FCC: Mr. Case, we think this is generally a bad idea. I'm afraid we can't allow this at all.
AOL: Is that right Mr. Chairman? Do you remember when you signed up for AOL? Did you read your EULA completely when you installed our service at home...?
Eventually, there will just be one giant media corporation that provides our entertainment and news. Once that happens, we'll finally be able to rely on the news that is provided to us, because there will be no other bothersome entities to provide conflicting reports! Finally -- news you can trust!
*COUGH* ---
seumas.com
The application software itself doesn't have to be written outside of the states. It doesn't even need to be open-source (though it would probalby be a good idea). But the OS, at least, is a better alternative.
And there isn't necessarily any greater shame in a multi-national effort to create software for elections that any country can modify and use than there is in using software from Microsoft.
I just don't see the need for the bloat of a Windows-type operating system. All you need the system to do is check a database and see if the person in front of it is a registered voter and if they have voted yet. Then provide a text-based list of choices, accept an input from the voter, prompt the voter to confirm their choice, encrypt the results for that individual and send them back to the database. Once the database confirms receipt, start over again.
You don't need Microsoft's bloated code. You don't need some snazzy system by Dell. All you need is a network connection, a form of encryption, a cheap display unit and input device, a tiny single-purpose operating system and an old box with about enough processing power as an 286.
Instead, I'm sure we'll end up with a closed-source, buggy Microsoft operating system with a horribly expensive license, and a $2500 machine by Dell that I'm sure that in addition to whatever original funding the government has to pay for development, they'll end up paying $25,000 per voting device, just like they overpay for wrenches and toilet seats. ---
seumas.com
What I don't understand is why the same government that tried to tear Microsoft apart because of their unethical business practices would want to then employ them in the pursuit of a new voting system -- something which one should aspire to include only those participants who are extremely ethical.
Remember Netscape Engineers are weinees and 'leasing the operating system' and '.NET' and recently, the backdoor account in Interbase (granted, not MS but just an example of the type of things one could not put past Microsoft)? -- Is this really the kind of risk we need to put our voting system in?
The whole idea of a Windows-based system is frightening. Why not go for something that at least will allow an uptime long enough to complete the full voting day? Maybe Solaris or Linux or a reduced size, limited function distrobution of their own?
Further, these are obviously going to be networked throughout the country, to a central city computer, then to a central state computer and then to a central national computer (sure, you could go directly to a national machine, but I think there may be some federal/state issues that would make regionalizing each function of the process preferrable). As we all know, anything that is on a network is potentially crackable.
If anyone needs proof of that, look at the NSA, CIA, FBI, IRS and other government websites which have been cracked in the past. ---
seumas.com
I'm not a television person, but I do have a decent (100+) DVD collection and buy several more each month. I didn't need the most extravegant system for my entertainment center, but the following suit me very well:
36" RCA Entertainment Series ($400)
Good picture, especially with digital video. I would have gone for a much larger screen, but if I did that, I might as well go for a widescreen/HDTV -- besides, I'm not carrying that thing up three flights of stairs. This one was hard enough and barely fit through the door!
JVC RX-6008V Audio/Video Reciever ($550)
Great sounding reciever with a 5.1 speaker system. Supports DTS, DTS-ES, 5.1 and some others. DTS-ES sounds especially nice of course, but everything else sounds pretty good too.
Apex AD600A DVD Player ($150)
Single tray player. Plays DVD, CD, MP3. Cheap and nice.
I figure this system will due until I buy a home and go nuts on a real home theater, like you see in those expensive renovations on all the home building shows on PBS and TLC.:) ---
seumas.com
The problem is that one (our) inhabited planet doesn't set a pattern to base further expectations on. Once we find another, then the expectations could be limitless.
For example, for decades, we've said "no two people have the same fingerprints". Well, we know that at least one person has that set of fingerprints. But based on each unique set, we can't make the claim that out of the billions and billions of pairs of hands out there, someone must have the same fingerprints.
But we don't. We state that no two people could possibly have the same fingerprints. So how can we apply that same logic to saying "well, we only know of one inhabited planet, but there are zillions of others and chances are that one or more have life"?
Now, if we found a second person with the same set of fingerprints, that opens the door -- could there be three? Ten? Thousands? Same with inhabited planets. With just one planet known (ours), it can go either way. But once (if) we find a second, then the numbers could be huge. ---
seumas.com
Finally, a place to send all of the politicians and lawyers!
Seriously though, that's pretty cool. Who knew, 30 years ago, that we'd be discovering several planets every year -- let alone those of such amazing size! I'm not one of those alien-buff types, but every time more of these are discovered within our viewable range, it only encourages the idea that life somewhere else in this universe is more and more likely.
I'm to young to have experienced the "ooh"s and "aah"s that my parent's generation were able to when man first orbited the earth and landed on the moon. But little things like this bring a spark of excitement that astronomy and space exploration has been missing for sooooo damn long. ---
seumas.com
Okay. Then I misread the article. I read it twice, just to be sure and the impression I had was that Disney was buying the database, agreeing to abide by the same privacy constraints that the original owner of that data swore to, and ordering Toysmart to destroy their copy of the data.
So how is this any benefit to Disney? ---
seumas.com
An ethical person would destroy the data before it even became an issue.
I have personal information on almost 8,000 members at my 'company'. Under no circumstances would I hand this data over to another company or agency for money. I would sooner delete the data from my database or hurl the machine into the river. ---
seumas.com
So, Toysmart is out of business. They sold their database to another company (Disney). Doesn't sound like a win to me.
If Toysmart itself was bought by Disney and they were going to continue to run the toystore site, that's one thing. I would not approve of my registration information with (for example) ComputerStuff.com being sold to russianbrides.com when they go out of business. After all, I was providing my information to have an account and services of a computer service -- not a russian bride thing. Same goes in this case. If people wanted to have their information owned by disney, they would have registered with disney. But they didn't. They registered with Toysmart.
I say, when a company/entity goes out of business, the personal data needs to be trashed. If a parent company continued to run a purchased company, that would be acceptible. But to just shell out what you want from a dead company and use that personal data -- OUR -- personal data for your own completely seperate purpose, is wrong. ---
seumas.com
eBay is only one of many that do that sort of thing. I and a lot of other people I've talked with have had similar problems with places like techies.com, which is a major recruiting monster.com-like technical site. If you opt-out of their mailing lists, they continue to email you, but from other regions. For example, I signed up on the Portland Oregon site. Then I opted out of their mailing lists. They stopped sending the spam, but then I suddenly started reciving spam from places like their Kentucky server. ---
seumas.com
Right, but that doesn't displace the fact that 'sound' and 'radio waves' are two distinctly seperate things. Radio waves are not immediately audible without conversion. Saying that these are "sounds of space" is like graphing a person's weight loss/gain over a month and then converting each point on the graph into an audible transation and calling that the "sound of weight loss". ---
seumas.com
The Arecibo album was called "Trans Plutonian Transmissions" IIRC... Very trancy stuff.
Sweet. I just downloaded this after reading your comment. I like it. I'll have to check Ozone next time I'm downtown and see if there's a way to get a copy. ---
seumas.com
I didn't say you were a troll. I said you were obviously being funny. But apparently, you are neither -- you just have a really dumb sense of justice.
Just because some people illegally copy data to a recordable media doesn't mean that the only use for that recordable media is for copying unliscensed material. For example, I use recordable media to backup all of my email (which runs around 1gb a year). I also use it to backup other personal data and make backups of games I really like and would hate to see damaged from routine handling around my house.
Perhaps if the greedy "pay me! pay me!" mentality of so many people in the recording and entertainment industry (outside of the actual musicians, actors, writers themselves) had a bit more experience of the real world, they'd realize that it is as unfair for them to force me to subsidize their businesses when all I'm doing is making a legitimate use of legitimate data storage devices that has NOTHING to do with any of them, even remotely -- as it is for other people to unfairly copy and exploit their intellectual property.
I've seen people photocopying from books at the library -- but I don't see anyone forcing me to pay tax on paper becuase some people could use it to pirate a book. And I've certainly never been taxed for a pocket-sized spiral notebook, because some people can use it as a utility for storage of ill-gotten software passwords. ---
seumas.com
I suppose I could probably make money with the site I run right now. Advertising would fall flat, I'm sure -- but if I charged a yearly subscription fee for people who use the auction site, I could earn a decent second income. But why bother? Just because there might be some money in something doesn't mean it is necessary to exploit it for that money.
In fact, the only time I've ever considered charging any of my 7,000+ members for using my service (as an example) is to prevent deadbeats and trouble-makers by adding the additional effort of sending a payment for an account. -- Doing it to make money never came to mind.
Also, what people seem to forget is that all it takes is one person not to charge for the same service you offer. People will never pay for something they can get free at another place on the net -- and just about everything can be found for free.
-Pay for a porn site or download from usenet?
-Pay for a pay-per-song download service or use Napster?
-Pay for the NY Times or get your news on CNN?
We all know what people really choose. And no kind of distributed payment system will rectify the fact that one person making the same information and services available for free will put everyone else trying to charge for it out of the running.
---
seumas.com
ISPs must not be allowed to bill consumers on the basis of their individual usage of copyrighted material. Instead, they must pass on their licensing costs only in the form of a blanket surcharge on bandwidth.
This is one of those statements that can be uttered on its own without any further commentary -- the idiocy speaks for itself.
Aside from the matter of various points of access (some from public libraries or other community terminals, others from schools, others from work, others from free dial-up services), you have the rediculous idea that if I use the internet for nothing but sending a few emails back and forth with friends, playing a little Quake3 and maybe visiting my friends' personal websites and downloading some public domain literature from Gutenburg, I should be made to contribute toward the cost of the other guy down the street downloading porn and Dr. Dre.
Plus, this only helps the big money-makers. Universal Records, Touchstone, Doubleday and NBC will be able to levy fees through this system, but there's little chance of Joe Blow getting paid for people reading his articles on his website or using his cross-indexed horror movie database. ---
seumas.com
One thing that looked pathetic is that the author of the original Vaporware list never seemed to retract or update his placement of 2.4 on the list -- the only comment that was made was by a different author of a different piece (the one where they suggested they were the inspiration for the soon-to-follow release).
If any publication considers themselve to be the mitigating factor in Linus' release dates, they need to check their ego, methinks. ---
seumas.com
Yeah. I like to read articles that talk about Linus, but they blew a great chance to ask him some really interesting questions and wasted it on something that makes a Larry King love-in interview look like hard-core reporting. I've seen more interesting news-items on The Daily Show. ---
seumas.com
Wired's questioning of the time-line for releasing 2.4 is as silly as people who complain because RedHat is on 7.0 while Debian is on 2x. "Why are they so far behind RedHat!?"
Popping out a sham release every 18 months like Microsoft, just to keep your name fresh in people's mind and earning a few extra bucks is fine for some, but it has nothing to do with an actual programming cycle.
Wired is to the technical industry what Cosmo and Family Circle are to the financial market. ---
seumas.com
Slashdot Mirror
FCC: Mr. Case, we think this is generally a bad idea. I'm afraid we can't allow this at all.
AOL: Is that right Mr. Chairman? Do you remember when you signed up for AOL? Did you read your EULA completely when you installed our service at home...?
Heh.
---
seumas.com
Eventually, there will just be one giant media corporation that provides our entertainment and news. Once that happens, we'll finally be able to rely on the news that is provided to us, because there will be no other bothersome entities to provide conflicting reports! Finally -- news you can trust! *COUGH*
---
seumas.com
And there isn't necessarily any greater shame in a multi-national effort to create software for elections that any country can modify and use than there is in using software from Microsoft.
I just don't see the need for the bloat of a Windows-type operating system. All you need the system to do is check a database and see if the person in front of it is a registered voter and if they have voted yet. Then provide a text-based list of choices, accept an input from the voter, prompt the voter to confirm their choice, encrypt the results for that individual and send them back to the database. Once the database confirms receipt, start over again.
You don't need Microsoft's bloated code. You don't need some snazzy system by Dell. All you need is a network connection, a form of encryption, a cheap display unit and input device, a tiny single-purpose operating system and an old box with about enough processing power as an 286.
Instead, I'm sure we'll end up with a closed-source, buggy Microsoft operating system with a horribly expensive license, and a $2500 machine by Dell that I'm sure that in addition to whatever original funding the government has to pay for development, they'll end up paying $25,000 per voting device, just like they overpay for wrenches and toilet seats.
---
seumas.com
Remember Netscape Engineers are weinees and 'leasing the operating system' and '.NET' and recently, the backdoor account in Interbase (granted, not MS but just an example of the type of things one could not put past Microsoft)? -- Is this really the kind of risk we need to put our voting system in?
The whole idea of a Windows-based system is frightening. Why not go for something that at least will allow an uptime long enough to complete the full voting day? Maybe Solaris or Linux or a reduced size, limited function distrobution of their own?
Further, these are obviously going to be networked throughout the country, to a central city computer, then to a central state computer and then to a central national computer (sure, you could go directly to a national machine, but I think there may be some federal/state issues that would make regionalizing each function of the process preferrable). As we all know, anything that is on a network is potentially crackable.
If anyone needs proof of that, look at the NSA, CIA, FBI, IRS and other government websites which have been cracked in the past.
---
seumas.com
Right, but it's my company/business. So I sort of have final say-so. ;)
---
seumas.com
36" RCA Entertainment Series ($400)
Good picture, especially with digital video. I would have gone for a much larger screen, but if I did that, I might as well go for a widescreen/HDTV -- besides, I'm not carrying that thing up three flights of stairs. This one was hard enough and barely fit through the door!
JVC RX-6008V Audio/Video Reciever ($550)
Great sounding reciever with a 5.1 speaker system. Supports DTS, DTS-ES, 5.1 and some others. DTS-ES sounds especially nice of course, but everything else sounds pretty good too.
Apex AD600A DVD Player ($150)
Single tray player. Plays DVD, CD, MP3. Cheap and nice.
I figure this system will due until I buy a home and go nuts on a real home theater, like you see in those expensive renovations on all the home building shows on PBS and TLC. :)
---
seumas.com
For example, for decades, we've said "no two people have the same fingerprints". Well, we know that at least one person has that set of fingerprints. But based on each unique set, we can't make the claim that out of the billions and billions of pairs of hands out there, someone must have the same fingerprints.
But we don't. We state that no two people could possibly have the same fingerprints. So how can we apply that same logic to saying "well, we only know of one inhabited planet, but there are zillions of others and chances are that one or more have life"?
Now, if we found a second person with the same set of fingerprints, that opens the door -- could there be three? Ten? Thousands? Same with inhabited planets. With just one planet known (ours), it can go either way. But once (if) we find a second, then the numbers could be huge.
---
seumas.com
Seriously though, that's pretty cool. Who knew, 30 years ago, that we'd be discovering several planets every year -- let alone those of such amazing size! I'm not one of those alien-buff types, but every time more of these are discovered within our viewable range, it only encourages the idea that life somewhere else in this universe is more and more likely.
I'm to young to have experienced the "ooh"s and "aah"s that my parent's generation were able to when man first orbited the earth and landed on the moon. But little things like this bring a spark of excitement that astronomy and space exploration has been missing for sooooo damn long.
---
seumas.com
So how is this any benefit to Disney?
---
seumas.com
I have personal information on almost 8,000 members at my 'company'. Under no circumstances would I hand this data over to another company or agency for money. I would sooner delete the data from my database or hurl the machine into the river.
---
seumas.com
If Toysmart itself was bought by Disney and they were going to continue to run the toystore site, that's one thing. I would not approve of my registration information with (for example) ComputerStuff.com being sold to russianbrides.com when they go out of business. After all, I was providing my information to have an account and services of a computer service -- not a russian bride thing. Same goes in this case. If people wanted to have their information owned by disney, they would have registered with disney. But they didn't. They registered with Toysmart.
I say, when a company/entity goes out of business, the personal data needs to be trashed. If a parent company continued to run a purchased company, that would be acceptible. But to just shell out what you want from a dead company and use that personal data -- OUR -- personal data for your own completely seperate purpose, is wrong.
---
seumas.com
eBay is only one of many that do that sort of thing. I and a lot of other people I've talked with have had similar problems with places like techies.com, which is a major recruiting monster.com-like technical site. If you opt-out of their mailing lists, they continue to email you, but from other regions. For example, I signed up on the Portland Oregon site. Then I opted out of their mailing lists. They stopped sending the spam, but then I suddenly started reciving spam from places like their Kentucky server.
---
seumas.com
Right, but that doesn't displace the fact that 'sound' and 'radio waves' are two distinctly seperate things. Radio waves are not immediately audible without conversion. Saying that these are "sounds of space" is like graphing a person's weight loss/gain over a month and then converting each point on the graph into an audible transation and calling that the "sound of weight loss".
---
seumas.com
Sweet. I just downloaded this after reading your comment. I like it. I'll have to check Ozone next time I'm downtown and see if there's a way to get a copy.
---
seumas.com
What in the hell are you talking about?
---
seumas.com
Just because some people illegally copy data to a recordable media doesn't mean that the only use for that recordable media is for copying unliscensed material. For example, I use recordable media to backup all of my email (which runs around 1gb a year). I also use it to backup other personal data and make backups of games I really like and would hate to see damaged from routine handling around my house.
Perhaps if the greedy "pay me! pay me!" mentality of so many people in the recording and entertainment industry (outside of the actual musicians, actors, writers themselves) had a bit more experience of the real world, they'd realize that it is as unfair for them to force me to subsidize their businesses when all I'm doing is making a legitimate use of legitimate data storage devices that has NOTHING to do with any of them, even remotely -- as it is for other people to unfairly copy and exploit their intellectual property.
I've seen people photocopying from books at the library -- but I don't see anyone forcing me to pay tax on paper becuase some people could use it to pirate a book. And I've certainly never been taxed for a pocket-sized spiral notebook, because some people can use it as a utility for storage of ill-gotten software passwords.
---
seumas.com
Maybe I just had an idiot for an astronomy teacher in school, but in the vaccuum of space... how can you have sound?
---
seumas.com
Heheheheh. This has gotta be moderated up. If it weren't so obviously being funny, you'd make a pretty classy troll. ;)
---
seumas.com
I suppose I could probably make money with the site I run right now. Advertising would fall flat, I'm sure -- but if I charged a yearly subscription fee for people who use the auction site, I could earn a decent second income. But why bother? Just because there might be some money in something doesn't mean it is necessary to exploit it for that money.
In fact, the only time I've ever considered charging any of my 7,000+ members for using my service (as an example) is to prevent deadbeats and trouble-makers by adding the additional effort of sending a payment for an account. -- Doing it to make money never came to mind.
Also, what people seem to forget is that all it takes is one person not to charge for the same service you offer. People will never pay for something they can get free at another place on the net -- and just about everything can be found for free.
-Pay for a porn site or download from usenet?
-Pay for a pay-per-song download service or use Napster?
-Pay for the NY Times or get your news on CNN?
We all know what people really choose. And no kind of distributed payment system will rectify the fact that one person making the same information and services available for free will put everyone else trying to charge for it out of the running.
---
seumas.com
This is one of those statements that can be uttered on its own without any further commentary -- the idiocy speaks for itself.
Aside from the matter of various points of access (some from public libraries or other community terminals, others from schools, others from work, others from free dial-up services), you have the rediculous idea that if I use the internet for nothing but sending a few emails back and forth with friends, playing a little Quake3 and maybe visiting my friends' personal websites and downloading some public domain literature from Gutenburg, I should be made to contribute toward the cost of the other guy down the street downloading porn and Dr. Dre.
Plus, this only helps the big money-makers. Universal Records, Touchstone, Doubleday and NBC will be able to levy fees through this system, but there's little chance of Joe Blow getting paid for people reading his articles on his website or using his cross-indexed horror movie database.
---
seumas.com
Gasp! Oh my god, hardly anyone is making money from content?! What good is this whole web thingy if people can't make money with it?!
---
seumas.com
It also didn't qualify in any mannre whatsoever as vaporware either, and you know it.
---
seumas.com
If any publication considers themselve to be the mitigating factor in Linus' release dates, they need to check their ego, methinks.
---
seumas.com
Yeah. I like to read articles that talk about Linus, but they blew a great chance to ask him some really interesting questions and wasted it on something that makes a Larry King love-in interview look like hard-core reporting. I've seen more interesting news-items on The Daily Show.
---
seumas.com
Popping out a sham release every 18 months like Microsoft, just to keep your name fresh in people's mind and earning a few extra bucks is fine for some, but it has nothing to do with an actual programming cycle.
Wired is to the technical industry what Cosmo and Family Circle are to the financial market.
---
seumas.com