And anyone who knows what they're doing can subvert it.
Dump the subversion repository to XML, edit it all you want, rebuild it... there you are, you've changed history.
Something with chained cryptographic signatures timestamped by a trusted third party digital notary service is more appropriate to the task. That way, there are two components which need to be subverted -- the storage repository, and the notary service.
And frankly, all the talk about how SUVs are the big danger to small cars is ridiculous. Sure there are a lot of blonde soccer moms out there talking on the phone while driving their Excursions--but far more dangerous (and scary) are the hordes of untrained, ignorant, and oblivious drivers of heavy equipment[...]
Uhh... huh.
Do you have any idea what the requirements are to acquire and maintain a CDL?
Let me additionally note that the folks who complain about SUVs being a threat to smaller vehicles generally have actual statistics to back them up. Can you say the same?
I'll cede your point on the math -- I wasn't taking taxes and fees into account on my initial figures, and that does change things very substantially.
The utility value of a larger car is pretty variable -- speaking for myself, I have no kids, won't have any in the near future, and rarely travel (and when I do, the Mazda 3 is big enough to fit ourselves, luggage, the dogs, and maybe a few folks coming with; the wifely one has excellent spatial sense when it comes to packing). With these folks planning on production of 20,000 units per year, they don't need a huge target market -- look at how many hybrids are on the road; those hardly make sense when looking at the numbers -- but you've certainly made your point that the economics aren't compelling enough for "big changes" in the average American's vehicular preferences.
Same payment-to-principal ratio as my current car loan (60 months at 5%, with a local credit union; I'd rather put extra money into quickly paying down the house [which is financed at a higher interest rate with people I don't like so much] rather than an accelerated payoff on the car). Aforementioned credit union still has car loans available well under 6%, though no longer at 5% even (a shame).
Or are you basically tossing away value you could recoup had you went with another car?
No doubt. You'll note that I mentioned its status as an electric car as a benefit, rather than a means to separate (and more utilitarian) ends. The electric car industry is a Good Thing -- from an environmental perspective and a hedge against peak oil -- and supporting them via buying their products when feasible is something I'm generally inclined to do. If I wanted a good investment, do you think I'd seriously be looking at a new car of any variety? Cars are bloody awful investments categorically -- and while I'm obviously not going to make a commitment likely to interfere with meeting my financial goals, I'm looking for more in a vehicle than expected ROI.
If you're in the US, are you really willing to pay over $300/month (if you finance this thing) + $200/month "battery fee" for a two-seater for your wife?
"Over $300/month" just to finance the vehicle? Not likely. I'd be paying closer to $230/month to finance said vehicle. If its efficiency is on par with other high-profile EVs, the electricity cost to run it would be under 1/4 of the gasoline cost for a conventional vehicle, so that's at least another $50/month saved, for a total impact of about $380/mo (even if the battery fee is $200/mo, which they specified as on the high side of their estimates).
$380/mo is a little high, but again -- that's if the battery fee is higher rather than lower. If the "mobility fee" (battery + connectivity + etc) is $150/mo, that brings the total impact of the vehicle to around $330/mo, which (for a new electric car with a warranty) strikes me as entirely reasonable.
I rarely -- very, very rarely -- drive more than 70 miles in a day, and I find that going to a gas station is a bloody inconvenience. Also, the part of my garage which doesn't house my primary vehicle is mostly already in use as storage, and I can only afford to give up so much of it.
$13K+$200/mo for a plug-in electric vehicle is a little steep for me personally, but it's not anything close to out of feasibility range. Raise the top speed to 70MPH, and I'll think very seriously about this in a few years when we're looking for a commuter car for my wife.
You may not find this vehicle interesting -- but if that's the case, it's not for you.
If that's the error you were getting, next time you see it you should try using dumpe2fs to look at the last checked / check interval / next check after values after booting out of either FS; one of them, presumably, is getting it wrong -- or the system's knowledge of the system date was wrong at boot time (easy enough to check for; just put in a "date" command to print it out in your init scripts [or your initrd's init script, if that's where it's happening] before the code that runs e2fsck).
Hmm... maybe your BIOS clock was off and on one of the OSes this was happening before ntpdate was kicking off and correcting it?
Anyhow -- yeah, interesting case, but not normal/expected behavior.
The dirty bit is set on mount and unset on clean unmount. If it was always set for you whenever you flipped operating systems, that indicates an issue specific to your situation; perhaps one of the operating systems wasn't shutting itself down cleanly?
In that example, sure. Much of the larger issue is the death of the lone developer. Once upon a time, extremely popular games were written by a single person -- and they were considered good! Those days, needless to say, are no more. (I'm not necessarily complaining -- I adore Half-Life -- but there are also a lot of stories that don't get told, because one person no longer has the resources to tell them alone in the style to which gamers have become accustomed).
As for games which make good use of text-based format, look at the Xyzzy winners in the "Best Use of the Medium" category -- I'm personally extremely fond of the 1998 winner, Andrew Plotkin's Spider and Web. For another example, I doubt very much that Photopia would have as much of its emotional impact were it graphical rather than text-based.
BTW, you might find Inform 7 interesting; it's a toolkit intended to make writing interactive fiction easier for those whose background is more literary than technical (while still leaving plenty of fun for the software geeks among us). Certainly, this kind of toolage makes it far easier for a single individual to put together a compelling game (presuming, of course, that they have the relevant talent) than any graphical framework in which visual artwork, 3D physics, etc etc. needs to be implemented.
Do you know who Richard Garriot is? I'll give you a hint: His first groundbreaking game (targeting the Apple II) was published 28 years ago, and he hasn't exactly sat on his laurels since.
I'm not saying that everything that comes out of his mouth is gold -- but I am saying that to the extent that experience and success bring authority within a field, Garriot is most certainly an authority with regard to innovation and evolution in game design -- so making snide comments ("Hey awesome...") isn't necessarily appropriate. (And yes, he is making a new game).
The intended word was "exempt"; the context should have made it clear that the reference was to exempting oneself from membership in the group of individuals acting in accordance with the general trend described.
A "causal correlation" is one in which there is a cause-and-effect relation between those items which correlate, as opposed to a correlation with external causes. Duh.
Oh -- and way to make yourself look intelligent and professional with the personal attacks there, AC.
They're arguing that there's a causal correlation -- not that individuals can't excempt themselves from being one of the cases acting in accordance with the trend. It's like as study that says that eating McDonalds once a day makes you fat. To use your logic, such a study would be BS because people who eat McDonalds daily can work out for a few hours and counteract the effect. Obviously, that study would not mean that people who eat McDonalds once a day can't possibly lose weight -- and likewise, this one does not in fact imply that people who hang out with fat people can't lose weight either; in claiming otherwise, you're setting up an intentionally easy-to-knock-down strawman.
As for me, my personal experience leaves me inclined to trust this study's results. When I was in college, I lost a lot of weight without consciously thinking about it (or changing my diet, which was dictated by my personal finances, and thus fairly constant, at the time) when I was chasing after a thin woman, to the point where some ex-roommates referred to me as "half of Duff" when meeting me in the library; that trend ended roughly when our friendship became more distant and I was less focused on getting her attention.
So -- I'm perfectly willing to believe that, in the absence of other factors, hanging out with thin people makes it easier for one to lose weight without making conscious decisions to do so, and that hanging out with fat people gives one a predisposition towards gaining weight. Obviously, neither of these is foolproof -- failing to exercise will have a bigger influence than hanging out with thin people, and planning one's diet carefully will have a bigger influence than hanging out with fat people -- but that's not to say that this isn't a legitimate influence, and well worth knowing about.
How do we expect the citizens with maybe only a highschool or lesser education to understand the system.
Well, I guess that's where the "appeal to authority" approach kicks in. Your average high-school-education individual doesn't need to know how it works; they need to know that it works, and how to do their part in validation (if they're so incined). (The whole "university degree in software engineering" doesn't go that far with me, btw -- when spending time in the ivory tower myself, I was astounded at the incompetence level of some of the folks working on their masters' degrees, never mind half of the professors).
For the complex parts, this thing won a contest where Ron Rivest was one of the judges. It's been audited by some seriously big names. For the simple parts, which is everything but the way the sequencing is generated and the votes are actually counted (as opposed to the slower way which requires knowing the sequences for each ballot)... they really should be intuitively understandable. I explained it to my wife, and she has no computing background whatsoever. (Mind you, though most of the explanation she was looking at me like I was on crack, but eventually it all fit together).
Here's the thing: You may understand how existing paper ballots work, but that doesn't mean they have adequate security guarantees. They're a whole lot better than some of the existing electronic systems, without question, but there are still plenty of cases of voter fraud going on where paper ballots are in use.
Punchscan provides mathematically provable guarantees (with quantifiable but very small allowance for error) that an election cannot be tampered with. The exact allowance for error depends on the percentage of voters who choose to verify their ballots after-the-fact, but in any event it makes election rigging an activity which is much more likely to be successfully detected after-the-fact than it has been at any point in history.
Now, getting back to a simplified version of how it makes an election more secure:
You can validate that your ballot is part of the archive of recorded ballots which is made accessible to the public (so you can be confident that your ballot was recorded when cast -- this itself is a big improvement), and that 2/3 of the data involved hasn't been tampered in such a way as to change your vote. (Understanding how tampering with the other 1/3 is prevented means getting into the math; however, while I haven't studied this implementation well enough to grok it, I know enough similar ways of getting to the same end that I trust [with the level of expert and competitive review involved] that they didn't FUBAR it. I prefer to think of it as using a value stream off a single, established PRNG key -- which is close enough for completely nonprofessional horseshoes, though it doesn't explain some of their nifty properties [such as being able to perform and verify the count based only on the publicly released data without seeing the mappings which represent the hidden ballot piece]).
Individuals can validate that their own ballots made it into the counted data (as this is published to the public), and 3rd parties can validate the count itself off this published data using some magic. There you are -- oversight, and a massive improvement over what traditional election methods have to offer.
So if all I can verify is that I voted for A, A, D, and C, then how can I actually verify that my vote was counted correctly.
Read the wikipedia article describing Punchscan; my previous post was an oversimplification. Punchscan actually creates two components to a vote's record; the voter can select either one to be used to count them (and act as their receipt), whereas the other one is shredded. Both pieces tell whether the voter selected the first, second, third or fourth punch; one additionally tells which candidates are A, B, C and D, while the other additionally tells which of the first, second, third and fourth punches corresponds with A, B, C and D (but not which candidates are A, B, C or D); in either case, one piece of information needed for the voter to sell their vote is missing, but the choice of which piece this is is left with the voter.
The voter can then take home the piece they chose, which (in either event) has two of the three pieces of information needed to prove whom they voted for. After the election, they can then compare that physical token which they hold with the publicly available, scanned versions of the non-shredded tokens which were counted.
So -- the way voter validation is done is very easy for anyone to understand, without a heavy cryptography background available. Also, notably, there's no computer needed at all to implement the actual voting process (which is typically implemented with nothing but paper)... though the generation and validation of the ballots is a different matter.
The only thing that requires computers to implement, and a cryptographic background to understand, is the secret kept back at the voting organization describing the item orderings used for the ballots. Now, the election organization can't change these after the fact -- because of the implementation (getting into crypto here) any change to it would effectively randomize the orderings on every ballot in existence, and the 1/2 of people who decided to record and keep the half of their ballot containing that ordering information would notice, making such an attempt futile.
The worst that a corrupt election authority can do under the Punchscan system is release the ordering information to some colluding group, thus allowing a third party to tell how individuals voted; they cannot miscount your vote without being detected. (Without knowing the serial numbers on individuals' ballots, they still could not identify the votes -- so while a corrupt election authority could allow a third party to identify how you voted, they could only do so if you were compelled to show that third party the serial number on your receipt). Compared to a corrupt election authority being able to completely throw an election, this is an extreme and dramatic improvement, and it answers your question (why should I trust one group over another?) in that any election authority implementing the Punchscan doesn't need to be trusted -- the system itself provides for transparency and public oversight.
PunchScan is principally implemented on paper, and adds dramatically to the security and auditability of preexisting paper systems. If I've done a bad job of explaining it, you can walk through the process of voting with PunchScan (or counting the votes) here, here and here.
Punchscan handles this scenario. It means you can prove that you voted for A, A, D and C (and validate that this set of votes was counted correctly) -- but you can't prove who option A on item #1 was on your ballot (as opposed to someone else's ballot), so even when knowing that you voted for A on #1, Vinnie can't tell whether you voted for Enzo or not.
Bloody hell, people, learn how this works before you trash it.
I've heard these described as "brainos", which I think is a more accurate description.
I agree that that's a better description. My point is that you tried to paint your opponent as either unknowledgeable or intellectually dishonest based on this thinko, which seemed a bit over-the-top -- and looking over your posts so far in the thread, I'm finding much less signal than noise thus far. In any event...
[D]id you want to talk about subsidizing biofuels grown in this country vs paying money for dino-fuels to countries who hate us?
Not so much; my position is well-formed, and I don't think there's much point to getting involved in discussions where I'll just be reiterating it (and probably not changing it much, unless someone who knows considerably more about the topic chimes in). In short, biofuels are a Darned Good Thing, but we're going about it wrong -- and putting enough money into that misguided approach that we're getting a huge amount of physical and political infrastructure built which will need to be reworked (at great difficulty and expense) to take a more optimal approach in the future -- not entirely unlike our failure to use the best available nuclear reactor designs, despite the production of waste which could be reused were we using modern breeder reactors. Brazil has a good thing going on due to their use of sugar, but if that's not going to fly here for various reasons I'd prefer putting money into the R&D necessary for large-scale algae-based biofuel production; since algae can be grown (extremely quickly and cheaply) using land unsuitable for food crops (and just about anything makes more sense than corn from an efficiency perspective), it makes massively more sense as an eventual direction than other approaches taken thus far.
Some people have at least a moderate tendency to think and type in letter groups associated with sounds, which can lead to inadvertent errors which would be improbable in association with pure finger-slips (as opposed to invocation of muscle memory for similar-sounding but differently spelled phrases). I think it is reasonable to characterize these inadvertent errors as "typos" so long as the generated text does not reflect the thought process of the author while said text was being written. (Unusual keyboard layouts are also not necessarily as unusual as you might think -- though the "m" and the "e" are still a good distance away from each other even on Dvorak, there nonetheless are far more layouts than QWERTY in common use).
From my perspective as an uninvolved 3rd party, you're the ass in this thread.
To be sure, there are indeed -- but for those with nonfinancial motives, why is copyright necessary at all to encourage them to create?
I have no interest in "copyright reform" that protects the intellectual property of the rich - but throws the creative work of the poor into the "public domain."
Everything has its cost. The public domain you speak of so derisively is a commons from which all artists can draw -- but it is particularly useful to those unable to pay licensing fees. Are you so sure that your position is in the best interest of the poor artists?
To be sure, one can argue that all artists' works should have equal protection, even if that protection ought not be eternal -- but certain political realities make that position incompatible with a belief that copyright policy should, as its first and foremost goal, exist to further the good of the public as a whole. Disney will never give up their wish to control their earlier works, even to the detriment of the public as a whole; at least, in requiring them to pay for that privilege, one can assign an explicit cost to an action which otherwise has costs measured only as externalities -- actions which, like environmental pollution in industrial activity, has (when unregulated) great but largely unaccounted costs to others but little cost to oneself.
Would you say that it is unfair that a small manufacturer can less afford to buy pollution credits than a large one? That every individual has the right to damage the atmosphere by the same amount? How, then, is delineation of parts of the world's shared cultural heritage as unusable by the poor any different? (This is admittedly a rather extreme comparison, and is intended to induce thought rather than to characterize my position as a whole).
For the convenience of the Geek.
For the convenience of the geek, to be sure. And the convenience of those who would have classic works republished by small houses rather than languishing (and eventually being forgotten) in a larger publisher's catalog. And the convenience of those who would publicly perform music long embedded within the public consciousness without being forced to pay for the privilege. And the convenience of those who would listen to the same. For the convenience of those who would play classics from the 1920s at a charity concert without losing the revenue they generate to the heirs of the authors of that music. And the convenience of those who would benefit from the charity. And the convenience of those who would benefit from the performance itself. For the convenience of the computer science student in the year 2035 who decides to try to see what software could have been built in 2001 were it not for license incompatibilities holding movement back. For the convenience of the artist who wishes to create an audiovisual collage made up of (once-copyrighted) images and soundbytes of their youth.
Works being lost to mankind's use because their copyright status is unknown is a travesty, but shortening all copyright terms is politically untenable, even if a timespan could be found which strikes an ideal balance between providing the incentive needed to encourage authors to create and enriching the public by permitting as much access as possible to consume and reuse the works created. Internalizing some portion of the shared costs associated with excessive copyright terms encourages those that hold copyrights to do the right thing and free their works after they have made a reasonable profit. To be sure, there are those who put their heart into their work -- but if a work is not making enough of a profit to pay for a copyright extension, how is its author harmed by that work becoming part of the public commons from which new creators draw? Much to the contrary, being one of the giants one whose shoulders others can stand is an honorable place to be.
A few years back, we had another simpering wimp... He was so focused on being a "man of peace", that it became a weapon that was used against him and the entire US.
I'll thank you to back up that assertion. Prior to 9/11, Bush was doing less to combat terrorism than Clinton had before him -- despite Clinton warning him at the exit interview that he considered al-Qaida to be the most serious national security threat facing the county at that time.
Do you really want to be represented by a brawling frat boy? Frat boys make enemies unnecessarily -- but hatreds between distant peoples are not so easily healed as those between individuals, and a mistake made now can result in a country which is still our foe fifty years later. Far better to absorb some blows and mete out a measured and effective response than to flail around wildly, trampling over one's stated values and destroying a reputation which has taken centuries to build.
Roosevelt had it right -- walk softly, and carry a big stick. Walking softly in the world of international politics is something done by a statesman, not a frat boy; deciding wisely when to wield the stick, the same.
That's not the same as making it illegal to have done something and then charging someone for having done it. It would be ex post facto if they passed that law and then sent a felon up for having owned a gun last week. That's just a change in the law.
Smoking is no longer permitted in restaurants in California. It's the same kind of thing. People don't get to do that anymore. Felons don't get to own guns anymore.
How is passing a law to the effect that members of the set of people who have at some time committed a given class of crime are to be deprived of some right or privilege not effectively increasing, after the fact, the punishment associated with that crime? You may frame the issue differently -- but it is nonetheless effectively additional punishment for a previously-committed crime.
To take an extreme, consider a law which prohibits those guilty of computer crimes from using the Internet. By no means is it unheard of for avoiding Internet use to be a probation term for those convicted of such crimes -- but to legislatively extend such a prohibition to all of those who have committed such crimes regardless of whether they have completed that probationary period is effectively to indefinitely extend the period of their sentences, every much so as it would be an ex post facto imposition of house arrest for the legislature to craft a law which (on a forward-looking basis) makes it illegal for those who previously committed a given class of crimes to leave their homes.
We either risk another huge terrorist attack on our soil or we spy on international phone calls.
If that's the choice, then bring on the bombings. What kind of "lighthouse to the world" can we be while giving up our freedoms? And what kind of sorry excuse for a patriot can you be if you care more about the infinitesimal risk to your life posed by international terrorism more than you care about the principals your country was founded on?
That said, the idea that it's one way or the other is bullshit. The reason we're a target in the first place is our involvement in the Middle East; if we weren't maintaining a military presence there (and propping up Israel) to start with, none of this would be our problem today.
Mmm. It might bear mentioning that I live in Texas. Those perpetrating home-invasion robberies run the risk of being shot; lower-risk crimes (ie. car stereo thefts from vehicles parked outside and out of view) are much more common.
Slashdot Mirror
And anyone who knows what they're doing can subvert it.
Dump the subversion repository to XML, edit it all you want, rebuild it... there you are, you've changed history.
Something with chained cryptographic signatures timestamped by a trusted third party digital notary service is more appropriate to the task. That way, there are two components which need to be subverted -- the storage repository, and the notary service.
5 year loan at 5% interest. (Granted, 5.5% is more likely in today's environment).
Also remember to subtract for fuel cost savings.
Do you have any idea what the requirements are to acquire and maintain a CDL?
Let me additionally note that the folks who complain about SUVs being a threat to smaller vehicles generally have actual statistics to back them up. Can you say the same?
I'll cede your point on the math -- I wasn't taking taxes and fees into account on my initial figures, and that does change things very substantially.
The utility value of a larger car is pretty variable -- speaking for myself, I have no kids, won't have any in the near future, and rarely travel (and when I do, the Mazda 3 is big enough to fit ourselves, luggage, the dogs, and maybe a few folks coming with; the wifely one has excellent spatial sense when it comes to packing). With these folks planning on production of 20,000 units per year, they don't need a huge target market -- look at how many hybrids are on the road; those hardly make sense when looking at the numbers -- but you've certainly made your point that the economics aren't compelling enough for "big changes" in the average American's vehicular preferences.
$380/mo is a little high, but again -- that's if the battery fee is higher rather than lower. If the "mobility fee" (battery + connectivity + etc) is $150/mo, that brings the total impact of the vehicle to around $330/mo, which (for a new electric car with a warranty) strikes me as entirely reasonable.
I rarely -- very, very rarely -- drive more than 70 miles in a day, and I find that going to a gas station is a bloody inconvenience. Also, the part of my garage which doesn't house my primary vehicle is mostly already in use as storage, and I can only afford to give up so much of it.
$13K+$200/mo for a plug-in electric vehicle is a little steep for me personally, but it's not anything close to out of feasibility range. Raise the top speed to 70MPH, and I'll think very seriously about this in a few years when we're looking for a commuter car for my wife.
You may not find this vehicle interesting -- but if that's the case, it's not for you.
If that's the error you were getting, next time you see it you should try using dumpe2fs to look at the last checked / check interval / next check after values after booting out of either FS; one of them, presumably, is getting it wrong -- or the system's knowledge of the system date was wrong at boot time (easy enough to check for; just put in a "date" command to print it out in your init scripts [or your initrd's init script, if that's where it's happening] before the code that runs e2fsck).
Hmm... maybe your BIOS clock was off and on one of the OSes this was happening before ntpdate was kicking off and correcting it?
Anyhow -- yeah, interesting case, but not normal/expected behavior.
The dirty bit is set on mount and unset on clean unmount. If it was always set for you whenever you flipped operating systems, that indicates an issue specific to your situation; perhaps one of the operating systems wasn't shutting itself down cleanly?
In that example, sure. Much of the larger issue is the death of the lone developer. Once upon a time, extremely popular games were written by a single person -- and they were considered good! Those days, needless to say, are no more. (I'm not necessarily complaining -- I adore Half-Life -- but there are also a lot of stories that don't get told, because one person no longer has the resources to tell them alone in the style to which gamers have become accustomed).
As for games which make good use of text-based format, look at the Xyzzy winners in the "Best Use of the Medium" category -- I'm personally extremely fond of the 1998 winner, Andrew Plotkin's Spider and Web. For another example, I doubt very much that Photopia would have as much of its emotional impact were it graphical rather than text-based.
BTW, you might find Inform 7 interesting; it's a toolkit intended to make writing interactive fiction easier for those whose background is more literary than technical (while still leaving plenty of fun for the software geeks among us). Certainly, this kind of toolage makes it far easier for a single individual to put together a compelling game (presuming, of course, that they have the relevant talent) than any graphical framework in which visual artwork, 3D physics, etc etc. needs to be implemented.
Do you know who Richard Garriot is? I'll give you a hint: His first groundbreaking game (targeting the Apple II) was published 28 years ago, and he hasn't exactly sat on his laurels since.
I'm not saying that everything that comes out of his mouth is gold -- but I am saying that to the extent that experience and success bring authority within a field, Garriot is most certainly an authority with regard to innovation and evolution in game design -- so making snide comments ("Hey awesome...") isn't necessarily appropriate. (And yes, he is making a new game).
The intended word was "exempt"; the context should have made it clear that the reference was to exempting oneself from membership in the group of individuals acting in accordance with the general trend described.
A "causal correlation" is one in which there is a cause-and-effect relation between those items which correlate, as opposed to a correlation with external causes. Duh.
Oh -- and way to make yourself look intelligent and professional with the personal attacks there, AC.
They're arguing that there's a causal correlation -- not that individuals can't excempt themselves from being one of the cases acting in accordance with the trend. It's like as study that says that eating McDonalds once a day makes you fat. To use your logic, such a study would be BS because people who eat McDonalds daily can work out for a few hours and counteract the effect. Obviously, that study would not mean that people who eat McDonalds once a day can't possibly lose weight -- and likewise, this one does not in fact imply that people who hang out with fat people can't lose weight either; in claiming otherwise, you're setting up an intentionally easy-to-knock-down strawman.
As for me, my personal experience leaves me inclined to trust this study's results. When I was in college, I lost a lot of weight without consciously thinking about it (or changing my diet, which was dictated by my personal finances, and thus fairly constant, at the time) when I was chasing after a thin woman, to the point where some ex-roommates referred to me as "half of Duff" when meeting me in the library; that trend ended roughly when our friendship became more distant and I was less focused on getting her attention.
So -- I'm perfectly willing to believe that, in the absence of other factors, hanging out with thin people makes it easier for one to lose weight without making conscious decisions to do so, and that hanging out with fat people gives one a predisposition towards gaining weight. Obviously, neither of these is foolproof -- failing to exercise will have a bigger influence than hanging out with thin people, and planning one's diet carefully will have a bigger influence than hanging out with fat people -- but that's not to say that this isn't a legitimate influence, and well worth knowing about.
For the complex parts, this thing won a contest where Ron Rivest was one of the judges. It's been audited by some seriously big names. For the simple parts, which is everything but the way the sequencing is generated and the votes are actually counted (as opposed to the slower way which requires knowing the sequences for each ballot)... they really should be intuitively understandable. I explained it to my wife, and she has no computing background whatsoever. (Mind you, though most of the explanation she was looking at me like I was on crack, but eventually it all fit together).
Here's the thing: You may understand how existing paper ballots work, but that doesn't mean they have adequate security guarantees. They're a whole lot better than some of the existing electronic systems, without question, but there are still plenty of cases of voter fraud going on where paper ballots are in use.
Punchscan provides mathematically provable guarantees (with quantifiable but very small allowance for error) that an election cannot be tampered with. The exact allowance for error depends on the percentage of voters who choose to verify their ballots after-the-fact, but in any event it makes election rigging an activity which is much more likely to be successfully detected after-the-fact than it has been at any point in history.
Now, getting back to a simplified version of how it makes an election more secure:
You can validate that your ballot is part of the archive of recorded ballots which is made accessible to the public (so you can be confident that your ballot was recorded when cast -- this itself is a big improvement), and that 2/3 of the data involved hasn't been tampered in such a way as to change your vote. (Understanding how tampering with the other 1/3 is prevented means getting into the math; however, while I haven't studied this implementation well enough to grok it, I know enough similar ways of getting to the same end that I trust [with the level of expert and competitive review involved] that they didn't FUBAR it. I prefer to think of it as using a value stream off a single, established PRNG key -- which is close enough for completely nonprofessional horseshoes, though it doesn't explain some of their nifty properties [such as being able to perform and verify the count based only on the publicly released data without seeing the mappings which represent the hidden ballot piece]).
Individuals can validate that their own ballots made it into the counted data (as this is published to the public), and 3rd parties can validate the count itself off this published data using some magic. There you are -- oversight, and a massive improvement over what traditional election methods have to offer.
The voter can then take home the piece they chose, which (in either event) has two of the three pieces of information needed to prove whom they voted for. After the election, they can then compare that physical token which they hold with the publicly available, scanned versions of the non-shredded tokens which were counted.
So -- the way voter validation is done is very easy for anyone to understand, without a heavy cryptography background available. Also, notably, there's no computer needed at all to implement the actual voting process (which is typically implemented with nothing but paper)... though the generation and validation of the ballots is a different matter.
The only thing that requires computers to implement, and a cryptographic background to understand, is the secret kept back at the voting organization describing the item orderings used for the ballots. Now, the election organization can't change these after the fact -- because of the implementation (getting into crypto here) any change to it would effectively randomize the orderings on every ballot in existence, and the 1/2 of people who decided to record and keep the half of their ballot containing that ordering information would notice, making such an attempt futile.
The worst that a corrupt election authority can do under the Punchscan system is release the ordering information to some colluding group, thus allowing a third party to tell how individuals voted; they cannot miscount your vote without being detected. (Without knowing the serial numbers on individuals' ballots, they still could not identify the votes -- so while a corrupt election authority could allow a third party to identify how you voted, they could only do so if you were compelled to show that third party the serial number on your receipt). Compared to a corrupt election authority being able to completely throw an election, this is an extreme and dramatic improvement, and it answers your question (why should I trust one group over another?) in that any election authority implementing the Punchscan doesn't need to be trusted -- the system itself provides for transparency and public oversight.
PunchScan is principally implemented on paper, and adds dramatically to the security and auditability of preexisting paper systems. If I've done a bad job of explaining it, you can walk through the process of voting with PunchScan (or counting the votes) here, here and here.
Punchscan handles this scenario. It means you can prove that you voted for A, A, D and C (and validate that this set of votes was counted correctly) -- but you can't prove who option A on item #1 was on your ballot (as opposed to someone else's ballot), so even when knowing that you voted for A on #1, Vinnie can't tell whether you voted for Enzo or not.
Bloody hell, people, learn how this works before you trash it.
Some people have at least a moderate tendency to think and type in letter groups associated with sounds, which can lead to inadvertent errors which would be improbable in association with pure finger-slips (as opposed to invocation of muscle memory for similar-sounding but differently spelled phrases). I think it is reasonable to characterize these inadvertent errors as "typos" so long as the generated text does not reflect the thought process of the author while said text was being written. (Unusual keyboard layouts are also not necessarily as unusual as you might think -- though the "m" and the "e" are still a good distance away from each other even on Dvorak, there nonetheless are far more layouts than QWERTY in common use).
From my perspective as an uninvolved 3rd party, you're the ass in this thread.
OpenVPN is very well-written C -- clean and accessible. Likewise for glib (not glibc, glib), presuming one likes the fun it does with macros.
To be sure, one can argue that all artists' works should have equal protection, even if that protection ought not be eternal -- but certain political realities make that position incompatible with a belief that copyright policy should, as its first and foremost goal, exist to further the good of the public as a whole. Disney will never give up their wish to control their earlier works, even to the detriment of the public as a whole; at least, in requiring them to pay for that privilege, one can assign an explicit cost to an action which otherwise has costs measured only as externalities -- actions which, like environmental pollution in industrial activity, has (when unregulated) great but largely unaccounted costs to others but little cost to oneself.
Would you say that it is unfair that a small manufacturer can less afford to buy pollution credits than a large one? That every individual has the right to damage the atmosphere by the same amount? How, then, is delineation of parts of the world's shared cultural heritage as unusable by the poor any different? (This is admittedly a rather extreme comparison, and is intended to induce thought rather than to characterize my position as a whole).For the convenience of the geek, to be sure.
And the convenience of those who would have classic works republished by small houses rather than languishing (and eventually being forgotten) in a larger publisher's catalog.
And the convenience of those who would publicly perform music long embedded within the public consciousness without being forced to pay for the privilege.
And the convenience of those who would listen to the same.
For the convenience of those who would play classics from the 1920s at a charity concert without losing the revenue they generate to the heirs of the authors of that music.
And the convenience of those who would benefit from the charity.
And the convenience of those who would benefit from the performance itself.
For the convenience of the computer science student in the year 2035 who decides to try to see what software could have been built in 2001 were it not for license incompatibilities holding movement back.
For the convenience of the artist who wishes to create an audiovisual collage made up of (once-copyrighted) images and soundbytes of their youth.
Works being lost to mankind's use because their copyright status is unknown is a travesty, but shortening all copyright terms is politically untenable, even if a timespan could be found which strikes an ideal balance between providing the incentive needed to encourage authors to create and enriching the public by permitting as much access as possible to consume and reuse the works created. Internalizing some portion of the shared costs associated with excessive copyright terms encourages those that hold copyrights to do the right thing and free their works after they have made a reasonable profit. To be sure, there are those who put their heart into their work -- but if a work is not making enough of a profit to pay for a copyright extension, how is its author harmed by that work becoming part of the public commons from which new creators draw? Much to the contrary, being one of the giants one whose shoulders others can stand is an honorable place to be.
Do you really want to be represented by a brawling frat boy? Frat boys make enemies unnecessarily -- but hatreds between distant peoples are not so easily healed as those between individuals, and a mistake made now can result in a country which is still our foe fifty years later. Far better to absorb some blows and mete out a measured and effective response than to flail around wildly, trampling over one's stated values and destroying a reputation which has taken centuries to build.
Roosevelt had it right -- walk softly, and carry a big stick. Walking softly in the world of international politics is something done by a statesman, not a frat boy; deciding wisely when to wield the stick, the same.
To take an extreme, consider a law which prohibits those guilty of computer crimes from using the Internet. By no means is it unheard of for avoiding Internet use to be a probation term for those convicted of such crimes -- but to legislatively extend such a prohibition to all of those who have committed such crimes regardless of whether they have completed that probationary period is effectively to indefinitely extend the period of their sentences, every much so as it would be an ex post facto imposition of house arrest for the legislature to craft a law which (on a forward-looking basis) makes it illegal for those who previously committed a given class of crimes to leave their homes.
That said, the idea that it's one way or the other is bullshit. The reason we're a target in the first place is our involvement in the Middle East; if we weren't maintaining a military presence there (and propping up Israel) to start with, none of this would be our problem today.
Mmm. It might bear mentioning that I live in Texas. Those perpetrating home-invasion robberies run the risk of being shot; lower-risk crimes (ie. car stereo thefts from vehicles parked outside and out of view) are much more common.
None of my acquaintances live in gated communities, to the best of my knowledge; certainly, none of those to whom the grandparent post refers.