The box you drop it in doesn't count that you voted for X just that you showed up and voted. Then at the end of the night, count the votes in random order and make sure the total voted cast match the number the box counted.
Unless you have a particular reason to mistrust that machine, it could simultaneously record two different things: That you showed up and voted, and who you voted for. It would just record these in separate places, with no record other than the physical ballots kept somewhere.
Thus, at the end of the day, there's effectively no difference -- so long as your data store doesn't log transactions in some kind of revealing way -- but it's slightly more efficient.
I'll admit TFA doesn't make it obvious, as they seem to be against copyright or something, but
The way I see it is: If the content is so terrible, don't download it. As you will not be infringing on anyone's copyright, you will not get sued.
Are you really that naive?
The RIAA (or MPAA? I always lose track) has, so far, sued 12-year-olds, people who have never used a computer (and don't know how), people who are dead...
Frankly, I don't care whether who they catch, or how guilty they are -- they are the worst example of a "fishing expedition". I honestly don't know how they "catch" people, but I suspect they just throw a dart at a phone book or something.
But to say students are being forced to buy record labels' music,
I'd have to look up the exact article, but yes, there have been cases where universities have bought subscriptions to services like Napster or the Zune Store in order to provide students a place to legally download music, on the assumption that without providing this service, students would illegally download music.
or to say that universities have a responsibility to cover up lawbreaking by their students
NO. WRONG ATTITUDE.
Why should the universities have a responsibility to turn over their students? Especially on practically no evidence?
I'm sorry, but this is pretty much like saying "You're with us, or you're with the terrorists." Refusing to cooperate doesn't mean you're suddenly taking the other side, or that you're "covering up" anything, or, indeed, that there is even something to cover up.
In particular, if an IP-address-to-student mapping is considered private, I'd say you need more than "Well, 50% of college students pirate -- oh wait, I totally pulled that number out of my ass, but give me their names anyway!"
Or you could follow the examples of Opera and Skype and go Qt.
Same rules apply, though. Don't be afraid to pull in libraries, but no matter how closely you tie it to a particular desktop environment, unless you do something incredibly stupid, it will work on others -- it will just be that much more bloated on them.
Tiered internet would support oligarchies and monopolies more.
Imagine a world where "the studios" had to pay for all bandwidth usage twice, or suffer degraded performance. What happens to independentprojects, then?
Did someone actually try to argue that raising the barrier of entry can do anything at all other than support the existing, entrenched power structures?
Of course, that was multiplayer, so they probably honestly didn't know that the campaign is the Good Guys against a bunch of religious zealots who were about to inadvertently bring about the end of life as we know it...
So stop whining and complaining and go invent, go create, go design, go and WORK because you to deserve the fruits of your labor.
Fair enough.
I should point out, though, that while some things I do depend on copyright, none of them depend on patents. All patents do for us is make us have to pay other people for inane things like a particular hash algorithm.
And, in fact, most of the stuff that I'm doing so far doesn't even rely on copyright. It's almost certain that most of it will be released under a fairly permissive license -- probably MIT or GPL. The few things that do rely on copyright are also not in a position where their success or failure depends on a dongle, or any other form of DRM.
And yes, I get paid. I get paid by the hour for the work that I produce. Or, more accurately, I get paid a salary, for which I am expected to work a certain number of hours.
I don't get to stop working one day, sit back, and watch royalty checks roll in.
That's why I prefixed that point with "devil's advocate".
Without this new information (which I did know about), you don't really have an argument. With this information, it's kind of a compelling argument, and my only remaining comment is, what kind of garbage collection? (Can they be swapped out at will? Will they support soft or hard realtime?)
Assigning a big blob of memory to an application is a pretty much solved problem. Is garbage collection sufficiently solved for this to be desirable of a general-purpose OS? (I really hope so. It's exciting stuff!)
There are a few other things that I've had to tweak. For instance, I've now set just about all KDE apps to respond to the ctrl+M shortcut that Konqueror did already -- hides the menu. (Except Konsole, for obvious reasons.)
Basically, I tend to carry home directories around for many years. I figure, I can configure it once, and carry that home directory to my next computer, and the one after that. I do agree that sane defaults are nice, but I happen to like single-click-everywhere, and defaults just aren't as crucial to me as overall functionality.
(To a point, of course. It has to at least be somewhat usable out of the box. I'm looking at you, ratpoison.)
When was the last time Muslim persons did any of the objectionable things forbidden by the Quran?
Fixed it for you.
Among other things, suicide is explicitly forbidden, and the consequences of suicide are also fairly explicit -- you are condemned to a Hell where you will re-live the pain and agony of your suicide for all Eternity.
Now, you certainly shouldn't have a problem explaining how many Muslims are evil, hypocritical bastards. That's also irrelevant, as it is not at all what the religion itself teaches, or what is there in the text.
You're basing your belief system now on two faulty assumptions:
First, you assume that belief in a deity depends on organized religion. It doesn't.
Second, you assume that religious teachings are particularly problematic in pushing racism, censorship, and other forms of hatred. Atheists have been guilty of just as many atrocities. The only difference is, they can skip the step of perverting some holy book to prove their point.
I'm Agnostic, but I am under no illusions that this belief has any correlation with hatred and stupidity. It's possible to make a peaceful religion, and it's possible to make a hateful Atheist dogma.
Here's an idea: Instead of looking for someone to blame for the problem, why don't you do something about it?
I'd actually hypothesize that it has more to do with society than anything else -- specifically, the pressures of repression and idolization. The first, you can see in the reputation of Catholic schoolgirls. The second, you can see in just the opposite -- party girls.
But that's all speculation; I certainly don't have any research to back it up.
No, seriously -- TiVo got plenty of money for being first to market, and for licensing their actual product (hardware and software) to others.
What does the consumer gain at this point by having competition killed? Would TiVo really not have bothered to invent the DVR without protection from this competition?
Fact is, you can configure KDE to work pretty much the way GNOME does, if you really want to.
The reverse is not true. Maybe the GNOME people have better defaults, according to you. But they have a nasty habit of removing functionality because it might confuse someone. Classic example: In KDE, I can configure what clicking my title-bar does. Or double-click, or middle-click, or right-click, or mouse-wheel. In GNOME, well...
Too bad that I can develop closed source commercial apps for KDE with out paying thousands. Developing closed source apps for Windows or Mac doesn't cost a dime.
Mac costs a Mac, and Windows costs a Windows license. So that's an up-front cost right there, unless you already have both. In addition, Windows, at least, is going to cost you Visual Studio, and KDE/Qt is hardly the only framework that will cost you money.
And you can always use Python -- if I remember, the Python-Qt bindings don't require that your Python app be GPL'd. Or you can use any of the other toolkits for Linux, or write your own.
However, depending on how popular your commercial app is, you have to consider TCO here. How much is it going to cost you to license Qt, versus how much development time will it save you? Adobe, Skype, Opera, et al seem happy with it. What's your hangup?
Nobody would buy those crap telly programmes that they watch either.
Yes they do. Unless you're talking about shows distributed via BitTorrent, you're talking about people who have some sort of subscription to some sort of TV service. In addition, they see ads, and if it's a government-sponsored show, they pay taxes.
That's more analogous to the radio than it is to Internet piracy, unless you're going to argue that Internet piracy is really analogous to radio.
Think of it this way: The granularity of a system with no memory protection at all is the entire system. Array overflow on Mac OS 9, in ANY program? Whoops, you just overwrote the kernel. Or fubared some other, completely unrelated process.
The granularity of most modern systems is the process. Array overflow is not an exception, it's a segmentation fault, an illegal operation, etc. Or it's randomly corrupting some other part of your program, possibly with security implications.
What I was suggesting, which I think you agree with, is that we move to managed memory, where the granularity of memory protection is the constructs of the language/VM. Here, array overflow means exception -- but you could conceivably have entire self-contained "programs", and a "kernel" which catches those exceptions and simply nukes the appropriate program.
That is what I think Microsoft's Singularity is about, and it's hardly the first.
The less information the bad guys have about your internal network, the better.
In other words, Security through Obscurity.
it's kinda hard to scan your system for vulnerable software/OS when the attackers only see one generic address that doesn't respond to external connections, other than port-forwarded connections that the company wants to respond to.
It's equally hard when they see a pile of generic addresses that don't respond to external connections, other than explicitly-allowed connections that the company wants to respond to.
I happen to have a 2nd PC that I keep as a "hot backup". Every couple of weeks I turn it on, and update it (Gentoo linux). Damned if I'm going to pay extra for a 2nd IP address for that machine.
And NAT is your way of hacking around the ISPs' greed. If we were on IPv6, there would be no need for an IP address to cost money. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that you use, say, 1394 to wire two computers together, so that you don't have to pay for a network card, and don't pollute the MAC address namespace.
svn merge $REPO/trunk . -r...^C svn log...... #shit, this is taking too long ^C svn log --limit 10 | less svn merge $REPO/trunk . -r123:HEAD # Now go resolve some conflicts
This is less painful if you do it often, because there will be fewer conflicts and surprises. But doing it often is, itself, painful, because of how needlessly complex that process is. And then when it's time to merge back to trunk, well, first you do the above, then you do this:
cd../trunk svn update -r...^C cd../mybranch svn log --limit=1 cd../trunk svn update -r456 svn merge $REPO/branches/mybranch . -r...^C cd../mybranch svn log --limit=10 | less # Oh right, I do need everything this time svn log | less... # Alright, coffee time... # Let's see what's on YouTube... # Finally! cd../trunk svn merge $REPO/branches/mybranch . -r123:HEAD svn update # Grr, more conflicts svn commit
So that was a bit exaggerated, and it's actually tolerable for what people use branches for in Subversion. But having branching/merging actually be easy opens up a few possibilities -- like being able to "commit" a change to your branch almost every time you save, and not having to worry about it being "done" for you to get the benefits of version control. And then, when you want everyone else to see your changes, bundle them all up in one neat patch (or changeset) and send them in. You certainly wouldn't commit as often to a central repository -- who wants the CI system spamming you (and everyone else) for every typo?
That's how I understand it, anyway. I do use svn at work, but I've been considering using something like bzr to maintain all my local checkouts.
And yes, you could do something like this with svn, but making it easy is a Good Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you have a particular reason to mistrust that machine, it could simultaneously record two different things: That you showed up and voted, and who you voted for. It would just record these in separate places, with no record other than the physical ballots kept somewhere.
Thus, at the end of the day, there's effectively no difference -- so long as your data store doesn't log transactions in some kind of revealing way -- but it's slightly more efficient.
I'll admit TFA doesn't make it obvious, as they seem to be against copyright or something, but
Are you really that naive?
The RIAA (or MPAA? I always lose track) has, so far, sued 12-year-olds, people who have never used a computer (and don't know how), people who are dead...
Frankly, I don't care whether who they catch, or how guilty they are -- they are the worst example of a "fishing expedition". I honestly don't know how they "catch" people, but I suspect they just throw a dart at a phone book or something.
I'd have to look up the exact article, but yes, there have been cases where universities have bought subscriptions to services like Napster or the Zune Store in order to provide students a place to legally download music, on the assumption that without providing this service, students would illegally download music.
NO. WRONG ATTITUDE.
Why should the universities have a responsibility to turn over their students? Especially on practically no evidence?
I'm sorry, but this is pretty much like saying "You're with us, or you're with the terrorists." Refusing to cooperate doesn't mean you're suddenly taking the other side, or that you're "covering up" anything, or, indeed, that there is even something to cover up.
In particular, if an IP-address-to-student mapping is considered private, I'd say you need more than "Well, 50% of college students pirate -- oh wait, I totally pulled that number out of my ass, but give me their names anyway!"
Or you could follow the examples of Opera and Skype and go Qt.
Same rules apply, though. Don't be afraid to pull in libraries, but no matter how closely you tie it to a particular desktop environment, unless you do something incredibly stupid, it will work on others -- it will just be that much more bloated on them.
Tiered internet would support oligarchies and monopolies more.
Imagine a world where "the studios" had to pay for all bandwidth usage twice, or suffer degraded performance. What happens to independent projects, then?
Did someone actually try to argue that raising the barrier of entry can do anything at all other than support the existing, entrenched power structures?
Not as much as Halo in churches, I would think.
Of course, that was multiplayer, so they probably honestly didn't know that the campaign is the Good Guys against a bunch of religious zealots who were about to inadvertently bring about the end of life as we know it...
Fair enough.
I should point out, though, that while some things I do depend on copyright, none of them depend on patents. All patents do for us is make us have to pay other people for inane things like a particular hash algorithm.
And, in fact, most of the stuff that I'm doing so far doesn't even rely on copyright. It's almost certain that most of it will be released under a fairly permissive license -- probably MIT or GPL. The few things that do rely on copyright are also not in a position where their success or failure depends on a dongle, or any other form of DRM.
And yes, I get paid. I get paid by the hour for the work that I produce. Or, more accurately, I get paid a salary, for which I am expected to work a certain number of hours.
I don't get to stop working one day, sit back, and watch royalty checks roll in.
That's why I prefixed that point with "devil's advocate".
Without this new information (which I did know about), you don't really have an argument. With this information, it's kind of a compelling argument, and my only remaining comment is, what kind of garbage collection? (Can they be swapped out at will? Will they support soft or hard realtime?)
Assigning a big blob of memory to an application is a pretty much solved problem. Is garbage collection sufficiently solved for this to be desirable of a general-purpose OS? (I really hope so. It's exciting stuff!)
One more advantage: My local branch in a distributed rcs is local, as in, not affected by my Internet connection (or lack thereof).
Can svnmerge do that?
Yes, but again, "by default".
There are a few other things that I've had to tweak. For instance, I've now set just about all KDE apps to respond to the ctrl+M shortcut that Konqueror did already -- hides the menu. (Except Konsole, for obvious reasons.)
Basically, I tend to carry home directories around for many years. I figure, I can configure it once, and carry that home directory to my next computer, and the one after that. I do agree that sane defaults are nice, but I happen to like single-click-everywhere, and defaults just aren't as crucial to me as overall functionality.
(To a point, of course. It has to at least be somewhat usable out of the box. I'm looking at you, ratpoison.)
No offense intended, certainly. But you wouldn't call yourself "average", would you?
Yes! No more MAFIAA, just ShaRIAA!
Fixed it for you.
Among other things, suicide is explicitly forbidden, and the consequences of suicide are also fairly explicit -- you are condemned to a Hell where you will re-live the pain and agony of your suicide for all Eternity.
Now, you certainly shouldn't have a problem explaining how many Muslims are evil, hypocritical bastards. That's also irrelevant, as it is not at all what the religion itself teaches, or what is there in the text.
You're basing your belief system now on two faulty assumptions:
First, you assume that belief in a deity depends on organized religion. It doesn't.
Second, you assume that religious teachings are particularly problematic in pushing racism, censorship, and other forms of hatred. Atheists have been guilty of just as many atrocities. The only difference is, they can skip the step of perverting some holy book to prove their point.
I'm Agnostic, but I am under no illusions that this belief has any correlation with hatred and stupidity. It's possible to make a peaceful religion, and it's possible to make a hateful Atheist dogma.
Here's an idea: Instead of looking for someone to blame for the problem, why don't you do something about it?
Little boys don't get born from this procedure. There's no Y chromosomes.
Care to link to any of this research?
I'd actually hypothesize that it has more to do with society than anything else -- specifically, the pressures of repression and idolization. The first, you can see in the reputation of Catholic schoolgirls. The second, you can see in just the opposite -- party girls.
But that's all speculation; I certainly don't have any research to back it up.
More lesbians does not equal increased chances of males getting laid.
That is, unless you're implying that the average Slashdotter is a lesbian...
Why do we have a patent system?
No, seriously -- TiVo got plenty of money for being first to market, and for licensing their actual product (hardware and software) to others.
What does the consumer gain at this point by having competition killed? Would TiVo really not have bothered to invent the DVR without protection from this competition?
Fact is, you can configure KDE to work pretty much the way GNOME does, if you really want to.
The reverse is not true. Maybe the GNOME people have better defaults, according to you. But they have a nasty habit of removing functionality because it might confuse someone. Classic example: In KDE, I can configure what clicking my title-bar does. Or double-click, or middle-click, or right-click, or mouse-wheel. In GNOME, well...
Here, Linus said it best.
Did you even read what you wrote?
Mac costs a Mac, and Windows costs a Windows license. So that's an up-front cost right there, unless you already have both. In addition, Windows, at least, is going to cost you Visual Studio, and KDE/Qt is hardly the only framework that will cost you money.
And you can always use Python -- if I remember, the Python-Qt bindings don't require that your Python app be GPL'd. Or you can use any of the other toolkits for Linux, or write your own.
However, depending on how popular your commercial app is, you have to consider TCO here. How much is it going to cost you to license Qt, versus how much development time will it save you? Adobe, Skype, Opera, et al seem happy with it. What's your hangup?
Yes they do. Unless you're talking about shows distributed via BitTorrent, you're talking about people who have some sort of subscription to some sort of TV service. In addition, they see ads, and if it's a government-sponsored show, they pay taxes.
That's more analogous to the radio than it is to Internet piracy, unless you're going to argue that Internet piracy is really analogous to radio.
Why does that have to be recorded?
Just leave the box locked until the votes need to be counted, at which point, leave out either time or order.
Devil's advocate:
The difference is whether everything suffers from the overhead of garbage collection or whether just some of your newfangled programs do.
I actually agree with you, but that is not a compelling argument.
I think we might be talking about the same thing.
Think of it this way: The granularity of a system with no memory protection at all is the entire system. Array overflow on Mac OS 9, in ANY program? Whoops, you just overwrote the kernel. Or fubared some other, completely unrelated process.
The granularity of most modern systems is the process. Array overflow is not an exception, it's a segmentation fault, an illegal operation, etc. Or it's randomly corrupting some other part of your program, possibly with security implications.
What I was suggesting, which I think you agree with, is that we move to managed memory, where the granularity of memory protection is the constructs of the language/VM. Here, array overflow means exception -- but you could conceivably have entire self-contained "programs", and a "kernel" which catches those exceptions and simply nukes the appropriate program.
That is what I think Microsoft's Singularity is about, and it's hardly the first.
In other words, Security through Obscurity.
It's equally hard when they see a pile of generic addresses that don't respond to external connections, other than explicitly-allowed connections that the company wants to respond to.
And NAT is your way of hacking around the ISPs' greed. If we were on IPv6, there would be no need for an IP address to cost money. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that you use, say, 1394 to wire two computers together, so that you don't have to pay for a network card, and don't pollute the MAC address namespace.
No, more like:
... ...
../trunk ../mybranch ../trunk ../mybranch ... ... ... ../trunk
svn merge $REPO/trunk . -r...^C
svn log
#shit, this is taking too long
^C
svn log --limit 10 | less
svn merge $REPO/trunk . -r123:HEAD
# Now go resolve some conflicts
This is less painful if you do it often, because there will be fewer conflicts and surprises. But doing it often is, itself, painful, because of how needlessly complex that process is. And then when it's time to merge back to trunk, well, first you do the above, then you do this:
cd
svn update -r...^C
cd
svn log --limit=1
cd
svn update -r456
svn merge $REPO/branches/mybranch . -r...^C
cd
svn log --limit=10 | less
# Oh right, I do need everything this time
svn log | less
# Alright, coffee time
# Let's see what's on YouTube
# Finally!
cd
svn merge $REPO/branches/mybranch . -r123:HEAD
svn update
# Grr, more conflicts
svn commit
So that was a bit exaggerated, and it's actually tolerable for what people use branches for in Subversion. But having branching/merging actually be easy opens up a few possibilities -- like being able to "commit" a change to your branch almost every time you save, and not having to worry about it being "done" for you to get the benefits of version control. And then, when you want everyone else to see your changes, bundle them all up in one neat patch (or changeset) and send them in. You certainly wouldn't commit as often to a central repository -- who wants the CI system spamming you (and everyone else) for every typo?
That's how I understand it, anyway. I do use svn at work, but I've been considering using something like bzr to maintain all my local checkouts.
And yes, you could do something like this with svn, but making it easy is a Good Thing.