Publicly shaming people who refuse to learn to properly write English is good public policy -- at least in the case where said people are likely to be native speakers or otherwise sufficiently familiar with the language as to have a responsibility to know better. Reducing the error rate in written documents even in cases where those errors aren't important makes it less likely that those same errors will be included in more critical places -- and, perhaps more importantly, raises the status quo observed and respected by others.
No, I don't think "trolling" is an apt descriptor; it's defense of a laudable set of memes. In some circles, offenders get snubbed; here, they attract spelling and grammar nazis.
See Dean Kamen's variation on the Stirling engine. While Wikipedia claims that Stirling engines aren't typically appropriate for vehicular use, Kamen has pulled that off quite effectively.
In contrast, anything where you can't connect a voter with a vote WILL have corruption.
You're setting up a strawman where it's either your way or the status quo. That's simply not the case; there are solutions available which have less potential for subversion than either of those.
Punchscan allows a voter to prove that their vote was cast as intended and that it was counted as cast, but not who they voted for. Take a look at the Flash tutorials describing how it works -- simple, elegant, and provably secure -- and that's just one system. There are a great many alternatives allowing both protection both large-scale election fraud and individual voter coercion -- and with such research available, to advocate a voting mechanism without these protections is simply irresponsible behavior.
The silly thing is that there are people like you who are arguing here to get rid of the secret ballot, when there's absolutely no need to do so. There's been academic research ongoing for decades in verifiable voting mechanisms, and some of them are truly innovative. Punchscan and Scratch & Vote are two highly visible examples, but there have been scads of other papers on the topic.
Why risk a return to the corruption that occurred when ballots weren't secret when modern technology (not computing, but applied mathematics) provides mechanisms to have our cake and eat it too?
Too bad on the selections isn't "None of the Above" to force the parties to come up with better candidates.
What's wrong with Obama? He's the first presidential candidate I've been excited about in years.
If you think his speeches are all fluff and no content, you're just listening to the soundbites (or the Iowa acceptance speech, which wasn't one of his best); he's got serious and well-thought-out positions and isn't shy about expressing them.
Now Obama is outraising her and to date not one news story digging into where HE gets his 'mother's milk' of politics.
Try individual contributors. I've never donated to a political candidate in my life prior to Obama's candidacy, but am putting my money where my mouth is this time -- and there are a lot more like me.
Now, you may not believe the above (or the campaign's claims on the selfsame subject), but here's the thing: It's relatively easy to slip money from China in through some political action committee -- but if you're not taking money from PACs or other organizations, it's much riskier and more difficult to slip it in illegitimately. Just as folks jump at any Republican being caught in a sex scandal -- morality is one of their issues, so they're crucified when they're caught -- campaign finance is one of Obama's issues, so for him not to be squeaky clean would be a hugely unacceptable risk, particularly with Clinton's supporters anxious to find some dirt.
As for how Obama vaulted onto the national stage -- did you hear his 2004 DNC speech? If you haven't, go give it a listen; you'll understand immediately how Obama came to be where he is today.
Reread the line you quoted; you've obviously misparsed it.
The problem I refer to is that it's possible in the US for a candidate who loses the popular vote to nonetheless win the bulk of the electoral college and thus the election; indeed, we've seen this happen in recent history. This is even more true when you take into account that voters who select 3rd party candidates are unable to express their preferences between the 1st party candidates, and that these preferences are thus unheeded.
That said, I don't agree that a direct democracy is appropriate in a nation with as many minority groups (not in the racial/ethnic sense) as the United States -- see "tyranny of the majority".
...and yes, I realize that we can't get to anything significantly better without amending the Constitution. That's not impossible; it's been done a great many times, and may well be done again. Politically impossible in the current climate mayhaps, but implementation difficulty is no reason for folks to stop discussing good ideas -- if people never so much as proposed or supported difficult things, much good would be left undone.
There's no need for a separate runoff election -- IRV, Condorcet, and most of the other systems described in TFA moot the need.
And yes, the states count -- but there are serious negatives caused by that system. It's the reason folks can't vote for the 3rd party they prefer without losing the ability to have their preference between the Big Two counted -- and effectively locking the country into a two-party system (with, yes, good ideas occasionally adopted from elsewhere -- but no serious chance of power moving outside the major-party circles).
(Incidentally, I think Range Voting is a pretty good idea -- but as a minor implementation tweak, I'd move the range to be -100 to 100 [defaulting to 0] rather than 0 to 100, to encourage individuals to leave space in the range to distinguish between candidates they have no particular reason to support and candidates they strongly oppose).
The number of links in the summary should give you a tip. Plenty of theories, most of them without real proof.
Whadaya mean? It's mathematically provable that all available voting systems have at least one counterintuitive or undesired outcome -- but simple plurality has far more undesirable outcomes than most. This was covered in depth in the honors math class I took in my first year of college; unfortunately, I don't recall the details immediately. That said, given a set of characteristics which an ideal voting system should have, it is entirely possible to formally prove (not theorize about, prove) which voting systems are able to satisfy which subset of those characteristics.
One of those characteristics, incidentally, is that a candidate should never lose an election to another candidate whom a larger number of voters support. If the US had a voting system which respected that characteristic, maybe we wouldn't be in the hole we're in right now.
That speech Obama gave last night was amazing, I try to keep my emotions out of politics and even I was getting worked up
That's nothing. Have you heard his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention when Kerry was being nominated? I still can't get through it without tearing up.
I'm sure there is better software out there now, but the version of Rightfax they had was old(even three years ago). And the software was quite intwined with rightfax, and rightfax was very tied to the brooktrout cards they were running.
I understand -- I maintain a toolkit which integrates my employer's proprietary application with HylaFAX. (Several nifty improvements to HylaFAX+ have made it upstream as part of this, and some of our miscellaneous scripts and such have made it out to the mailing list for general use; we're not leeches).
Anyhow, we looked at supporting Brooktrout hardware since one of our larger customers has some already; the decision was that it would be cheaper (and less onerous for other reasons) to go the iaxmodem+asterisk+sangoma route rather than buy support for the proprietary branch of HylaFAX with Brooktrout support written in under NDA.
Anyhow, given that they're not implementing the standard serial interface, yes, remoting a Brooktrout card would be hard. (Shame your employer didn't have a second VM host hooked up to the same storage backend they could live-migrate everything onto during hardware installation... but I don't have the budget for that myself, either, so I've precious little room to talk).
Also, while I talk up virtualization, it's not something we use everywhere. A number of our servers are running under Xen -- but none of the particularly critical ones. VMware Server is used in our QA lab, and I use KVM on my workstation -- but any systems our customers access are running on raw hardware. That said, those systems are also under a high enough load that virtualizing them would not be productive. Used judiciously, though, it's a useful tool.
I can appreciate the point you're making -- but you're putting the software into a virtual environment when it's used to raw hardware; that's already changing things. If you tell that VM that you want serial port A on the virtual machine to be rerouted to a TCP connection over to some other location (and plug the same faxmodem in over there)... well, that's not changing particularly much, unless Rightfax is silly enough to rely on DTR-based resets; it's certainly not a larger change than the ones you're already making.
Even if rightfax wants to talk to a real COM port, through the magic of virtualization it's pretty easy to have that "COM port" connect to a t38modem instance on the other side. So...
...if you have more money than time; substitute iaxmodem and a minimal asterisk install for t38modem and the AS5300 if it's the other way around. Either way, that's a lot better than being held up waiting for a maintenance window.
But as you say -- there're considerably more factors involved in the real world than there are in some/. post; you didn't give a timeline, but iaxmodem or t38modem may not have been mature back when this was actually going on, and a separate box (be it Cisco hardware, a separate box to hold the modems, or whathaveyou) may not make sense in your environment. That said, I'd be surprised if there are really *that* many cases where it makes sense to put purpose-specific hardware in a VM host rather than keeping it elsewhere and remoting it.
Heh -- I got a good laugh out of that response; mods, if it's still at 0, give it a point or two of Funny.
That said -- ya know, if you'd generalize the point I was making a little, you'd realize that the bigger picture is that you rarely need to put hardware in a specific machine. Fax cards aren't the only piece of hardware which can be remoted over a network, have their functions performed instead by dedicated hardware, or the like.
Live migration is a pretty popular feature right now -- Xen has supported it pretty much forever at this point (assuming shared storage between your hosts -- but a SAN w/ GFS isn't all that hard thing to set up these days), and support went into KVM(!) early February '07.
With it available in the Free systems, I don't see how anyone trying to sell commercial software in the field could do without it.
That's just silly. Why would you put a physical fax card in your virtual server?
Virtualize the fax card with iaxmodem, run it over a TCP connection to a serial port on a separate box, use t38modem with the other endpoint on a dedicated piece of Cisco hardware... there are plenty of other options.
Here's the thing: You don't need to give up your desktop client. GMail supports IMAP -- best of both worlds. I do most of my mailing from Thunderbird, but that's not to say that the web interface doesn't come in handy.
Google's spam filtering is much better for me than what Thunderbird does, even after years of training -- and with regard to your claim that your IMAP client does search just as well, I doubt it very much; I only know of two of them that have similarly comprehensive functionality (boolean logic, individual components of that search restricted to to/from/subject/whatever, etc).
I used to pay for an IMAP-accessible account from SpamCOP. Still do, actually, since I haven't quite finished migrating off of it yet. However, GMail (or, rather, its Google Apps counterpart) offers more features and better spam filtering at a much better price (free, as opposed to $30/yr); why wouldn't I use it?
The other thing is that overestimating demand is risky, while underestimating it is safe. Manufacture too few items and sell them all at a profit, and you've turned a profit. Manufacture too many items, and it's easy to find yourself taking a loss on enough of them to eat up all the profits you might otherwise have made.
If some whackjob tried to claim in the mass media that its atomic weight was 5 you'd get commentary from scientists all over the place pointing out that he is wrong, why he is wrong, describing what atmoic weight is, and detailing the real atomic weight of helium. And there you have popular knowledge promoted.
You're ignoring two issues:
First, as to the scientists issuing corrections: If their corrections are publicized in a "fair and balanced" way, the whackjob is given a chance to restate his claims every time a refutation is published -- so not only is the objective truth promoted, but so is the outright fabrication.
Second, trying to show all things in such a "fair and balanced" way lends credence to the idea that all truth is subjective. Sure, the generally accepted model and peer-reviewed studies and experiments intended to validate it show $FOO, but if $WHACKJOB can believe that the scientific establishment is actually just trying to resist acknowledging the truth of $BAR, then why can't I?
I see a massive and unfounded anti-scientific backlash among the American populace today, and attempts by the media to be "fair and balanced" (or, as a conspiracy theorist might put it, to use a policy of presenting a "fair and balanced" viewpoint as an excuse to air outright lies which are useful to their corporate ownership's agenda) are a part of the cause.
Presenting non-credible fringe viewpoints from that community to the general public as if they are every bit as credible as those viewpoints which have survived peer review and acceptance is a Bad Thing. I'm not arguing that any part of the scientific community should be stifled -- but rather, that large media accept some responsibility in the manner in which they lend those fringe viewpoints their voice.
No, they don't do it for cash. You are right. They are too useless to add any real value, either service, or good, to the world, and they just hate people that do. So, they really are just looking to eake out some sort of a living, because what really drives these Sarumans is their hatred of inventive people. All they do is tear things down. They never build anything.
Just for the record -- this is the post I'm foe'ing you for; I quite enjoyed our other thread.
I can appreciate a good devil's advocate position -- but this isn't onesuch, even remotely. To play devil's advocate, one's position needs to be plausible, something an opponent might accept long enough to draw up a reasonable counterargument.
Look -- you claim to be a Libertarian-leaning Republican. How can you claim that all activists' work is destructive, when such a large branch of activism is centered around protecting the personal freedoms you claim you value? It's activists that got women the vote; activists who helped men and women escape slavery and flee to Canada; activists that ended apartheid; activists who uprooted British rule over their American colonies and started the revolution that lead to the very existence of the country you live in.
Devil's advocate or no, your claims insult the Constitution itself -- it was people demanding, agitating and giving their lives for change that resulted in the very idea of a government existing by the consent of the governed. If you'll spit on that for a chance to score a few points in some online forum, I will have nothing to do with you.
It bothers me that everyone is trying to muzzle this guy. Everyone can go slam Gitmo, but Gitmo can't speak up? It just offends my sense of fairness. Then, when everyone is everyone is all worked about the horror, I instinctively have to take the other side. I like a good fight, and, as a whole, you need to have someone in there to stand at the edge of the cliff to remind the other lemmings that they are being stupid.
Gitmo can put out press releases, publish books under its own name, stage media events, invite the press for tours; that's fair. Gitmo can't have representatives anonymously edit a wiki whose rules prohibit maintaining articles in which one has a vested interest, especially in cases of controvercy; that's not fair.
That said, the idea that governmental transparency and personal privacy are in any way comparable things, such that either both or none can be provided in a fair society is... insane. Governments are not people; rather, they're large control structures intended to keep a society running. "Enlightened" forms do so by the consent of the governed; for the governed to grant said consent, they must be informed and empowered. Simple as that.
Heh -- I think maybe I've treated you a little harshly in the conversation thus far.
I'd be thrilled to see the Republican Party of my youth make a revival -- small government, conservative economic policy, and a bit on the isolationist side in terms of foreign policy. I wouldn't necessarily join that party, but it'd be a group I could respect and work with.
Okay, so I was doing another readthrough, and this claim caught my eye...
And illegal immigration is a form of theft. It just is.
Whaaa?! In the midst of what appears to be an appeal to personal liberties above all else, this claim is disingenuous. The only argument I could see is "theft of services" -- effectively, taking advantage of government services without paying taxes -- except that this is a symptom of a broken taxation system, rather than an inherent effect of illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants do pay taxes at a higher rate than citizens and legal immigrants when they work (using fake IDs) for companies that withhold income taxes, as they're unable to file for refunds; switching to a consumption tax would completely avoid the loophole of being paid under-the-table, as taxes would be taken when money is spent, rather than when it's earned. (Further, illegals couldn't receive the cost-of-living refund proposed under the FairTax, resulting in them paying the highest possible effective rate). If you have another argument for illegal immigration being "theft", rather than an exercise of freedom of movement, under the Libertarian ethos -- well, I'd like to hear it.
You can't talk about personal freedoms as Priority 1, and at the same time want strictly controlled immigration; the two goals are incompatible. If freedoms are Priority 2 to you, you have no room to complain about those who have different things -- like healthcare -- which they value more.
And by the way -- you might find this presentation interesting -- particularly when the relationship between health and economic strength comes up.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't doubt that development of the OLPC has been expensive. Worthwhile things frequently are.
Publicly shaming people who refuse to learn to properly write English is good public policy -- at least in the case where said people are likely to be native speakers or otherwise sufficiently familiar with the language as to have a responsibility to know better. Reducing the error rate in written documents even in cases where those errors aren't important makes it less likely that those same errors will be included in more critical places -- and, perhaps more importantly, raises the status quo observed and respected by others.
No, I don't think "trolling" is an apt descriptor; it's defense of a laudable set of memes. In some circles, offenders get snubbed; here, they attract spelling and grammar nazis.
See Dean Kamen's variation on the Stirling engine. While Wikipedia claims that Stirling engines aren't typically appropriate for vehicular use, Kamen has pulled that off quite effectively.
Punchscan allows a voter to prove that their vote was cast as intended and that it was counted as cast, but not who they voted for. Take a look at the Flash tutorials describing how it works -- simple, elegant, and provably secure -- and that's just one system. There are a great many alternatives allowing both protection both large-scale election fraud and individual voter coercion -- and with such research available, to advocate a voting mechanism without these protections is simply irresponsible behavior.
The silly thing is that there are people like you who are arguing here to get rid of the secret ballot, when there's absolutely no need to do so. There's been academic research ongoing for decades in verifiable voting mechanisms, and some of them are truly innovative. Punchscan and Scratch & Vote are two highly visible examples, but there have been scads of other papers on the topic.
Why risk a return to the corruption that occurred when ballots weren't secret when modern technology (not computing, but applied mathematics) provides mechanisms to have our cake and eat it too?
If you think his speeches are all fluff and no content, you're just listening to the soundbites (or the Iowa acceptance speech, which wasn't one of his best); he's got serious and well-thought-out positions and isn't shy about expressing them.
Now, you may not believe the above (or the campaign's claims on the selfsame subject), but here's the thing: It's relatively easy to slip money from China in through some political action committee -- but if you're not taking money from PACs or other organizations, it's much riskier and more difficult to slip it in illegitimately. Just as folks jump at any Republican being caught in a sex scandal -- morality is one of their issues, so they're crucified when they're caught -- campaign finance is one of Obama's issues, so for him not to be squeaky clean would be a hugely unacceptable risk, particularly with Clinton's supporters anxious to find some dirt.
As for how Obama vaulted onto the national stage -- did you hear his 2004 DNC speech? If you haven't, go give it a listen; you'll understand immediately how Obama came to be where he is today.
Ya know, it's one level of thinko when I type something incorrectly.
It's another level when I reread it several times, knowing that a reasonable person has parsed it a specific way, and still think that it's correct.
Mea culpa.
Reread the line you quoted; you've obviously misparsed it.
The problem I refer to is that it's possible in the US for a candidate who loses the popular vote to nonetheless win the bulk of the electoral college and thus the election; indeed, we've seen this happen in recent history. This is even more true when you take into account that voters who select 3rd party candidates are unable to express their preferences between the 1st party candidates, and that these preferences are thus unheeded.
That said, I don't agree that a direct democracy is appropriate in a nation with as many minority groups (not in the racial/ethnic sense) as the United States -- see "tyranny of the majority".
...and yes, I realize that we can't get to anything significantly better without amending the Constitution. That's not impossible; it's been done a great many times, and may well be done again. Politically impossible in the current climate mayhaps, but implementation difficulty is no reason for folks to stop discussing good ideas -- if people never so much as proposed or supported difficult things, much good would be left undone.
There's no need for a separate runoff election -- IRV, Condorcet, and most of the other systems described in TFA moot the need.
And yes, the states count -- but there are serious negatives caused by that system. It's the reason folks can't vote for the 3rd party they prefer without losing the ability to have their preference between the Big Two counted -- and effectively locking the country into a two-party system (with, yes, good ideas occasionally adopted from elsewhere -- but no serious chance of power moving outside the major-party circles).
(Incidentally, I think Range Voting is a pretty good idea -- but as a minor implementation tweak, I'd move the range to be -100 to 100 [defaulting to 0] rather than 0 to 100, to encourage individuals to leave space in the range to distinguish between candidates they have no particular reason to support and candidates they strongly oppose).
One of those characteristics, incidentally, is that a candidate should never lose an election to another candidate whom a larger number of voters support. If the US had a voting system which respected that characteristic, maybe we wouldn't be in the hole we're in right now.
Anyhow, we looked at supporting Brooktrout hardware since one of our larger customers has some already; the decision was that it would be cheaper (and less onerous for other reasons) to go the iaxmodem+asterisk+sangoma route rather than buy support for the proprietary branch of HylaFAX with Brooktrout support written in under NDA.
Anyhow, given that they're not implementing the standard serial interface, yes, remoting a Brooktrout card would be hard. (Shame your employer didn't have a second VM host hooked up to the same storage backend they could live-migrate everything onto during hardware installation... but I don't have the budget for that myself, either, so I've precious little room to talk).
Also, while I talk up virtualization, it's not something we use everywhere. A number of our servers are running under Xen -- but none of the particularly critical ones. VMware Server is used in our QA lab, and I use KVM on my workstation -- but any systems our customers access are running on raw hardware. That said, those systems are also under a high enough load that virtualizing them would not be productive. Used judiciously, though, it's a useful tool.
Even if rightfax wants to talk to a real COM port, through the magic of virtualization it's pretty easy to have that "COM port" connect to a t38modem instance on the other side. So...
But as you say -- there're considerably more factors involved in the real world than there are in some
Heh -- I got a good laugh out of that response; mods, if it's still at 0, give it a point or two of Funny.
That said -- ya know, if you'd generalize the point I was making a little, you'd realize that the bigger picture is that you rarely need to put hardware in a specific machine. Fax cards aren't the only piece of hardware which can be remoted over a network, have their functions performed instead by dedicated hardware, or the like.
Live migration is a pretty popular feature right now -- Xen has supported it pretty much forever at this point (assuming shared storage between your hosts -- but a SAN w/ GFS isn't all that hard thing to set up these days), and support went into KVM(!) early February '07.
With it available in the Free systems, I don't see how anyone trying to sell commercial software in the field could do without it.
That's just silly. Why would you put a physical fax card in your virtual server?
Virtualize the fax card with iaxmodem, run it over a TCP connection to a serial port on a separate box, use t38modem with the other endpoint on a dedicated piece of Cisco hardware... there are plenty of other options.
Here's the thing: You don't need to give up your desktop client. GMail supports IMAP -- best of both worlds. I do most of my mailing from Thunderbird, but that's not to say that the web interface doesn't come in handy.
Google's spam filtering is much better for me than what Thunderbird does, even after years of training -- and with regard to your claim that your IMAP client does search just as well, I doubt it very much; I only know of two of them that have similarly comprehensive functionality (boolean logic, individual components of that search restricted to to/from/subject/whatever, etc).
I used to pay for an IMAP-accessible account from SpamCOP. Still do, actually, since I haven't quite finished migrating off of it yet. However, GMail (or, rather, its Google Apps counterpart) offers more features and better spam filtering at a much better price (free, as opposed to $30/yr); why wouldn't I use it?
The other thing is that overestimating demand is risky, while underestimating it is safe. Manufacture too few items and sell them all at a profit, and you've turned a profit. Manufacture too many items, and it's easy to find yourself taking a loss on enough of them to eat up all the profits you might otherwise have made.
First, as to the scientists issuing corrections: If their corrections are publicized in a "fair and balanced" way, the whackjob is given a chance to restate his claims every time a refutation is published -- so not only is the objective truth promoted, but so is the outright fabrication.
Second, trying to show all things in such a "fair and balanced" way lends credence to the idea that all truth is subjective. Sure, the generally accepted model and peer-reviewed studies and experiments intended to validate it show $FOO, but if $WHACKJOB can believe that the scientific establishment is actually just trying to resist acknowledging the truth of $BAR, then why can't I?
I see a massive and unfounded anti-scientific backlash among the American populace today, and attempts by the media to be "fair and balanced" (or, as a conspiracy theorist might put it, to use a policy of presenting a "fair and balanced" viewpoint as an excuse to air outright lies which are useful to their corporate ownership's agenda) are a part of the cause.
Presenting non-credible fringe viewpoints from that community to the general public as if they are every bit as credible as those viewpoints which have survived peer review and acceptance is a Bad Thing. I'm not arguing that any part of the scientific community should be stifled -- but rather, that large media accept some responsibility in the manner in which they lend those fringe viewpoints their voice.
Just for the record -- this is the post I'm foe'ing you for; I quite enjoyed our other thread.
I can appreciate a good devil's advocate position -- but this isn't onesuch, even remotely. To play devil's advocate, one's position needs to be plausible, something an opponent might accept long enough to draw up a reasonable counterargument.
Look -- you claim to be a Libertarian-leaning Republican. How can you claim that all activists' work is destructive, when such a large branch of activism is centered around protecting the personal freedoms you claim you value? It's activists that got women the vote; activists who helped men and women escape slavery and flee to Canada; activists that ended apartheid; activists who uprooted British rule over their American colonies and started the revolution that lead to the very existence of the country you live in.
Devil's advocate or no, your claims insult the Constitution itself -- it was people demanding, agitating and giving their lives for change that resulted in the very idea of a government existing by the consent of the governed. If you'll spit on that for a chance to score a few points in some online forum, I will have nothing to do with you.
That said, the idea that governmental transparency and personal privacy are in any way comparable things, such that either both or none can be provided in a fair society is... insane. Governments are not people; rather, they're large control structures intended to keep a society running. "Enlightened" forms do so by the consent of the governed; for the governed to grant said consent, they must be informed and empowered. Simple as that.
Heh -- I think maybe I've treated you a little harshly in the conversation thus far.
I'd be thrilled to see the Republican Party of my youth make a revival -- small government, conservative economic policy, and a bit on the isolationist side in terms of foreign policy. I wouldn't necessarily join that party, but it'd be a group I could respect and work with.
The neocons, on the other hand... gah.
You can't talk about personal freedoms as Priority 1, and at the same time want strictly controlled immigration; the two goals are incompatible. If freedoms are Priority 2 to you, you have no room to complain about those who have different things -- like healthcare -- which they value more.
And by the way -- you might find this presentation interesting -- particularly when the relationship between health and economic strength comes up.