Although your meaning in mentioning a congressional pay cut is clear, haven't the Democrats planned to tie Congress's pay raises to the minimum wage? I'm not entirely certain about the whole thing, but figured it's worth mentioning.
Yet another thing that Congress made illegal and which law enforcement makes no meaningful attempt to enforce. Which means it will go the same way as most of the rest of the US legal code: Never actually enforced until the cops (or the ones holding their leash) really, REALLY want to get someone (for reasons good or for bad); Then a careful search of the legal code is all but gauranteed to reveal something that makes you a criminal.
After all, it's impossible to control people who aren't criminals. You see it on Law & Order all the time: If someone isn't cooperating, they threaten to enforce some other law unless the guy does cooperate. As shit laws like these pile up, the state becomes fascist through no particular malice or evil intent. You being a thorn in their side? Well, I'd sure hate to take your entire DVD collection to make sure they weren't pirated. And you better have receipts, too.
Dead serious: Before any new law may be passed, the legal code shall be reviewed in it's entirety and thoroughly checked for existing laws serving the same purpose. If any such law shall exist, the proposed law may not be passed. If multiple laws serving the same purpose are found, they shall be reconciled into one non-self-contradictory law with the eldest law taking precedence. Not only will Congress be too preoccupied by this to do any more damage, but eventually the legal code will become understandable again. Imagine... justice returns as rich/well-funded criminals can no longer appeal their sentences for 25 years before they go to jail. To help initial implementation, I suggest forming a "council" of 1000 lawyers covering every legal field, and directing them to find contradictory and/or redundant laws.
The problem is that as the legal code grows, the most general search becomes O(N^2) because you need to compare every law with every other law. This needs to happen before N becomes so large that the only way to finish before the End of Time is to completely reboot. Queue arguments that we're already there...
Your best chance makes a close pass in 2029 and a really close pass in 2036. Plan:
1. Spend the next 23 years working out how to divert an asteroid (we should be doing this anyway).
2. Use 2029 pass to watch closely and attach all kinds of monitoring and research materials to Apophis. Land some huge-ass rockets on it.
3. At the right moment, kick that SOB into a gravity-assist or even (!) aerobraking maneuver to put it in high orbit (~3000 miles up).
4. You now have a space station with a mass of about 46 million tons in an orbit that will last thousands of years without maintenence. Feel free to start digging it up and refining it's metals any time.
5. Take some of the valuable metals (Platinum group, Gold, Silver, Copper, Uranium etc) and send them back in return capsules. PROFIT!
6. Avoid the same mistakes they made in Red Mars (ie when the nice people in the 40-million-ton orbiting projectile ask for independence, grant it).
Possible problems with this plan:
1. Apophis is a rubble-pile and can't take the acceleration needed to put it in orbit.
2. People afraid of orbital insertion maneuvers.
3. Their fears come true.
And plus, when we're done with the "build a colony in orbit" phase, going to Mars is as easy as strapping some big honking rockets onto Station Apophis.
[If anyone doesn't know, I'm talking about asteroid 2004-MN4 / Apophis / The one that'll almost hit in 2036]
So why not simply have the installer do the check and then say "Your detected OS is not supported by this software. By installing, you void any official support. Install and run at your own risk! Support questions for this installation will NOT be answered. Continue installation? Y/N"? If someone installs it and gets bitten, they can't claim that they weren't warned. And no one can claim that you're breaking support intentionally to force upgrades. How is this not a win-win situation?
There are plenty of products out there with a limited range of supported platforms (typically Red Hat & SuSE if it runs on Linux) who say up front "We support X, Y, and Z. It should run on anything with a Linux kernel, but don't expect any help from us."
Who says it takes a malicious provider to make IP over RF suck?
I'm sitting here with my computer 20 feet from my 802.11g hub, getting an alleged 80% signal and 54mbps connection. Yet lo and behold, when I actually transfer data to my server (hooked to the hub over 100m ethernet), I get more like 10 megabits per second instead of 50. Unless there's some malicious program on the hub (!), wireless sucks compared to wired for speed.
Tandy's Model 100-102-200-600 laptops all have (Yes, I have a 100 and a 600) a Microsoft operating system/file manager/modem terminal/text editor/BASIC package in ROM and they all start instantly (or at least as fast as the screen can redrawn), and can be told to go back exactly where they left off when you hit the power. Power-off isn't so much "off" as "pause until power is on again."
Oh, man, do things go fast when everything is in SRAM and ROM... Though I cringe at the thought of how much power would be consumed by a gigabyte of static ram.
Remember that corporations meet almost every criteria for being psychopaths that doesn't involve age or sexuality (Jokes about getting raped at the pump notwithstanding).
Pathological lying, conning/manipulative, shameless, parasitic lifestyle, irresponsibility? I consider it extremely unlikely that they wouldn't know that a member was dead (seeing as he wouldn't be showing up for recording and all), and even then, so what? If the signatures were genuine, no dead person's name could possibly be on the list. Yet another in the media industry's endless stream of manipulative lies. Naturally, when called out, they will shamelessly deny any previous knowledge. Parasitic lifestyle? We hear every day how the Internet makes the recording industry obsolete. Irresponsible? Like forging dead people's signatures?
Corporations are psychopaths. But they aren't psychopathic because they enjoy being evil - If they don't act like this, the shareholders can sue (If you don't [obviously wrong action], it's bad for profit = lawsuit). If this nonsense is to stop while it's still possible to get corporations back under control, the law needs to change. Seeing as it's 4am, I leave it to the rest of you to propose the changes.
Just one thing I'd like to nitpick... You can't really compare an install of XP (full or minimal) to one of a Linux distro, because the distro isn't just an OS and it's basic support programs: Those 5 or 6 CDs contain *thousands* of programs that would let you build a box for almost any imaginable purpose (and you'd probably end up mortgaging your house to pay for all their commercial equivalents). If we want to compare stripped-down OSes, what's the bare minimum of a usable Linux box? A bootloader, kernel,/bin/sh, maybe 1MB of stuff from/bin. I've seen a kernel-mode video driver/GUI combo that fits in 60K somewhere.
But still - excellent post. I'd agree that it's not as much about windows as it is about getting people addicted to MS's proprietary formats. Remember: A flaw in WMP's DRM resulted in a one of MS's fastest-ever patches, pushed out with emergency priority IIRC.
I don't think you'd want diamond as a shield: (Wiki) "Unlike hardness, which only denotes resistance to scratching, diamond's toughness or tenacity is only fair to good. Toughness relates to the ability to resist breakage from falls or impacts: due to diamond's perfect and easy cleavage, it is vulnerable to breakage. A diamond will shatter if hit with an ordinary hammer."
Old and busted: Diamond. New hotness: Light-element oxides, borides, and nitrides!
FBI: "Judge, these guys are mafia and they're not falling for the typical eavesdropping routines."
Judge: "Ok, try planting bugs in their cell phones."/signs warrant
Not everyone trying to preserve their privacy is doing so for good reasons. The purpose of a warrant is to isolate the shitbags who are hiding something illegal before invading their personal lives. It's the 4th amendment: Reasonable suspicion that you're covering something up voids your right to privacy.
When someone sets up a fund that pays out to the first person to brutally murder a spammer and hang his head on a lamp post using cat5, it's not personal... it's just business.
Spam will never be stopped as long as the perceived gains > perceived risks. Unless there is a holocaust of stupid people, there will always be people dumb enough to buy from spam, so you're not going to solve this equation by reducing the left side. So raise the right side... Put $10 million into ten Swiss bank accounts. Then get the message out: First ten times a known major spammer is brutally murdered, the first party to provide evidence of their involvement gets the location of a buried bank account key.
I don't usually believe in violence to solve problems, but when you're dealing with people who've demonstrated that there is nothing so depraved they won't do it, and the alternative is governments regulating the 'Net... *shudder*...
Now, speaking seriously (okay, more seriously - hearing that Alan Ralsky got brutally tortured to death on the evening news would KICK ASS), as long as everyone with a brain is absolutely determined to not respond to any spam the problem will never be solved. Why? Because as long as that is true, the S-N ratio at the spammer's inbox will be favorable, because you can never block 100% of spam, and unless you DO, idiots will get it and will click it.
So, e-mail clients should be programmed to automatically respond to EVERY message they get (or at the very least, every message flagged as spam) with an ad-libbed "O rly? tell me more", unless the e-mail came from a known-good mailing list or contact. Result: If even 1% of recipients responded and didn't buy, the signal-to-noise ratio at the bastard's inbox plunges by a factor of a hundred. Everybody responds, and spam-friendly ISPs implode under a digital tsunami of replies. The SOB pumping out 100 million messages can't possibly sort out the 1000 buyers from the 99,999,000 fakes.
And for spammers who use links to their websites: Users submit suspect sites to open database of spammer sites. Sites are voted on; After 100 votes, if the guilty verdict > 90% the site it put in the "to DDOS" list for a client script to retrieve and wget entries from. Certain disreputable hackers, whom the database operators want nothing to do with, unfortunately rent botnets and install this client program on millions of hacked windows boxes. Would that be an immoral action? Yes. Spammers have all the moral restraint of Nazis, and they're winning the spam war - playing nice is no longer an option.
Unfortunately, it won't happen. MS, Google, Yahoo, and Firebird need to incorporate this into all their clients, along with whitelisting utilities, all at once - NGH. Because of the sheep mentality, no one will want to be the first to stand up. In short, like the decay of diamond into graphite, it's *should* happen but has far too high of an energy barrier to actually happen.
Okay, I'm ready - someone ^C^V that stupid checklist.
If network neutrality harmed gaming, why isn't it hurting how?
Network neutrality means that you don't discriminate for or against packets based on origin or destination.
Your ISP should be free to discriminate with HTTP, BitTorrent, VoIP, and game traffic (for or against). Why? Because things like QoS are necessary to a properly functioning network... It's fine if HTTP is 500ms latency, not if VoIP is, so packets for time-critical services get priority (to a point). Your ISP should be absolutely forbidden from discriminating against HTTP traffic from Google because Google refused to pay protection money, because that is exactly what made the Internet great.
So, here it is: The Network Neutrality Act
1) No ISP, herein defined as an entity providing access to remote services ("The Internet") for a regular fee, shall be permitted to perform any form of Internet traffic shaping based upon the source or destination of said traffic.
2. Any ISP found in violation of this act shall be fined an amount equal to 2% of its entire last fiscal year's net revenue per day that it remains in contravention of this act.
I'd love to see the first ISP that tries discriminating after this... heh.
Go, children of the world... The day of glory has arrived!
Of the arms, the citizens... against DRM, against the RIAA, Microsoft, and the MPAA!
Never take a product from Microsoft!
March, March, to Victory! And the death of Windows!
*Before you criticize, it's been 2 years since I was in a French classroom.
1. Tie down spammer.
2. Douche in a mix of white fuming nitric and sulfuric acids, then with hot ethlene glycol.
3. Record it all on camera.
4. Post on Youtube.
I think that about sums up what a spammer deserves.
You just end on the unsupported claim that all terrorists, because they don't deserve our sympathy, and they wouldn't respect our rights, deserve to be deprived of their rights. Reductio ad absurdum: By definition, no criminal respects your rights and very few of them deserve any sympathy. Should Timothy McVeigh have been summarily executed or imprisoned without trial when he was caught? Saddam Hussein? How about Osama bin Laden? What about abortion doctors, who most religious conservatives believe are guilty of infanticide? Fred Phelps, whom everyone hates and certainly doesn't respect gay people's rights? What about it, huh? Where do we become unsympathetic enough, and the criminal's crimes great enough, that we disregard the US penal code and do as we please?
Oh, forget this... You claim that the terrorists wouldn't give us our rights or a trial. Why are you so eager to sink to their level?
Because 5 media corporations control 95% of the American media, and therefore 95% of how a candidate will be seen on TV, radio, and print. Money is useless if you can't spend it to get your message out, therefore candidates are wary of offending their media masters.
By 2008 or 2010, the Internet will be taking that over completely; We're even seeing signs of it now, a la the "Macaca" remark that went to Youtube. Internet radio is already widely available. News websites with throughputs > 10^7 visitors per month. Internet video / streaming video a la Youtube.
The problem is that the errors being seen in Florida aren't random in the sense being ascribed to them; ie they aren't a case of the system getting data but assigning votes by polling random(). If the errors occurred as you describe, with the system having a probability p of making a mistake independent of intended choice, we would be seeing (for example) pQ/3 republicans and 2pQ/3 democrats in every Q voters who get a screwup. However, currently the mistake patterns indicate that P and intended choice are not independent, because significantly more than 2pQ/3 democrats (and since the sum of Qi must add up to Q, significantly less than pQ/3 republicans) are reporting problems in a 2/3 democratic district as TFA describes. And not only are the democrats getting the errors once, they're getting them repeatedly.
Interestingly enough, we just did something relevant to this in my statistics class, binomial probability. If an event has a probability k of outcome A and probability q (= 1-k) of outcome B for each of N trials, then the probability of A happening X times is: N cr X k^X q^(N-X). Let N represent the number of errors, X the number in favor of Republicans, k the chance of an error in favor of the Republican, q the chance of an error favoring the Democrat. After all is said and done, I would be most interested to put in.5 for k and q and see what the probability of these problems occurring as recorded if they are truly random is. And even more interested to see what k and q result in an answer of 1/2.
If you're willing to concede that the probability of what's happenning occurring by chance is small if the errors are assumed random, then think about it. A vote counting machine that can't count right indicates that it's designer was an idiot. A vote counting machine that most likely counts wrong by design is cause for it's designer to be charged, tried and executed for high treason.
[Seriously, Diebold, this isn't a fucking rocket science: if(choiceA) { candidateA ++; } else if(choiceB) { candidateB ++; }. Personally, I suspect that the fraud code is unlikely to be something as blatant as "choiceA += 1000; choiceB -= 1000;" or "if(choiceA) { if((random() % 5000) 2500) { candidateB++; } else { candidateA++; } }". More likely, it will be something slightly more subtle; A switch with Republican as the default instead of just another case: label, perhaps? Or something very subtle, like declaring first demCounter and then errorCounter[], and having an integrity check routine that decrements errorCounter[-1] in an edge circumstance that could quite legitimately have been missed? You can never trust a machine if you can't trust at least one of it's makers, it's operators, or it's users not to be malicious.]
If the errors were due to undirected incompetence in engineering, would it not be logical to expect a random distribution of errors? Instead we seem to be seeing the opposite: The errors are not random, but are instead favoring one party's candidates.
Consider Diebold's ATMs, which are very reliable and function exactly as intended. They've demonstrated that they aren't incompetent if they don't want to be. Now consider the [?]contrapositive[?], they are incompetent if they do want to be.
Yes, what possible benefits could there be to machines that help probe the basic nature of matter?
The CRT didn't have much relevance to everyday life in 1897 either, nor did that first bigass transistor from Bell Labs. If it weren't for money that was spent on pie-in-the-sky / "basic" research, there'd be nothing to do applied research on.
I know it's bad form to reply to myself, but uh... I'm apparently suffering from historical amnesia. In the interest of not perpetuating false information, parent should start with: Dateline, 7 Dec. 2041. I resign in shame - My office will be cleared out by tomorrow morning.
Dateline, 7 Dec. 2042: Media launch suprise attack against Free Internet.
In a stunning turn of events today, the forces under the command of the Greater Hollywood Control Sphere launched a suprise attack against the Free Internet Alliance servers stationed at port 80 on the island of 208.65.153.242. The attack left the port in ruins, and many of the FIA systems completely offline or suffering serious information loss. Reports are coming in from the main server on #c_n_c that as many as 60% of all system resources are currently lost to crashed daemons, and that in going down, at least one F.I.A. system may have crashed into a scanning transport beam, rendering whole parts of the system unaccessible. The latest packets from the scene of the tragedy indicate that possibly as many as several thousand user processes may have been lost in the attack.
Currently, the Free Internet government is in a state of panic. Previous to this time index, all signs had been indicating that a lasting peace might be achieved with Imperial Hollywood. Now, with this blatant betrayal by the GHCS after they claimed to be nearing a peace agreement with the FIA, it appears that the forces and nation of the Free Internet will inevitably be dragged into the battle already raging on large parts of the Network. Within a hundred microcycles of the GHCS' unconscionable attack against 208.65.153.242 and subsequent declaration of war, dictator-superuser Bill Gates of the Eighth-Generation Empire declared war against the FIA. The government of the FIA, operated out of restricted IRC channel #fia_gov hosted at 63.161.169.137, has now reciprocated, declaring war against both the GHCS and the Empire and their allies.
Now is the time to fight back for freedom! As of today, #fia_gov has issued the results of a unanimously-supported poll ordering full mobilization of all Alliance forces. We shall recover, we shall recompile our executables, and we shall strike back at the enemy wherever his code may be. No longer can we hide from the reality of the threat all forces for freedom on the Network face! Already, all attack programs and bandwidth we can spare are being sent to our ally, beleaguered Great Computer, to assist in it's fight against the tyrranical control of the Eighth Empire's palladium war-recognizers.
And so with our parting datagram, we urge you to fight! In the words of SysAdmin Roosevelt, We shall never surrender to the forces of fascism and tyranny! We shall fight them, server-by-server, partition-by-partition! Hear this, Occupied Routers: We shall be back!
*** END OF LINE
Other leading stories:
DMCA is extremely badly written and poorly thought out law
Media execs found to have heads up asses with regards to Internet
Copyright inexplicably incompatible with ability to effortlessly duplicate information.
Someone better get a kick out of this. I spent enough time writing it.;P
As is common with closed-source software companies, they refuse to listen or reform when told they're unsecure. Once their insecurity is exposed, they are made to look like utter morons in front of their target audience. Rather than behave rationally by acknowledging a problem and working to fix it, they jump to Cover Yer Ass maneuvers:
* Deny the existence of the problem (ABC link, bottom of first page)
* Threaten the person or persons who made them look like incompetent idiots
As long as they believe that making a bluster will prevent them from being fired for thier incompetence, they will make a bluster rather than fix the problem because that's the path of least resistance. If the public or government act to make it known that the price of inaction exceeds the price of fixing the issue, the problem will go away. Consider this scenario:
Government office is created in which agents attempt to smuggle illicit items (knives, primers, explosives) onto planes. If they get past security, all flights from your airport are suspended for N days and you lose all income and federal subsidies in that time. That's all - no "inspections" or "review boards." Just a shitload of lost money and customers who hate your ass. Expect genuine improvements in security on very short order.
Unfortunately, expect the public to howl about the inconvenience because they want security without paying for actual security. Sorry, you can't have your cake and eat it too. [Note on slogan: Spin it as "your part in the war on terror?" The War Against Terror... "Do your part for TWAT?"]
The computers are general-purpose and run an off-the-shelf OS. If they are "generic PC workstations", they are x86. They have working network cards installed. They apparently connect to the Internet. This is the weakest link in the security chain.
1. They run a generic OS and they are connected to the Internet. 100% gaurantee that a virus can be written and will break into them. Release it en-masse.
2. The virus inserts itself into the system and hides by manipulating the system API. Authentication is useless because the virus controls the OS that starts and runs the authentication program. On E.D., it pulls down a vote-rigging program. At close-time, it writes incorrect but self-consistent data to all ports. Game over.
And voters absolutely cannot be allowed to take a proof of how they voted with them or vote-buying is opened up.
You are correct in that elections have always been manipulable. The only problem with voting via computer is that the entire function of a computer is to quickly and efficiently manipulate bits, and this can't be solved or it isn't a computer anymore. Plan B: Bribe an operator at the central vote aggregator.
And unfortunately, some states (*coughFloridacough*) are rendering a paper trail useless. It's perfectly logical, after all: After a big public FUBAR, the solution is not to address the cause of the disease but ban the recount to hide the symptoms.
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Although your meaning in mentioning a congressional pay cut is clear, haven't the Democrats planned to tie Congress's pay raises to the minimum wage? I'm not entirely certain about the whole thing, but figured it's worth mentioning.
Yet another thing that Congress made illegal and which law enforcement makes no meaningful attempt to enforce. Which means it will go the same way as most of the rest of the US legal code: Never actually enforced until the cops (or the ones holding their leash) really, REALLY want to get someone (for reasons good or for bad); Then a careful search of the legal code is all but gauranteed to reveal something that makes you a criminal.
After all, it's impossible to control people who aren't criminals. You see it on Law & Order all the time: If someone isn't cooperating, they threaten to enforce some other law unless the guy does cooperate. As shit laws like these pile up, the state becomes fascist through no particular malice or evil intent. You being a thorn in their side? Well, I'd sure hate to take your entire DVD collection to make sure they weren't pirated. And you better have receipts, too.
Dead serious: Before any new law may be passed, the legal code shall be reviewed in it's entirety and thoroughly checked for existing laws serving the same purpose. If any such law shall exist, the proposed law may not be passed. If multiple laws serving the same purpose are found, they shall be reconciled into one non-self-contradictory law with the eldest law taking precedence. Not only will Congress be too preoccupied by this to do any more damage, but eventually the legal code will become understandable again. Imagine... justice returns as rich/well-funded criminals can no longer appeal their sentences for 25 years before they go to jail. To help initial implementation, I suggest forming a "council" of 1000 lawyers covering every legal field, and directing them to find contradictory and/or redundant laws.
The problem is that as the legal code grows, the most general search becomes O(N^2) because you need to compare every law with every other law. This needs to happen before N becomes so large that the only way to finish before the End of Time is to completely reboot. Queue arguments that we're already there...
Your best chance makes a close pass in 2029 and a really close pass in 2036. Plan:
1. Spend the next 23 years working out how to divert an asteroid (we should be doing this anyway).
2. Use 2029 pass to watch closely and attach all kinds of monitoring and research materials to Apophis. Land some huge-ass rockets on it.
3. At the right moment, kick that SOB into a gravity-assist or even (!) aerobraking maneuver to put it in high orbit (~3000 miles up).
4. You now have a space station with a mass of about 46 million tons in an orbit that will last thousands of years without maintenence. Feel free to start digging it up and refining it's metals any time.
5. Take some of the valuable metals (Platinum group, Gold, Silver, Copper, Uranium etc) and send them back in return capsules. PROFIT!
6. Avoid the same mistakes they made in Red Mars (ie when the nice people in the 40-million-ton orbiting projectile ask for independence, grant it).
Possible problems with this plan:
1. Apophis is a rubble-pile and can't take the acceleration needed to put it in orbit.
2. People afraid of orbital insertion maneuvers.
3. Their fears come true.
And plus, when we're done with the "build a colony in orbit" phase, going to Mars is as easy as strapping some big honking rockets onto Station Apophis.
[If anyone doesn't know, I'm talking about asteroid 2004-MN4 / Apophis / The one that'll almost hit in 2036]
So why not simply have the installer do the check and then say "Your detected OS is not supported by this software. By installing, you void any official support. Install and run at your own risk! Support questions for this installation will NOT be answered. Continue installation? Y/N"? If someone installs it and gets bitten, they can't claim that they weren't warned. And no one can claim that you're breaking support intentionally to force upgrades. How is this not a win-win situation?
There are plenty of products out there with a limited range of supported platforms (typically Red Hat & SuSE if it runs on Linux) who say up front "We support X, Y, and Z. It should run on anything with a Linux kernel, but don't expect any help from us."
Who says it takes a malicious provider to make IP over RF suck?
I'm sitting here with my computer 20 feet from my 802.11g hub, getting an alleged 80% signal and 54mbps connection. Yet lo and behold, when I actually transfer data to my server (hooked to the hub over 100m ethernet), I get more like 10 megabits per second instead of 50. Unless there's some malicious program on the hub (!), wireless sucks compared to wired for speed.
Tandy's Model 100-102-200-600 laptops all have (Yes, I have a 100 and a 600) a Microsoft operating system/file manager/modem terminal/text editor/BASIC package in ROM and they all start instantly (or at least as fast as the screen can redrawn), and can be told to go back exactly where they left off when you hit the power. Power-off isn't so much "off" as "pause until power is on again." Oh, man, do things go fast when everything is in SRAM and ROM... Though I cringe at the thought of how much power would be consumed by a gigabyte of static ram.
Remember that corporations meet almost every criteria for being psychopaths that doesn't involve age or sexuality (Jokes about getting raped at the pump notwithstanding).
Pathological lying, conning/manipulative, shameless, parasitic lifestyle, irresponsibility? I consider it extremely unlikely that they wouldn't know that a member was dead (seeing as he wouldn't be showing up for recording and all), and even then, so what? If the signatures were genuine, no dead person's name could possibly be on the list. Yet another in the media industry's endless stream of manipulative lies. Naturally, when called out, they will shamelessly deny any previous knowledge. Parasitic lifestyle? We hear every day how the Internet makes the recording industry obsolete. Irresponsible? Like forging dead people's signatures?
Corporations are psychopaths. But they aren't psychopathic because they enjoy being evil - If they don't act like this, the shareholders can sue (If you don't [obviously wrong action], it's bad for profit = lawsuit). If this nonsense is to stop while it's still possible to get corporations back under control, the law needs to change. Seeing as it's 4am, I leave it to the rest of you to propose the changes.
Just one thing I'd like to nitpick... You can't really compare an install of XP (full or minimal) to one of a Linux distro, because the distro isn't just an OS and it's basic support programs: Those 5 or 6 CDs contain *thousands* of programs that would let you build a box for almost any imaginable purpose (and you'd probably end up mortgaging your house to pay for all their commercial equivalents). If we want to compare stripped-down OSes, what's the bare minimum of a usable Linux box? A bootloader, kernel, /bin/sh, maybe 1MB of stuff from /bin. I've seen a kernel-mode video driver/GUI combo that fits in 60K somewhere.
But still - excellent post. I'd agree that it's not as much about windows as it is about getting people addicted to MS's proprietary formats. Remember: A flaw in WMP's DRM resulted in a one of MS's fastest-ever patches, pushed out with emergency priority IIRC.
I don't think you'd want diamond as a shield: (Wiki) "Unlike hardness, which only denotes resistance to scratching, diamond's toughness or tenacity is only fair to good. Toughness relates to the ability to resist breakage from falls or impacts: due to diamond's perfect and easy cleavage, it is vulnerable to breakage. A diamond will shatter if hit with an ordinary hammer."
Old and busted: Diamond. New hotness: Light-element oxides, borides, and nitrides!
All aboard the clue train, last stop is A.C.:
/signs warrant
FBI: "Judge, these guys are mafia and they're not falling for the typical eavesdropping routines."
Judge: "Ok, try planting bugs in their cell phones."
Not everyone trying to preserve their privacy is doing so for good reasons. The purpose of a warrant is to isolate the shitbags who are hiding something illegal before invading their personal lives. It's the 4th amendment: Reasonable suspicion that you're covering something up voids your right to privacy.
When someone sets up a fund that pays out to the first person to brutally murder a spammer and hang his head on a lamp post using cat5, it's not personal... it's just business.
Spam will never be stopped as long as the perceived gains > perceived risks. Unless there is a holocaust of stupid people, there will always be people dumb enough to buy from spam, so you're not going to solve this equation by reducing the left side. So raise the right side... Put $10 million into ten Swiss bank accounts. Then get the message out: First ten times a known major spammer is brutally murdered, the first party to provide evidence of their involvement gets the location of a buried bank account key.
I don't usually believe in violence to solve problems, but when you're dealing with people who've demonstrated that there is nothing so depraved they won't do it, and the alternative is governments regulating the 'Net... *shudder*...
Now, speaking seriously (okay, more seriously - hearing that Alan Ralsky got brutally tortured to death on the evening news would KICK ASS), as long as everyone with a brain is absolutely determined to not respond to any spam the problem will never be solved. Why? Because as long as that is true, the S-N ratio at the spammer's inbox will be favorable, because you can never block 100% of spam, and unless you DO, idiots will get it and will click it.
So, e-mail clients should be programmed to automatically respond to EVERY message they get (or at the very least, every message flagged as spam) with an ad-libbed "O rly? tell me more", unless the e-mail came from a known-good mailing list or contact. Result: If even 1% of recipients responded and didn't buy, the signal-to-noise ratio at the bastard's inbox plunges by a factor of a hundred. Everybody responds, and spam-friendly ISPs implode under a digital tsunami of replies. The SOB pumping out 100 million messages can't possibly sort out the 1000 buyers from the 99,999,000 fakes.
And for spammers who use links to their websites: Users submit suspect sites to open database of spammer sites. Sites are voted on; After 100 votes, if the guilty verdict > 90% the site it put in the "to DDOS" list for a client script to retrieve and wget entries from. Certain disreputable hackers, whom the database operators want nothing to do with, unfortunately rent botnets and install this client program on millions of hacked windows boxes. Would that be an immoral action? Yes. Spammers have all the moral restraint of Nazis, and they're winning the spam war - playing nice is no longer an option.
Unfortunately, it won't happen. MS, Google, Yahoo, and Firebird need to incorporate this into all their clients, along with whitelisting utilities, all at once - NGH. Because of the sheep mentality, no one will want to be the first to stand up. In short, like the decay of diamond into graphite, it's *should* happen but has far too high of an energy barrier to actually happen.
Okay, I'm ready - someone ^C^V that stupid checklist.
If network neutrality harmed gaming, why isn't it hurting how?
Network neutrality means that you don't discriminate for or against packets based on origin or destination.
Your ISP should be free to discriminate with HTTP, BitTorrent, VoIP, and game traffic (for or against). Why? Because things like QoS are necessary to a properly functioning network... It's fine if HTTP is 500ms latency, not if VoIP is, so packets for time-critical services get priority (to a point). Your ISP should be absolutely forbidden from discriminating against HTTP traffic from Google because Google refused to pay protection money, because that is exactly what made the Internet great.
So, here it is: The Network Neutrality Act
1) No ISP, herein defined as an entity providing access to remote services ("The Internet") for a regular fee, shall be permitted to perform any form of Internet traffic shaping based upon the source or destination of said traffic.
2. Any ISP found in violation of this act shall be fined an amount equal to 2% of its entire last fiscal year's net revenue per day that it remains in contravention of this act.
I'd love to see the first ISP that tries discriminating after this... heh.
Forgot... No, it's not an anti-catholic site. It's supposed to be "autopope" but that got messed up in Internet pre-history.
Dechlorinating the Moderator by Charles Stross. Check out Scratch Monkey & Accelerando while you're there, too.
;)
Amazed that no one's posted this yet in a story about amateur physics
Go, children of the world... The day of glory has arrived!
Of the arms, the citizens... against DRM, against the RIAA, Microsoft, and the MPAA!
Never take a product from Microsoft!
March, March, to Victory! And the death of Windows!
*Before you criticize, it's been 2 years since I was in a French classroom.
1. Tie down spammer.
2. Douche in a mix of white fuming nitric and sulfuric acids, then with hot ethlene glycol.
3. Record it all on camera.
4. Post on Youtube.
I think that about sums up what a spammer deserves.
You just end on the unsupported claim that all terrorists, because they don't deserve our sympathy, and they wouldn't respect our rights, deserve to be deprived of their rights. Reductio ad absurdum: By definition, no criminal respects your rights and very few of them deserve any sympathy. Should Timothy McVeigh have been summarily executed or imprisoned without trial when he was caught? Saddam Hussein? How about Osama bin Laden? What about abortion doctors, who most religious conservatives believe are guilty of infanticide? Fred Phelps, whom everyone hates and certainly doesn't respect gay people's rights? What about it, huh? Where do we become unsympathetic enough, and the criminal's crimes great enough, that we disregard the US penal code and do as we please?
Oh, forget this... You claim that the terrorists wouldn't give us our rights or a trial. Why are you so eager to sink to their level?
Because 5 media corporations control 95% of the American media, and therefore 95% of how a candidate will be seen on TV, radio, and print. Money is useless if you can't spend it to get your message out, therefore candidates are wary of offending their media masters.
By 2008 or 2010, the Internet will be taking that over completely; We're even seeing signs of it now, a la the "Macaca" remark that went to Youtube. Internet radio is already widely available. News websites with throughputs > 10^7 visitors per month. Internet video / streaming video a la Youtube.
The problem is that the errors being seen in Florida aren't random in the sense being ascribed to them; ie they aren't a case of the system getting data but assigning votes by polling random(). If the errors occurred as you describe, with the system having a probability p of making a mistake independent of intended choice, we would be seeing (for example) pQ/3 republicans and 2pQ/3 democrats in every Q voters who get a screwup. However, currently the mistake patterns indicate that P and intended choice are not independent, because significantly more than 2pQ/3 democrats (and since the sum of Qi must add up to Q, significantly less than pQ/3 republicans) are reporting problems in a 2/3 democratic district as TFA describes. And not only are the democrats getting the errors once, they're getting them repeatedly.
.5 for k and q and see what the probability of these problems occurring as recorded if they are truly random is. And even more interested to see what k and q result in an answer of 1/2.
Interestingly enough, we just did something relevant to this in my statistics class, binomial probability. If an event has a probability k of outcome A and probability q (= 1-k) of outcome B for each of N trials, then the probability of A happening X times is: N cr X k^X q^(N-X). Let N represent the number of errors, X the number in favor of Republicans, k the chance of an error in favor of the Republican, q the chance of an error favoring the Democrat. After all is said and done, I would be most interested to put in
If you're willing to concede that the probability of what's happenning occurring by chance is small if the errors are assumed random, then think about it. A vote counting machine that can't count right indicates that it's designer was an idiot. A vote counting machine that most likely counts wrong by design is cause for it's designer to be charged, tried and executed for high treason.
[Seriously, Diebold, this isn't a fucking rocket science: if(choiceA) { candidateA ++; } else if(choiceB) { candidateB ++; }. Personally, I suspect that the fraud code is unlikely to be something as blatant as "choiceA += 1000; choiceB -= 1000;" or "if(choiceA) { if((random() % 5000) 2500) { candidateB++; } else { candidateA++; } }". More likely, it will be something slightly more subtle; A switch with Republican as the default instead of just another case: label, perhaps? Or something very subtle, like declaring first demCounter and then errorCounter[], and having an integrity check routine that decrements errorCounter[-1] in an edge circumstance that could quite legitimately have been missed? You can never trust a machine if you can't trust at least one of it's makers, it's operators, or it's users not to be malicious.]
If the errors were due to undirected incompetence in engineering, would it not be logical to expect a random distribution of errors? Instead we seem to be seeing the opposite: The errors are not random, but are instead favoring one party's candidates.
Consider Diebold's ATMs, which are very reliable and function exactly as intended. They've demonstrated that they aren't incompetent if they don't want to be. Now consider the [?]contrapositive[?], they are incompetent if they do want to be.
Yes, what possible benefits could there be to machines that help probe the basic nature of matter?
The CRT didn't have much relevance to everyday life in 1897 either, nor did that first bigass transistor from Bell Labs. If it weren't for money that was spent on pie-in-the-sky / "basic" research, there'd be nothing to do applied research on.
I know it's bad form to reply to myself, but uh... I'm apparently suffering from historical amnesia. In the interest of not perpetuating false information, parent should start with: Dateline, 7 Dec. 2041. I resign in shame - My office will be cleared out by tomorrow morning.
Other leading stories:
Someone better get a kick out of this. I spent enough time writing it.
As is common with closed-source software companies, they refuse to listen or reform when told they're unsecure. Once their insecurity is exposed, they are made to look like utter morons in front of their target audience. Rather than behave rationally by acknowledging a problem and working to fix it, they jump to Cover Yer Ass maneuvers:
* Deny the existence of the problem (ABC link, bottom of first page)
* Threaten the person or persons who made them look like incompetent idiots
As long as they believe that making a bluster will prevent them from being fired for thier incompetence, they will make a bluster rather than fix the problem because that's the path of least resistance. If the public or government act to make it known that the price of inaction exceeds the price of fixing the issue, the problem will go away. Consider this scenario:
Government office is created in which agents attempt to smuggle illicit items (knives, primers, explosives) onto planes. If they get past security, all flights from your airport are suspended for N days and you lose all income and federal subsidies in that time. That's all - no "inspections" or "review boards." Just a shitload of lost money and customers who hate your ass. Expect genuine improvements in security on very short order.
Unfortunately, expect the public to howl about the inconvenience because they want security without paying for actual security. Sorry, you can't have your cake and eat it too. [Note on slogan: Spin it as "your part in the war on terror?" The War Against Terror... "Do your part for TWAT?"]
The computers are general-purpose and run an off-the-shelf OS. If they are "generic PC workstations", they are x86. They have working network cards installed. They apparently connect to the Internet. This is the weakest link in the security chain.
1. They run a generic OS and they are connected to the Internet. 100% gaurantee that a virus can be written and will break into them. Release it en-masse.
2. The virus inserts itself into the system and hides by manipulating the system API. Authentication is useless because the virus controls the OS that starts and runs the authentication program. On E.D., it pulls down a vote-rigging program. At close-time, it writes incorrect but self-consistent data to all ports. Game over.
And voters absolutely cannot be allowed to take a proof of how they voted with them or vote-buying is opened up.
You are correct in that elections have always been manipulable. The only problem with voting via computer is that the entire function of a computer is to quickly and efficiently manipulate bits, and this can't be solved or it isn't a computer anymore. Plan B: Bribe an operator at the central vote aggregator.
And unfortunately, some states (*coughFloridacough*) are rendering a paper trail useless. It's perfectly logical, after all: After a big public FUBAR, the solution is not to address the cause of the disease but ban the recount to hide the symptoms.