I can imagine the majority of tin foil hat replies to this post, but just for once, if you're not in the position to be affected by this, shut the hell up.....
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew;
And when they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
We've had a lot of posts about "OH NO! COBOL!" Yes, yes, I agree with you -- pretending to be English usually results in awkward and unnatural syntaxes.
"I knew I'd hate COBOL the moment I saw they'd used perform instead of do." - Larry Wall.
Their other example was that most languages make people think in loops, when they really want to operate on a group. Saying "for (i = 0; i len; ++i) { x[i] += 10; }" it a really clumsy way to express what people thought, which was "add 10 to everything in x".
"Dome A is the highest point on the Antarctic Plateau, and it has never been reached by humans. It is thought to be the coldest place on earth, and is certainly among the most remote."
"Sir, we have successfully made to the Antarctic Plateau. It is indeed the coldest place on Earth, just as we thought, but unfortunately according to my map, it is not among the most remote ones. The most remote place on Earth seems to be the Arctic Ocean."
"Any ideas on how we can check for similar problems in other close elections?"
Unfortunately, there is no other solution than manual recounts. Not only in "close elections" because how do you differentiate a "far" (not "close") election from a large "glitch"? The only solution is to always do manual recounts--or just always count the ballots manually in the first place, skipping the "e-counting" step altogether.
The only way to make sure the votes are counted correctly, is to have a group of people representing all of the competing parties to witness and take part in the actual counting of physical ballots, look at each other while counting, compare the results, when they differ start from the beginning, and finally agree on one exact result. We cannot trust electronic counting the same way, because no one can witness and observe the counting process, no one can see the electrons being shuffled to eventually form a final outcome, just like we can see the paper ballots being shuffled and counted by people observed and verified by other people.
It doesn't even have anything to do with the source code being open or proprietary, the system being secure or vulnerable or the hardware being robust or faulty. It has nothing to do with the system being trustworthy or "trusted." The point is that being able to observe and verify the entire process we don't need to trust anyone or anything in the first place. And it means that the only way to have a solid democracy based on an e-voting system is to always do manual recounts, which obviously makes the whole e-voting idea quite counterproductive, to say the very least.
The regulatory power should mean the power to regulate our equipment so it wouldn't break the infrastructure and other equipment, or jam the spectrum in the case of wireless communication. It shouldn never mean anything more than that. Specifically, it should mean that our modems cannot send high voltage down the line and the prohibition of DOS (a digital equivalent to spectrum jamming) but should never mean which software do we use and how do we use it, provided it does not damage other equipment, and equipment only. In that context we should have nothing to worry about, though of course every regulatory body tends to increase its power way beyond what is reasonable, if it itself isn't regulated as well. What we need are better checks and balances, not more legislation.
First of all, detection of a recording device is impossible as long as the recorder does not send anything, just like it's impossible to detect any kind of passive eavesdropping, notwithstanding the quantum cryptography where by the very definition of measurement any observation is inherently active. Second of all, I fail to see how is it going to help "scan" for cameras set by the cinema operators themselves, for no one records a movie for serious bootleg operations using his camera phone in a crowd for Christ's sake. Third of all, I refuse to go to amy cinema which "uses light impulses" which can be potentially damaging to my poor eye sight, nor will I risk an epileptic attack. In short, they propose a dangerous technical solution to the social problem addressing not the right people which they should address in the first place. In order to introduce said pointless and dumb technology, they are going to raise the proces even further, making people even less likely to pay for a movie. In other words, it's a Very Bad Idea.(TM)
Software RAID on a bunch of different hard drives (preferably SCSI, but you can also use IDE/ATAPI/UDMA/USB) and automatic off-site (e.g. a remote ftp or scp) backup cron job should do the job.
Wouldn't that be dangerous if reflected into the eye? Remember that we are talking about a pure ultraviolet light with no component in the visible spectrum (like the ultraviolet in the sun light), therefore the eye wouldn't notice any light at all and keep the iris open. I don't think I would buy any product with invisible laser to use outside a specialised laboratory with protective equipment and I don't expect most of consumers to do it either.
If your friend can use keyboard then it should be possible to map certain keys to produce mouse buttons events and press them with the second hand. I know that people are doing it for example to emulate three-button mouse using Debian on Mac with one-button mouse. Google for mouse button emulation. Alternatively, you can prefer a very simple, low tech, portable, fully hardware solution: open the mouse and replace button switches with pairs of wires e.g. using 3 pairs in the standard ethernet cable. Other ends of every pair connect to a convenient button, which could be even something big to press with a foot--an old electric guitar effect pedal could be perfect for that. It's hard to be more specific since I don't know what input devices does your friend use, but I would suggest either emulating mouse buttons in software or rewiring the hardware, which should be trivial given an easy to open mouse. Good luck.
Cauliflower
Is cauliflower nutritious? Is specifying what parts are usable POV?
List of numbers that are always odd
the number 3 was being considered as possibly being not odd. Page protection was needed to halt the heated
debate. User:Wik's correction of a misspelling of hypochondriacs was
re-reverted no less than 3 times. Supposedly as a means to illustrate the ludicrousness of the subject, various examples such as
"the atomic numbers of gold and silver, but not their sum" and "the number of days in a year (except leap years)" were added to
the list. Later in the edit war, no less than two thousand five hundred numbers of debated oddness (every second integer from 1
to 4999) were added and removed, four hundred ninety eight of them repeatedly before the edit war was solved by the article's
deletion after a VfD vote.
Wikipedia:Yet more bad jokes and other deleted nonsense#Edit
conflicts
the edit war on the Wikipedia:Edit conflicts
page, preserved in Yet More Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense.
Gdanzig
edit wars have been occuring for most of a year as regards the exact name of this Polish German Prussian
Eastern Central Northern European Baltic Baltijas city.
Wikipedia:Requests for
de-adminship
Wik's nominations of 9 Wikipedia:Wikicops were moved; the wikicops page itself got in a move war about a week later and ended
back at Wikipedia:Administrators.
Sarah Edmonds
Wik makes a correction, giving her middle name and month of birth. This gets lost through an edit conflict, and Danny and
Alexandros add a paragraph worth of content. Wik reverts. Danny reverts. Etcetera. The only objection either had with the other's
edits was that it reverted their own.
Richard Neustadt
Two months of edit war on whether the page should say "[[Harry S. Truman|President Truman]]" or "President [[Harry S.
Truman]]" (plus the same with several other presidents).
Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars ever
edit war over what edit wars should be on this page. - see Recursion (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipe dia:Lamest_edit_wars_ever); see also tail recursion.
Suncrest, Washington
Constant reversion of Mark Richards's "vandalism" by
original creator who seemed to think it was his page. See page history and
Video games have already changed my workplace--I had to change my workplace after I was cought playing video games during work time. But more seriously, I have been using game theory while organising the cubicle space, which worker should be a neighbour of which worker, et cetera, for quite some time now with some success, and I have observed that prisoner's dilemma could be called "cubicle worker dilemma" just as well, for it proves surprisingly effective when applied to this kind of environment where people tend to interact more extensively with their direct neighbours. Using games for serious problems doesn't seem to be a new idea, but it certainly is interesting and worth exploring. Most of people tend to agree that games are fun, and for quite a few intellectually challenging tasks that very fun might be indeed a stronger imperative than the monetary compensation itself.
Okay, I'll grant you that FireFox is probably more secure than IE. But to say it lacks security issues is going a little further than I'd go, myself. In fact, I'd be willing to bet you $10 that it has security issues of it's own.
[...]
No software is bulletproof. No software lacks security issues.
I am answering only because your comment has been moderated as "Score:5, Insightful." Please let me use a great analogy: I often say that--unlike Bill Gates--I lack money. "To say you lack money is going a little further than I'd go," some people say, "for no person is absolutely poor, no person lacks money." Of course, I don't assert that I have absolutely no money whatsoever. I am only saying that I have considerably less money than Bill Gates. Also, the operating systems and web browsers I use have considerably less security issues than those sold by Bill Gates. No car is absolutely safe, but that is not a good excuse to sell cars which explode every time a butterfly hits the windshield. No sex is absolutely safe for your health but that doesn't make unprotected sex with strangers any smarter. The same goes with software. More pleasant? Convenient? Perhaps. But not any smarter.
Trademark in the headline, copyright infringement of patents in the summary... That is what I call great journalism. Next time please also add trade secrets somewhere. And Intellectual Property, while we're at it. Capitalised. Thanks.
The Guardian recently had an outreach program to get UK readers to help educate voters about how the world percieves America, to give them some perspective that is missing from their weekly digest. Unfortunately the campaign was DDOS and filibustered out of existence by republicans spinning a "foreign interference" false call to arms, but while it was ongoing I felt it did useful work and contributed myself. I hope I get an answer!
You are talking about My fellow non-Americans, a large happening completely silenced by the US media, even by Slashdot. I have submitted the story about this happening to politics.slashdot.org twice, on 18 and 19 October 2004, and in fact I was not the only person who has done it, but, needless to say, it got rejected every single time, for some reason, even though there were nearly no new stories on politics.slashdot.org posted during those days. It is actually quite an interesting story, certainly worth reposting at least as a comment.
Here is
the first sory I posted:
My fellow non-Americans
"The result of the US election will affect the lives of millions around the world but those of us outside the 50 states have had no say in it -- until now," writes Guardian Unlimited, one of the most popular online news resources on the Internet, in the article entitled My fellow non-Americans. "In a unique experiment, [Guardian] has assembled a democratic toolkit to enable people from Basildon to Botswana to campaign in the presidential race. And with a little help from the folks in Clark County, Ohio, you might help decide who takes up residence in the White House next month."
In this article
Oliver Burkeman thoroughly explains
how non-Americans can
have a real chance of influencing the outcome of the
United States presidential election in 2004
by writing to undecided voters in the crucial state of Ohio.
He also instructs how to give money and make your voice heard
by contacting the US media.
More can be read in the related articles, A brief guide to Clark County and Dear Clark County voter.
In the first three days after publishing
My fellow non-Americans,
more than 11,000 people requested addresses and
due to a strong reaction of US readers
Guardian Unlimited has received many voices of protest.
According to Wikipedia,
Ohio
is a swing state.
"The mixture of urban and rural areas, and the presense of both large blue-collar industries and significant white-collar commercial districts leads to a balance of conservative and liberal population that (together with the state's 20 electoral votes, more than most swing states) makes the state very important to the outcome of national elections and, therefore, very important to the campaigns of both major parties."
Guardian Unlimited is an on-line version of the British newspaper The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian. It is a serious broadsheet newspaper with relatively left wing politics.
This is really amazing how fast bugfixing work in free software and open source. "Warning, there is a hole, well actually there was a hole." I wonder how would that process work in case of proprietary software. We'll probably have to wait a year for another service pack. In any case, there is only one thing I can say here: kudos for PuTTY security team for fixing your holes so quickly.
No word yet on whether Verizon will block ports (25, 80, etc) for incoming or outgoing traffic; with 2MB upload, I hope to basically run a small data center in my basement.
First of all you can use any service you want listening on any port you want. Data in your/etc/services file are only default ports, not mandatory ones. For example, you might run smtp server on port 80 and http on port 25 and they would complete the tcp three-way handshake just fine. If you have ever seen a web url in the form of proto://host:port then you know what am I talking about.
Second of all, there are other important factors of Internet connection than only throughput. For certain tasks other factors may be in fact much more important, from which responsiveness, min/avg/max icmp round-trip, full duplex support, underlying protocol, mean time between failures, uptime and responsiveness are only a few.
Generally, when you want a good data center you have to learn to look at other factors than raw throughput when choosing an Internet connection, just like you have to learn to look at other factors than clock speed when buying a server for said data center.
Besides, what does the "2MB upload" mean? Two megabytes per second? Including or excluding data parity bits? Synch bits? Tcp headers? Data integrity checksum overhead? Networking is a difficult craft. There is a long way before you will "run a small data center in my basement" just as easily as you imagine, if it is ever possible at all.
It's basically a choice between expensive ink and expensive printers. The question whether one should consider it a good news or bad news depends only on the individual printing patterns, i.e. how much ink does one use on average in a printer lifetime. This is certainly a hard question to answer.
Is it legal to release Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas with its crime and violence apotheosis in Australia? I hope so, but does anyone know any formal decisions and rationale?
Slashdot Mirror
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew;
And when they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
-- Martin Niemöller
We've had a lot of posts about "OH NO! COBOL!" Yes, yes, I agree with you -- pretending to be English usually results in awkward and unnatural syntaxes.
"I knew I'd hate COBOL the moment I saw they'd used perform instead of do." - Larry Wall.
See hyper operators in Perl 6:
@x >>+= 10;
and junctions. In fact, for such simple cases, it's already easy in Perl 5:
$_ += 10 for @x;
where @x is the array from your example.
"Dome A is the highest point on the Antarctic Plateau, and it has never been reached by humans. It is thought to be the coldest place on earth, and is certainly among the most remote."
"Sir, we have successfully made to the Antarctic Plateau. It is indeed the coldest place on Earth, just as we thought, but unfortunately according to my map, it is not among the most remote ones. The most remote place on Earth seems to be the Arctic Ocean."
"Any ideas on how we can check for similar problems in other close elections?"
Unfortunately, there is no other solution than manual recounts. Not only in "close elections" because how do you differentiate a "far" (not "close") election from a large "glitch"? The only solution is to always do manual recounts--or just always count the ballots manually in the first place, skipping the "e-counting" step altogether.
The only way to make sure the votes are counted correctly, is to have a group of people representing all of the competing parties to witness and take part in the actual counting of physical ballots, look at each other while counting, compare the results, when they differ start from the beginning, and finally agree on one exact result. We cannot trust electronic counting the same way, because no one can witness and observe the counting process, no one can see the electrons being shuffled to eventually form a final outcome, just like we can see the paper ballots being shuffled and counted by people observed and verified by other people.
It doesn't even have anything to do with the source code being open or proprietary, the system being secure or vulnerable or the hardware being robust or faulty. It has nothing to do with the system being trustworthy or "trusted." The point is that being able to observe and verify the entire process we don't need to trust anyone or anything in the first place. And it means that the only way to have a solid democracy based on an e-voting system is to always do manual recounts, which obviously makes the whole e-voting idea quite counterproductive, to say the very least.
The regulatory power should mean the power to regulate our equipment so it wouldn't break the infrastructure and other equipment, or jam the spectrum in the case of wireless communication. It shouldn never mean anything more than that. Specifically, it should mean that our modems cannot send high voltage down the line and the prohibition of DOS (a digital equivalent to spectrum jamming) but should never mean which software do we use and how do we use it, provided it does not damage other equipment, and equipment only. In that context we should have nothing to worry about, though of course every regulatory body tends to increase its power way beyond what is reasonable, if it itself isn't regulated as well. What we need are better checks and balances, not more legislation.
You have mistakenly used Ask Slashdot instead of Google. Here you go. Froogle also seems useful.
First of all, detection of a recording device is impossible as long as the recorder does not send anything, just like it's impossible to detect any kind of passive eavesdropping, notwithstanding the quantum cryptography where by the very definition of measurement any observation is inherently active. Second of all, I fail to see how is it going to help "scan" for cameras set by the cinema operators themselves, for no one records a movie for serious bootleg operations using his camera phone in a crowd for Christ's sake. Third of all, I refuse to go to amy cinema which "uses light impulses" which can be potentially damaging to my poor eye sight, nor will I risk an epileptic attack. In short, they propose a dangerous technical solution to the social problem addressing not the right people which they should address in the first place. In order to introduce said pointless and dumb technology, they are going to raise the proces even further, making people even less likely to pay for a movie. In other words, it's a Very Bad Idea.(TM)
Software RAID on a bunch of different hard drives (preferably SCSI, but you can also use IDE/ATAPI/UDMA/USB) and automatic off-site (e.g. a remote ftp or scp) backup cron job should do the job.
It's octarine, the eighth color of the spectrum, the color of magic.
Wouldn't that be dangerous if reflected into the eye? Remember that we are talking about a pure ultraviolet light with no component in the visible spectrum (like the ultraviolet in the sun light), therefore the eye wouldn't notice any light at all and keep the iris open. I don't think I would buy any product with invisible laser to use outside a specialised laboratory with protective equipment and I don't expect most of consumers to do it either.
That is something I find essential. I rarely use any software which is not part of Debian.
If your friend can use keyboard then it should be possible to map certain keys to produce mouse buttons events and press them with the second hand. I know that people are doing it for example to emulate three-button mouse using Debian on Mac with one-button mouse. Google for mouse button emulation. Alternatively, you can prefer a very simple, low tech, portable, fully hardware solution: open the mouse and replace button switches with pairs of wires e.g. using 3 pairs in the standard ethernet cable. Other ends of every pair connect to a convenient button, which could be even something big to press with a foot--an old electric guitar effect pedal could be perfect for that. It's hard to be more specific since I don't know what input devices does your friend use, but I would suggest either emulating mouse buttons in software or rewiring the hardware, which should be trivial given an easy to open mouse. Good luck.
The so called "edit wars" which include both the "revert wars" and less common "deletion wars" are unfortunately quite common on Wikipædia. Please see the lamest edit wars ever:
Video games have already changed my workplace--I had to change my workplace after I was cought playing video games during work time. But more seriously, I have been using game theory while organising the cubicle space, which worker should be a neighbour of which worker, et cetera, for quite some time now with some success, and I have observed that prisoner's dilemma could be called "cubicle worker dilemma" just as well, for it proves surprisingly effective when applied to this kind of environment where people tend to interact more extensively with their direct neighbours. Using games for serious problems doesn't seem to be a new idea, but it certainly is interesting and worth exploring. Most of people tend to agree that games are fun, and for quite a few intellectually challenging tasks that very fun might be indeed a stronger imperative than the monetary compensation itself.
I am answering only because your comment has been moderated as "Score:5, Insightful." Please let me use a great analogy: I often say that--unlike Bill Gates--I lack money. "To say you lack money is going a little further than I'd go," some people say, "for no person is absolutely poor, no person lacks money." Of course, I don't assert that I have absolutely no money whatsoever. I am only saying that I have considerably less money than Bill Gates. Also, the operating systems and web browsers I use have considerably less security issues than those sold by Bill Gates. No car is absolutely safe, but that is not a good excuse to sell cars which explode every time a butterfly hits the windshield. No sex is absolutely safe for your health but that doesn't make unprotected sex with strangers any smarter. The same goes with software. More pleasant? Convenient? Perhaps. But not any smarter.
I hope they don't make Unix games, because I wouldn't like to have /usr/local/bin/linden directory in my filesystem...
Trademark in the headline, copyright infringement of patents in the summary... That is what I call great journalism. Next time please also add trade secrets somewhere. And Intellectual Property, while we're at it. Capitalised. Thanks.
You are talking about My fellow non-Americans, a large happening completely silenced by the US media, even by Slashdot. I have submitted the story about this happening to politics.slashdot.org twice, on 18 and 19 October 2004, and in fact I was not the only person who has done it, but, needless to say, it got rejected every single time, for some reason, even though there were nearly no new stories on politics.slashdot.org posted during those days. It is actually quite an interesting story, certainly worth reposting at least as a comment. Here is the first sory I posted:
Unfortunately, it got rej
This is really amazing how fast bugfixing work in free software and open source. "Warning, there is a hole, well actually there was a hole." I wonder how would that process work in case of proprietary software. We'll probably have to wait a year for another service pack. In any case, there is only one thing I can say here: kudos for PuTTY security team for fixing your holes so quickly.
No word yet on whether Verizon will block ports (25, 80, etc) for incoming or outgoing traffic; with 2MB upload, I hope to basically run a small data center in my basement.
/etc/services file are only default ports, not mandatory ones. For example, you might run smtp server on port 80 and http on port 25 and they would complete the tcp three-way handshake just fine. If you have ever seen a web url in the form of proto://host:port then you know what am I talking about.
First of all you can use any service you want listening on any port you want. Data in your
Second of all, there are other important factors of Internet connection than only throughput. For certain tasks other factors may be in fact much more important, from which responsiveness, min/avg/max icmp round-trip, full duplex support, underlying protocol, mean time between failures, uptime and responsiveness are only a few.
Generally, when you want a good data center you have to learn to look at other factors than raw throughput when choosing an Internet connection, just like you have to learn to look at other factors than clock speed when buying a server for said data center.
Besides, what does the "2MB upload" mean? Two megabytes per second? Including or excluding data parity bits? Synch bits? Tcp headers? Data integrity checksum overhead? Networking is a difficult craft. There is a long way before you will "run a small data center in my basement" just as easily as you imagine, if it is ever possible at all.
Does the "production readiness" include ACID?
Old news
It's basically a choice between expensive ink and expensive printers. The question whether one should consider it a good news or bad news depends only on the individual printing patterns, i.e. how much ink does one use on average in a printer lifetime. This is certainly a hard question to answer.
Is it legal to release Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas with its crime and violence apotheosis in Australia? I hope so, but does anyone know any formal decisions and rationale?