I agree. I think the ballot should be as secret as you want it to be, no more. People should be able to at the very least check their *own* votes.
You mean: as secret as their bank, employer, or anyone else who can give them shit for not voting as ordered wants. Ballot is secret for a reason, that reason being that it is the only way to prevent blackmail. If it is possible for you to check your vote, then it is possible for someone else to demand that you do so while they are looking over your shoulder, with dire consequences should the vote not be what they want.
Anyway, here's my proposal for a tamper-proof secret voting system:
At the start of the voting day, open the doors to the public.
Take an empty lockable wooden box to the voting place. Show the interior to everyone present to proof it's empty, and lock it. For the rest of the day, it is never once taken out of public eye.
Each vote is marked on a piece of paper (or cardboard or whatever) and placed into the box. The marking happens in private, the placement in public.
When voting ends, open the box and count the votes, with everyone interested looking over the shoulder to verify that they are counted correctly.
Phone the central tallying place and give them the numbers. They mark down the numbers and, once all voting places have called in, sum them up.
If neccessary, the central tallying place can then call a higher-level center and repeat the process as many times as neccessary.
Each and every tallying center publishes both the sum and the sub-sums it was calculated from.
This way anyone can ensure that their own vote makes it all the way to the top, there is no way for anyone to figure out who voted how (assuming that each individual voting place serves enough people), and there is no point in the loop where anyone could add or remove votes without it being noticed. As a nice addition, the system is scalable to arbitrarily large population (it's a tree model, after all), and the final result will propably be ready by that same evening.
The key is to keep sufficient accounting so that any abnormalities can be detected and traced to the source. Voting machines make this impossible and should not be used in any circumstances.
Just use a neural net in conjunction with Gmaps. Hook up the system to a GPS tracker and train it for a few weeks. Then link up GMaps and you get a pretty damn accurate system to suggest routes and points to the salesman.
Well, I suppose an experienced salesman can plan pretty good routes, but I thought that the question was about using a computer for this;).
At issue here is the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly. Can you be punished at school for attending a non-school party where some possibly illegal activity is taking place?
Actually, I think that this is a great learning experience for everyone involved. The students learn from this that the Constitution is just a piece of paper, and in reality they have the rights - and only the rights - they can back with force. The school has no right to do this, but it has the power, and that is all that matters in the end.
Because they are the lucky ones. You do not tell a kid he can keep sticking his head in the guillotine just because it hasnt fallen on him.
Let me be the first to congratulate you of the combination of your login and statement:).
Anyway, I agree that you shouldn't waste your teenage years getting drunk, since you can consume alcohol at any age. The vice most appropriate for that age is sex. Fuck around as a teenager so you get it out of your system and aren't tempted by curiosity when you're older and have a family. And even if you never start a family, at least you'll have memories when you're old and bitter.
Oh, and if you post the pictures online, obscure your face by drawing an opaque block over it - a gaussian blur, mosaic, or similar filter can be reversed. The whole head, not just eyes, including the hair.
I guess because I am a teacher and my kids have added me on facebook and I've looked at a few of their photo galleries, then I must be a pedophile.
Well, I suppose you could also be trying to find some excuse to punish them. Personally I think looking at someone because you find them attractive is less despicable than looking at them because you are trying to find some way to make them suffer, but that's just my perverted opinion.
Obviously faculty and administration should have absolutely no interest in getting to know their students.
They shouldn't. They should concentrate on maintaining order in school and teaching their students, and keep their noses the fuck out of their lives outside of it. There is no reason whatsoever a teacher should know or care about what a student does in a party outside of schoolday and -grounds. They are not the police and they are not parents. They are teachers and nothing more.
This is especially true for teachers in public schools who, after all, are government employees. This whole thing is just another power grab, nothing less, nothing more.
Provided the same number are printed out the new way would actually be a negative. The reason is that printing shops can do the printing far cheaper and more green then your office printer.
Surely the solution is obvious then: outsource the printing to a printing press. That way the White House is green because it doesn't print anything, the Congress gets printed copies, and the economy gets a boost from the money paid to the printing press. Environment and economy both benefit. It's a perfect scheme:).
thinks that a happy snap of their pet has any value other than sentimental. If you make pictures of your pet available, I should be free to use them as I see fit.
You should, but you aren't under current copyright laws. Help get them removed and the problem disappears. Furthermore, if someone finds an use to the pictures of my dog, then clearly said pictures have some kind of value to that person. Why else would they bother having anything to do with those pictures ?
Why does the slashdot community have a problem with this, but not with sampling and remixing in the musical context?
Dunno about "Slashdot community", but I only have a problem with hypocrisy of the Hollywood studios suing people for infringing on their copyrights while infringing on them themselves. Even if I cared nothing about copyrights (I do; I oppose them on both practical and philosophical reasons) I would still oppose this kind of practice, simply because laws which are enforced selectively cause well deserved contempt and bitterness against the legal system and consequently make the society less stable.
A bigger problem is that prev_time isn't initialized, so there's no telling when the program will print the first line. Furthermore, time() is needlessly called again in the true branch of the if.
It is however interesting how Second Life started out as this sort of free for all, and more and more it's starting to evolve a government out of necessity.
I wonder how libertarians explain that. After all, since it is impossible to use physical force against anyone in a virtual world - even if you hack their avatar into pieces doesn't harm the actual player in any way - the should be no need for a government of any kind there.
Libertarians, Rayndians, and Free-Market Capitalists, care to comment ?
Very funny, but actually an extension of the same thing.
It wasn't a joke, and it's not very funny.
People who lack that perception are the ones endlessly backing into and out of a space when there's still a long way between them and the next car. Be interesting to see if there's been some test to see if these people also have a limited sense of personal space outside the car and are more prone to misjudging distances from their own bodies.
That's me, and yes, I do. Especially if I'm listening to music. Weird.
If throttling encrypted traffic becomes popular enough, people will come up with encrypted protocols which are too computationally expensive to distinguish from non-encrypted protocols in real time.
Actually, what I'll do is say "was fun while it lasted" and terminate my Internet connection. Internet, being all about free exchange of ideas, cannot last; it is too much of a threat for the powers that be. We had the good luck of being alive during the brief time Internet allowed free communication before being destroyed by greed and hunger for power. Surely you didn't think freedom can last ?
US of A invests huge amount of money into producing top quality music, videos, and other intellectual property.
Some people are producing top quality intellectual property in the US, but they seem to be doing fine despite some horrible pirate having posted their hard work on the Web:). Maybe those that aren't doing so well simply aren't quite as good as they think they are.
If one can do so little to a public domain work and thereafter assert a copyright, then there is clearly no other word for copyrights but viral!
Cancerous. Copyright starts as a few small, harmless-looking regulations. Then they multiply until they form a noticeable malformation on the body of society; but they are still mistakenly considered the benign kind of tumor, rather than the deadly disease they are. Finally the copyright cancer begins sending its deadly cells to take root in remote locations - called "harmonizing" copyright laws in various countries - and begins shoving aside healthy, productive tissue in its mad scramble to steal all resources for itself. At that point the only hope the patient has is to nuke it with a particle accelerator.
This article, and countless others like it, are a testament to the harm the copyright cancer is doing to the society and all humanity. Let us cut it out before it is too late. Simply cutting it back down to a small size won't work, since it will begin growing again; we have to eradicate the cancerous tumor which is copyright utterly.
Check out Freenet - total anonymity and total encryption is the goal. All that's needed for it to work is for more people to download and run nodes.
It would also help if more people took part in development; the current version has a wrapper to restart it whenever it deadlocks.
But I have to admit, now that opennet is finally working, it is actually easy to get into the network and most freesites and Frost work fine. It's still slow as a glacier, but you can just leave the freesite to open in a background tab or browser window while reading Slashdot:).
Of course Freenet will only last until encryption without a license will be forbidden, as it propably will be in a few years, the way things are going.
Your self-image, the precise volume that you occupy in space and how it's organized, is one of the most important aspects of your consciousness. It allows you to navigate past a table in the hallway and miss it by a fraction of a centimeter.
That's nothing. Truck drivers regularly miss me by a fraction of a centimeter on public roads.
Everyone should be forced to give up manual memory allocation regardless of the power it can afford.
Considering that Firefox crashes whenever I happen to hit the "Insert" key when writing a reply on Slashdot, and randomly otherwise, I'm inclined to agree. Programmers, in general, are apparently incapable of dealing with memory management or bounds checking, so they should just use automation.
Of course simply moving them to Java will just have them do things like starting threads from object constructors (which causes all kinds of weird and wonderfull bugs), use 100+ threads for low-volume network communication (I'm looking at you, Freenet) and in general write such inefficient code that a lookalike but less featured remake of a DOS-era game running on a 1 GHz machine feels like watching a glacier (FreeCol, that means you).
Most programmers are incompetent, there's no getting around that. And giving more power to an incompetent is propably not such a bright idea.
Sorry about the rant. I blame it on Firefox crashing three times this morning.
Truckers already have an automated system for interstate driving. A trucker friend of mine can play playstation 2 in his cab while it drives!
That's nothing. I've seen truckers read the newspaper while driving on city traffick without any kind of automation. Which, I suppose, explains why there's so many traffick accidents.
Driverless cars sound nice, but I really want a flying car.
Driverless cars are a neccessary prerequisite for a flying car. Considering the trouble humans have with 2-dimensional traffick, can you imagine the mess having the sky full of flying cars driven by humans would cause ? Especially when you consider that it's kinda hard to brake without anything solid for the wheels to grap.
I can drive. I don't *want* to drive, generally. Tell the car where I'm going and I can get in some reading on the way to and from work.
Don't forget parking. Once the self-driving car has taken you to work in the city center, there's no reason you can't send it home or somewhere else with free parking. When your workday ends, it'll come pick you up; or you can call it with a mobile phone and tell it to come immediately.
Coming to think of it, you could have automated cheap taxis with this technology.
It also would be really nice to be able to take a quick nap when you need one without having to find somewhere to pull off and stop.
Why would you need to stop ? Back when I was in school I used to take a nap while driving my bicycle there, uphill both ways through a snowstorm and heavy morning traffick. And I liked it !
I understand that I've oversimplified above, but what I don't understand is why people high up in the decision making structure in big business don't understand it even this well. It shouldn't require huge textbooks and research to understand this.
Because when you kick out your own IT staff, the short-term costs go down due to decreased payroll, which in turn pushes the profits and share price up. If the IT staff was competent, things will continue working for a while with only token support contract with an outsourced IT provider. Of course you will likely end up paying more in the long run and lose productivity due to deteriorating IT infrastructure, but by that time the people high up have already gotten fat bonuses for their good work in pushing the share price up.
Cynical, but in all fairness I can't really blame the top brass. After all, their job is impossible: the company's share price can't grow faster than the economy as a whole infinitely (because the company would eventually grow larger than the whole economy, which is impossible due to it being a subset of the whole economy), yet that is precisely what shareholders want. The end result is the leadership resorting to cynical and desperate tricks like this.
Like I said above, it all depends on what you are trying to teach; for example, it is possible to teach OO using plain old C, but it is rather painful!
Which is a good thing, IMHO. Objects (try to) solve the problem of exponentially increasing program complexity. If you never run into that problem yourself, how are you supposed to understand the answer either ?
IMHO learning programming languages should start from BASIC - and I mean the old one with line numbers, GOTOs and all-global variables, not a newer procedural kind. Have the students make more and more complex programs with it, and the problems soon start manifesting; then introduce the idea of a stack and stack pointer (an array and a number to hold the current place). Then show how the computer can take care of stack management automatically, and advance into C. Then you can continue increasing the complexity until problems start appearing again, introduce the concept of objects as a solution, and teach C++/Java/whatever.
The point here is that if you don't know what specific problems language features are designed to solve, you are unlikely to be able to use them appropriately. 42 may well the the Ultimate Answer, but it is useless without knowing the Ultimate Question.
Oh, and I picked old BASIC instead of Assembler simply because I know it but not assembler. I suppose either would work.
Anyway, this kind of curriculum would produce programmers who understand why their tools are like they are, know which is appropriate for each task, and know how to leverage their sterngths to full effect.
So yes, Java doesn't teach very darn much about the harsh realities of actually thinking. And since thinking is hard, it's an impediment to productivity anyway, so it hasn't much been missed. The only thing we lost in the shuffle is our professional self respect.
A programmer who refuses to use a language with automatic memory management and mandatory bounds checking due to professional pride is the computer world equivalent to a truck driver who refuses to use a seatbelt, a miner who refuses to use a hardhat and a scryscraper window washer who refuses to use a safety rope out of professional pride.
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You mean: as secret as their bank, employer, or anyone else who can give them shit for not voting as ordered wants. Ballot is secret for a reason, that reason being that it is the only way to prevent blackmail. If it is possible for you to check your vote, then it is possible for someone else to demand that you do so while they are looking over your shoulder, with dire consequences should the vote not be what they want.
Anyway, here's my proposal for a tamper-proof secret voting system:
This way anyone can ensure that their own vote makes it all the way to the top, there is no way for anyone to figure out who voted how (assuming that each individual voting place serves enough people), and there is no point in the loop where anyone could add or remove votes without it being noticed. As a nice addition, the system is scalable to arbitrarily large population (it's a tree model, after all), and the final result will propably be ready by that same evening.
The key is to keep sufficient accounting so that any abnormalities can be detected and traced to the source. Voting machines make this impossible and should not be used in any circumstances.
Well, I suppose an experienced salesman can plan pretty good routes, but I thought that the question was about using a computer for this ;).
Actually, I think that this is a great learning experience for everyone involved. The students learn from this that the Constitution is just a piece of paper, and in reality they have the rights - and only the rights - they can back with force. The school has no right to do this, but it has the power, and that is all that matters in the end.
Take that lesson to heart, kids.
Let me be the first to congratulate you of the combination of your login and statement :).
Anyway, I agree that you shouldn't waste your teenage years getting drunk, since you can consume alcohol at any age. The vice most appropriate for that age is sex. Fuck around as a teenager so you get it out of your system and aren't tempted by curiosity when you're older and have a family. And even if you never start a family, at least you'll have memories when you're old and bitter.
Oh, and if you post the pictures online, obscure your face by drawing an opaque block over it - a gaussian blur, mosaic, or similar filter can be reversed. The whole head, not just eyes, including the hair.
Well, I suppose you could also be trying to find some excuse to punish them. Personally I think looking at someone because you find them attractive is less despicable than looking at them because you are trying to find some way to make them suffer, but that's just my perverted opinion.
They shouldn't. They should concentrate on maintaining order in school and teaching their students, and keep their noses the fuck out of their lives outside of it. There is no reason whatsoever a teacher should know or care about what a student does in a party outside of schoolday and -grounds. They are not the police and they are not parents. They are teachers and nothing more.
This is especially true for teachers in public schools who, after all, are government employees. This whole thing is just another power grab, nothing less, nothing more.
Surely the solution is obvious then: outsource the printing to a printing press. That way the White House is green because it doesn't print anything, the Congress gets printed copies, and the economy gets a boost from the money paid to the printing press. Environment and economy both benefit. It's a perfect scheme :).
You should, but you aren't under current copyright laws. Help get them removed and the problem disappears. Furthermore, if someone finds an use to the pictures of my dog, then clearly said pictures have some kind of value to that person. Why else would they bother having anything to do with those pictures ?
Dunno about "Slashdot community", but I only have a problem with hypocrisy of the Hollywood studios suing people for infringing on their copyrights while infringing on them themselves. Even if I cared nothing about copyrights (I do; I oppose them on both practical and philosophical reasons) I would still oppose this kind of practice, simply because laws which are enforced selectively cause well deserved contempt and bitterness against the legal system and consequently make the society less stable.
A bigger problem is that prev_time isn't initialized, so there's no telling when the program will print the first line. Furthermore, time() is needlessly called again in the true branch of the if.
I could. If I can't find a job, will you vote me ?
I wonder how libertarians explain that. After all, since it is impossible to use physical force against anyone in a virtual world - even if you hack their avatar into pieces doesn't harm the actual player in any way - the should be no need for a government of any kind there.
Libertarians, Rayndians, and Free-Market Capitalists, care to comment ?
It wasn't a joke, and it's not very funny.
That's me, and yes, I do. Especially if I'm listening to music. Weird.
Actually, what I'll do is say "was fun while it lasted" and terminate my Internet connection. Internet, being all about free exchange of ideas, cannot last; it is too much of a threat for the powers that be. We had the good luck of being alive during the brief time Internet allowed free communication before being destroyed by greed and hunger for power. Surely you didn't think freedom can last ?
Some people are producing top quality intellectual property in the US, but they seem to be doing fine despite some horrible pirate having posted their hard work on the Web :). Maybe those that aren't doing so well simply aren't quite as good as they think they are.
Cancerous. Copyright starts as a few small, harmless-looking regulations. Then they multiply until they form a noticeable malformation on the body of society; but they are still mistakenly considered the benign kind of tumor, rather than the deadly disease they are. Finally the copyright cancer begins sending its deadly cells to take root in remote locations - called "harmonizing" copyright laws in various countries - and begins shoving aside healthy, productive tissue in its mad scramble to steal all resources for itself. At that point the only hope the patient has is to nuke it with a particle accelerator.
This article, and countless others like it, are a testament to the harm the copyright cancer is doing to the society and all humanity. Let us cut it out before it is too late. Simply cutting it back down to a small size won't work, since it will begin growing again; we have to eradicate the cancerous tumor which is copyright utterly.
It would also help if more people took part in development; the current version has a wrapper to restart it whenever it deadlocks.
But I have to admit, now that opennet is finally working, it is actually easy to get into the network and most freesites and Frost work fine. It's still slow as a glacier, but you can just leave the freesite to open in a background tab or browser window while reading Slashdot :).
Of course Freenet will only last until encryption without a license will be forbidden, as it propably will be in a few years, the way things are going.
That's nothing. Truck drivers regularly miss me by a fraction of a centimeter on public roads.
Considering that Firefox crashes whenever I happen to hit the "Insert" key when writing a reply on Slashdot, and randomly otherwise, I'm inclined to agree. Programmers, in general, are apparently incapable of dealing with memory management or bounds checking, so they should just use automation.
Of course simply moving them to Java will just have them do things like starting threads from object constructors (which causes all kinds of weird and wonderfull bugs), use 100+ threads for low-volume network communication (I'm looking at you, Freenet) and in general write such inefficient code that a lookalike but less featured remake of a DOS-era game running on a 1 GHz machine feels like watching a glacier (FreeCol, that means you).
Most programmers are incompetent, there's no getting around that. And giving more power to an incompetent is propably not such a bright idea.
Sorry about the rant. I blame it on Firefox crashing three times this morning.
That's nothing. I've seen truckers read the newspaper while driving on city traffick without any kind of automation. Which, I suppose, explains why there's so many traffick accidents.
Driverless cars are a neccessary prerequisite for a flying car. Considering the trouble humans have with 2-dimensional traffick, can you imagine the mess having the sky full of flying cars driven by humans would cause ? Especially when you consider that it's kinda hard to brake without anything solid for the wheels to grap.
Don't forget parking. Once the self-driving car has taken you to work in the city center, there's no reason you can't send it home or somewhere else with free parking. When your workday ends, it'll come pick you up; or you can call it with a mobile phone and tell it to come immediately.
Coming to think of it, you could have automated cheap taxis with this technology.
Why would you need to stop ? Back when I was in school I used to take a nap while driving my bicycle there, uphill both ways through a snowstorm and heavy morning traffick. And I liked it !
Because when you kick out your own IT staff, the short-term costs go down due to decreased payroll, which in turn pushes the profits and share price up. If the IT staff was competent, things will continue working for a while with only token support contract with an outsourced IT provider. Of course you will likely end up paying more in the long run and lose productivity due to deteriorating IT infrastructure, but by that time the people high up have already gotten fat bonuses for their good work in pushing the share price up.
Cynical, but in all fairness I can't really blame the top brass. After all, their job is impossible: the company's share price can't grow faster than the economy as a whole infinitely (because the company would eventually grow larger than the whole economy, which is impossible due to it being a subset of the whole economy), yet that is precisely what shareholders want. The end result is the leadership resorting to cynical and desperate tricks like this.
Which is a good thing, IMHO. Objects (try to) solve the problem of exponentially increasing program complexity. If you never run into that problem yourself, how are you supposed to understand the answer either ?
IMHO learning programming languages should start from BASIC - and I mean the old one with line numbers, GOTOs and all-global variables, not a newer procedural kind. Have the students make more and more complex programs with it, and the problems soon start manifesting; then introduce the idea of a stack and stack pointer (an array and a number to hold the current place). Then show how the computer can take care of stack management automatically, and advance into C. Then you can continue increasing the complexity until problems start appearing again, introduce the concept of objects as a solution, and teach C++/Java/whatever.
The point here is that if you don't know what specific problems language features are designed to solve, you are unlikely to be able to use them appropriately. 42 may well the the Ultimate Answer, but it is useless without knowing the Ultimate Question.
Oh, and I picked old BASIC instead of Assembler simply because I know it but not assembler. I suppose either would work.
Anyway, this kind of curriculum would produce programmers who understand why their tools are like they are, know which is appropriate for each task, and know how to leverage their sterngths to full effect.
A programmer who refuses to use a language with automatic memory management and mandatory bounds checking due to professional pride is the computer world equivalent to a truck driver who refuses to use a seatbelt, a miner who refuses to use a hardhat and a scryscraper window washer who refuses to use a safety rope out of professional pride.