Not if you're allowed to vote as many times as you like, but it only counts the last one. You can vote with someone watching, for the candidate that they want, take their money, and then vote again for the other candidate.
The real problem is the lack of transparency. In a democratic system, anyone should be able to verify the security and integrity of the electoral apparatus. With an online voting system, I doubt even 10% of the Slashdot audience could do it, let alone the general population. If you're trusting a magic black box to count your votes, then you may as well trust it to cast the votes in the first place.
...actually this doctor example points to bigger devices. The keyboard may or may not be important, but the display should be much larger.
Depends on the use case. When you're walking down a ward, you don't want a big display. Something that you can carry in your hand and look and make small changes to without needing to put it down is the main requirement. Which is why most of this stuff is done using clipboards and paper. You wouldn't want to replace the large X-Ray displays with a tablet, but having a small copy of the X-Ray in your hand with a zoom feature when you're in the ward can be very useful.
Many of the major open source projects have a similar problem, where "graphic designers" and "UI experts" are calling the shots instead of real software developers.
I disagree. We've seen what happens when real software developers are in charge - see 20 years of crappy *NIX UIs. The problem is that "UI experts" are now in charge of these projects, instead of UI experts. Most of these people have no actual experience of human-computer interaction and have never even read papers in the field (or, if they have, they've read papers from 30 years ago that were addressing completely unrelated sets of constraints, and none of the follow-up work). There are good programmers who are also UI experts, but they are not the majority.
I'd imagine that Google would offer a couple of 'benefits'. They'd include a web browser with the set-top box and include your browser history as well as your TV-viewing habits to pick adverts. They'd offer the cable companies the same sort of deal that they provide to website owners: Google harvests the data, shows ads, and takes a percentage of the ad revenue. Most cable companies aren't in direct competition with each other - you generally don't have the choice of multiple cable companies in a single area - so they don't need to differentiate their offerings too much.
Depends on the real work. If it's directly computer-related, then sure. On the other hand, a lot of real work gets done by people interacting with things in the real world and using the computer mainly to access relevant information. This kind of use can be easier on something like a tablet than on a real computer. For example, consider a doctor wanting to check a patient's medical history, see their X-rays, and what has been prescribed to them in the past. None of this requires a keyboard, but I'd class it as 'real work'.
Oh, I know the answer to this one! Their CEO made public statements against privacy, they collected huge amounts of data about everyone that make things like the proposed UK ID database look like children's toys, and they decided that copyright was something that only applied to other people.
Depends where you are. In the South West of England, it's still very common in the local dialect, and fairly common in the North. Where I grew up, it was one of the words that signalled socioeconomic class - the working class would use it but the middle class wouldn't.
Nobody can afford home insurance in the kind of deprived areas where homes were burnt down.
Well, except the slumlords, who probably have complete rebuild insurance with a value much higher than the property, and can build a much nicer house and increase the rent a lot as a result...
I'm sorry to say that but for an outside European observer the UK is becoming more and more like a totalitarian country. There are cameras everywhere
Let me guess, an outside European perspective gained from reading The Daily Mail? The number of cameras in Britain is massively over exaggerated. The number that's usually thrown around was generated by taking a mile of one of the busiest streets in central London, counting the number of cameras (including speeding cameras and privately owned CCTV cameras inside shops on both sides) and then multiplying that number by the number of miles of roads in Britain.
The more realistic number includes motorway monitoring cameras, which are not recorded, have one person monitoring about 100 of them, and are used to notify radio stations and so on of large traffic jams and dispatch emergency services to accidents. The next highest number is automated speed / red light cameras. The government controlled ones in city centres are operated by the local councils and are mostly being shut down because they provide little benefit and the councils can't afford to operate them.
and face-recognition software is used to identify people on it
Not sure why this is a sign of totalitarianism. Is it less totalitarian if you have a human matching the faces to photographs? The face recognition that's been talked about in the media recently has been matching the faces of people from Facebook who said things like 'I got a new 42" TV in the riots!' to images from shops' CCTV. How evil...
internet and phone serveillance everywhere,
Unless you think The News of the World and Phorm are government agencies, I'm not sure where this comes from.
and all big parties are decidedly right-wing
Bullshit. One of the two parties in our coalition government is still slightly left of centre, and my MEP is from a decidedly left-wing party.
it is still legal in the UK to beat up your children
any UK news source, then you'd see examples of parents being imprisoned and having their children taken into care for this.
Actually, it's not. I have friends in some of the affected areas, and the majority of the population just stayed inside and locked their doors. If you read the news reports, you'll see that the mobs moved around very quickly, which made it hard for the police to do anything - by the time the police arrived at the scene, the rioting had moved somewhere else. So, when you see those photographs of big riots in lots of places, remember that a lot of them will be the same people rioting and looting in multiple places. When you consider that London has a population of 9 million, a few thousand rioters is a pretty small percentage.
They probably can't. Your average user won't be able to connect their new Linux install to the Internet, so their machine will be safe. At least, until someone comes and installs Windows for them...
You need the license to operate equipment capable of receiving broadcast television signals (including a video recorded connected to an antenna). You also need it to watch live streaming of television channels over the Internet (i.e. the stream is at the same time as the live broadcast). You do not need to to watch live streams of things that are not shown on TV (e.g. webcams), streams that are not live (e.g. iPlayer or 4oD streams of things that have already been on television), or to play back recordings.
Normal copyright applies independently of the TV license.
Solaris got the 'slow-aris' nickname because lots of things in the kernel were designed for scalability at the expense of speed. Run it on a 1-2 processor machine, and that's overhead. Run it on a 64-processor machine, and you really appreciate it. The Solaris kernel was split into lots of largely independent threads back when Linux was still using a single lock for everything.
I hope you're joking, because if you can not think of a reason why you might legitimately destroy 10 VMs for your employer - especially if you're using this kind of system where you can easily be managing thousands of VMs - then you probably shouldn't be using a computer.
It is possible to tell people politely that you're too busy to talk to them right now, without resorting to this kind of passive-aggressive behaviour. Unless they're really irritating people, and then 'fuck off' is the socially acceptable method of ending a conversation
While they were sitting around arguing over concepts, they could have been including support for multithreading
Actually, they did add some support for threading. C++11 has support for a thread-local storage qualifier and a rich set of atomic operations. These are both also in C1x. There is also now a std::thread class, and various synchronisation primitives, and even support for futures / promises.
Much as I dislike C++, the latest version does have a subset that is much nicer than any subset of previous versions.
Actually, reference counting garbage collectors are state of the art, but we're talking about concurrent reference counting with cycle detection, which is used in IBM's research GCs for embedded applications. That said, reference counting - as long as you have zeroing weak references - is good enough for 99% of cases. Especially if your compiler can optimise away redundant reference counting operations, clang does for Objective-C but no compilers do for C++...
Slashdot Mirror
Not if you're allowed to vote as many times as you like, but it only counts the last one. You can vote with someone watching, for the candidate that they want, take their money, and then vote again for the other candidate.
The real problem is the lack of transparency. In a democratic system, anyone should be able to verify the security and integrity of the electoral apparatus. With an online voting system, I doubt even 10% of the Slashdot audience could do it, let alone the general population. If you're trusting a magic black box to count your votes, then you may as well trust it to cast the votes in the first place.
...actually this doctor example points to bigger devices. The keyboard may or may not be important, but the display should be much larger.
Depends on the use case. When you're walking down a ward, you don't want a big display. Something that you can carry in your hand and look and make small changes to without needing to put it down is the main requirement. Which is why most of this stuff is done using clipboards and paper. You wouldn't want to replace the large X-Ray displays with a tablet, but having a small copy of the X-Ray in your hand with a zoom feature when you're in the ward can be very useful.
Many of the major open source projects have a similar problem, where "graphic designers" and "UI experts" are calling the shots instead of real software developers.
I disagree. We've seen what happens when real software developers are in charge - see 20 years of crappy *NIX UIs. The problem is that "UI experts" are now in charge of these projects, instead of UI experts. Most of these people have no actual experience of human-computer interaction and have never even read papers in the field (or, if they have, they've read papers from 30 years ago that were addressing completely unrelated sets of constraints, and none of the follow-up work). There are good programmers who are also UI experts, but they are not the majority.
I'd imagine that Google would offer a couple of 'benefits'. They'd include a web browser with the set-top box and include your browser history as well as your TV-viewing habits to pick adverts. They'd offer the cable companies the same sort of deal that they provide to website owners: Google harvests the data, shows ads, and takes a percentage of the ad revenue. Most cable companies aren't in direct competition with each other - you generally don't have the choice of multiple cable companies in a single area - so they don't need to differentiate their offerings too much.
Real work gets done with a real keyboard
Depends on the real work. If it's directly computer-related, then sure. On the other hand, a lot of real work gets done by people interacting with things in the real world and using the computer mainly to access relevant information. This kind of use can be easier on something like a tablet than on a real computer. For example, consider a doctor wanting to check a patient's medical history, see their X-rays, and what has been prescribed to them in the past. None of this requires a keyboard, but I'd class it as 'real work'.
What changed, you ask?
Oh, I know the answer to this one! Their CEO made public statements against privacy, they collected huge amounts of data about everyone that make things like the proposed UK ID database look like children's toys, and they decided that copyright was something that only applied to other people.
Depends where you are. In the South West of England, it's still very common in the local dialect, and fairly common in the North. Where I grew up, it was one of the words that signalled socioeconomic class - the working class would use it but the middle class wouldn't.
Nobody can afford home insurance in the kind of deprived areas where homes were burnt down.
Well, except the slumlords, who probably have complete rebuild insurance with a value much higher than the property, and can build a much nicer house and increase the rent a lot as a result...
I'm sorry to say that but for an outside European observer the UK is becoming more and more like a totalitarian country. There are cameras everywhere
Let me guess, an outside European perspective gained from reading The Daily Mail? The number of cameras in Britain is massively over exaggerated. The number that's usually thrown around was generated by taking a mile of one of the busiest streets in central London, counting the number of cameras (including speeding cameras and privately owned CCTV cameras inside shops on both sides) and then multiplying that number by the number of miles of roads in Britain.
The more realistic number includes motorway monitoring cameras, which are not recorded, have one person monitoring about 100 of them, and are used to notify radio stations and so on of large traffic jams and dispatch emergency services to accidents. The next highest number is automated speed / red light cameras. The government controlled ones in city centres are operated by the local councils and are mostly being shut down because they provide little benefit and the councils can't afford to operate them.
and face-recognition software is used to identify people on it
Not sure why this is a sign of totalitarianism. Is it less totalitarian if you have a human matching the faces to photographs? The face recognition that's been talked about in the media recently has been matching the faces of people from Facebook who said things like 'I got a new 42" TV in the riots!' to images from shops' CCTV. How evil...
internet and phone serveillance everywhere,
Unless you think The News of the World and Phorm are government agencies, I'm not sure where this comes from.
and all big parties are decidedly right-wing
Bullshit. One of the two parties in our coalition government is still slightly left of centre, and my MEP is from a decidedly left-wing party.
it is still legal in the UK to beat up your children
any UK news source, then you'd see examples of parents being imprisoned and having their children taken into care for this.
That's a lot of people just out to have fun
Actually, it's not. I have friends in some of the affected areas, and the majority of the population just stayed inside and locked their doors. If you read the news reports, you'll see that the mobs moved around very quickly, which made it hard for the police to do anything - by the time the police arrived at the scene, the rioting had moved somewhere else. So, when you see those photographs of big riots in lots of places, remember that a lot of them will be the same people rioting and looting in multiple places. When you consider that London has a population of 9 million, a few thousand rioters is a pretty small percentage.
pled guilty
You are the third person to say that, but the first to spell it correctly. Congratulations!
They're not even trying anymore. The last few things to get through my spam filters have been in Thai (and, apparently, not very good Thai).
It's the thing old people in Korea use instead of IM.
They probably can't. Your average user won't be able to connect their new Linux install to the Internet, so their machine will be safe. At least, until someone comes and installs Windows for them...
Facebook in 2005 was like Facebook in 2011, but with fewer morons, too.
No, Google is a hive mind.
You need the license to operate equipment capable of receiving broadcast television signals (including a video recorded connected to an antenna). You also need it to watch live streaming of television channels over the Internet (i.e. the stream is at the same time as the live broadcast). You do not need to to watch live streams of things that are not shown on TV (e.g. webcams), streams that are not live (e.g. iPlayer or 4oD streams of things that have already been on television), or to play back recordings.
Normal copyright applies independently of the TV license.
My interest in Bitcon peaked a long time ago, thank you.
Solaris got the 'slow-aris' nickname because lots of things in the kernel were designed for scalability at the expense of speed. Run it on a 1-2 processor machine, and that's overhead. Run it on a 64-processor machine, and you really appreciate it. The Solaris kernel was split into lots of largely independent threads back when Linux was still using a single lock for everything.
I hope you're joking, because if you can not think of a reason why you might legitimately destroy 10 VMs for your employer - especially if you're using this kind of system where you can easily be managing thousands of VMs - then you probably shouldn't be using a computer.
That's alot of kittens!.
It is possible to tell people politely that you're too busy to talk to them right now, without resorting to this kind of passive-aggressive behaviour. Unless they're really irritating people, and then 'fuck off' is the socially acceptable method of ending a conversation
In fact, there are more English words that don't fit that rule than do. It's just that quite a few of the ones that do are common.
While they were sitting around arguing over concepts, they could have been including support for multithreading
Actually, they did add some support for threading. C++11 has support for a thread-local storage qualifier and a rich set of atomic operations. These are both also in C1x. There is also now a std::thread class, and various synchronisation primitives, and even support for futures / promises.
Much as I dislike C++, the latest version does have a subset that is much nicer than any subset of previous versions.
Actually, reference counting garbage collectors are state of the art, but we're talking about concurrent reference counting with cycle detection, which is used in IBM's research GCs for embedded applications. That said, reference counting - as long as you have zeroing weak references - is good enough for 99% of cases. Especially if your compiler can optimise away redundant reference counting operations, clang does for Objective-C but no compilers do for C++...