Encrypted email for the unwashed masses won't be a reality until there's a simple one click button for it in every client, webmail app, and PDA. Until GMail includes an "Encrypt before sending" checkbox, no one will take the time to use GPG or Enigmail or equivalents.
Which brings me to a question...
Is there a standard in the SMTP spec for public key swapping? In other words, let's say I'm sending an email from Server A to my friend Alice, who uses Server B. We both have created public and private keys, and will need to swap them to encrypt emails to each other. But I've never emailed Alice before. Is there an available spec in the email system that would allow Server A to hold my message after I click Send, and instead send a key request email to Server B? Server B would then respond with the public key that corresponds to the email address requested, in the form of an email, which Server A would store, and use to encrypt my original message before sending it. If the spec contained this functionality, it would all happen automatically, in the background, when I click Send.
I know Exchange has a system to keep track of public keys within its own system, but I'm not sure how it would deal with encrypting emails to other servers, without hand-entering the public key of the recipient.
Until this kind of Just Works (tm) system is put in place, and honored by a majority of clients, email will continue to be plaintext in the mainstream.
`(B) The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title, as determined under subparagraph (C).
`(C) During the 2-year period described in subparagraph (A), and during each succeeding 3-year period, the Librarian of Congress, upon the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, who shall consult with the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information of the Department of Commerce and report and comment on his or her views in making such recommendation, shall make the determination in a rulemaking proceeding on the record for purposes of subparagraph (B) of whether persons who are users of a copyrighted work are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by the prohibition under subparagraph (A) in their ability to make noninfringing uses under this title of a particular class of copyrighted works. In conducting such rulemaking, the Librarian shall examine--
`(i) the availability for use of copyrighted works;
`(ii) the availability for use of works for nonprofit archival, preservation, and educational purposes;
`(iii) the impact that the prohibition on the circumvention of technological measures applied to copyrighted works has on criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research;
`(iv) the effect of circumvention of technological measures on the market for or value of copyrighted works; and
`(v) such other factors as the Librarian considers appropriate.
Emphasis mine.
So the idea that watching purchased DVDs in Linux is illegal is a romantic notion of civil disobedience, but it is also a myth. The anti-circumvention measures are exempt if you are circumventing for the purposes of non-infringing use, which is very clear in the case of Linux DVDs (covered under subsections (i) and (iv), since the copyrighted works are not available for use without circumvention and the circumvention does not affect the market value of the work).
Additionally, TiVo users wishing to archive their programs, and cracking the encryption to do it, is a "non-infringing use", and therefore not applicable under the section you quoted. In short, this is not a DMCA violation, and is, in fact, legal. Whether or not you violated the Terms of Service you signed when you signed up is a contract dispute question. So TiVo could probably refuse to continue your service for this, but they certainly can't sue you for infringement of copyright.
1 - Fail-safe. The machine can break, power can go out, etc. The paper ballot still exists and can be easily hand counted.
The paper can tear, the marks can be incomplete, the building could burn down. A properly engineered mature design will not "break." Think about 5-function calculators... do they crash? Do they give incorrect answers? No. All they need is power, and they work flawlessly, cheap-o stamped-out-of-plastic-in-China-for-three-cents-a- unit issues aside. I see no reason why an electronic voting machine wouldn't be the same, given proper engineering attention.
2 - Inexpensive scaling. Since you mark on paper the polling station can have 20 booths for people which are not much more than a table, curtain, and a pen; yet they can share one or two optical scanners. Touch screen systems require one expensive machine per booth.
Again, the machines need not be that expensive. Hell, we can build an entire damn laptop for under $100 a pop, how expensive can a touchscreen that performs a fraction of the functions of a laptop be?
Do the math. 20 expensive touch screen machines per polling station, versus 2 less expensive optical scanners.
This cost savings could be used in urban areas where there traditionally have not been enough resources for the election.
Urban areas don't have enough resources for the paper process now. This is an independent issue.
3 - Trustable. Any dispute can be settled by the actual piece of paper I wrote on. Optical scanners are based on technology used by schools to grade for decades and require little more than a motor, light sensor, and a very low end CPU. There is little to go wrong and very little which can hide tricks.
This directly contradicts your first point about the voting machines breaking. If a touch-screen can break, so can a scanner.
4 - Easy to use. I take a pen and fill in a box. Touch screen systems appear to suffer serious "alignment" issues which can cause votes to be mis-registered and which require frequent realignment in the field.
Only because the systems are poorly engineered (see my response to point 1). What if the ballot is printed crooked on the paper, or your pen runs out of ink, or someone forgot to bring #2 pencils and the scanner won't recognize the #1 pencils they did bring? Misalignment and ease-of use are engineering problems, not systemic ones.
5 - Robust. There is no screen to be scratched, or broken. The voter never interacts with the scanner except to slide a piece of paper into it. There is no printer to jam, or foul, or have other issues.
Same as point 1.
I agree with you that completely electronic voting is bad, but not for the reasons you stated. The problem is not that we need to vote on paper, it's that we need a paper trail, and I disagree with the NIST that hand-marked, optical scanned ballots are the best way to go. Humans make more mistakes than computers, and there is a percentage of the population that would benefit from touchscreens that printed ballots (I'm thinking here of the disabled). The problem as I see it is that the companies creating the voting machines are approaching the problem from an assembly viewpoint instead of an engineering viewpoint. They are trying to purchase off-the-shelf, multi-function components and then adapt them to their use and lock them down for security. It makes much more sense to design the entire system from the ground up. Hire some proper board designers, and have them cobble together a custom board containing a ROM chip, a graphics chip, and a tiny CPU. Add removable storage that contains the candidates' names and offices, etc. Hook it up to a touchscreen LCD and a custom-built printer, and wrap the whole thing in a box that's easy to stack and carry around. This machine only h
"I tend to believe that the media is just inherently anti-government, regardless of party, because of its duties as the fourth estate."
That would be exactly what the media *should* be doing, but also exactly what it is *not* doing.
With a few exceptions, the vast majority of the media in this country has, in the last 20 years, begun a slide from Fourth Estate to IPO. As they became beholden to shareholders more than citizens, and place the worth of their company in terms of dollars instead of respect, the media are now tiptoe-ing around the politicians. They desperately need to have important people on their shows to gain ratings; exclusive interviews are very highly hyped. But when the politicians arrive, the reporters are unwilling to ask the tough questions or hold their feet to the fire for fear that the politicians won't come on the show anymore. Instead of being anti-government, the media has become pro-government, to keep their ratings.
Unfortunately for the people, the media has not yet realized that there are more ratings to be had with a hard-hitting, tough-question, (frankly BBC-ish) style of reporting, that holds the politicians accountable for their actions, than the softballs they lob now. And, they seem to have forgotten that the politicians need the media more than the media need the politicians, due to the fact that the media are not reelected every few years. Right now, they are airing on the side of caution, taking the safe route to maintain a constant ROI curve. Someday soon, one of these huge companies will wake up and realize that they could wipe the floor with the other companies if they would just do some real reporting, and demand accountability and answers from the politicians. They will have to simultaneously realize that the politicians can't just ignore them; they have to be reelected, after all, and that requires that people know who they are. Once this idea takes off, the pendulum will swing the other way for a while.
For me, the big appeal was that things of significant scope actually happened and the story progressed and changed with time. At the point that Babylon 5 came out, I was really fed up with the Star Trek franchise: Good acting and effects, but a horribly pedestrian and smarmy humanism seemed to infest most of the writing.
Seconded. I really enjoyed the longer story arc, and the fact that characters disagreed on principle, not on plot points. It was breaking new ground in television storytelling, because it was a multi-season show with a definite beginning, middle, and end.
However, the writing of each individual episode (on a dialog level) was sometimes downright painful, even during the best seasons of the show, and the poor acting didn't make it any better.
I like to say that the writing was just like the special effects: the farther back you stood, the better it looked.
Humans and pigs are actually fairly close anatomically, which is why high school students dissect pig fetuses every year and why pigs are a promising species in the field of Xenotransplantation. And it's really not distressing at all, after you get over the ick factor. We're not made of magical fairy dust... we are flesh and bone just like any other mammal, and it seems reasonable to believe that animals which are similar anatomically would have similar compounds that generate similar tastes.
Article | Discussion | Edit this page | + | History | Move | Watch
Talk:Future Plans
Contents [hide] 1 Added possible plot 2 Page needs cleanup
Added possible plot I added the "underwear bomber" idea. The shoes thing worked, let's see if we can get them to take off their underwear at the airport! - AlMusari 10:14, Oct 14, 2006 (UTC)
Page needs cleanup IMHO, we need to clean up this page to better organize our thoughts. Please complete the entries for future plans with specific information about participants, methods, and dates/times. Cite your sources. - NotTheCIA 14:35, Oct 25, 2006 (UTC)
...the fact that we elected a retard to the Oval Office not once, but twice...
This doesn't disturb me half as much as the fact that when it came time to select the retard to elect to office, we had such a wealth of retards to choose from.
Face it people, if the Democrats had been in power for the last six years, we still would have the TSA rooting around in our shorts looking for god knows what, and we'd still be sending troops to die in some godforsaken wilderness (although likely in Ethiopia or Syria or some other "humanitarian effort"). The press would still be unaccountable to the people and licking the balls of anyone in power just to get a few minutes of interview time. The Pentagon would still be forming a comittee to make sure that the "correct" set of "facts" are reported by the corporate-run, ball-licking ratings jockeys.
The Democrats and Republicans are locked in an epic battle for control of irrelevance, the third parties are all nutjobs and wackos, and the Fourth Estate is crumbling to the will of stockholders.
I'm sick of the whole charade. I want my country back.
Seriously, wtf? The Internet is global and currently the US controls ICANN. Believe it or not, roughly 180 countries see this as a problem. It's not as if the UN is going to hand sole control over to China.
Seriously, wtf? The Internet is global, but the US payed for and installed a large majority of the infrastructure and DNS systems required to run it. The rest of the world is using our systems and want us to give up control. Believe it or not, roughly 50 states see this as a problem. It's not as if the US is going to hand over control of something we paid for.
Man up and set up your own DNS if you don't like it. We built it, we're retaining control.
Dear Lord! Are you saying that there are actually programs available for download on the internet that might be harmful to your computer, which might also be disguised as something else?! I've never been so outraged in all my life!
People will install anything if it promises naked pictures. How is this news?
I agree that this is perhaps THE most pressing issue right now for Americans, but is it really ethical to distribute this kind of information? At what point do you take responsibility for what you post, and NOT diseminate information that, in the wrong hands, will cause what you are trying to prevent?
I think that's a valid concern, when talking about certain kinds of information, such as instructions for building a nuclear weapon.
However, I think the author's point is that we have been trying the responsible way of getting people to reform the vote for the last six years, and the response has been overwhelming apathy. No one even cares that the voting system is broken, yet it is so fundamental to our governmental process of checks and balances that everything else hinges on it. Disseminating information that further breaks the system is not really going to damage anything any more than it already is. It is time for some drastic action.
Once Bart Simpson* is elected president in 14 key districts, people might sit up and take notice. Only then will we get meaningful reform.
------------------
*Of course, the only way to get people to sit up and notice is to elect someone absurd. Someone who isn't even on the ballot. Otherwise it's too easy to dismiss the results as genuine, and leave people bickering instead of reforming.
...though strictly speaking the Fusion has six, because it has a single blade on its flip-side for tricky areas...
"That's right folks, our new razor with 5 blades is so completely useless and cumbersome that we have included a handy dandy straight razor on the back, for getting the job done right!"
If I buy a CD, I can stick it in my computer and rip it into iTunes. That's legal, right?
If I buy a DVD, why can't I do the same thing? Rip it into iTunes, put it on my iPod, import it into other programs and play with it, etc.
Here's the answer to your question:
A Redbook standard compliant CD (with the little CDAudio logo) does not have encryption or other protection placed on the music. The raw 44.1 kHz stream is encoded on the disk for all the world to read. Making a non-infringing copy of this stream for yourself and manipulating it is legal under Fair Use (and to a certain extent, the Home Audio Recording Act of 1992).
An IEEE standard compliant DVD encrypts the video content with a symmetric key system (CSS), and then hides the key on a non-writable section of the disc. Breaking this encryption violates patent and/or contract law. The interoperability clause of the DMCA, which DVD Jon uses as his basis for the legality of his system, allows you to break the CSS encryption on DVDs in order to play them on your Linux box. However, the patent on the CSS encryption system allows the DVD Copy Control Association to only license the technology to companies that pay a licensing fee; creating an implimentation of CSS without paying the licensing fee violates patent law, and creating an incomplete version of the spec (for example, ignoring the Do Not Fast Forward flag) violates the contract you signed when obtaining a license. The reverse engineering is legal, but the implementation of the reverse-engineered technology is illegal, under different laws. Unencrypted DVDs are legal to rip, for the same reasons it is legal to rip CDs.
That's the way it is, and the reason why ripping a CD is legal and copying a DVD is not legal. The question of whether this is how things SHOULD be is left as an exercise for the reader.
AllOfMP3 is not legal in the U.S., and in most European countries.
In order to sell music "by the pound", as it were, AllOfMP3 are exploiting a loophole in Russian copyright law that allows them to "broadcast" digital copies over the internet, as if they were a radio station. Since such an activity would be illegal in the U.S. and most of Europe (AFAIK, please pipe up if you know otherwise), it is prohibited by import laws (for the same reason that you cannot fly back from Amsterdam with a pocket full of marijuana). The act of downloading the music from a Russian server constitutes importation, and there are restrictions on that.
It's no different than requiring someone to have eyesight to drive a car -- that policy is intentionally discriminatory against the blind, but who's complaining about that?
It is much different than requiring eyesight on a driver's test, because it presumes a motive.
Remember that freedom is really about choice. My right to vote does not presume WHY I vote. I have the freedom to vote however I want. I could vote for someone because of their stance on an issue, or because they have great hair, or because they're a buddy of mine, or because I once dated their sister, or because I like their accent, or because they're in the same party I'm in, or because I think their last name sounds good in that lame rap song I wrote in high school.
The government cannot decide for me that I must vote based on their position on issues. To continue your analogy from before, this would be like the DMV requiring me to take a test on the locations of grocery stores in my area before I would be given a drivers' license, thus presuming that the reason I would want to drive is to go to the store. What if I only want a drivers' license so I can get into bars more easily, and never intend to drive? What if I only want to drive to my grandmother's house 8 hours away, and walk to the store? The state has no reason to decide WHY I would drive.
Freedom is about choice, and that means I can choose to vote for a stupid reason, even if it's a reason you disagree with.
This just in: Over 90% of Americans are suffering an addiction to electricity!
Nearly 89% of respondents said they found it difficult to stay away from electricity for several days and 75% admitted that they often use more electricity than expected. More than 98% of those surveyed said they hid electricity use from family, friends and employers, and the same percentage confessed to using electricity to flee from real-world problems. Approximately 86% also said their personal relationships had suffered as a result of electricity. 'Potential markers of problematic electricity use are present in a sizeable portion of the population,' the researchers note.
Good Lord, people. The internet is a means of accomplishing other things, it's not an activity in and of itself. Most of the population uses the internet every day at work, using email, company intranets, or talking on company-wide VOIP systems. Are they addicted to that?
FTA:
Most disturbing, according to the study's lead author Elias Aboujaoude, is the discovery that some people hide their internet surfing, or go online to cure foul moods - behaviour that mirrors the way alcoholics behave.
"In a sense, they're using the internet to self-medicate," Aboujaoude says.
People do exactly the same thing with TV, or hanging out with friends, or talking on the phone. That doesn't mean they're addicted. How many people lie about how many hours of TV they watch? Probably everybody.
Addictions are chemical. Anything psychological is merely a bad habit, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
I read it. Different rules for the US. The US and its allies can have nuclear power, but not other countries it chooses to put on a list. You can enforce that sort of mindset through force, but it doesn't make it morally right, and there are consequences to all acts of unfairness.
In that case, I would encourage you to go downstairs to the city street, find that crazy homeless guy who is carrying a bottle in a paper bag and smells heavily of urine, who is muttering constantly to himself about the overthrow of the oppressive government who implanted tracking devices in his teeth and how everyone who doesn't believe him must be an agent of said government and deserves to die, and hand him a loaded 9mm pistol.
Aside from the private vote, public count principles that you mention, I'd add "One vote per eligible voter". That's where the voters lists come in. Some countries have the voter dip a digit into indelible ink to ensure this last principle.
Wow, what a great way for politicians to ensure contract money gets sent to their buddies in the indelible ink industry!
While I almost completely agree with you, your system would flawed without multiple independent counters. Otherwise, there's nothing to prevent fraudulent counting on the part of a single election official.
Of course, I'm not suggesting that we lock a dude in a room with the ballot box and then ask him what the totals are when he emerges a few hours later. The two keys to public voting are accountability and repeatibility. Set up the system so that three independent people all count separately, and then when their numbers agree, consider that the official total. Or something similar. The point would be that in a paper system, the amount of effort to change 100,000 votes would be very very high, involving either creating 100,000 fraudulent pieces of paper or convincing a dangerously large number of people to participate in the corrupt counting. No single person could pull it off. With digital systems, changing 100,000 votes can be done with a few keystrokes by one person, with no verifiable trail, and that's bad news.
I also think it would be more worthwhile if the government took the money they are currently spending on electronic systems, and instead spent it on tax breaks for companies who give paid time off to employees for working at a polling place. This would encourage participation in the system, and relieve the burden on the current crop of retirees running the polling places. It would also allow for such systems as multiple independent counters, since staffing would no longer be a problem.
The true perfect voting machine consists of the following four components:
- Paper - Pencil - Locked box with slot - Election official who can count
Anything else is a solution in search of a problem, and a way for partisan election officials to send some contract money to their buddies in the tech industry.
Seriously, who the hell cares about digital records or fast counts? I don't care how fast the results come in, I want them to be RIGHT. A voting system needs to enforce two basic principles: private votes and public counts. The voters need to know that their votes are private and anonymous, and the counting process needs to be simple and transparent enough that it can be understood, audited, and repeated. Computers, for the majority of people, are magical black boxes. They don't trust them as far as they can throw them, and that means there will always be suspicion of fraud, no matter how open the source and how impenetrable the outer casing. When we go to paper ballots, we guarantee that the process is easily understood, auditible, difficult to rig, and that counting is repeatable. There is no electronic system that satisfies all those conditions, and therefore electronic systems should not be used.
However, if we wanted to use touch screen systems to print out ballots instead of marking them, that's fine with me (it would make voting more accessible, with a well-designed UI). The voter can verify their votes before dropping them in the box. But the printed paper ballots need to be counted by hand.
"If you've got 50,000 lines of code, that's approaching the complexity of the U.S. tax code," Wagner says.
Could you please express that number in Libraries of Congress? If you laid out all those lines of code without newlines, how many times would it wrap around the Earth?
Saying "I could care less" means "there is no limit on how less I care but rather a limit on the effort I put into not caring". For us Americans we don't challenge each other on the limit of not caring (which is a bottomless pit) but on how much effort is put into not caring (because we are so lazy, effort is more valuable).
That's what we call a "justification," and it's wrong.
The phrase is "I couldn't care less," meaning I care so little there is no way I could care any less, regardless of effort. It equates to "I don't care" (the least amount of caring being logically zero).
"I could care less" is sometimes considered a more sarcastic counterpart, equating to "I care," and only used when spoken sarcastically. However, this is a specious argument, since the original "I couldn't care less" is already dripping with sarcasm. The truth is, "I could care less" is a linguistic evolution, a lazyism propogated because pronouncing several consonants in a row is difficult, and most Americans don't care about their speech patterns (in fact, they couldn't care less). It's in the same category with "acrosst the street," "nucular," "towards," "besides the point," and "for all intensive purposes." "I could care less" also has a more natural rhythm and meter than "I couldn't care less," which makes it easier to say.
What needs to happen is that the OS' windowing system itself needs to implement tabbing, instead of leaving it to each application to do differently. Think of the neat stuff you could do -- any window could become a tab in any other window, maybe by just dragging one window's title bar into another.
Fluxbox (window manager for Linux) already does this, and those who use it (like me) swear by it.
Slashdot Mirror
Which brings me to a question...
Is there a standard in the SMTP spec for public key swapping? In other words, let's say I'm sending an email from Server A to my friend Alice, who uses Server B. We both have created public and private keys, and will need to swap them to encrypt emails to each other. But I've never emailed Alice before. Is there an available spec in the email system that would allow Server A to hold my message after I click Send, and instead send a key request email to Server B? Server B would then respond with the public key that corresponds to the email address requested, in the form of an email, which Server A would store, and use to encrypt my original message before sending it. If the spec contained this functionality, it would all happen automatically, in the background, when I click Send.
I know Exchange has a system to keep track of public keys within its own system, but I'm not sure how it would deal with encrypting emails to other servers, without hand-entering the public key of the recipient.
Until this kind of Just Works (tm) system is put in place, and honored by a majority of clients, email will continue to be plaintext in the mainstream.
Emphasis mine.
So the idea that watching purchased DVDs in Linux is illegal is a romantic notion of civil disobedience, but it is also a myth. The anti-circumvention measures are exempt if you are circumventing for the purposes of non-infringing use, which is very clear in the case of Linux DVDs (covered under subsections (i) and (iv), since the copyrighted works are not available for use without circumvention and the circumvention does not affect the market value of the work).
Additionally, TiVo users wishing to archive their programs, and cracking the encryption to do it, is a "non-infringing use", and therefore not applicable under the section you quoted. In short, this is not a DMCA violation, and is, in fact, legal. Whether or not you violated the Terms of Service you signed when you signed up is a contract dispute question. So TiVo could probably refuse to continue your service for this, but they certainly can't sue you for infringement of copyright.
IANAL.
The paper can tear, the marks can be incomplete, the building could burn down. A properly engineered mature design will not "break." Think about 5-function calculators... do they crash? Do they give incorrect answers? No. All they need is power, and they work flawlessly, cheap-o stamped-out-of-plastic-in-China-for-three-cents-a- unit issues aside. I see no reason why an electronic voting machine wouldn't be the same, given proper engineering attention.
Again, the machines need not be that expensive. Hell, we can build an entire damn laptop for under $100 a pop, how expensive can a touchscreen that performs a fraction of the functions of a laptop be?
Urban areas don't have enough resources for the paper process now. This is an independent issue.
This directly contradicts your first point about the voting machines breaking. If a touch-screen can break, so can a scanner.
Only because the systems are poorly engineered (see my response to point 1). What if the ballot is printed crooked on the paper, or your pen runs out of ink, or someone forgot to bring #2 pencils and the scanner won't recognize the #1 pencils they did bring? Misalignment and ease-of use are engineering problems, not systemic ones.
Same as point 1.
I agree with you that completely electronic voting is bad, but not for the reasons you stated. The problem is not that we need to vote on paper, it's that we need a paper trail, and I disagree with the NIST that hand-marked, optical scanned ballots are the best way to go. Humans make more mistakes than computers, and there is a percentage of the population that would benefit from touchscreens that printed ballots (I'm thinking here of the disabled). The problem as I see it is that the companies creating the voting machines are approaching the problem from an assembly viewpoint instead of an engineering viewpoint. They are trying to purchase off-the-shelf, multi-function components and then adapt them to their use and lock them down for security. It makes much more sense to design the entire system from the ground up. Hire some proper board designers, and have them cobble together a custom board containing a ROM chip, a graphics chip, and a tiny CPU. Add removable storage that contains the candidates' names and offices, etc. Hook it up to a touchscreen LCD and a custom-built printer, and wrap the whole thing in a box that's easy to stack and carry around. This machine only h
"I tend to believe that the media is just inherently anti-government, regardless of party, because of its duties as the fourth estate."
That would be exactly what the media *should* be doing, but also exactly what it is *not* doing.
With a few exceptions, the vast majority of the media in this country has, in the last 20 years, begun a slide from Fourth Estate to IPO. As they became beholden to shareholders more than citizens, and place the worth of their company in terms of dollars instead of respect, the media are now tiptoe-ing around the politicians. They desperately need to have important people on their shows to gain ratings; exclusive interviews are very highly hyped. But when the politicians arrive, the reporters are unwilling to ask the tough questions or hold their feet to the fire for fear that the politicians won't come on the show anymore. Instead of being anti-government, the media has become pro-government, to keep their ratings.
Unfortunately for the people, the media has not yet realized that there are more ratings to be had with a hard-hitting, tough-question, (frankly BBC-ish) style of reporting, that holds the politicians accountable for their actions, than the softballs they lob now. And, they seem to have forgotten that the politicians need the media more than the media need the politicians, due to the fact that the media are not reelected every few years. Right now, they are airing on the side of caution, taking the safe route to maintain a constant ROI curve. Someday soon, one of these huge companies will wake up and realize that they could wipe the floor with the other companies if they would just do some real reporting, and demand accountability and answers from the politicians. They will have to simultaneously realize that the politicians can't just ignore them; they have to be reelected, after all, and that requires that people know who they are. Once this idea takes off, the pendulum will swing the other way for a while.
We can only hope.
Seconded. I really enjoyed the longer story arc, and the fact that characters disagreed on principle, not on plot points. It was breaking new ground in television storytelling, because it was a multi-season show with a definite beginning, middle, and end.
However, the writing of each individual episode (on a dialog level) was sometimes downright painful, even during the best seasons of the show, and the poor acting didn't make it any better.
I like to say that the writing was just like the special effects: the farther back you stood, the better it looked.
We would be good on a sandwich.
... we are flesh and bone just like any other mammal, and it seems reasonable to believe that animals which are similar anatomically would have similar compounds that generate similar tastes.
Humans and pigs are actually fairly close anatomically, which is why high school students dissect pig fetuses every year and why pigs are a promising species in the field of Xenotransplantation. And it's really not distressing at all, after you get over the ick factor. We're not made of magical fairy dust
In response to Something I've never understood about the "tubes" (#16789037)...
e d&search=
This is why.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=kiZ-TqvVdGM&mode=relat
Al' Qaedapedia
Article | Discussion | Edit this page | + | History | Move | Watch
Talk:Future Plans
Contents [hide]
1 Added possible plot
2 Page needs cleanup
Added possible plot
I added the "underwear bomber" idea. The shoes thing worked, let's see if we can get them to take off their underwear at the airport! - AlMusari 10:14, Oct 14, 2006 (UTC)
Page needs cleanup
IMHO, we need to clean up this page to better organize our thoughts. Please complete the entries for future plans with specific information about participants, methods, and dates/times. Cite your sources. - NotTheCIA 14:35, Oct 25, 2006 (UTC)
Category: Western Infidels to Blow Up
This doesn't disturb me half as much as the fact that when it came time to select the retard to elect to office, we had such a wealth of retards to choose from.
Face it people, if the Democrats had been in power for the last six years, we still would have the TSA rooting around in our shorts looking for god knows what, and we'd still be sending troops to die in some godforsaken wilderness (although likely in Ethiopia or Syria or some other "humanitarian effort"). The press would still be unaccountable to the people and licking the balls of anyone in power just to get a few minutes of interview time. The Pentagon would still be forming a comittee to make sure that the "correct" set of "facts" are reported by the corporate-run, ball-licking ratings jockeys.
The Democrats and Republicans are locked in an epic battle for control of irrelevance, the third parties are all nutjobs and wackos, and the Fourth Estate is crumbling to the will of stockholders.
I'm sick of the whole charade. I want my country back.
My IPS/IDS appliance goes up to 11.
Seriously, wtf? The Internet is global, but the US payed for and installed a large majority of the infrastructure and DNS systems required to run it. The rest of the world is using our systems and want us to give up control. Believe it or not, roughly 50 states see this as a problem. It's not as if the US is going to hand over control of something we paid for.
Man up and set up your own DNS if you don't like it. We built it, we're retaining control.
Dear Lord! Are you saying that there are actually programs available for download on the internet that might be harmful to your computer, which might also be disguised as something else?! I've never been so outraged in all my life!
People will install anything if it promises naked pictures. How is this news?
I think that's a valid concern, when talking about certain kinds of information, such as instructions for building a nuclear weapon.
However, I think the author's point is that we have been trying the responsible way of getting people to reform the vote for the last six years, and the response has been overwhelming apathy. No one even cares that the voting system is broken, yet it is so fundamental to our governmental process of checks and balances that everything else hinges on it. Disseminating information that further breaks the system is not really going to damage anything any more than it already is. It is time for some drastic action.
Once Bart Simpson* is elected president in 14 key districts, people might sit up and take notice. Only then will we get meaningful reform.
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*Of course, the only way to get people to sit up and notice is to elect someone absurd. Someone who isn't even on the ballot. Otherwise it's too easy to dismiss the results as genuine, and leave people bickering instead of reforming.
"That's right folks, our new razor with 5 blades is so completely useless and cumbersome that we have included a handy dandy straight razor on the back, for getting the job done right!"
Here's the answer to your question:
A Redbook standard compliant CD (with the little CDAudio logo) does not have encryption or other protection placed on the music. The raw 44.1 kHz stream is encoded on the disk for all the world to read. Making a non-infringing copy of this stream for yourself and manipulating it is legal under Fair Use (and to a certain extent, the Home Audio Recording Act of 1992).
An IEEE standard compliant DVD encrypts the video content with a symmetric key system (CSS), and then hides the key on a non-writable section of the disc. Breaking this encryption violates patent and/or contract law. The interoperability clause of the DMCA, which DVD Jon uses as his basis for the legality of his system, allows you to break the CSS encryption on DVDs in order to play them on your Linux box. However, the patent on the CSS encryption system allows the DVD Copy Control Association to only license the technology to companies that pay a licensing fee; creating an implimentation of CSS without paying the licensing fee violates patent law, and creating an incomplete version of the spec (for example, ignoring the Do Not Fast Forward flag) violates the contract you signed when obtaining a license. The reverse engineering is legal, but the implementation of the reverse-engineered technology is illegal, under different laws. Unencrypted DVDs are legal to rip, for the same reasons it is legal to rip CDs.
That's the way it is, and the reason why ripping a CD is legal and copying a DVD is not legal. The question of whether this is how things SHOULD be is left as an exercise for the reader.
AllOfMP3 is not legal in the U.S., and in most European countries.
In order to sell music "by the pound", as it were, AllOfMP3 are exploiting a loophole in Russian copyright law that allows them to "broadcast" digital copies over the internet, as if they were a radio station. Since such an activity would be illegal in the U.S. and most of Europe (AFAIK, please pipe up if you know otherwise), it is prohibited by import laws (for the same reason that you cannot fly back from Amsterdam with a pocket full of marijuana). The act of downloading the music from a Russian server constitutes importation, and there are restrictions on that.
Buying a CD, however, is still perfectly legal.
It is much different than requiring eyesight on a driver's test, because it presumes a motive.
Remember that freedom is really about choice. My right to vote does not presume WHY I vote. I have the freedom to vote however I want. I could vote for someone because of their stance on an issue, or because they have great hair, or because they're a buddy of mine, or because I once dated their sister, or because I like their accent, or because they're in the same party I'm in, or because I think their last name sounds good in that lame rap song I wrote in high school.
The government cannot decide for me that I must vote based on their position on issues. To continue your analogy from before, this would be like the DMV requiring me to take a test on the locations of grocery stores in my area before I would be given a drivers' license, thus presuming that the reason I would want to drive is to go to the store. What if I only want a drivers' license so I can get into bars more easily, and never intend to drive? What if I only want to drive to my grandmother's house 8 hours away, and walk to the store? The state has no reason to decide WHY I would drive.
Freedom is about choice, and that means I can choose to vote for a stupid reason, even if it's a reason you disagree with.
Nearly 89% of respondents said they found it difficult to stay away from electricity for several days and 75% admitted that they often use more electricity than expected. More than 98% of those surveyed said they hid electricity use from family, friends and employers, and the same percentage confessed to using electricity to flee from real-world problems. Approximately 86% also said their personal relationships had suffered as a result of electricity. 'Potential markers of problematic electricity use are present in a sizeable portion of the population,' the researchers note.
Good Lord, people. The internet is a means of accomplishing other things, it's not an activity in and of itself. Most of the population uses the internet every day at work, using email, company intranets, or talking on company-wide VOIP systems. Are they addicted to that?
FTA:
People do exactly the same thing with TV, or hanging out with friends, or talking on the phone. That doesn't mean they're addicted. How many people lie about how many hours of TV they watch? Probably everybody.
Addictions are chemical. Anything psychological is merely a bad habit, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
In that case, I would encourage you to go downstairs to the city street, find that crazy homeless guy who is carrying a bottle in a paper bag and smells heavily of urine, who is muttering constantly to himself about the overthrow of the oppressive government who implanted tracking devices in his teeth and how everyone who doesn't believe him must be an agent of said government and deserves to die, and hand him a loaded 9mm pistol.
In the interest of fairness, of course.
Wow, what a great way for politicians to ensure contract money gets sent to their buddies in the indelible ink industry!
**ducks**
Of course, I'm not suggesting that we lock a dude in a room with the ballot box and then ask him what the totals are when he emerges a few hours later. The two keys to public voting are accountability and repeatibility. Set up the system so that three independent people all count separately, and then when their numbers agree, consider that the official total. Or something similar. The point would be that in a paper system, the amount of effort to change 100,000 votes would be very very high, involving either creating 100,000 fraudulent pieces of paper or convincing a dangerously large number of people to participate in the corrupt counting. No single person could pull it off. With digital systems, changing 100,000 votes can be done with a few keystrokes by one person, with no verifiable trail, and that's bad news.
I also think it would be more worthwhile if the government took the money they are currently spending on electronic systems, and instead spent it on tax breaks for companies who give paid time off to employees for working at a polling place. This would encourage participation in the system, and relieve the burden on the current crop of retirees running the polling places. It would also allow for such systems as multiple independent counters, since staffing would no longer be a problem.
The true perfect voting machine consists of the following four components:
- Paper
- Pencil
- Locked box with slot
- Election official who can count
Anything else is a solution in search of a problem, and a way for partisan election officials to send some contract money to their buddies in the tech industry.
Seriously, who the hell cares about digital records or fast counts? I don't care how fast the results come in, I want them to be RIGHT. A voting system needs to enforce two basic principles: private votes and public counts. The voters need to know that their votes are private and anonymous, and the counting process needs to be simple and transparent enough that it can be understood, audited, and repeated. Computers, for the majority of people, are magical black boxes. They don't trust them as far as they can throw them, and that means there will always be suspicion of fraud, no matter how open the source and how impenetrable the outer casing. When we go to paper ballots, we guarantee that the process is easily understood, auditible, difficult to rig, and that counting is repeatable. There is no electronic system that satisfies all those conditions, and therefore electronic systems should not be used.
However, if we wanted to use touch screen systems to print out ballots instead of marking them, that's fine with me (it would make voting more accessible, with a well-designed UI). The voter can verify their votes before dropping them in the box. But the printed paper ballots need to be counted by hand.
Could you please express that number in Libraries of Congress? If you laid out all those lines of code without newlines, how many times would it wrap around the Earth?
That's what we call a "justification," and it's wrong.
The phrase is "I couldn't care less," meaning I care so little there is no way I could care any less, regardless of effort. It equates to "I don't care" (the least amount of caring being logically zero).
"I could care less" is sometimes considered a more sarcastic counterpart, equating to "I care," and only used when spoken sarcastically. However, this is a specious argument, since the original "I couldn't care less" is already dripping with sarcasm. The truth is, "I could care less" is a linguistic evolution, a lazyism propogated because pronouncing several consonants in a row is difficult, and most Americans don't care about their speech patterns (in fact, they couldn't care less). It's in the same category with "acrosst the street," "nucular," "towards," "besides the point," and "for all intensive purposes." "I could care less" also has a more natural rhythm and meter than "I couldn't care less," which makes it easier to say.
Personally, I avoid it.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm
</pedantic>
Fluxbox (window manager for Linux) already does this, and those who use it (like me) swear by it.
http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/features/tabs.php
The only thing I wish Fluxbox supported was SVG graphic themes...