The main thing that the elections showed was that our voting technology needs to be upgraded. We had an election that was literally too close to call considering the margins of error on our voting recorders.
This will allow different branches of government to interface MUCH more efficiently and cut down on the number of errors greatly. Or at least it should.
I'm from Louisiana, USA, and every election they have a large amount of the dead population vote. You know, fraud. The problem is that the people who register voters and the people who keep track of who's dead can't interface anywhere near as quickly as they should.
Having the different branches of government being able to share the same data, making sure everyone's on the same page, is a huge jump in efficiency. It needs to come, and this is a plan that would serve to jump start the process that would otherwise be completely wrapped up in red tape from now till kingdom come.
It's like how if you accept the upgrade to the mp3 codec suggested by media player, it will downgrade your professional version of the Freunhoffer codec to the standard version.
Not that I have an illegal copy of the codec...
There is absolutely nothing wrong with them doing this. It's their business, and their technologies, they can do whatever they want with it. Sure I think it's misguided and a waste of effort on the part of both Macrovision and the music industry, but it's their businesses.
Don't make it sound like they're killing puppies, they're just trying to make a buck... it's what a business generally does.
I would just hope that people would refuse to buy CDs with the copyprotection. That's how to fight this crap.
The DNS SHOULD be open to competition. It SHOULD be such that since ICANN is doing a lousy job, another group could step up and take over with only a matter of ISPs pointing to new root files. Whoever is doing a better job would be the de facto authority.
You know, here one party is demanding a change in a second party because of the stupidity and/or carelessness in a third party that didn't bother to RTFM.
But oh well, what can ya do?
No judgement from me about the appropriateness of this email.
If the Clinton administration's strongest side was its foreign policy, then thank got they're out. The administration's policies were all over the place, lacking any type of real consistancy or logic except for that logic which would benefit Clinton or his friends personally.
Perhaps they had a policy, but it sure looked like they were playing by ear to me and many others. In any case, the foreign actions of the administration seemed only consistant in that they half-assed everything. Never fully devoting resources to anything only ended up wasting them and making things worse for the US and the other countries involved.
I mean, come on, what good did he do internationally? And at the same time we have soaring oil prices causing major economic and industrial turmoil. The lack of a consistant, and consistantly good, foreign policy was a direct contributer to that.
Non-partisan numbers probably don't exist either way. For that reason, I would simply trust the numbers that are most consistant with the rest of the news, and those happen to be the ones that point to an economic slowdown (or perhaps an economic speedup slowdown, as it's about a derivation away) beginning a couple of years ago.
As far as the man who lost both popular and electoral votes, noone knows who that is:) I'm sorry, but the voting machines in the US are too inaccurate to say exactly who won the election. Count all you want, you'll never find out because voting machines with a 4% error can't tell who won in an election with a 3% difference.
The real underlying problem is really people who do a large number of self serving things that hurt the rest of the country, and even the world. Take the past administration, for example...
Yes, but how to automate this whole process?
I've been usig a program called vcr with limited results, as my processor is too slow for realtime compression...
The US economy is definately on its way down. The turn actually came about three or four years ago, but the dot-com boom masked it to some extent and the liberal biased press masked it the rest of the way. Large amounts of mismanagement during the past presidency were the real root of the problem, with a lack of foreign policy being one of the main issues.
The doomsaying going on now is actually only the numbers being reported accurately for the first time in quite a long time. It only seems a bit radical because of the sudden change out of skewed numbers.
Granted the doom and gloom is slightly exaggerated because of the president trying to get a tax cut through the legislature, but on the whole yes, the US economy is going through a large slowdown, as it has been for about three or four years.
:) Should anyone be allowed to regulate the extent to which ISP's regulate use of their service?
I'd love to say the same thing you did, but when you think about it, it really is inconsistant. The hope would be that market forces would encourage ISP's to not regulate as strongly.
Phone companies are a little tricky as they are sometimes partially public services, with the community helping to pay for the infrastructure. In that case, though, the community would have a reason to step in and request them to operate certain ways.
Otherwise, the ISP equipment is property of that company and so where does anyone else have the right to tell them what they can and can't do with their own property?
I hate that there is only one domain name system in use today. There is absolutely no competition and so there is absolutely no reason why the powers that be should make things fair.
Then again, this is a case of choices and finding the best balance between ease of use and the good of the users. Having a multitude of domain name systems competing would create confusion over names registered the same on different systems.
Oh well, I personally would like to see multiple DNS's simply because seeing one of anything like this makes me nervous. Also I think that having multiple of them would set some legal precidents that would clean up a lot of stuff.
The only part that I hate is that I guarantee that if someone pushed hard to for widespread acceptance of an alternative DNS, a legal battle would insue and it would not be allowed. We all remember what happened to AlterNIC, right?
I have always been a fan of multiple domain name systems, and I cheered on AlterNIC while they were still doing interesting things. Granted I didn't think the hijacking of that domain name was the greatest idea, but I think the competition between the systems was a great thing.
It goes against some of the fundamental beliefs of most geeks. While the geek would go for decentralization, fostering productive competition and progress, liberals try to centralize the power.
I could go on with examples and such, but that's basically my point.
It always surprises me that people here are in favor of Gore. It seems to go against most geek theories.
First of all, I think it is useless to talk about Bush vs Gore without talking about the advisors they will surround themselves with. Bush seems stupid, yes, but he also seems like he would listen to his cabinet. Gore seems just intelligent enough to be dangerous to the country, not listening to advisors while charging off on some personal crusades.
That being said, look at the differences between their parties' platforms. IN THEORY the republicans want to distribute the power allowing the states to have more control and the federal government less. This distribution of power seems much more along the lines of what geeks would ask for. Just as OS is all about giving choices in programs, letting states set the laws would give people more of a choice (granted noone really wants to move) and more space to experiment with different approaches. Also, things like school vouchers foster competition for money, just like the OS programs keeping companies on their toes.
Granted Republicans are not entirely consistant behind their ideals (Christian Coalition) but they are there and often do make it into politics.
Even more important for a president, I think Bush would do a better job with foreign policy than Gore. I simply think Bush has the balls to do the right thing with the military to avoid the complete screwups of Clinton. I would even propose that something in the liberal mindset makes them poor commanders-in-chief. I wouldn't be alone in making that proposition, either.
I completely blame Clinton for many things icluding the price of oil and the current slowdown of the US economy (and it is a slowdown...). I think Gore is a little more upstanding than Clinton, but even worse in terms of personal agendas. He would just push forward more of Clinton's erronious policies but adding an extra layer of overstated environmental concerns and wussy foreign policy, all of these places Bush would shine in with help from his advisors.
Yes! Democrats are better because they give more support to things like research for the sake of research, but that doesn't outweigh the drop in the standard of living that they bring about. Handle research funding through Congress where it belongs and let's have a president who can keep us from ticking of the rest of the world.
It always surprises me that people here are in favor of Gore. It seems to go against most geek theories.
First of all, I think it is useless to talk about Bush vs Gore without talking about the advisors they will surround themselves with. Bush seems stupid, yes, but he also seems like he would listen to his cabinet. Gore seems just intelligent enough to be dangerous to the country, not listening to advisors while charging off on some personal crusades.
That being said, look at the differences between their parties' platforms. IN THEORY the republicans want to distribute the power allowing the states to have more control and the federal government less. This distribution of power seems much more along the lines of what geeks would ask for. Just as OS is all about giving choices in programs, letting states set the laws would give people more of a choice (granted noone really wants to move) and more space to experiment with different approaches. Also, things like school vouchers foster competition for money, just like the OS programs keeping companies on their toes.
Granted Republicans are not entirely consistant behind their ideals (Christian Coalition) but they are there and often do make it into politics.
Even more important for a president, I think Bush would do a better job with foreign policy than Gore. I simply think Bush has the balls to do the right thing with the military to avoid the complete screwups of Clinton. I would even propose that something in the liberal mindset makes them poor commanders-in-chief. I wouldn't be alone in making that proposition, either.
I completely blame Clinton for many things including the price of oil and the slowdown of the US economy. I think Gore is a little more upstanding than Clinton, but even worse in terms of personal agendas. He would just push forward more of Clinton's erronious policies but adding an extra layer of overstated environmental concerns and wussy foreign policy, all of these places Bush would shine in with help from his advisors.
Yes! Democrats are better because they give more support to things like research for the sake of research, but that doesn't outweigh the drop in the standard of living that they bring about. Handle research funding through Congress where it belongs and let's have a president who can keep us from ticking of the rest of the world.
I love how so many of the sentances on that webpage weren't even complete sentances. Just the way to get down to the level of the common man, I guess....
What's so bad about RAR?
I always thought its compression was superior to almost all alternatives except Quantum (paq) which takes an eternity and a couple of others that are even slower.
It's definately better than zip and gzip.... right?
I havn't had to look into compression too much since I moved up from my 68 meg harddrive back in the day:)
I know this is slightly off topic, but does anyone know where I can get a Yahoo protocol spec? I have been wanting to develop MSN and Yahoo protocols into a chat application I'm writing for fun, but all I can find are C libraries (this program is in Java).
AIM and ICQ specs were very easy to find, but not Yahoo.
I love mine and use it constantly. Sure the design could use a little work, but it's one of those things where once you get used to it, you've got it down.
Just another learning curve.
After using mine for the past four months, I have absolutely no gripes about shelling out the $120 for it. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
This whole ROOT.NET system sounds a lot like what JINI promises. I'm not 100% clear on how JINI works, but I know it would allow your PocketPC to find the MegaServer to interpret your voice, so it kind of sounds like Microsoft is planning a JINI killer... to bad JINI seems to not have taken off at all, damn Sun.
Microsoft will take over ROOT.NET and we will all be left battling them for freedom, perhaps with JINI, when JINI could have made headway by now and left Microsoft struggling against it.
I never liked Jabber. They have spent so long building it into a huge project.... it really seems to be not worth the trouble. How many years have they been working to release 1.0? For a messaging system that seems a little long, especially considering the number of developers working on it.
It seems like a much too complicated and too large thing, and I don't like the fundamental feel of how they did the project. It seems to be making things overly complex, and I think the long development time confirms this.
Slashdot Mirror
The main thing that the elections showed was that our voting technology needs to be upgraded. We had an election that was literally too close to call considering the margins of error on our voting recorders.
This will allow different branches of government to interface MUCH more efficiently and cut down on the number of errors greatly. Or at least it should.
I'm from Louisiana, USA, and every election they have a large amount of the dead population vote. You know, fraud. The problem is that the people who register voters and the people who keep track of who's dead can't interface anywhere near as quickly as they should.
Having the different branches of government being able to share the same data, making sure everyone's on the same page, is a huge jump in efficiency. It needs to come, and this is a plan that would serve to jump start the process that would otherwise be completely wrapped up in red tape from now till kingdom come.
It's like how if you accept the upgrade to the mp3 codec suggested by media player, it will downgrade your professional version of the Freunhoffer codec to the standard version. Not that I have an illegal copy of the codec...
No problem at all. They can track my TV watching all they want, I have no reason to not want that.
Heck, I'd even let them do it non-anonymously.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with them doing this. It's their business, and their technologies, they can do whatever they want with it. Sure I think it's misguided and a waste of effort on the part of both Macrovision and the music industry, but it's their businesses.
Don't make it sound like they're killing puppies, they're just trying to make a buck... it's what a business generally does.
I would just hope that people would refuse to buy CDs with the copyprotection. That's how to fight this crap.
The DNS SHOULD be open to competition. It SHOULD be such that since ICANN is doing a lousy job, another group could step up and take over with only a matter of ISPs pointing to new root files. Whoever is doing a better job would be the de facto authority.
Of course then the legal system gets involved....
I hate problems that are caused by third parties.
You know, here one party is demanding a change in a second party because of the stupidity and/or carelessness in a third party that didn't bother to RTFM.
But oh well, what can ya do?
No judgement from me about the appropriateness of this email.
If the Clinton administration's strongest side was its foreign policy, then thank got they're out. The administration's policies were all over the place, lacking any type of real consistancy or logic except for that logic which would benefit Clinton or his friends personally.
Perhaps they had a policy, but it sure looked like they were playing by ear to me and many others. In any case, the foreign actions of the administration seemed only consistant in that they half-assed everything. Never fully devoting resources to anything only ended up wasting them and making things worse for the US and the other countries involved.
I mean, come on, what good did he do internationally? And at the same time we have soaring oil prices causing major economic and industrial turmoil. The lack of a consistant, and consistantly good, foreign policy was a direct contributer to that.
Non-partisan numbers probably don't exist either way. For that reason, I would simply trust the numbers that are most consistant with the rest of the news, and those happen to be the ones that point to an economic slowdown (or perhaps an economic speedup slowdown, as it's about a derivation away) beginning a couple of years ago.
:) I'm sorry, but the voting machines in the US are too inaccurate to say exactly who won the election. Count all you want, you'll never find out because voting machines with a 4% error can't tell who won in an election with a 3% difference.
As far as the man who lost both popular and electoral votes, noone knows who that is
The real underlying problem is really people who do a large number of self serving things that hurt the rest of the country, and even the world. Take the past administration, for example...
Yes, but how to automate this whole process?
I've been usig a program called vcr with limited results, as my processor is too slow for realtime compression...
The US economy is definately on its way down. The turn actually came about three or four years ago, but the dot-com boom masked it to some extent and the liberal biased press masked it the rest of the way. Large amounts of mismanagement during the past presidency were the real root of the problem, with a lack of foreign policy being one of the main issues.
The doomsaying going on now is actually only the numbers being reported accurately for the first time in quite a long time. It only seems a bit radical because of the sudden change out of skewed numbers.
Granted the doom and gloom is slightly exaggerated because of the president trying to get a tax cut through the legislature, but on the whole yes, the US economy is going through a large slowdown, as it has been for about three or four years.
:) Should anyone be allowed to regulate the extent to which ISP's regulate use of their service?
I'd love to say the same thing you did, but when you think about it, it really is inconsistant. The hope would be that market forces would encourage ISP's to not regulate as strongly.
Phone companies are a little tricky as they are sometimes partially public services, with the community helping to pay for the infrastructure. In that case, though, the community would have a reason to step in and request them to operate certain ways.
Otherwise, the ISP equipment is property of that company and so where does anyone else have the right to tell them what they can and can't do with their own property?
I hate that there is only one domain name system in use today. There is absolutely no competition and so there is absolutely no reason why the powers that be should make things fair.
Then again, this is a case of choices and finding the best balance between ease of use and the good of the users. Having a multitude of domain name systems competing would create confusion over names registered the same on different systems.
Oh well, I personally would like to see multiple DNS's simply because seeing one of anything like this makes me nervous. Also I think that having multiple of them would set some legal precidents that would clean up a lot of stuff.
The only part that I hate is that I guarantee that if someone pushed hard to for widespread acceptance of an alternative DNS, a legal battle would insue and it would not be allowed. We all remember what happened to AlterNIC, right?
I have always been a fan of multiple domain name systems, and I cheered on AlterNIC while they were still doing interesting things. Granted I didn't think the hijacking of that domain name was the greatest idea, but I think the competition between the systems was a great thing.
It goes against some of the fundamental beliefs of most geeks. While the geek would go for decentralization, fostering productive competition and progress, liberals try to centralize the power.
I could go on with examples and such, but that's basically my point.
It always surprises me that people here are in favor of Gore. It seems to go against most geek theories.
First of all, I think it is useless to talk about Bush vs Gore without talking about the advisors they will surround themselves with. Bush seems stupid, yes, but he also seems like he would listen to his cabinet. Gore seems just intelligent enough to be dangerous to the country, not listening to advisors while charging off on some personal crusades.
That being said, look at the differences between their parties' platforms. IN THEORY the republicans want to distribute the power allowing the states to have more control and the federal government less. This distribution of power seems much more along the lines of what geeks would ask for. Just as OS is all about giving choices in programs, letting states set the laws would give people more of a choice (granted noone really wants to move) and more space to experiment with different approaches. Also, things like school vouchers foster competition for money, just like the OS programs keeping companies on their toes.
Granted Republicans are not entirely consistant behind their ideals (Christian Coalition) but they are there and often do make it into politics.
Even more important for a president, I think Bush would do a better job with foreign policy than Gore. I simply think Bush has the balls to do the right thing with the military to avoid the complete screwups of Clinton. I would even propose that something in the liberal mindset makes them poor commanders-in-chief. I wouldn't be alone in making that proposition, either.
I completely blame Clinton for many things icluding the price of oil and the current slowdown of the US economy (and it is a slowdown...). I think Gore is a little more upstanding than Clinton, but even worse in terms of personal agendas. He would just push forward more of Clinton's erronious policies but adding an extra layer of overstated environmental concerns and wussy foreign policy, all of these places Bush would shine in with help from his advisors.
Yes! Democrats are better because they give more support to things like research for the sake of research, but that doesn't outweigh the drop in the standard of living that they bring about. Handle research funding through Congress where it belongs and let's have a president who can keep us from ticking of the rest of the world.
It always surprises me that people here are in favor of Gore. It seems to go against most geek theories.
First of all, I think it is useless to talk about Bush vs Gore without talking about the advisors they will surround themselves with. Bush seems stupid, yes, but he also seems like he would listen to his cabinet. Gore seems just intelligent enough to be dangerous to the country, not listening to advisors while charging off on some personal crusades.
That being said, look at the differences between their parties' platforms. IN THEORY the republicans want to distribute the power allowing the states to have more control and the federal government less. This distribution of power seems much more along the lines of what geeks would ask for. Just as OS is all about giving choices in programs, letting states set the laws would give people more of a choice (granted noone really wants to move) and more space to experiment with different approaches. Also, things like school vouchers foster competition for money, just like the OS programs keeping companies on their toes.
Granted Republicans are not entirely consistant behind their ideals (Christian Coalition) but they are there and often do make it into politics.
Even more important for a president, I think Bush would do a better job with foreign policy than Gore. I simply think Bush has the balls to do the right thing with the military to avoid the complete screwups of Clinton. I would even propose that something in the liberal mindset makes them poor commanders-in-chief. I wouldn't be alone in making that proposition, either.
I completely blame Clinton for many things including the price of oil and the slowdown of the US economy. I think Gore is a little more upstanding than Clinton, but even worse in terms of personal agendas. He would just push forward more of Clinton's erronious policies but adding an extra layer of overstated environmental concerns and wussy foreign policy, all of these places Bush would shine in with help from his advisors.
Yes! Democrats are better because they give more support to things like research for the sake of research, but that doesn't outweigh the drop in the standard of living that they bring about. Handle research funding through Congress where it belongs and let's have a president who can keep us from ticking of the rest of the world.
I love how so many of the sentances on that webpage weren't even complete sentances. Just the way to get down to the level of the common man, I guess....
~Chris
What's so bad about RAR?
:)
I always thought its compression was superior to almost all alternatives except Quantum (paq) which takes an eternity and a couple of others that are even slower.
It's definately better than zip and gzip.... right?
I havn't had to look into compression too much since I moved up from my 68 meg harddrive back in the day
~Chris
I know this is slightly off topic, but does anyone know where I can get a Yahoo protocol spec? I have been wanting to develop MSN and Yahoo protocols into a chat application I'm writing for fun, but all I can find are C libraries (this program is in Java).
AIM and ICQ specs were very easy to find, but not Yahoo.
~Chris Carlin
I don't think that's the only problem with Jabber :)
I get very bad vibes from watching Jabber's development. I sincerely hope that it doesn't catch on.
Granted I can't back this up very well at all, but... bad vibes, man.
~Chris
I love mine and use it constantly.
Sure the design could use a little work, but it's one of those things where once you get used to it, you've got it down.
Just another learning curve.
After using mine for the past four months, I have absolutely no gripes about shelling out the $120 for it. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
~Chris
There is a directory mode.
Documentation sucks, but if you play with it enough you can figure it out.
This whole ROOT.NET system sounds a lot like what JINI promises. I'm not 100% clear on how JINI works, but I know it would allow your PocketPC to find the MegaServer to interpret your voice, so it kind of sounds like Microsoft is planning a JINI killer... to bad JINI seems to not have taken off at all, damn Sun.
Microsoft will take over ROOT.NET and we will all be left battling them for freedom, perhaps with JINI, when JINI could have made headway by now and left Microsoft struggling against it.
I never liked Jabber.
They have spent so long building it into a huge project.... it really seems to be not worth the trouble. How many years have they been working to release 1.0? For a messaging system that seems a little long, especially considering the number of developers working on it.
It seems like a much too complicated and too large thing, and I don't like the fundamental feel of how they did the project. It seems to be making things overly complex, and I think the long development time confirms this.
This is not a flame, just an oppinion.
~Chris