to lists is useful). As far as I know, Spamcop does all that and although it takes a few seconds extra effort per spam mail, I prefer reporting to just deleting.
What Spamcop does, as well, and which is perhaps even more important, is reporting to upstream providers of spamvertized websites. While spammers can switch mail servers very easily, it causes some additional work or cost for them if they have to upload their websites again and again because many free webspace providers spammers use remove spamvertized sites (you can also report e-mail addresses in the mail body, but that's off by default because you could easily lart yourself since spammers often include recipients' addresses in the body).
I'm very satisfied with Spamcop, and while there are certainly administrators who don't care about spam, but others do and I think especially fast reporting of fresh spam (to administrators/upstream providers of both mail sourse and spamvertizes sites) can help a lot in the fight against spam.
Spamcop also offers filtering (based on mail source). I personally found the filters not really usable - an unacceptable number of false positives and also a lots of false negatives, probabilistic content-based filtering we have heard a lot about recently are certainly better. However, even without using this filtering, I have registered for this paid service because it also makes reporting even faster (just a few clicks) than with the free web-based interface (where you have to use copy-paste). So, it doesn't take too much time to report every single spam mail (at least in my case, I don't get that much spam mails, after all).
I think these are really two different issues - it is important to have a good GUI and wouldn't want to do without one (I personally find KDE and Gnome more convenient and more powerful than the GUI of windows where I don't have several virtual desktops and have to disable all kinds of comic figures getting in the way first, but that's perhaps a matter of taste). But that certainly doesn't mean that the command line is dead.
there are just some things you can do with a bash, cshell or the like with a single command line while even the most sophisticated GUI would probably require a large number of clicks - maybe GUIs of the future will have possibilities we can't even think of now, but I think it's always better to have the choice - even when working with windows, some things are easier to do with the command line, but that DOS command line is hardly comparable with a Unix shell
When you're editing text or reading web pages, the resources taken away by the graphical systems are probably worth it, but if you do calculations with large amounts of data (I am doing linguistic experiments with large text corpora stored in databases), I prefer not to waste memory and processing time. With Linux it's very easy to shut down the graphical system for increased performance and to start it again later - try that with windows... (by the way, lynx is quite a good web browser)
Yes, freedom of speech is a weighty issue, but why should it be in danger when everyone can put up a website about anything (be it penis enlargement, low mortgages, teen sluts or perhaps even a more sensible subject) at no cost (if they put up with ads) and anyone who is interested in that can find it with a search engine?
There seems to be some cultural gap between Europe and the United State in that matter, I think in Europe very few people would degrade the principle of freedom of speech to such a formal notion about the media with which one should be able to spread unwanted data, but I suppose there are enough Americans, too, who think that freedom of speech is about the right of people to make their opinions public and the right of people who are interested to access this material.
I find it odd that while there is such insisting on issues about how one should be able to transmit information, restrictions on content seem to be accepted more easily. Laws against obscenity in the United States are much stricter than in many other countries and repression for political views unfortunately isn't over after the McCarthy era, now there are again reports about people being questioned because of "un-american material": The New McCarthyism, Novel Security Measures...
Certainly, the United States isn't the only country with such problems, but I find it strange that, while there are such real issues, again and again Americans think it could be a big problem for the freedom of speech when sellers had to wait for interested people coming to their website rather than waste the time of millions of people who aren't interested (well, maybe even a DOS attack should be protected by the First Amendment because even if there are so many of these data packets, they're all free speech that has to be protected as long as they aren't un-American). I haven't ever heard someone outside the United States seriously seeing the regulation of damaging advertising methods like spamming as a matter of free speech - it's a matter of business regulation, and there are much more important things for people concerned about free speech to worry about.
"There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and that this is not a time for remarks like that. - It never is" - White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer
Re:Why can't we have legal restrictions on spam?
on
Plan for Spam, Version 2
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's not just about the US, in many European countries spam is illegal already now (clear cases are Norway and Austria), and the European Union as a whole has decided to outlaw spam, it should be implemented this year. I don't know exactly about the situation in East Asia, but I don't think the Chinese and Koreans like it too much that their resources are misused for sending spam all over the world, so they could follow soon. Yes, there certainly will be some smaller countries where spam is still legal, but once spam is illegal in the European Union, the United States, China and many other big countries no one who has sent thousands of spam mails to harvested addresses can reasonably claim that he or she believed that all the addresses were only of people in a few offshore countries. Furthermore, the US American conception of law has, as far as I know, the principle of being applicable exterritorially, which is in general quite controversial, but could be useful here - it would probably be possible to forbid any companies that do business in the US to send spam, even if the spam is only sent from other countries and only to people living outside the United States.
Even something as seemingly trivial as requiring spam to be uniformly labeled as such is probably impermissible, precisely because automated filters would use the effect of this legislation to stop all spam, which would be denying spammers the right to send people advertisements, i.e. banning their speech due to the commercial content thereof.
Well, I've heard a lot of things about the legal system in the US;-), but I don't believe it's actually that weird that freedom of speech, which is, indeed, very important has been perverted to a prohibition of people deciding themselves which messages they want to receive and whether they want to spend a lot of time looking for e-mail messages in heaps of spam every day.
I wonder what might be unconstitutional, as well, in the United States if mandatory labels people can use for filtering were. Examples might be
having "secret" e-mail addresses that aren't published in any place spambots can reach - by withholding that address from spambots you deny spammers their constitutional right to send you anything they want to your address!
doorlocks - doorlocks can be used for the unconstitutional purpose of denying somebody who wants to talk to you their right to do so, they make it easy to violate the constitution by keeping the door shut when someone wants to speak
caller identification (telephones) - something that can be used for violating the constitution by not ansering calls from certain people
ear-grafts - terrible tools that seduce you to act unconstitutionally! Don't think you can keep the window open in summer and put something in your ears to be able to sleep despite of loud people on the street, oh no, maybe these people want to yell something at you, and you're depriving them of their rights!
In my view, it's absurd to establish any connection between ant-spam laws (and even more so if it's just about labels) and the right of free speech because the right of free speech does not and has never meant that everyone must sacrifice their time for listening to / receiving any kind of speech. No anti-spam law prevents people from signing up to mailing lists about low mortgages, teen porn and printer cartidges, setting up opt-in mailing lists about these topics, searching such material on the Internet etc., so it really takes a lot of imagination to see a connection between anti-spam laws and the right of free speech.
Recently, I've seen a report about people in the US being interrogated by the FBI after criticizing Bush's war politics. Maybe these were just untypical cases, but I think if you're worried about the right of free speech in the United States, at all, this would be the kind of issues you'd have to look at and certainly not one of many possible channels of advertizing (one that costs people particularly much time whether they want or not) being restricted.
I agree, it does have something to do with cultural resistance to women taking part in politics that for such a long time, women didn't have the right to vote. But on the other hand, I also think that this definitely has to do with direct democracy. I think in many countries, voting would have remained a male privilege for a longer time if - like in Switzerland - the majority of men had to decide to let participate women, as well. The Swiss parliament wanted to introduce the right to vote in the 50es, but it took some time to convince the majority of men. I think with such things the people is often more conservative than members of the parliament (even if they're all men, as well). As to the two cantons of Appenzell - it seems to me quite likely that in many countries, there would have been some small, conservative province/state/county, where the majority of men would have resisted equal rights if they had the possibility. So, I think this has, indeed, something to do with the political system of Switzerland (direct democracy, federalism), but I don't think it's generally bad, in some cases, it may be better to let elected people decide important questions, but letting people vote directly also has advantages. In the case of women's rights, I'd say that it's of course bad that it took so long in Switzerland, but on the other hand, I'd say that the fights for equal rights that were necessary in this system still have the advantage that people are more aware of the problem now (of course, equal rights in the law isn't enough).
The Swiss president is elected by parliament, not directly by the people (and the office of the presindent isn't that important in Switzerland, the government consists of seven ministers, and the one who is president for a year keeps his or her ministry/department, being president mostly matters for some representational duties).
I think now a majority of Swiss people votes by mail, and in the cantons Geneva and Basle-City it's usually over 90%. I think most risks of Internet voting that have been mentioned are the same or even bigger with voting by mail. - Tampering with results: With voting by mail, abuse is relatively easy, and some cases have been detected. In a neighbouring city, an employee of a home of elderly people filled out and sent the ballot papers of old people about whom he knew that they wouldn't miss them. It was detected because he filled out all of them with the same pen and sent them all together. If he had to enter all these additional data (birthplace, date of birth, password etc.), such abuse would have been much more difficult. - Privacy: To make it a bit easier to detect such abuse of mail voting, the envelopes with which the voting forms have to be sent have unique codes (at least in Basle). People who choose to vote by mail have to trust, too, that the information on the envelopes isn't connected to the vote. I think that surveillance of the process and making sure that anonymity of the votes is guaranteed is even a bit easier with Internet voting than with voting by mail where local cases of vote tracking might be more difficult to detect. - People being influenced: Of course, we do not know whether someone is in front of the computer alone. But that's the same when ballot papers are sent by mail.
On the whole I think that possibly, in-person voting offers a bit more security, but as soon as voting is facilitated - be it by mail or by Internet, there are some risks (in my view, they aren't too big), and then Internet voting is perhaps even one of the more secure methods. The main reason why voting by mail was introduced was probably that there are so many votes (referendums, initiatives) in Switzerland because of the system of 'direct democracy', so there is the fear that turnout will be too low because people get tired of voting (even with the possibility of voting by mail, on average only about 40% of people participate).
In my view, disposable e-mail addresses with systems like mailshell are definitely the best solution, I find the little additional work of getting a new address is really worth it. There are quite a number of such services, a few more links: Sneakemail, the oldest one of these system - there is still a free version (with limited mail size) emailias.com, I find it very convenient, a lot of options (19.95$/year) Spamex, a similar service ($9.95/year) Spamgourmet, a slightly unusual, but interesting system, free
These services are quite sophisticated, with most of them you can reply to mails in any mail client without giving away the real address because the reply-to address is replaced and the answer will first go to the DEA, where it recieves the appropriate from-address; with emailias and others you can forward different alias addresses to different real addresses,...
More information:
PC Magazine article about DEA system with reviews
I think there are many other reasons for using SMS rather than calling, but price can be an argument, as well.
In Switzerland, mobile calls are far from free, depending on the time, it costs from about 15c to about 60c per minute, an SMS message only costs 15c (20 Swiss cents).
Where the differece really gets big is when you are abroad - with roaming access, mobile telephone calls get very expensive (often over $1 per minute), while SMS with roaming isn't that expensive.
I don't think SMS is just some additional feature, I find it is one of the main reasons why mobile phones are so useful. I know many people here in Switzerland who use their mobile phones at least as often for writing and reading SMS messages as for telephoning. There are many advantages - in many situations, it would not be possible to answer phone calls, e.g. in libraries, at lectures, during conferences etc., but it is possible to receive SMS messages, when the phone is set to vibrate rather than to ring, it doesn't disturb anyone, you can send someone a telephone number or an e-mail address and with most modern phones, they can be used directly from the phone. It is much easier to reach someone who is busy because asynchronous communication is possible. SMS is also used as a kind of chat system, and I use it for e-mail notifications, I find it very convenient that I don't have to be at a computer to know about e-mails sent to me. For these e-mail notifications, it's good to have good filtering in order not to receive too many of them for spam. I have, however, hardly ever received spam directly by SMS (maybe 2 or 3 spam SMS in the last years) - there were some incidents of SMS spamming in Switzerland, too, but SMS seems to be much easier to control than e-mail, and the telephone companies are very strict on that matter. I don't think I have ever experienced SMS messages getting lost, and there were times when I used SMS very much (that could get quite expensive). Until about two years ago, there were sometimes delays of more than an hour at peak times like New Year's Eve when everyone sends around greetings, but now that seems to be over. This time, on New Year and New Year's Eve, 58 millions of SMS messages were sent in Switzerland without problem - this also shows how popular the service is (the country only has about 7 millions inhabitants).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it would work that way. The publication of rebuttals is quite common in European newspapers, but it's far from taking up so much space in newspapers that it could become a problem. In many cases, newspapers only publish a rebuttal after a court decides they have to. I think that makes sense - rather than only having the option of suing for getting compensation payments or even banning a text on one hand or doing nothing, at all, you can just demand that your differing views about something that concerns you and is imbalanced are published in the same place. I think that's quite reasonable.
In practice, the "threat" that you may have to publish an opposing view certainly hinders freedom of speech much less than the threat of multi-million damage claims - in contrary, the right to have a rebuttal published in the mainstream medium where there was a biased article and not only somewhere else where it is read by much fewer people is quite important for freedom of speech.
If someone tries to abuse this right to cause someone else bandwidth costs, they can just refuse to publish the rebuttal, and the courts will then support this decision (e.g. if the person who wants to write the rebuttal wasn't really concerned by what was written in the original text, if there is no basis for the rebuttal, if the rebuttal is disproportionately long etc.)
Well, an SMS would not really be required to know which network you are using, the phone shows that, anyway, usually directly on the display and if you have configured the display differently, it can always be looked up. I think these "welcome messages" are quite annoying when you're travelling, but at least they only occur in clearly defined circumstances.
I couldn't find the original document on the Internet either.
It is quoted on quite a number of news pages, e.g.
commondreams.org
shm.com.au
When you meet a follower of the current US administration's doctrine: 1. Punch him in the face as hard as you can 2. As long as he hasn't fallen to the ground repeat step 1 3. Tell him that it was necessary to punch him because otherwise he might have punched you or gained the abilitry to punch you in a few years 4. When he is getting up again, this shows that you were right, the likelihood of him punching you in the future rises again. Therefore continue with 1. Repeat all this until he admits that the idea of pre-emptive strikes was not meant to be used by anyone else, is actually the same like the "right" of the stronger and doesn't make sense as a general principle.
Yes, and with pg_dump dumps in different formats are possible, some of which are already compressed.
Unfortunately, I haven't found new data, but here is a list of January 2001. .com: 21,174,751 .net: 2,806,721 .uk: 2,078,474 .de: 1,732,994 .org: 1,614,740 .nl: 416,842 .kr: 325,203
...
The top ranks are:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
The numbers have certainly changed since then, but perhaps the ranks are still similar. Maybe someone has found new data?
PostgreSQL is particularly good when you don't just store and retrieve data, but want to use complex queries, do a lot of calculations with the data, write your own functions etc. Not only is support for standard SQL more complete with PostgreSQL than with MySQL, PostgreSQL has many extensions that can be very useful. Using these extensions can, of course, mean that moving to another DB system will be difficult, but there are manuals how to port between Oracle and PostgreSQL (e.g. plpgsql and oracle pl/sql). Migrating applications that use extensions of the Microsoft SQL server would certainly be harder because there are fewer similarities than with Oracle.
I don't have very much experience with MySQL, when I saw some time ago how few in-built functions it has and and didn't see an easy way for programming own functions, I moved to PostgreSQL. It's possible that MySQL has become better in that respect in the meantime.
I mainly use PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL server, and I'd say that from a programming perspective PostgreSQL is better for extensions. I'm not sure if newer versions of Microsoft SQL server now support writing your own aggregate functions and have got rid of the maximum nesting level in stored procedures, in any case none of this has been a problem with PostgreSQL for a long time.
As has been mentioned, an important reason why PostgreSQL isn't mentioned as often as MySQL probably is that it doesn't run natively on windows.
Still, why should mandated labeling by any problem, at all, in connection with the First Amendment? After all, I thought the First Amendment was about free speech, not about coercion of people to receive messages.
I don't think it's the case, but if the First Amendment had the absurd consequence of restricting people's rights to decide which messages they want to see, I guess the wording of the First Amendment should be changed.
Spamcop is very good for reporting Spam. It analyzes the headers automatically, and I think it's very good at doing that. I report all my spam via Spamcop. Quite a lot of spam comes from China, but it's all over the world (there's a lot of spam from servers in Brazil, for example). There's nearly always someone to report to - if there's an open relay that doesn't add useful Received headers report to the upstream provider of that open relay (and saving IP addresses to lists is useful). As far as I know, Spamcop does all that and although it takes a few seconds extra effort per spam mail, I prefer reporting to just deleting.
What Spamcop does, as well, and which is perhaps even more important, is reporting to upstream providers of spamvertized websites. While spammers can switch mail servers very easily, it causes some additional work or cost for them if they have to upload their websites again and again because many free webspace providers spammers use remove spamvertized sites (you can also report e-mail addresses in the mail body, but that's off by default because you could easily lart yourself since spammers often include recipients' addresses in the body).
I'm very satisfied with Spamcop, and while there are certainly administrators who don't care about spam, but others do and I think especially fast reporting of fresh spam (to administrators/upstream providers of both mail sourse and spamvertizes sites) can help a lot in the fight against spam.
Spamcop also offers filtering (based on mail source). I personally found the filters not really usable - an unacceptable number of false positives and also a lots of false negatives, probabilistic content-based filtering we have heard a lot about recently are certainly better. However, even without using this filtering, I have registered for this paid service because it also makes reporting even faster (just a few clicks) than with the free web-based interface (where you have to use copy-paste). So, it doesn't take too much time to report every single spam mail (at least in my case, I don't get that much spam mails, after all).
Yes, freedom of speech is a weighty issue, but why should it be in danger when everyone can put up a website about anything (be it penis enlargement, low mortgages, teen sluts or perhaps even a more sensible subject) at no cost (if they put up with ads) and anyone who is interested in that can find it with a search engine?
There seems to be some cultural gap between Europe and the United State in that matter, I think in Europe very few people would degrade the principle of freedom of speech to such a formal notion about the media with which one should be able to spread unwanted data, but I suppose there are enough Americans, too, who think that freedom of speech is about the right of people to make their opinions public and the right of people who are interested to access this material.
I find it odd that while there is such insisting on issues about how one should be able to transmit information, restrictions on content seem to be accepted more easily. Laws against obscenity in the United States are much stricter than in many other countries and repression for political views unfortunately isn't over after the McCarthy era, now there are again reports about people being questioned because of "un-american material": The New McCarthyism, Novel Security Measures...
Certainly, the United States isn't the only country with such problems, but I find it strange that, while there are such real issues, again and again Americans think it could be a big problem for the freedom of speech when sellers had to wait for interested people coming to their website rather than waste the time of millions of people who aren't interested (well, maybe even a DOS attack should be protected by the First Amendment because even if there are so many of these data packets, they're all free speech that has to be protected as long as they aren't un-American). I haven't ever heard someone outside the United States seriously seeing the regulation of damaging advertising methods like spamming as a matter of free speech - it's a matter of business regulation, and there are much more important things for people concerned about free speech to worry about.
"There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and that this is not a time for remarks like that. - It never is" - White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer
It's not just about the US, in many European countries spam is illegal already now (clear cases are Norway and Austria), and the European Union as a whole has decided to outlaw spam, it should be implemented this year. I don't know exactly about the situation in East Asia, but I don't think the Chinese and Koreans like it too much that their resources are misused for sending spam all over the world, so they could follow soon. Yes, there certainly will be some smaller countries where spam is still legal, but once spam is illegal in the European Union, the United States, China and many other big countries no one who has sent thousands of spam mails to harvested addresses can reasonably claim that he or she believed that all the addresses were only of people in a few offshore countries.
Furthermore, the US American conception of law has, as far as I know, the principle of being applicable exterritorially, which is in general quite controversial, but could be useful here - it would probably be possible to forbid any companies that do business in the US to send spam, even if the spam is only sent from other countries and only to people living outside the United States.
Well, I've heard a lot of things about the legal system in the US
I wonder what might be unconstitutional, as well, in the United States if mandatory labels people can use for filtering were. Examples might be
- having "secret" e-mail addresses that aren't published in any place spambots can reach - by withholding that address from spambots you deny spammers their constitutional right to send you anything they want to your address!
- doorlocks - doorlocks can be used for the unconstitutional purpose of denying somebody who wants to talk to you their right to do so, they make it easy to violate the constitution by keeping the door shut when someone wants to speak
- caller identification (telephones) - something that can be used for violating the constitution by not ansering calls from certain people
- ear-grafts - terrible tools that seduce you to act unconstitutionally! Don't think you can keep the window open in summer and put something in your ears to be able to sleep despite of loud people on the street, oh no, maybe these people want to yell something at you, and you're depriving them of their rights!
In my view, it's absurd to establish any connection between ant-spam laws (and even more so if it's just about labels) and the right of free speech because the right of free speech does not and has never meant that everyone must sacrifice their time for listening to / receiving any kind of speech. No anti-spam law prevents people from signing up to mailing lists about low mortgages, teen porn and printer cartidges, setting up opt-in mailing lists about these topics, searching such material on the Internet etc., so it really takes a lot of imagination to see a connection between anti-spam laws and the right of free speech.Recently, I've seen a report about people in the US being interrogated by the FBI after criticizing Bush's war politics. Maybe these were just untypical cases, but I think if you're worried about the right of free speech in the United States, at all, this would be the kind of issues you'd have to look at and certainly not one of many possible channels of advertizing (one that costs people particularly much time whether they want or not) being restricted.
I agree, it does have something to do with cultural resistance to women taking part in politics that for such a long time, women didn't have the right to vote.
But on the other hand, I also think that this definitely has to do with direct democracy. I think in many countries, voting would have remained a male privilege for a longer time if - like in Switzerland - the majority of men had to decide to let participate women, as well. The Swiss parliament wanted to introduce the right to vote in the 50es, but it took some time to convince the majority of men.
I think with such things the people is often more conservative than members of the parliament (even if they're all men, as well).
As to the two cantons of Appenzell - it seems to me quite likely that in many countries, there would have been some small, conservative province/state/county, where the majority of men would have resisted equal rights if they had the possibility.
So, I think this has, indeed, something to do with the political system of Switzerland (direct democracy, federalism), but I don't think it's generally bad, in some cases, it may be better to let elected people decide important questions, but letting people vote directly also has advantages.
In the case of women's rights, I'd say that it's of course bad that it took so long in Switzerland, but on the other hand, I'd say that the fights for equal rights that were necessary in this system still have the advantage that people are more aware of the problem now (of course, equal rights in the law isn't enough).
The Swiss president is elected by parliament, not directly by the people (and the office of the presindent isn't that important in Switzerland, the government consists of seven ministers, and the one who is president for a year keeps his or her ministry/department, being president mostly matters for some representational duties).
I think now a majority of Swiss people votes by mail, and in the cantons Geneva and Basle-City it's usually over 90%. I think most risks of Internet voting that have been mentioned are the same or even bigger with voting by mail.
- Tampering with results: With voting by mail, abuse is relatively easy, and some cases have been detected. In a neighbouring city, an employee of a home of elderly people filled out and sent the ballot papers of old people about whom he knew that they wouldn't miss them. It was detected because he filled out all of them with the same pen and sent them all together. If he had to enter all these additional data (birthplace, date of birth, password etc.), such abuse would have been much more difficult.
- Privacy: To make it a bit easier to detect such abuse of mail voting, the envelopes with which the voting forms have to be sent have unique codes (at least in Basle). People who choose to vote by mail have to trust, too, that the information on the envelopes isn't connected to the vote. I think that surveillance of the process and making sure that anonymity of the votes is guaranteed is even a bit easier with Internet voting than with voting by mail where local cases of vote tracking might be more difficult to detect.
- People being influenced: Of course, we do not know whether someone is in front of the computer alone. But that's the same when ballot papers are sent by mail.
On the whole I think that possibly, in-person voting offers a bit more security, but as soon as voting is facilitated - be it by mail or by Internet, there are some risks (in my view, they aren't too big), and then Internet voting is perhaps even one of the more secure methods.
The main reason why voting by mail was introduced was probably that there are so many votes (referendums, initiatives) in Switzerland because of the system of 'direct democracy', so there is the fear that turnout will be too low because people get tired of voting (even with the possibility of voting by mail, on average only about 40% of people participate).
In my view, disposable e-mail addresses with systems like mailshell are definitely the best solution, I find the little additional work of getting a new address is really worth it. There are quite a number of such services, a few more links: ...
Sneakemail, the oldest one of these system - there is still a free version (with limited mail size)
emailias.com, I find it very convenient, a lot of options (19.95$/year)
Spamex, a similar service ($9.95/year)
Spamgourmet, a slightly unusual, but interesting system, free
These services are quite sophisticated, with most of them you can reply to mails in any mail client without giving away the real address because the reply-to address is replaced and the answer will first go to the DEA, where it recieves the appropriate from-address; with emailias and others you can forward different alias addresses to different real addresses,
More information: PC Magazine article about DEA system with reviews
I think there are many other reasons for using SMS rather than calling, but price can be an argument, as well. In Switzerland, mobile calls are far from free, depending on the time, it costs from about 15c to about 60c per minute, an SMS message only costs 15c (20 Swiss cents). Where the differece really gets big is when you are abroad - with roaming access, mobile telephone calls get very expensive (often over $1 per minute), while SMS with roaming isn't that expensive.
I don't think SMS is just some additional feature, I find it is one of the main reasons why mobile phones are so useful. I know many people here in Switzerland who use their mobile phones at least as often for writing and reading SMS messages as for telephoning.
There are many advantages - in many situations, it would not be possible to answer phone calls, e.g. in libraries, at lectures, during conferences etc., but it is possible to receive SMS messages, when the phone is set to vibrate rather than to ring, it doesn't disturb anyone, you can send someone a telephone number or an e-mail address and with most modern phones, they can be used directly from the phone. It is much easier to reach someone who is busy because asynchronous communication is possible. SMS is also used as a kind of chat system, and I use it for e-mail notifications, I find it very convenient that I don't have to be at a computer to know about e-mails sent to me. For these e-mail notifications, it's good to have good filtering in order not to receive too many of them for spam. I have, however, hardly ever received spam directly by SMS (maybe 2 or 3 spam SMS in the last years) - there were some incidents of SMS spamming in Switzerland, too, but SMS seems to be much easier to control than e-mail, and the telephone companies are very strict on that matter.
I don't think I have ever experienced SMS messages getting lost, and there were times when I used SMS very much (that could get quite expensive). Until about two years ago, there were sometimes delays of more than an hour at peak times like New Year's Eve when everyone sends around greetings, but now that seems to be over. This time, on New Year and New Year's Eve, 58 millions of SMS messages were sent in Switzerland without problem - this also shows how popular the service is (the country only has about 7 millions inhabitants).