I'm not certain (I haven't RTA) but I thought that the Internet radio stations were paying different rates for their airplay of songs than were conventional radio stations - the Internet stations were paying for each song almost as if it were being ripped to disc for each song while the conventional radio stations do not. Thus, Internet stations are charged a significant premium for broadcasting music relative to conventional radio. Since most radio stations are comparable quality to Internet radio stations (if the Internet stations aren't of worse sound quality), the ability to rip digital copies from either medium (directly, over the Internet or via the "audio in" from the radio) is not much different, and doesn't justify the difference in cost per song per listener. Internet radio stations should have to pay artists to play their music, but not more than conventional radio stations do.
Ultimately, this decision (and its prosecution) appears to be the RIAA (on behalf of its members) standing up to defend themselves as the sole portal to music sales. By driving (non-RIAA-controlled) Internet radio out of the market, the RIAA can enforce its playlist rules and control what customers hear. This intent, even more than the (questionable) means used to enforce it, is what I (and perhaps others) object to.
There is a minor problem, though...I can detoxify chemical waste in a variety of ways which make it far less hazardous (insoluble arsenic salts, for example). Organics can be incinerated at very high temperatures; you can probably recapture the organic byproducts and hit them again. With radioactive isotopes such as cobalt-60, iodine-131, strontium-90, etc., the half-lives range from hours to years; depending on the types of radiation emitted, the only way to keep them safe is to store them under shielding until they decay. There is no way to detoxify them until they decay on their own; while there are lots of safe ways to store toxic waste and/or to destroy it and render it nontoxic, there are few ways to store (and no ways to destroy, unless you can get fusion going or the material is fissionable) radioactive waste. Low level waste will be easy to shield, but high-level waste (used cores) will take lots of protection and a long time before they can be stored anywhere safely.
Oh, and lots of the radioactive waste is also toxic, independent of its radioactivity (plutonium, for example, in a soluble form, is the most toxic element known to man - in insoluble form, it is still bad via emission of gamma rays). So, even if the waste is low level, you are still likely to have toxicity issues; the radioactivity and its requirements for storage just compound them.
In summary, if your put the coal waste in my backyard, I can have it dumped elsewhere, incinerated, or processed to render it much less toxic. With medium- to high-level nuclear waste, there is no way to do so - you're stuck with it for the next... thousand?....years.
I am not dismissing nuclear power as an energy source - it has problems which need to be solved but it could be useful if and when they are solved (where do we put the waste? how do we secure plants against potential and probable dangers?). The relative convenience and toxicity of wastes, however, is not an argument for it.
Willing suspension of disbelief is good for reading books, but not as a method of approaching real life. I usually am only willing to suspend disbelief when the story and characters don't suck - Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer read like cardboard cutouts to me, Microsoft's actions combine the least exciting components of the New York Yankees' yearly exploits and a cell being swallowed by an amoeba, and the character development is much like that of the famous short movie Bambi Meets Godzilla. So if they're not reading, they must be doing something else to generate that frame of mind, and I'm guessing it's not legal.
As an irrelevant side note, if I said that I believed I could circumvent copy protections either by legal or illegal drugs or by the force of my mind, would drugs or self-delusion be rendered illegal circumvention mechanisms under the DMCA?
actually if you do it right the mirror might even explode...nothing like shards of glass or plastic to make life safe for the people inside the mirror.
lasers are being thought of, I believe, as point defense weapons for ships - it's likely that any target hit is going to have a really big increase in temperature in a very short time, so unless the mirror can handle a lot of energy and sustain high thermal stress, it won't have much defensive value...even less if your foe has other weapons and an easily visible target (as another poster suggested, the rest of our weapons aren't going away).
This reminds me of Reason (the depleted uranium chain-gun) in Snow Crash. The major problem with weapons such as Reason is the sense of invincibility they induce in their possessors (this is approximately what Stephenson said in the novel). This invincibility may be as hazardous to the ones possessing the weapons or technology (and to those around them) as to others on the potential receiving end. If all of the people in the chain of command using the weapon have sufficient intelligence and judgment, weapons like this are very useful; unfortunately, if that is not the case, then misguided or stupid people have the power, as the phrase goes, to make big, lethal mistakes at the speed of light.
It is good to have technology like this, but the intelligence to use technology and people effectively and wisely is a far greater strategic weapon.
Please see post 7261081 and others in the major topic heading - Boeing sunk it all by their lonesome, without requiring the help of any hippies. If it doesn't work and won't make money, chances are it won't be made, with or without protest. If it does work and can make money, it will probably be made - our government has not for some time let the interests of our country interfere with the interests of its largest businesses.
I don't think the hippies at the height of their power were able to put a stop to anything in the first place.
The problem with privatization is when it involves public goods and when the public goods have values that aren't represented in money; the environment, for example, has value not easily accounted for by money (if we were to screw it up badly enough, we could delete ourselves from the list of nonextinct species - if we don't exist, there is obviously no value for us to create). If the value is significant represented in nonmonetary sources, then businesses have an incentive to take the parts that can be sold and leave the rest; since the public needs it, eventually the gov't (and, indirectly, its citizens) will have to step in and rebuild what hasn't been maintained.
Businesses will maintain what they need to make money (unless they can not maintain it and convince someone else to do so) - what doesn't need to be maintained for them to make money, won't. If much of the value of a service is nonmonetary, than privitization may do harm rather than good. Sometimes, when a service can make money for others while providing the same good, a business can potentially run it. Gov't does some things that could be done by others more efficiently, but most things done by government probably wouldn't have been done otherwise - the goods were either mainly to the public and not monetary so that they wouldn't have made money, of high enough risk that businesses were unlikely to invest in them, or subject to "free rider" issues. I don't believe that privatization is the solution here.
Now that I think about it, the subject post was probably ironic. Sorry. The point still stands, though; it probably just shouldn't have stood here.
...he'd be correct. Just what exactly should make me want to trust his judgment; as the SiteFinder incident shows, his ability to judge what's best to do with other people's computers is more than questionable. Maybe when he can buy and build his own toys he can do as he wishes - but until then, he can shut up and play by the rules or leave and go do something "useful", like make a nonmandatory SiteFinder for the six people that actually found his "feature" useful.
It may not be a rigged election here, but with no audit trail or ability to verify the results, there's no guarantee that the next one won't be. It doesn't even have to be rigged - depending on the margin of victory, it might not take many errors to perturb the outcome. Without an ability to check election results, the ability to rig an election exists, and eventually it will be used.
The people that run Diebold have a political bias. While they probably aren't allowing that to affect their judgment, as long as they are trying to implement a system with potential for both accidental misuse and full-blown voter fraud, their bias will be an issue. A clearer system for voting absolves the innocent and allows mistakes to be corrected.
Either incompetence or malice could alter election results where this system is used. People in power want to keep it, and the only way to prevent them from abusing their power to that end is to watch them. A system that doesn't allow one to do so is a system built for fraud. Any election in which that system is used will yield questionable results - even if the results aren't in error, no one will know whether they are correct or not. The (known) technical ability to either mess up or steal elections with this system can only decrease mistrust of it while decreasing the ability to do anything constructive with that mistrust. This is a bad combination for either political party.
P.S. the same problem that potentially could change outcomes (unverifiability) also means that there's no guarantee that dead people (or imaginary ones) won't vote. Without checks, all some programmer (cracker) has to do is summon them from the ether, and add the appropriate code.
Spamm^H^H^H^H^Hemarketers sell products that either don't work or that no one wants, and they sell it by using other people's computers (either by legal or illegal means) to do it for them without paying for it. So, people without consciences sell products without merit while people who actually provide useful products or services pay for them to do it.
By this reasoning, criminals provide jobs as well - stores would go out of business if criminals didn't have ill-gotten gains to spend. The minor flaw in the reasoning is that the person whose resources are used by spammers could have used those resources more efficiently, both in providing services that people actually want and in spending the money returned from those services in a more efficient manner. Criminals, after all, have no incentive to be fiscally responsible - if they run out of money, they'll just steal more. If spammers don't use their bandwidth efficiently, it doesn't matter - they aren't paying anyway, and they'll just send some more or write another virus to take over some other computers.
It is safe to say spammers "create" jobs - but it is also likely that more and better jobs would be created if spammers didn't exist. Spammers don't create jobs - spam and its deployment probably result in a net loss of jobs.
Spammers rely on their status as free riders to make money. Once they make up a significant portion of the cost of operation of the internet, they become a burden which arouses directed and righteous anger. If some of them are stupid enough to get together to publicly defend themselves, they provide an opportunity for those who pay for the leeches to shut them down. Free ridership only works when no one knows who the free riders are; once they're out in the open, they are a target. The Mafia dons who live public lives of wealth and largesse are the ones targeted by the gov't - they are the obvious targets. EMA provides a similar role for spammers, which is good for everyone else.
....that we can only type in lowercase? if the shift key is a DMCA (oops, four counts there) violation, then I guess someone is going to have to make a very large keyboard for standard use...
I think this is one of the few legitimate arguments aganst education - with education, morons like this can run a company, hire lawyers, write legislation (and crappy DRM) and get rich doing it.
....they could have at least sold an effective DRM, rather than one that could be dismantled by a monkey using the famous PLOKTA method. So, someone publishes the fact that their DRM is defective, and the incompetents who wrote the POS intend to sue. I guess this is the reductio ab absurdum (sic) of the Constitution - if the 1st Amendment is trumped by a bunch of incompetents with a legal team of their own powered by corporate- (Hollywood-)sponsored legislation, then we should just give up now.
If DRM successfully stopped piracy it would be OK. Since it doesn't stop anything but casual piracy it's not so good. It becomes even less good when my fair use rights are taken without companies having to go through the technicality of buying members of Congress to get an amenable law passed. And I like it even less when companies choose overly onerous ways to enforce the rights. (I don't have to give book publishers a spare key to my house so that they can make sure I don't have books I haven't paid for.)
Ultimately, people don't like paying to be treated like criminals while getting software with less flexibility that costs them more while large scale pirates are selling the software. Going after the people who buy software to get the people who copy it (while avoiding those who do most of the copying) seems like collateral damage on a massive scale - only in this case, the damage to users is intentional, designed to get from them the money they aren't making from other sources. If you think this is a good idea, you are entitled to your opinion, but ultimately it seems to be behavior guaranteed to drive off your (paying) customers while encouraging people to buy from large scale copiers. Since this doesn't seem to be what they had in mind, the lesson that they need to learn is hurting your customers to get copiers is a flawed business model.
Familiarity with computers is a positive attribute, but considering the lack of money for lots of other things in the school system with longer term records of benefits to students (art/music/sports) and lower equipment turnover (don't need to buy all new music or instruments every year for music, for example), Spending a lot of money each each year on consumer goods will only decrease the amount of money available for other things. The continual update and modifications will require students to either buy computers every few years after 6th grade or for the state to buy them, spending even more money; without the expenditures for continuing education, this doesn't make much sense as a one-time expense. Add the costs of maintenance and administration and this could cost a lot of money in the long term. Other programs such as testing also require fixed budgeting (money that has to be used for a specific purpose - if schools don't test I think they don't get other funding from the federal gov't?) - thus computers are replacing discretionary money (money that can be moved between programs) for fixed expenditures. Unless the use of computers in the classroom (and its displacement of other educational means) is a significant benefit in the long term, this is a bad idea.
Finally, this seems like armament for people who claim that education already spends too much. Computers don't seem to be the primary problem with American education, and so spending lots of money on that problem before others seems to be an error in priorities. Computers for every 6th grader sound like the anecdote about cocaine - it's God's way of saying that you have too much money. Since that probably isn't the case, it doesn't make so much sense to me.
I pay Verisign to register a.com domain. Sitefinder comes along and points people trying to find my domain to a variety of businesses, some of which are my competitors. I don't have access to their rankings, so I can't redirect people unless I buy the potential misspelled sites from Verisign; otherwise, they have effectively built a bypass around my domain (which I paid them for). Verisign took money from domain holders and then devalued what it sold for its own benefit. As a bonus, the means it used to devalue their property it also didn't own - the unregistered domain names are community property. Essentially, it charged domain holders for advertising, then put up signs on public property advertising competitors.
Had Verisign wanted to help users, it could have done so in other ways, some of which would not have broken a working RFC standard or the servers of lots of people. In addition, as stated in previous threads, the searcher is not even as good as Microsoft's similar feature; thus Verisign's "help" is worse than that most users were already receiving. That seems to indicate that help for users was not a priority for SiteFinder - rather the opportunity for free advertising (and the lack of tangible worth of the trust they violated) led Verisign to conclude that this was a good idea.
Apparently about the same time Sony issued an 'Enhanced CD" where the only enhancement is the ability to crash your Mac or not to play in your car. It is in line with their current policy of suing your customers, silencing critics of bad and/or cracked DRM, and raising prices while decreasing CD issues and calling it a business plan for the future.
Wait a second...it is a business plan for the future - if the future of your industry is a shallow grave and the enduring hatred of millions of ex-customers.
...for which organic chemists and anybody who makes organic compounds is eternally grateful. Since NMR enabled nondestructive characterization of molecules while providing enough information about molecules to reliably determine their structures (at least, once computers and strong magnets came), organic chemists didn't have to burn lots of material to determine its structure. Other techniques (IR, UV) existed which don't destroy material, but NMR gives far more data on the structure of compounds than either of these techniques.
Early synthesis of molecules usually went through readily available intermediates ("relays") because of the amount of material required to characterize intermediates. Now organic synthesis can be performed easily on milligram scale, allowing for drug discovery and easier educational uses. Syntheses no longer need to include potential relays, allowing more efficient chemistry to be developed.
The development of small scale synthesis techniques has been a significant factor in the development and discovery of a variety of drugs. The ability to make things on small scale allows chemists to explore lots of drugs, giving them a better chance of finding an effective one. The ability to nondestructively determine the location, connectivity, and stereochemistry (arrangement in space) makes the structure determination and characterization of natural product drugs (such as Taxol) and their subsequent modification possible. These drugs, while not an unnmixed blessing, have been a significant benefit to the advancement of human health.
NMR has long been a useful technique for human health - MRI simply gave it a much more direct application.
...with the total lack of objectivity or the active deception in their press release (as linked to this thread), now would they? I guess having Verisign as a partner means not having you're sorry you hung the Internet.
Schools have a right to control their networks, not my computer. Why not control bandwith usage rather than the applications; if the applications are sucking down bandwith like a diner at an all-you-can-eat spaghetti dinner, pull the plug. It should be easy to do and require no intrusion into my computer. People with specialized needs for bandwidth can get specific dispensation. The fact that there is a less intrusive alternative (and probably more effective) measure to control bandwidth hogs and that the school has chosen instead a highly intrusive one implies that the intrusion is part of the purpose. So, in addition to paying through the nose for school (tuition increases in OH are double digit % of tuition) I also agree to give away my rights for search and seizure. Wow. What a deal. I get to give away rights to unelected unaccountable administrators so that I can live in cramped dorms. Sounds like Microsoft's EULA.
The RIAA didn't need the pretense of "file sharing" to enforce Draconian DRM - they wanted the ability to rewrite copyright law without the pretense of buying politicians. Again, choosing the most controlling method to do something rather than the least means that the control is part of the desired outcome. Going after people infringing copyright might help, but the people doing much of the copying (and profiting from it) are in places that couldn't care less what the RIAA or their labels think. Killing the housecats to scare the tigers doesn't do a whole lot. If it can be heard, it can be ripped - that is the lesson the RIAA hasn't learned. The methods you claim are motivated by file sharing to prevent copyright infringement won't prevent this. Even if the ends did justify the means, the means won't achieve the desired ends, and so I am giving away my freedom for no one's profit except the school. The school now has the ability to take away even more of my rights later for whatever else they see fit, and probably with methods no more effective than this.
Finally, your cause and effect reasoning is more than a little flawed. If winter robberies are occuring where the robbers wear ski jackets, by your logic, the police could arrest and shoot people in ski jackets and say, "It's the robbers' fault." Actually, it's not. If you choose an onerous and intrusive method to pursue a goal in the presence of less intrusive methods, either you intend to intrude (in which case you deserve the bile you are going to get) or you didn't care (in which case, you deserve the bile you are going to get).
By choosing this route, UF is teaching its students a very important lesson : in life, the Golden Rule is "he who has the gold makes the rules". I'm sure the students will remember this when their time comes around. Hope you don't expect much privacy in your retirement village/assisted living facility.
Have you considered sending an email to the judge in the SCO case (or whoever oversees the motions)? They might be interested in this, after all - I assume that, like policemen and other law enforcement officers, judges don't like being lied to. Maybe there's even room for a nice perjury charge followed by a list of/. references to prison rape and a back-and-forth discussion on it....but that's for another day.
One problem : who buys the services provided by people employing illegal aliens? Why, lots of people...meaning that a lot of people do in fact benefit because they get services without paying for the taxes that they would normally have to pay (as a part of their service costs). If the lack of taxes doesn't decrease the effective price of service, it increases profits, generating money which is taxed (at the corporation or personal level) and ends up getting spent anyway. Oh, and the people getting paid under the table get paid less (because they can't complain - who would they go to?) while at the same time paying lots of taxes (mainly consumption taxes such as sales tax which are also high in CA) while not drawing on governemt services (with the possible exception of health care, which of course is going up everywhere faster than inflation anyway).
I don't like the influx of illegal aliens anywhere, but money is not likely a reason to argue against their presence.
See post 7096601 - it is at least a partial refutation of the "extreme liberalism" of Dean's position. Ultimately, the Republicans will demonize whatever candidate the Democrats come up with as being too far left and a crazy liberal (just as, to some degree, the Democrats would do to the Republicans in reverse).
I'd rather have a candidate who will take positions I agree with and defend them than one who is desperately trying to be not liberal. The Democratic Party can succeed if it defines (and can achieve) positive goals rather than merely negative goals. Having a candidate people care about is better than choosing one that is "electable". The Labour party in Britain spent a lot of time finding this out - being respected or taking stands is much better than trying to be "electable"; if you get elected this way, it could turn out to be meaningless anyway (this is from Christopher Hitchens' essays in "For the Sake of Argument").
In summary, it is probably better for the Democratic Party (and probably politics in general) to have a candidate who is liked by a fair amount of people who is willing to stand and fight for issues, even if they were further left than many might like. Since the Republicans will portray their opponent as far left as possible anyway, it's better to stand and fight than to aquiesce quietly and in the process cede the initiative and the terms of debate to the Republicans. As in baseball, it's better to lose with your best pitches than to throw what you aren't good at and get beaten anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not certain (I haven't RTA) but I thought that the Internet radio stations were paying different rates for their airplay of songs than were conventional radio stations - the Internet stations were paying for each song almost as if it were being ripped to disc for each song while the conventional radio stations do not. Thus, Internet stations are charged a significant premium for broadcasting music relative to conventional radio. Since most radio stations are comparable quality to Internet radio stations (if the Internet stations aren't of worse sound quality), the ability to rip digital copies from either medium (directly, over the Internet or via the "audio in" from the radio) is not much different, and doesn't justify the difference in cost per song per listener. Internet radio stations should have to pay artists to play their music, but not more than conventional radio stations do.
Ultimately, this decision (and its prosecution) appears to be the RIAA (on behalf of its members) standing up to defend themselves as the sole portal to music sales. By driving (non-RIAA-controlled) Internet radio out of the market, the RIAA can enforce its playlist rules and control what customers hear. This intent, even more than the (questionable) means used to enforce it, is what I (and perhaps others) object to.
There is a minor problem, though...I can detoxify chemical waste in a variety of ways which make it far less hazardous (insoluble arsenic salts, for example). Organics can be incinerated at very high temperatures; you can probably recapture the organic byproducts and hit them again. With radioactive isotopes such as cobalt-60, iodine-131, strontium-90, etc., the half-lives range from hours to years; depending on the types of radiation emitted, the only way to keep them safe is to store them under shielding until they decay. There is no way to detoxify them until they decay on their own; while there are lots of safe ways to store toxic waste and/or to destroy it and render it nontoxic, there are few ways to store (and no ways to destroy, unless you can get fusion going or the material is fissionable) radioactive waste. Low level waste will be easy to shield, but high-level waste (used cores) will take lots of protection and a long time before they can be stored anywhere safely.
... thousand?....years.
Oh, and lots of the radioactive waste is also toxic, independent of its radioactivity (plutonium, for example, in a soluble form, is the most toxic element known to man - in insoluble form, it is still bad via emission of gamma rays). So, even if the waste is low level, you are still likely to have toxicity issues; the radioactivity and its requirements for storage just compound them.
In summary, if your put the coal waste in my backyard, I can have it dumped elsewhere, incinerated, or processed to render it much less toxic. With medium- to high-level nuclear waste, there is no way to do so - you're stuck with it for the next
I am not dismissing nuclear power as an energy source - it has problems which need to be solved but it could be useful if and when they are solved (where do we put the waste? how do we secure plants against potential and probable dangers?). The relative convenience and toxicity of wastes, however, is not an argument for it.
Willing suspension of disbelief is good for reading books, but not as a method of approaching real life. I usually am only willing to suspend disbelief when the story and characters don't suck - Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer read like cardboard cutouts to me, Microsoft's actions combine the least exciting components of the New York Yankees' yearly exploits and a cell being swallowed by an amoeba, and the character development is much like that of the famous short movie Bambi Meets Godzilla. So if they're not reading, they must be doing something else to generate that frame of mind, and I'm guessing it's not legal.
As an irrelevant side note, if I said that I believed I could circumvent copy protections either by legal or illegal drugs or by the force of my mind, would drugs or self-delusion be rendered illegal circumvention mechanisms under the DMCA?
actually if you do it right the mirror might even explode...nothing like shards of glass or plastic to make life safe for the people inside the mirror.
lasers are being thought of, I believe, as point defense weapons for ships - it's likely that any target hit is going to have a really big increase in temperature in a very short time, so unless the mirror can handle a lot of energy and sustain high thermal stress, it won't have much defensive value...even less if your foe has other weapons and an easily visible target (as another poster suggested, the rest of our weapons aren't going away).
What? Hubris could never happen to us....
This reminds me of Reason (the depleted uranium chain-gun) in Snow Crash. The major problem with weapons such as Reason is the sense of invincibility they induce in their possessors (this is approximately what Stephenson said in the novel). This invincibility may be as hazardous to the ones possessing the weapons or technology (and to those around them) as to others on the potential receiving end. If all of the people in the chain of command using the weapon have sufficient intelligence and judgment, weapons like this are very useful; unfortunately, if that is not the case, then misguided or stupid people have the power, as the phrase goes, to make big, lethal mistakes at the speed of light.
It is good to have technology like this, but the intelligence to use technology and people effectively and wisely is a far greater strategic weapon.
Please see post 7261081 and others in the major topic heading - Boeing sunk it all by their lonesome, without requiring the help of any hippies. If it doesn't work and won't make money, chances are it won't be made, with or without protest. If it does work and can make money, it will probably be made - our government has not for some time let the interests of our country interfere with the interests of its largest businesses.
I don't think the hippies at the height of their power were able to put a stop to anything in the first place.
join the Red Sox fans in that...I wish I drank...
The problem with privatization is when it involves public goods and when the public goods have values that aren't represented in money; the environment, for example, has value not easily accounted for by money (if we were to screw it up badly enough, we could delete ourselves from the list of nonextinct species - if we don't exist, there is obviously no value for us to create). If the value is significant represented in nonmonetary sources, then businesses have an incentive to take the parts that can be sold and leave the rest; since the public needs it, eventually the gov't (and, indirectly, its citizens) will have to step in and rebuild what hasn't been maintained.
Businesses will maintain what they need to make money (unless they can not maintain it and convince someone else to do so) - what doesn't need to be maintained for them to make money, won't. If much of the value of a service is nonmonetary, than privitization may do harm rather than good. Sometimes, when a service can make money for others while providing the same good, a business can potentially run it. Gov't does some things that could be done by others more efficiently, but most things done by government probably wouldn't have been done otherwise - the goods were either mainly to the public and not monetary so that they wouldn't have made money, of high enough risk that businesses were unlikely to invest in them, or subject to "free rider" issues. I don't believe that privatization is the solution here.
Now that I think about it, the subject post was probably ironic. Sorry. The point still stands, though; it probably just shouldn't have stood here.
...he'd be correct. Just what exactly should make me want to trust his judgment; as the SiteFinder incident shows, his ability to judge what's best to do with other people's computers is more than questionable. Maybe when he can buy and build his own toys he can do as he wishes - but until then, he can shut up and play by the rules or leave and go do something "useful", like make a nonmandatory SiteFinder for the six people that actually found his "feature" useful.
It may not be a rigged election here, but with no audit trail or ability to verify the results, there's no guarantee that the next one won't be. It doesn't even have to be rigged - depending on the margin of victory, it might not take many errors to perturb the outcome. Without an ability to check election results, the ability to rig an election exists, and eventually it will be used.
The people that run Diebold have a political bias. While they probably aren't allowing that to affect their judgment, as long as they are trying to implement a system with potential for both accidental misuse and full-blown voter fraud, their bias will be an issue. A clearer system for voting absolves the innocent and allows mistakes to be corrected.
Either incompetence or malice could alter election results where this system is used. People in power want to keep it, and the only way to prevent them from abusing their power to that end is to watch them. A system that doesn't allow one to do so is a system built for fraud. Any election in which that system is used will yield questionable results - even if the results aren't in error, no one will know whether they are correct or not. The (known) technical ability to either mess up or steal elections with this system can only decrease mistrust of it while decreasing the ability to do anything constructive with that mistrust. This is a bad combination for either political party.
P.S. the same problem that potentially could change outcomes (unverifiability) also means that there's no guarantee that dead people (or imaginary ones) won't vote. Without checks, all some programmer (cracker) has to do is summon them from the ether, and add the appropriate code.
wouldn't that be out of character? Testing and security don't seem to be their strong points. Forcing users to do what they want, on the other hand...
Spamm^H^H^H^H^Hemarketers sell products that either don't work or that no one wants, and they sell it by using other people's computers (either by legal or illegal means) to do it for them without paying for it. So, people without consciences sell products without merit while people who actually provide useful products or services pay for them to do it.
By this reasoning, criminals provide jobs as well - stores would go out of business if criminals didn't have ill-gotten gains to spend. The minor flaw in the reasoning is that the person whose resources are used by spammers could have used those resources more efficiently, both in providing services that people actually want and in spending the money returned from those services in a more efficient manner. Criminals, after all, have no incentive to be fiscally responsible - if they run out of money, they'll just steal more. If spammers don't use their bandwidth efficiently, it doesn't matter - they aren't paying anyway, and they'll just send some more or write another virus to take over some other computers.
It is safe to say spammers "create" jobs - but it is also likely that more and better jobs would be created if spammers didn't exist. Spammers don't create jobs - spam and its deployment probably result in a net loss of jobs.
Spammers rely on their status as free riders to make money. Once they make up a significant portion of the cost of operation of the internet, they become a burden which arouses directed and righteous anger. If some of them are stupid enough to get together to publicly defend themselves, they provide an opportunity for those who pay for the leeches to shut them down. Free ridership only works when no one knows who the free riders are; once they're out in the open, they are a target. The Mafia dons who live public lives of wealth and largesse are the ones targeted by the gov't - they are the obvious targets. EMA provides a similar role for spammers, which is good for everyone else.
Isn't "excellence" the wrong terminology for the award - kind of like giving an award for competence in accidentally shooting oneself in the foot?
....that we can only type in lowercase? if the shift key is a DMCA (oops, four counts there) violation, then I guess someone is going to have to make a very large keyboard for standard use...
I think this is one of the few legitimate arguments aganst education - with education, morons like this can run a company, hire lawyers, write legislation (and crappy DRM) and get rich doing it.
....they could have at least sold an effective DRM, rather than one that could be dismantled by a monkey using the famous PLOKTA method. So, someone publishes the fact that their DRM is defective, and the incompetents who wrote the POS intend to sue. I guess this is the reductio ab absurdum (sic) of the Constitution - if the 1st Amendment is trumped by a bunch of incompetents with a legal team of their own powered by corporate- (Hollywood-)sponsored legislation, then we should just give up now.
If DRM successfully stopped piracy it would be OK. Since it doesn't stop anything but casual piracy it's not so good. It becomes even less good when my fair use rights are taken without companies having to go through the technicality of buying members of Congress to get an amenable law passed. And I like it even less when companies choose overly onerous ways to enforce the rights. (I don't have to give book publishers a spare key to my house so that they can make sure I don't have books I haven't paid for.)
Ultimately, people don't like paying to be treated like criminals while getting software with less flexibility that costs them more while large scale pirates are selling the software. Going after the people who buy software to get the people who copy it (while avoiding those who do most of the copying) seems like collateral damage on a massive scale - only in this case, the damage to users is intentional, designed to get from them the money they aren't making from other sources. If you think this is a good idea, you are entitled to your opinion, but ultimately it seems to be behavior guaranteed to drive off your (paying) customers while encouraging people to buy from large scale copiers. Since this doesn't seem to be what they had in mind, the lesson that they need to learn is hurting your customers to get copiers is a flawed business model.
Familiarity with computers is a positive attribute, but considering the lack of money for lots of other things in the school system with longer term records of benefits to students (art/music/sports) and lower equipment turnover (don't need to buy all new music or instruments every year for music, for example), Spending a lot of money each each year on consumer goods will only decrease the amount of money available for other things. The continual update and modifications will require students to either buy computers every few years after 6th grade or for the state to buy them, spending even more money; without the expenditures for continuing education, this doesn't make much sense as a one-time expense. Add the costs of maintenance and administration and this could cost a lot of money in the long term. Other programs such as testing also require fixed budgeting (money that has to be used for a specific purpose - if schools don't test I think they don't get other funding from the federal gov't?) - thus computers are replacing discretionary money (money that can be moved between programs) for fixed expenditures. Unless the use of computers in the classroom (and its displacement of other educational means) is a significant benefit in the long term, this is a bad idea.
Finally, this seems like armament for people who claim that education already spends too much. Computers don't seem to be the primary problem with American education, and so spending lots of money on that problem before others seems to be an error in priorities. Computers for every 6th grader sound like the anecdote about cocaine - it's God's way of saying that you have too much money. Since that probably isn't the case, it doesn't make so much sense to me.
I pay Verisign to register a .com domain. Sitefinder comes along and points people trying to find my domain to a variety of businesses, some of which are my competitors. I don't have access to their rankings, so I can't redirect people unless I buy the potential misspelled sites from Verisign; otherwise, they have effectively built a bypass around my domain (which I paid them for). Verisign took money from domain holders and then devalued what it sold for its own benefit. As a bonus, the means it used to devalue their property it also didn't own - the unregistered domain names are community property. Essentially, it charged domain holders for advertising, then put up signs on public property advertising competitors.
Had Verisign wanted to help users, it could have done so in other ways, some of which would not have broken a working RFC standard or the servers of lots of people. In addition, as stated in previous threads, the searcher is not even as good as Microsoft's similar feature; thus Verisign's "help" is worse than that most users were already receiving. That seems to indicate that help for users was not a priority for SiteFinder - rather the opportunity for free advertising (and the lack of tangible worth of the trust they violated) led Verisign to conclude that this was a good idea.
Apparently about the same time Sony issued an 'Enhanced CD" where the only enhancement is the ability to crash your Mac or not to play in your car. It is in line with their current policy of suing your customers, silencing critics of bad and/or cracked DRM, and raising prices while decreasing CD issues and calling it a business plan for the future.
Wait a second...it is a business plan for the future - if the future of your industry is a shallow grave and the enduring hatred of millions of ex-customers.
...for which organic chemists and anybody who makes organic compounds is eternally grateful. Since NMR enabled nondestructive characterization of molecules while providing enough information about molecules to reliably determine their structures (at least, once computers and strong magnets came), organic chemists didn't have to burn lots of material to determine its structure. Other techniques (IR, UV) existed which don't destroy material, but NMR gives far more data on the structure of compounds than either of these techniques.
Early synthesis of molecules usually went through readily available intermediates ("relays") because of the amount of material required to characterize intermediates. Now organic synthesis can be performed easily on milligram scale, allowing for drug discovery and easier educational uses. Syntheses no longer need to include potential relays, allowing more efficient chemistry to be developed.
The development of small scale synthesis techniques has been a significant factor in the development and discovery of a variety of drugs. The ability to make things on small scale allows chemists to explore lots of drugs, giving them a better chance of finding an effective one. The ability to nondestructively determine the location, connectivity, and stereochemistry (arrangement in space) makes the structure determination and characterization of natural product drugs (such as Taxol) and their subsequent modification possible. These drugs, while not an unnmixed blessing, have been a significant benefit to the advancement of human health.
NMR has long been a useful technique for human health - MRI simply gave it a much more direct application.
...with the total lack of objectivity or the active deception in their press release (as linked to this thread), now would they? I guess having Verisign as a partner means not having you're sorry you hung the Internet.
Schools have a right to control their networks, not my computer. Why not control bandwith usage rather than the applications; if the applications are sucking down bandwith like a diner at an all-you-can-eat spaghetti dinner, pull the plug. It should be easy to do and require no intrusion into my computer. People with specialized needs for bandwidth can get specific dispensation. The fact that there is a less intrusive alternative (and probably more effective) measure to control bandwidth hogs and that the school has chosen instead a highly intrusive one implies that the intrusion is part of the purpose. So, in addition to paying through the nose for school (tuition increases in OH are double digit % of tuition) I also agree to give away my rights for search and seizure. Wow. What a deal. I get to give away rights to unelected unaccountable administrators so that I can live in cramped dorms. Sounds like Microsoft's EULA.
The RIAA didn't need the pretense of "file sharing" to enforce Draconian DRM - they wanted the ability to rewrite copyright law without the pretense of buying politicians. Again, choosing the most controlling method to do something rather than the least means that the control is part of the desired outcome. Going after people infringing copyright might help, but the people doing much of the copying (and profiting from it) are in places that couldn't care less what the RIAA or their labels think. Killing the housecats to scare the tigers doesn't do a whole lot. If it can be heard, it can be ripped - that is the lesson the RIAA hasn't learned. The methods you claim are motivated by file sharing to prevent copyright infringement won't prevent this. Even if the ends did justify the means, the means won't achieve the desired ends, and so I am giving away my freedom for no one's profit except the school. The school now has the ability to take away even more of my rights later for whatever else they see fit, and probably with methods no more effective than this.
Finally, your cause and effect reasoning is more than a little flawed. If winter robberies are occuring where the robbers wear ski jackets, by your logic, the police could arrest and shoot people in ski jackets and say, "It's the robbers' fault." Actually, it's not. If you choose an onerous and intrusive method to pursue a goal in the presence of less intrusive methods, either you intend to intrude (in which case you deserve the bile you are going to get) or you didn't care (in which case, you deserve the bile you are going to get).
By choosing this route, UF is teaching its students a very important lesson : in life, the Golden Rule is "he who has the gold makes the rules". I'm sure the students will remember this when their time comes around. Hope you don't expect much privacy in your retirement village/assisted living facility.
Have you considered sending an email to the judge in the SCO case (or whoever oversees the motions)? They might be interested in this, after all - I assume that, like policemen and other law enforcement officers, judges don't like being lied to. Maybe there's even room for a nice perjury charge followed by a list of /. references to prison rape and a back-and-forth discussion on it....but that's for another day.
One problem : who buys the services provided by people employing illegal aliens? Why, lots of people...meaning that a lot of people do in fact benefit because they get services without paying for the taxes that they would normally have to pay (as a part of their service costs). If the lack of taxes doesn't decrease the effective price of service, it increases profits, generating money which is taxed (at the corporation or personal level) and ends up getting spent anyway. Oh, and the people getting paid under the table get paid less (because they can't complain - who would they go to?) while at the same time paying lots of taxes (mainly consumption taxes such as sales tax which are also high in CA) while not drawing on governemt services (with the possible exception of health care, which of course is going up everywhere faster than inflation anyway).
I don't like the influx of illegal aliens anywhere, but money is not likely a reason to argue against their presence.
See post 7096601 - it is at least a partial refutation of the "extreme liberalism" of Dean's position. Ultimately, the Republicans will demonize whatever candidate the Democrats come up with as being too far left and a crazy liberal (just as, to some degree, the Democrats would do to the Republicans in reverse).
I'd rather have a candidate who will take positions I agree with and defend them than one who is desperately trying to be not liberal. The Democratic Party can succeed if it defines (and can achieve) positive goals rather than merely negative goals. Having a candidate people care about is better than choosing one that is "electable". The Labour party in Britain spent a lot of time finding this out - being respected or taking stands is much better than trying to be "electable"; if you get elected this way, it could turn out to be meaningless anyway (this is from Christopher Hitchens' essays in "For the Sake of Argument").
In summary, it is probably better for the Democratic Party (and probably politics in general) to have a candidate who is liked by a fair amount of people who is willing to stand and fight for issues, even if they were further left than many might like. Since the Republicans will portray their opponent as far left as possible anyway, it's better to stand and fight than to aquiesce quietly and in the process cede the initiative and the terms of debate to the Republicans. As in baseball, it's better to lose with your best pitches than to throw what you aren't good at and get beaten anyway.