The Republicans are already trying for just that sort of control over the right to vote. At the State Level, where it can be exploited to disenfranchise people.
Nonsense.
Please quote specific citations in specific states, or STFU.
Having looked at that dog's breakfast, it seems the way we do it now is just fine. There are no clear winners in that hodgepodge of methods, and the stated rationale for many of them seems often seeded with manipulative social goals.
An online voting booth would easily create a substantial boost in the number of people voting and would limit out virtually no one (except those without internet or in rural areas, but frankly, absent door-to-door service, it is going to be extremely hard to include these people in elections. That, or at least a national and easy to use site/phone hotline for signing up for absentee voting.
Sure, toss that out there with out a shred of evidence that it would substantial boos in the number of people voting.
It might well increase the number of votes cast, but not necessarily the number of people voting.
It is drop dead simple to sign up for Absentee voting. Call your county government, forms in the mail, done. It is not a National system because Elections are by constitution, managed by the states. That you don't know this, or are willing to waive it away makes you a very dangerous person in my eyes.
Why not a national ID system? Why not any kind of biometric systems? Why nothing but a picture?
If the Republicans suggested this you would be the first one up in arms.
Think for just a minute before posting such nonsense. Someone puts your name on a secret list, and you can't board an airplane. Now you want to entrust the right to vote to these same people?
There are already many different programs in place for this, from Absentee Ballots (by mail) , to free handicapped bus service for those still wanting to go to the polls. By some accounts even the dead can already vote.
It seems like this is redundant, as states and local government already reach out to their handicapped citizens. Government posturing seems to be the primary emphasis here, to get the last possible government dependent person to vote, regardless of cost, and woe be to anyone who stands in the way, or suggests that anyone who wants to vote already has the opportunity, and that there are those who simply don't want to vote.
Follow the link in TFA to the mission statement and notice this nugget:
If someone can't remember who they wanted to vote for, or is too mentally challenged to form and opinion why include them in this process at all? (especially when some states require a sound mind to vote).
More troubling was this paragraph:
While each country has its own election system, and we have only a limited ability to change that, we can focus on making elections more accessible, through new technologies, communications tools, and processes.
What? Excuse me? This sounds like the groundwork for more meddling in the business of other countries than improving anything in the US.
Word craps out on long documents, excel has a lot of bugs and powerpoint is SHIT. What exactly are you paying for ?
The sad thing is Word used to be pretty good about not crapping out. I can't figure if it was when they went to XML storage or when the added that god aweful ribbon, but it has gotten progressively worse over the years.
At work we wrote and edited several very large complex documents in word with no problem, (Office 2000 version). Very big documents. Now it scares me. OOO or LO seem to handle these documents ok, but I've seen a few crashes there as well, but I haven't totally lost anything with either of them yet.
As for Paying, I stopped upgrading Office/Word a long time ago, and we cut over to OOO, and are now using a mix of OOO and LO. Not paying for that stuff anymore.
He is complaining about the HUGE Chrome ad in Google if you go there not on Chrome. The Chrome ad made it convenient for people who knew their browser was shitty but didn't want to do anything extreme about it.
Personally I experienced the flash crashes on Chrome a lot.
So you are saying he visits a Google site and complains about an Ad for a google product? I certainly didn't read that in anything he wrote. There is a big X in that chrome ad, and you click that X you won't see that button show up again, regardless of browser.
One ad does not "forcing" make. (Checking: Ford, yup, Sunkist, yup, Nikon, yup. It seems just about any company website I visit I see ads for their products. The Gall of some of these people!!!)
He wasn't complaining about Flash crashing, he was complaining about Chrome crashing. I never notice Flash crashing, although sometimes it would be a blessing.
Yes, you can disable Flash in Chrome, either by keying in the address bar "about:plugins" with no quotes, or by using the menus and navigating to/Options / under the hood / Content settings button / Disable link.
On Android, you have the option of running Flash only on demand, (my preferred way), but on Google Chrome you really don't have that option in the same easy way.
I leave flash on most of the time on those platforms that have the horsepower to handle them. I don't like it, its an annoyance, but its not worth the fight to get rid of it everywhere when I still need it in some few places.
My comment had nothing to do with giving Google "credit".
It had to do with BSI's decision to cite Chrome's bundling of Flash as a reason for recommendation. A true security organization would not make that a reason for a recommendation, rather they would cite it as a detriment, a blemish, (even for Flash in a sandbox given Adobe's history).
As for people wanting flash, its value is negative in most people's eyes. People hate it more than you know.
Its nothing but an advertising tool to most people. A source of daily irritation when reading almost any web page due to disruptive graphics dancing around while you try to read. Apple dropped flash both from OSx and iOS , and nobody cared. Even Android users find it mostly an annoyance.
Sometimes it crashes hard to the point where you need a hard reset of your computer. It even happens on major sites such as Boing Boing. Even though I switched to Chrome from Firefox after all it's "changes" from 4.0+ I still don't like crashes. I also feel that Google is trying to force Chrome on people similar to IE did to squelch Netscape with their over advertising and bundling.
The browser war is getting too rough, I hope once HTML5 is finally finished in 2014 the browser scene can stabilize again.
How is Google forcing chrome? You have to go out and download it to get it on your computer. Your computer didn't come with Chrome.
As for Chrome crashing, I suggest you wipe your (most likely horribly compromised) computer and re-install your OS and then Chrome. I haven't had Chrome crash in many months, and never had to restart because of Chrome.
Maybe part of your problem is your reference to version 4.0.
The current release of Chrome is version 16.0.912.77 (January 23, 2012).
It would seem to me that "Chrome's habit of bundling Adobe Flash" would be a detriment. But that's just me.
They went on to recommend Adobe Reader X. I agree that pdf readers in a sandbox make a lot of sense, its just that I have no particular reason to trust Adobe, since it was their doing that made PDFs unsafe in the first place. With Chrome's built in PDF render engine, I find I seldom have to use the adobe plugin at all any more. (And when I do, I'm always suspicious).
If Google wanted to do us all a favor they would to with Flash content what they did with PDF documents, and add their own in-browser render engine.
That being said, I do like the sandboxing that Chrome supplies, and Google Chrome is my browser of choice.
Some people don't like keying search terms in the URL bar, and other minor objections that, when investigated, all amount to "its not firefox". I've seen some reports of incredibly slow page fetches, which are usually traceable to external things (chrome likes to use multiple concurrent connections, and swamps some anti-virus packages that operate as a proxy server).
For me, the speed can't be beat on any of the platforms I use (linux and windows - various flavors of each). I prefer Google's builds to those in the Chromium Open Source project but both work very well.
Voters seldom get to vote on budgets in most cities, and certainly not at the line item level. Bond issues would certainly come under closer scrutiny especially in this economy. Federal funding of libraries is under close scrutiny over the last year.
On the other side, a Gates foundation study found that people who find libraries "transformational" rather than simply "informational" are more likely to vote for more funding. (What transformational means is unclear).
Still there is a great layer of insulation between the library board and the tax payer.
It may take years, but funding support will wane when local tax payers figure out they are funding something other than a quiet place to read where they feel comfortable sending their kids. I suspect it would not take much, perhaps only a rows computers filled by unwashed geezers in sweatpants with only one hand on the keyboard, before the library board will choose to sequester the material to specific parts of the library, if merely to preserve the library itself.
That you have no idea what is wrong with itunes simply indicates to me you are ALL IN with the idea you need a computer to manage your phone. Time to step out of your cocoon into the real world.
I have zero software packages on my computer to manage my several Android devices. I haven't cabled any of my androids to my computer, other than once to prove it could be done.
All my music is managed in the cloud, I can install anything without a computer application, move any documents, media, and applications to an from the device over wifi, 3g, or bluetooth.
I can shop for music, movies, apps, books, on the android or computer, and have them delivered to the android seamlessly.
Updates come over the air, never have to hook up to a computer. Backup to the cloud. Backup to my hard drive over wifi.
Yet for iPhone, you simply can not own an iPhone without owning a computer. Can't be done. My iPhone was a constant source of irritation. Always cabling to the damn computer for simple minded tasks. The itunes pops up, runs ridiculously slowly on a high-end quad processor machine, requires USB drivers that were obsolete and troublesome the day the iphone was released and haven't improved with age. Requires a complete separate, and insecure appletalk protocol stack, and refuses to run without it. Launches slowly with no indication its doing anything, on screen controls are nonstandard and provide no mouse hover guidance, violates the principal of "least astonishment" on a minute by minute basis.
Luckily I could move my entire itunes library to the Android via simple "drag and drop" over wifi and never had to deal with itunes again, except to update my iPhone which I now use only as an ipod. The I pointed my music directory to the cloud, and haven't looked back. Buy a song on any device it appears on every device.
Look: its a terrible piece of software in so many ways I could write a book. But google works for you too, so do some research on your own.
But the number one take away you should understand is YOU DO NOT NEED A COMPUTER to manage a phone.
Researchers knew that it would only be a matter of time before its controller used the botnet's complex infrastructure of proxy servers and communication nodes to regain control.
The linked story says they fully expected this, and that the method they used (sink-holing) was never expected to be a permanent solution. One has only to hope that stating they have no "recourse" is merely baffle-gab to embolden the controllers. It might also mean "lets make believe we haven't compromised some of the bots and planted a few or our own".
They also suggest that the suspected Russian controller couldn't be extradited, but conveniently neglect to mention that Kaspersky Lab is a Russian company that could influence internal Russian enforcement actions.
It is still possible to neutralize the botnet with sinkholing but using slightly different techniques as was used before, and it is still possible to push an update tool on infected machines to neutralize the botnet. In this case the botmasters need to infect machines again to build another botnet.
Slashdot Mirror
Brilliant!
And all paid for by the candidates. Problem solved with no additional government money.
The Republicans are already trying for just that sort of control over the right to vote. At the State Level, where it can be exploited to disenfranchise people.
Nonsense.
Please quote specific citations in specific states, or STFU.
Having looked at that dog's breakfast, it seems the way we do it now is just fine.
There are no clear winners in that hodgepodge of methods, and the stated rationale for many of them seems often seeded with manipulative social goals.
County.
Go read it for your self: http://www.openideo.com/open/voting/brief.html
Third paragraph below the sub-title "The Opportunity"
Probably the most insightful thing posted on this thread. Where are my mod points when I need them, and why are you posting as AC?
An online voting booth would easily create a substantial boost in the number of people voting and would limit out virtually no one (except those without internet or in rural areas, but frankly, absent door-to-door service, it is going to be extremely hard to include these people in elections. That, or at least a national and easy to use site/phone hotline for signing up for absentee voting.
Sure, toss that out there with out a shred of evidence that it would substantial boos in the number of people voting.
It might well increase the number of votes cast, but not necessarily the number of people voting.
It is drop dead simple to sign up for Absentee voting. Call your county government, forms in the mail, done.
It is not a National system because Elections are by constitution, managed by the states. That you don't know this, or are willing to waive it away makes you a very dangerous person in my eyes.
Why not a national ID system? Why not any kind of biometric systems? Why nothing but a picture?
If the Republicans suggested this you would be the first one up in arms.
Think for just a minute before posting such nonsense. Someone puts your name on a secret list, and you can't board an airplane. Now you want to entrust the right to vote to these same people?
You, sir, are a dangerous man.
There are already many different programs in place for this, from Absentee Ballots (by mail) , to free handicapped bus service for those still wanting to go to the polls. By some accounts even the dead can already vote.
It seems like this is redundant, as states and local government already reach out to their handicapped citizens. Government posturing seems to be the primary emphasis here, to get the last possible government dependent person to vote, regardless of cost, and woe be to anyone who stands in the way, or suggests that anyone who wants to vote already has the opportunity, and that there are those who simply don't want to vote.
Follow the link in TFA to the mission statement and notice this nugget:
Cognitive disabilities: intellectual, developmental, remembering, concentrating
If someone can't remember who they wanted to vote for, or is too mentally challenged to form and opinion why include them in this process at all? (especially when some states require a sound mind to vote).
More troubling was this paragraph:
While each country has its own election system, and we have only a limited ability to change that, we can focus on making elections more accessible, through new technologies, communications tools, and processes.
What? Excuse me? This sounds like the groundwork for more meddling in the business of other countries than improving anything in the US.
Word craps out on long documents, excel has a lot of bugs and powerpoint is SHIT.
What exactly are you paying for ?
The sad thing is Word used to be pretty good about not crapping out. I can't figure if it was when they went to XML storage or when the added that god aweful ribbon, but it has gotten progressively worse over the years.
At work we wrote and edited several very large complex documents in word with no problem, (Office 2000 version). Very big documents. Now it scares me. OOO or LO seem to handle these documents ok, but I've seen a few crashes there as well, but I haven't totally lost anything with either of them yet.
As for Paying, I stopped upgrading Office/Word a long time ago, and we cut over to OOO, and are now using a mix of OOO and LO.
Not paying for that stuff anymore.
I always run Dev channel, and have had very little problems with it.
I'm going to try sandboxing Flash for a while.
Where can we find definitions of "enhanced Low IL sandbox" to see what is or is not allowed therein?
Ads don't Force you to use it.
Actually, the only part of that I like is the Sandboxing of Flash.
The bundling I attribute to clever Adobe Marketing.
If the sandboxing was half as good as Google seems to think it is, keeping Flash up to date would not be that critical, would it?
He is complaining about the HUGE Chrome ad in Google if you go there not on Chrome. The Chrome ad made it convenient for people who knew their browser was shitty but didn't want to do anything extreme about it.
Personally I experienced the flash crashes on Chrome a lot.
So you are saying he visits a Google site and complains about an Ad for a google product? I certainly didn't read that in anything he wrote. There is a big X in that chrome ad, and you click that X you won't see that button show up again, regardless of browser.
One ad does not "forcing" make. (Checking: Ford, yup, Sunkist, yup, Nikon, yup. It seems just about any company website I visit I see ads for their products. The Gall of some of these people!!!)
He wasn't complaining about Flash crashing, he was complaining about Chrome crashing. I never notice Flash crashing, although sometimes it would be a blessing.
Yes, you can disable Flash in Chrome, either by keying in the address bar "about:plugins" with no quotes, /Options / under the hood / Content settings button / Disable link.
or by using the menus and navigating to
On Android, you have the option of running Flash only on demand, (my preferred way), but on Google Chrome you really don't have that option in the same easy way.
I leave flash on most of the time on those platforms that have the horsepower to handle them. I don't like it, its an annoyance, but its not worth the fight to get rid of it everywhere when I still need it in some few places.
My comment had nothing to do with giving Google "credit".
It had to do with BSI's decision to cite Chrome's bundling of Flash as a reason for recommendation.
A true security organization would not make that a reason for a recommendation, rather they would cite it as a detriment, a blemish, (even for Flash in a sandbox given Adobe's history).
As for people wanting flash, its value is negative in most people's eyes. People hate it more than you know.
Its nothing but an advertising tool to most people. A source of daily irritation when reading almost any web page due to disruptive graphics dancing around while you try to read. Apple dropped flash both from OSx and iOS , and nobody cared. Even Android users find it mostly an annoyance.
Sometimes it crashes hard to the point where you need a hard reset of your computer. It even happens on major sites such as Boing Boing. Even though I switched to Chrome from Firefox after all it's "changes" from 4.0+ I still don't like crashes. I also feel that Google is trying to force Chrome on people similar to IE did to squelch Netscape with their over advertising and bundling.
The browser war is getting too rough, I hope once HTML5 is finally finished in 2014 the browser scene can stabilize again.
How is Google forcing chrome?
You have to go out and download it to get it on your computer. Your computer didn't come with Chrome.
As for Chrome crashing, I suggest you wipe your (most likely horribly compromised) computer and re-install your OS and then Chrome.
I haven't had Chrome crash in many months, and never had to restart because of Chrome.
Maybe part of your problem is your reference to version 4.0.
The current release of Chrome is version 16.0.912.77 (January 23, 2012).
Falling behind a little perhaps?
It would seem to me that "Chrome's habit of bundling Adobe Flash" would be a detriment. But that's just me.
They went on to recommend Adobe Reader X. I agree that pdf readers in a sandbox make a lot of sense, its just that I have no particular reason to trust Adobe, since it was their doing that made PDFs unsafe in the first place. With Chrome's built in PDF render engine, I find I seldom have to use the adobe plugin at all any more. (And when I do, I'm always suspicious).
If Google wanted to do us all a favor they would to with Flash content what they did with PDF documents, and add their own in-browser render engine.
That being said, I do like the sandboxing that Chrome supplies, and Google Chrome is my browser of choice.
Some people don't like keying search terms in the URL bar, and other minor objections that, when investigated, all amount to "its not firefox". I've seen some reports of incredibly slow page fetches, which are usually traceable to external things (chrome likes to use multiple concurrent connections, and swamps some anti-virus packages that operate as a proxy server).
For me, the speed can't be beat on any of the platforms I use (linux and windows - various flavors of each). I prefer Google's builds to those in the Chromium Open Source project but both work very well.
Public funds maybe?
Voters seldom get to vote on budgets in most cities, and certainly not at the line item level. Bond issues would certainly come under closer scrutiny especially in this economy. Federal funding of libraries is under close scrutiny over the last year.
On the other side, a Gates foundation study found that people who find libraries "transformational" rather than simply "informational" are more likely to vote for more funding. (What transformational means is unclear).
Still there is a great layer of insulation between the library board and the tax payer.
It may take years, but funding support will wane when local tax payers figure out they are funding something other than a quiet place to read where they feel comfortable sending their kids. I suspect it would not take much, perhaps only a rows computers filled by unwashed geezers in sweatpants with only one hand on the keyboard, before the library board will choose to sequester the material to specific parts of the library, if merely to preserve the library itself.
That you have no idea what is wrong with itunes simply indicates to me you are ALL IN with the idea you need
a computer to manage your phone. Time to step out of your cocoon into the real world.
I have zero software packages on my computer to manage my several Android devices. I haven't cabled
any of my androids to my computer, other than once to prove it could be done.
All my music is managed in the cloud, I can install anything without a computer application, move any
documents, media, and applications to an from the device over wifi, 3g, or bluetooth.
I can shop for music, movies, apps, books, on the android or computer, and have them delivered
to the android seamlessly.
Updates come over the air, never have to hook up to a computer. Backup to the cloud. Backup
to my hard drive over wifi.
Yet for iPhone, you simply can not own an iPhone without owning a computer. Can't be done.
My iPhone was a constant source of irritation. Always cabling to the damn computer for simple minded
tasks.
The itunes pops up, runs ridiculously slowly on a high-end quad processor machine, requires USB drivers
that were obsolete and troublesome the day the iphone was released and haven't improved with age. Requires
a complete separate, and insecure appletalk protocol stack, and refuses to run without it. Launches slowly
with no indication its doing anything, on screen controls are nonstandard and provide no mouse hover guidance,
violates the principal of "least astonishment" on a minute by minute basis.
Luckily I could move my entire itunes library to the Android via simple "drag and drop" over wifi
and never had to deal with itunes again, except to update my iPhone which I now use only as
an ipod. The I pointed my music directory to the cloud, and haven't looked back. Buy a song on any
device it appears on every device.
Look: its a terrible piece of software in so many ways I could write a book. But google works for you
too, so do some research on your own.
But the number one take away you should understand is YOU DO NOT NEED A COMPUTER to manage a phone.
If not from the future, perhaps from your past visit to the lake.
Formation does not equal swarm.
Formation is from of a swarm.
A great number of things or persons, especially in motion.
Insects don't get the right to define human words in my book.
Cool stuff, but it needs a link to the home page: https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/
Very cool (and creepy) crawler bot video on the homepage.
These flying bots remind me of you average Alaskan mosquito.
Researchers knew that it would only be a matter of time before its controller used the botnet's complex infrastructure of proxy servers and communication nodes to regain control.
The linked story says they fully expected this, and that the method they used (sink-holing) was never expected to be a permanent solution. One has only to hope that stating they have no "recourse" is merely baffle-gab to embolden the controllers. It might also mean "lets make believe we haven't compromised some of the bots and planted a few or our own".
They also suggest that the suspected Russian controller couldn't be extradited, but conveniently neglect to mention that Kaspersky Lab is a Russian company that could influence internal Russian enforcement actions.
Kaspersky Lab Expert Maria Garnaeva Posts in her Blog some of the difference between the new and old control mechanisms: http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/655/Kelihos_Hlux_botnet_returns_with_new_techniques
She also mentions it is not as bleak as the original article, because:
It is still possible to neutralize the botnet with sinkholing but using slightly different techniques as was used before, and it is still possible to push an update tool on infected machines to neutralize the botnet. In this case the botmasters need to infect machines again to build another botnet.
I really doubt that they'll be able to do it but it would be interesting to be proven wrong.
And you really have to wonder why they bother?
I find it hard to believe that busybox is the ONLY GPL software they are using, so this buys them no "out" of the GPL.